Wuchang did not linger long aboard the transport inside the volcano crater. He was no use to anyone here, after all, and he understood nothing about outer space. After taking his leave of Boss Jiang, Brother Mad Dog led Wuchang off the nameless little island.
"What in the world is going on out in space?" Wuchang asked on the way back.
"Some fleet must have folded space and come out right on top of us. It's a huge one — the kind you see maybe once in years. But this crummy backwater of ours sits deep in the heart of the Horsehead Star Ring, and there's no big power anywhere nearby. So why would a fleet come through here?"
Mad Dog was plainly not cut out to be a teacher. Not only did he fail to explain anything clearly to Wuchang, he got himself muddled along the way.
They went the whole way in silence. When Wuchang got back to Huang'e City, before he could even reach the hideout, several of Brother Mad Dog's men stopped him.
"Don't go back. Whatever you do, don't go home. That house you rented has been raided by the Guard."
"What!" Wuchang leapt straight up. "Who leaked it?"
Now Mad Dog lost his temper, and that mad streak of his came surging back. "Damn it, Ye Tian is walking all over us now — he dares to trample my turf? Turn loose all our little dogs. I want to know exactly who leaked it."
"First I butcher the traitor, then I kill the outsiders..."
Brother Mad Dog's men had informants beyond counting; these little dogs got in everywhere, and it took them less than a single afternoon to come back with a report.
"Boss, it was Poison Wasp Adu who leaked it. We've got brothers who are thick with Big Fatty and Little Fatty, and they dug out the whole story..." From the little dogs' account, Wuchang finally understood what had happened.
Sick with regret, Wuchang slapped himself twice across the face, hard. "How could I be so stupid? I never even checked the portable terminal on Adu's wrist. I didn't even think to shut the damn thing off!" Smack — he gave himself another slap.
In fairness, you couldn't really blame Wuchang. He had transmigrated here from Earth, and he was still ignorant of the way things worked in this world. He knew a portable terminal could leak secrets, but knowing a thing and having it baked into your reflexes the way the people of this world did were two different matters. Anyone can slip up when they're in a hurry.
Just as Wuchang was drowning in self-blame, Brother Mad Dog clapped him on the shoulder. "So what do you want to do now? Boss Pan and the others are locked up in the Guard base near the fire prison. On your own, there's no way on earth you can get them out..."
"To hell with it, I'll bet my life on it. If a man will risk being hacked to pieces, he can haul the emperor off his horse."
Wuchang's careless words chilled every man there on the spot. None of them had ever heard that saying, but they all felt the vicious resolve packed into it.
"You bastard, you're crazier than I am — you'd dare haul the Emperor of Three Seas Star off his horse?"
That very night, in the tunnels beneath the volcano where Huang'e City stood, there was a secret Guard base, not far from the fire prison. In one of its interrogation rooms, work was going on, tense and busy.
The smack of leather on flesh never stopped. Lane, Boss Pan, Wild Bull and Pike — four grown men — hung from a single alloy crossbeam, taking the lash in turn.
Luckily for them, Ye Tian had a bit of aristocratic grace about him, and he had not put Eileen and A Yun and the children to the question. But Eileen and the children were shut behind a barred gate in the corner, forced to watch the grown men out there being tortured.
"Auntie Eileen, I'm scared..." a child in the cell said, shrinking into Eileen's arms.
"Shut up..." A thug's whip cracked against the metal bars with a dull clang. The brute — bare-chested, his face a mask of savagery — looked at the children with a cruel smile. "You'd better pray they talk. Otherwise I'll string every last one of you little rabbits up on that beam, one by one. Heh heh, I'll build a fire under you and roast you nice and brown..."
With a wail, the children all burst into tears, bunching up together with their hands over their eyes, not daring to open them. Eileen was like a mother tiger guarding her cubs, sheltering the children behind her, her hate-filled eyes fixed on the man in front of her.
Soldiers who had spent years at the interrogation trade hardly cared about a look like that. They were long used to it. The soldier with the whip went down the line whipping them again.
"Talk! Where did that suit of war armor come from? What exactly are you plotting? Who else is in it with you? Where is that bastard Wuchang hiding?"
He had asked that same question over and over, and he could never get the answer he wanted. Pike, who could no longer hold out under the torture, said, weeping,
"We dug the armor out of the ground. We don't have any accomplices, we're just ordinary miners. How would we know where Wuchang went... wuu wuu... Huang'e is only so big. Where could he hide? Just search carefully and you'll find him... if that doesn't work, go ask Brother Mad Dog for him..."
Every word Pike said was the plain truth, but the plain truth is the one thing nobody ever believes. The more Pike talked like that, the more viciously the whip came down.
"Damn you, do you take me for an idiot or a moron? You dig in a mine and dig up a Hercules war armor? You've got the God of Wealth riding on your back or something? With luck like that you should just go gamble your way out of poverty..." Then came another round of the lash.
"Talk! Where is Wuchang hiding? Who else is in it with you? What is your plot?"
The soldiers were frantic by now. Once they had found this suit of war armor in the slums, the whole Guard — and all three big bosses of Huang'e Star — had been struck dumb. Today was the day Princess Ye Mei arrived in secret, and on that very day a war armor with killing power to spare had turned up. If there was no plot behind that, then ghosts didn't exist.
All three big bosses had thought of the same word at the same moment: "assassination." And suddenly nobody was attacking Ye Tian over the cruelty and butchery of his anti-crime sweep. For the safety of Her Highness the Princess, butchering every miner on Huang'e was not out of the question.
The death order Ye Tian handed his interrogators was this: within three days they had to dig out this assassination organization, and the threat had to be strangled in the cradle. As for the Princess, Ye Tian resolved to find some way to keep her aboard the mothership for another three days.
The Guard turned the whole city upside down hunting for Wuchang, and they even sent Mad Dog an ultimatum: if Mad Dog dared obstruct the Guard's search, Ye Tian would not mind repeating what he had done more than ten years ago.
Brother Mad Dog could not hold up under the pressure either, because half an hour earlier a secret channel had brought him word: the Second Princess, Ye Mei, had already arrived near Huang'e and would soon be inspecting Huang'e City.
If that massacre more than ten years ago had been caused by nothing but a Mine Supervisor's greed, this time the black-market merchants did not have a leg to stand on. Ye Tian was protecting the safety of an imperial princess, and any means at all were thinkable. That reasoning would hold up even if it were laid out before Lord Dao Tuo himself.
Wuchang would not put a friend in a hard spot. Before Mad Dog could even open his mouth, he had already slipped into the deep maze of mine tunnels below, without so much as a simple goodbye.
After half an hour of hard running, Wuchang finally drew near the fire prison's security perimeter. Unfortunately, every passage leading to the fire prison and the military base had been fitted with massive ten-thousand-jin blast gates, high-strength alloy a full meter thick.
Nor was that all: heavy machine guns covered the alloy gates, and patrols drifted around the outer perimeter at all hours.
That iron defense blocked every way forward. He searched the tunnels for a good three hours and more, and never found a single passage a man could squeeze through.
"Fuck, so you're forcing me to risk my neck? Fine. Let's see who's afraid of who."
Like a phantom, Wuchang hung his whole body from the tunnel ceiling and moved along the tunnels like a quiet gecko. Before long he met his target: a three-man patrol.
The three soldiers would never in their wildest dreams have expected an ambush right at their own front door, and the speed of it was shocking — they never even got the chance to draw their guns.
The heavy Nail Fist landed on them, and in under three seconds all three soldiers had lost any ability to fight. When the sharp military bayonet pressed against their throats, not one of them dared make a sound.
"Keep quiet. You'd better believe me: I can open the carotid artery in all three of your necks inside a second, and no doctor alive could do a thing about it..."
Wuchang leaned in close to the soldier with the higher rank and said with a cold smile, "Relax, I'm not going to kill you. I just need you to carry a message for me — to Governor Ye Fei and Guard Captain Ye Tian..."
"My name is Wuchang. They call me Ghost Wuchang. In my hands I have a top-grade crystal twenty-two centimeters long. If they want that crystal, then they had better keep my friends safe and sound, with not one more stroke of torture. Understand?"
The three terrified soldiers nodded for all they were worth. Wuchang patted their cheeks and turned to go. But just then a burst of gunfire and muzzle flash came down the tunnel.
"Enemies! Enemies in the tunnels! Open fire, no quarter!"
Wuchang's reaction was frighteningly fast. Dragon-Tiger strength flooded his whole body, and his body flatly defied the laws of physics: he crawled along the rock wall up to the tunnel ceiling, narrowly dodging the bullets from the ambush.
In his fury Wuchang showed no mercy. The military bayonet in his hand became a streak of cold flying light and punched through the lead soldier's throat in an instant. Then he kicked off with both legs, his body tracing a bizarre S through the air that not only dodged the incoming bullets but slammed him down into the middle of the ambushers' squad.
That is how war in a narrow space works: once a martial artist gets in close, soldiers holding guns are lambs waiting for the slaughter. The six-man squad was no match for Wuchang at all. The Triple Nail Fist, backed by the Tiger Break stance, was savage beyond measure, and in under half a minute the entire squad was down.
Red was blood, white was brains. The Nail Fist with the Tiger Break stance behind it could now crack a skull open with ease; even the soldiers' tactical helmets could not protect them.
Breathing hard, Wuchang looked at the carnage on the ground and said viciously to the three terrified soldiers, "See that? That's what happens when you piss me off. If you don't want a butchering ghost haunting Huang'e City from now on, then release my friends and behave yourselves."
"Remember, the chance I'm giving Ye Tian and the rest is a one-time offer. Don't think holding my friends gives you a handle on me. If my friends die, I'll send a thousand lives to atone for their injustice — and Ye Tian's worthless life will be among them..."
With that, Wuchang turned and left. At the very moment more soldiers came rushing up, he turned and left.