bookpower Acquiring Information, Getting Information…
Acquiring Information, Getting Information…
The sound of something snapping resounded throughout the tall woods, alongside a sharp grunt of pain as a man whose hair had clearly not seen cleaning in weeks was struck off his feet, before his back smashed into the trunk of a tree. The impact made him cough as he grasped his left arm, which was now bending completely the wrong way.“Motherfucker-!”
He tried to grab the sword he had dropped, but the weapon was flung away from him just before his shirt was grabbed... His attacker pulled him off the ground and then slammed him against the same tree for the second time.
“Alright, I’m going to repeat myself, little guy… What’s up with all the bandit groups appearing in the area recently? What’s the big deal? Do you guys have meetings? Are you all part of an organisation? Or do you all have the same informants and they told you of something big that was going to happen in the surroundings?”
“Fuck you! I am not telling you shit!”
“Well, congratulations, your response does tell me that there is something of interest. Wouldn’t it have been smarter to feign not knowing anything I was talking about?”
“You-!”
The bandit’s broken arm was squeezed, making him howl in pain. His feet and other arm tried to fight back, but not only did he struggle to hit his adversary when the man had his arm fully outstretched like this, but he felt like he was hitting stone rather than a person.
“Answer my questions, and I’ll let you off”
“I… I don’t believe a fucking word coming out of your mouth!”
The vulgar bandit breathed heavily. The pain was blinding, and he could feel his adrenaline steadily decreasing, only making the suffering of his injuries and bruises worse.
“Perhaps you don’t believe me, but your options are either to die from keeping your mouth shut, or to speak and have a go at survival. Is your allegiance to a bunch of now-dead bandits really worth this much?”
The bandit’s eyes moved around the battlefield. He and his fellows had been camping out in what they had believed to be a well-hidden, quiet place of the woods... But clearly, they had been wrong.
They had just arrived in the region and hadn’t even done anything reprehensible so far, yet the guy currently threatening him had shown up out of nowhere.
He hadn’t even attacked by surprise. He had just waltzed in, asked questions, and when they attacked, beaten everyone to a pulp without any weapons. In the heat of the moment, everyone kept attacking, but with the gift of hindsight, the filthy bandit now knew well that he should have run from the very beginning.
This guy’s fists had snapped swords and casually deflected head-on strikes from maces… Hell, their biggest guy, known for his ability to kill bears with his bare hands, had died from a single blow to the chest–A single punch that had seemingly broken all of the bones in his torso and destroyed his organs… The same guy who had been grappling with bears since he was a kid! The very same guy whose skull was so thick that a freaking bear had broken a tooth trying to bite down on it!
They had been foolish. They had kept attacking because their first thought about this guy was that he looked like a rather average young guy. In their minds, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that just a young guy could be a threat to them. After all, they had their abnormally strong big guy, as well as a cultivator as their leader! A real cultivator at that, not like most of them who were only cultivators by technicality, but could get beaten up by any farmer.
Obviously, the young guy was an actual body cultivator. Even a strike that had landed against his back had only damaged his clothing.
“Alright, alright! I’ll tell you!”
The bandit was dropped, falling to his knees as his broken arm ached.
“It’s… It’s the informant thing, alright? We bandits… We tend to hang close to the black markets, that’s where we sell our more valuable stuff and buy things for ourselves… Bandit cultivators can’t really use the official channels since they are wanted, and the country puts high bounties on their heads…”
“...A reputable informant of the black market has been speaking of a rare kind of healing grass… Not the shitty kind that they ground up, cook, and call a freaking healing pill–But a grass from which a single stalk is enough for someone to regrow limbs, cure illnesses, restore lost senses, and even ‘heal’ things that can’t usually be healed, like… Like if you were born without an arm… This thing could apparently give you something you never even had!”
“Huh, and so many bandits believed this? It sounds unlikely that some guy on the black market would know, but not the great clans. They definitely have people in there”
“Listen… The informant has a good reputation, and we are down on our luck lately… Haven’t you heard? Many of the smaller bandit groups have been simply… Vanishing! The weakest and smallest were the first, but it's been working its way up! Most of us want something big to be able to leave this damned kingdom before whatever this is catches up to us”
“Mmh…Did the big dogs take the bait as well?”
“Ah! We wouldn’t bother if they did… They are more like proper underground organisations or sects than bandit groups. These guys might send a few of their weaklings to check things out, but they would never actually commit. Even the strongest guys present are just wretches in the grand scheme of things”
“I see… Do you actually believe this healing grass is real? Did you not think that this informant could have been willfully inventing things to get you guys killed? You know… That they could have been paid to lie? I doubt someone who hangs around the black market would put their reputation above money”
“...Everyone is aware that it could be false... But you’re wrong. Informants do value their reputation far above a stack of coins. They make way more by working in the black market per year than anything anyone would be willing to offer… And for what? To trick a bunch of weaklings into going to the same place?”
“Mmh… Alright, I see. You can-”
The young cultivator stopped as though he had been interrupted.
‘What is it, System?’
‘Crap, does it mean that I need to find a woman? For her Yin or whatever, right?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You’re telling me to have sex with men? I am not into that at all’
‘You’re crazy…’
‘Damn it…’
“Hey. I have a job for you, actually…”
“You said you would let me go!”
“I will, but it is sort of an emergency, and you’re the best one available…”
“…Why… Why are you looking at me like that…?”