Dou Ma was furious and said, "Wu Zhao, you bastard, you are looking for death, but you don't play like this! How many bowls of rice do you think you can eat?"
I laughed and said, "As a son, I have to make my mother proud. Don't worry, I can go back."
"You little bastard..." When Dou Ma's voice started to cry, I hung up the phone immediately: "Heshang, did you hear me? For Dou Ma, we have to fight for our lives!"
Shi Heshang stretched and said, "It's a pity that Dou Ma is old and doesn't have the feeling of fighting for the goddess. It's not good!"
Just as I was about to tease him, my phone rang again.
"Shen Fengyin!" I gnashed my teeth when I saw the three words on the phone screen. I almost forgot who Shen Fengyin was, so she just wanted to call me. I picked up the phone and said unhappily, "What's up? Is there something wrong?"
Shen Fengyin said with a smile: "Calm down, it's just that you forgot the mission, it's not a big deal!"
The veins on my forehead almost popped out: "What do you think is a big deal?"
Shen Fengyin said quickly: "I found out something important. What you encountered was actually..."
I gritted my teeth and said, "I already know!"
Shen Fengyin laughed and said, "You know? There was a similar case 20 years ago..."
I squeezed out a few words from between my teeth: "I know too!"
"You know everything?" Shen Fengyin said depressedly, "Then why did you look for me? By the way, Chen Lei and his wife have a bad relationship and domestic violence often occurs..."
"That's enough!" I finally couldn't help but hang up the phone, and sat there panting in anger. Fortunately, I didn't count on Shen Fengyin, who would definitely remember to burn the information to me half a year after I died.
How could Dou Ma do such an unreliable thing!
I sat there for a long time without recovering from the shock, when there was a knock on the door: "The food delivery guy is here."
When I stood up and walked to the door, the door of the conference room was pushed open a crack, and someone handed me a lunch box in a plastic bag through the door. When I reached out to take the plastic bag, my hand suddenly changed and slammed hard on the door.
The door of the conference room burst open, and a figure dressed in black appeared at the door. The sharp blade in the other party's hand, which had not yet been retracted, was exposed in front of me. After only a moment's hesitation, he stabbed it in front of my eyes.
I took several wrong steps, and slid backwards a few feet on the ground before stopping. The man chased me with the dagger in his hand, never leaving me half a foot away. He pressed the dagger against my throat and said, "Get out of the way. I won't kill you!"
I said calmly, "The head you are looking for is in the iron barrel. I trapped it to wait for you to come. Since we have the same goal, why don't we cooperate?"
The other party was slightly stunned: "Cooperation? By you?"
"By me!" I said in a deep voice, "As far as I know, twenty years ago, you killed a wooden Buddha with a human head. More than a hundred years ago, you also had a bloody battle with Shenmu Temple. Facts have proved that you are helpless against Shenmu Temple, and you may even be unable to suppress them. You must find a partner to cooperate with, am I right?"
The man was silent for a moment and said, "I need to consult the leader about this matter."
I made a “please” gesture and said, “You can also take the head in the bucket.”
“No need.” After saying this, the man disappeared from my sight strangely like green smoke.
Not long after, there was another knock on the door of the conference room. This time, the other party was obviously knocking out of courtesy, and the sound was not strange at all.
After I opened the door, a middle-aged man in black slowly walked in. My first impression of him was that he was ordinary, an ordinariness that could be ignored at any time, but it was this ordinariness that made me feel extremely dangerous.
The other party smiled and bowed to me and said, "I am Chen Hanxing, the Jiangshan Iron Guard."
"Mr. Dongbei, Wu Zhao, nice to meet you, senior!" The other party called himself Jiangshan Iron Guard, but Jiangshan Iron Guard had long disappeared with the demise of the Qing Dynasty, and the existing Iron Guard has been renamed Hongding Mansion. Although I doubted the other party's identity, it was not an exaggeration for me to call him a senior regardless of age or status.
“Senior! Haha…” Chen Hanxing said with a wry smile, “I haven’t heard this title for hundreds of years. I kind of miss it!”
As Chen Hanxing pulled over a chair and sat down, he raised his hand and sent out a sword energy that split the iron barrel a few meters away, splitting the head in the barrel in half. The green gas that floated from the dirty blood was like a twisting green snake standing upright in the air and swaying left and right. Chen Hanxing sent out another sword energy to disperse the twisting smoke: "In fact, this green smoke is the Buddha with a human head and a wooden body."
Chen Hanxing said: "You must be curious about what I am, right?"
I nodded and said, "That's right!"
As I nodded, Chen Hanxing smiled and said, "After hearing my identity, you won't be able to withdraw from this business. You might even end up in ruins. Are you sure you want to hear it?"
I looked him straight in the eye and said, "I'd like to hear more details."
"That's right! If you were born a few hundred years earlier, I would have pulled you into the Jiangshan Iron Guard no matter what." Chen Hanxing praised him and then said, "I've already said that we are the Jiangshan Iron Guard, which means we are a group of people who have been dead for hundreds of years."
"I, Chen Hanxing, joined the Jiangshan Iron Guard in the eleventh year of Emperor Kangxi's reign. I was promoted to the fourth rank and served for thirty years. In the forty-first year of Emperor Kangxi's reign, the evildoers in Shenmu Temple suddenly rebelled, and I was ordered to lead my troops to suppress them."
"At that time, I took the wrong road and failed to reach the designated location in time. By the time I led my men back to Shenmu Temple, the war was over. More than half of Jiangshan Iron Guards were killed, and Shenmu Temple was sealed on the spot."
"But because I missed the chance to fight, I was punished by the Iron Guards and was executed in the mountains along with my brothers from the first battalion. The commander said to me at the time: To atone for your sins, you must stay here! You cannot leave until Shenmu Temple is destroyed."
"My brothers and I who have turned into heroic spirits have been guarding Shenmu Temple here for hundreds of years."
Heroic souls are different from ordinary ghosts. Only those who sacrificed their lives for the country and others will be recognized by the Heavenly Dao after death, and their ghosts will be protected and transformed into heroes. Simply put, there is a trace of Heavenly Dao power in the body of a hero's soul. Even if it is only a tiny trace of Heavenly Dao power, it is enough for the hero's soul to walk under the sun like an ordinary person.
Legend has it that when the underworld recruits ghost soldiers, it will first choose heroic souls. Although Chen Hanxing and his men are not ghost soldiers, they at least have the strength of ghost soldiers, and Chen Hanxing's own strength may be even higher.
Seeing that I didn't say anything, Chen Hanxing spoke first, "What do you think about this matter?"
I said calmly, "I think the reason why you went in the wrong direction was that someone deliberately arranged it. I'm afraid you know this yourself, right?"
Chen Hanxing looked at me with a half-smile and said, "So what do you think, is it right or wrong for me to defend Shenmu Temple to the death?"
"Whether you are right or wrong is up to you." I looked at Chen Hanxing and said, "Everyone has his or her own persistence. In the eyes of others, it doesn't matter whether you are a madman, a fool, a hero or a righteous man, because they can't change your persistence."
"Hahaha..." Chen Hanxing laughed, "You're right! If you had flattered me or complained about me, I would have left immediately. Because you are not worthy of my cooperation."
Chen Hanxing said, "In fact, before I was given the poisoned wine, I had already thought that it was a deliberate arrangement by the commander. Because the brothers I brought with me are already old, and some are even scarred. They are experienced but no longer strong. The result of us surviving is either to slowly wait for death, or to be trained as ghosts after death and continue to serve the Iron Guard."
"Back then, the commander let us die here, which was actually a disguised form of protection. I vaguely feel that the chief shaman in the Iron Guard was preparing to refine us into ghost servants. If we were really trained to serve ghosts, it would be a dilemma between life and death!"
I looked at Chen Hanxing and said, "Don't you know that the Qing Dynasty has fallen?"
"I know. I knew it a long time ago!" Chen Hanxing said, "At that time, I was also confused. We are the iron guards of the Qing Dynasty. We are guarding the country of the Qing Dynasty. Even the Qing Dynasty has fallen, what are we guarding?"
"At that time, many brothers were confused and didn't know what to do. Because of our negligence, hundreds of evil spirits escaped. By the time we reacted, the mountain was littered with corpses."
"That time, we had to send half of our forces to hunt down the evil spirit. My best brother was also killed in that battle. Before he died, he only said one sentence to me: We will defend the country to the death."
"It was then that I realized that although the Qing Dynasty had fallen, the country was still there. As long as we were not wiped out, we should protect this country. So, we retreated again, and this time we had to protect it for another hundred years!"
Chen Hanxing said: "Originally, our battalion had thousands of brothers, but now there are only thirty left. Shenmu Temple is about to be destroyed again, and we really can't defend it anymore!"
"Many days ago, I was looking for partners to cooperate with, and we have always had people around you. Nothing you did or said escaped my eyes."
"Your strength is not as good as Duan Yunfei's, but you have some special qualities that he doesn't have." Chen Hanxing looked at me and said, "You are a pure warlock!"
I didn't even understand what Chen Hanxing meant, but he said directly: "A sorcerer should act like a sorcerer. I am not from the underworld, but I have the spirit of the underworld. I will never cooperate with or even compromise with someone I don't like. This is why I have served in the Jiangshan Iron Guard for thirty years and am still only a fourth-rank official."
I raised my hand and gave Chen Hanxing a thumbs up, and the latter reached out and bumped my fist. (To be continued)