Lanke Chess Edge
Chapter 103: Not Going To Pay

“Old man? Why aren’t you answering? What are you doing?”

A voice came from the inner room, followed by the sound of rustling, someone getting dressed, and footsteps. The woman inside lifted the curtain and joined him outside, only to see her husband collapsed on the ground, gasping for breath with a cold sweat on his face.

The woman was so frightened that she squatted down to help him, but when she did, she found that Zuo Boran’s body was stiff.

“Hey, old man, what’s wrong!?”

When she reached out, Zuo Boran’s hair was wet to the touch. Seeing Zuo Boran’s slightly pale face, she hurriedly rubbed his chest to help him calm down.

Perhaps it was the touch of warmth in his wife’s hands that made Zuo Boran finally feel a little better. He circulated his internal Qi to calm himself down.

“Hooh… haah… just now, I thought I was going to die…”

“What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“Shhhhh!”

Zuo Boran immediately became agitated and looked carefully at the door.

“Don’t speak nonsense, I have seen a God! The judges under the jurisdiction of Juntian Prefecture’s City God — the Martial and Civil Judges — they were here just now!”

Zuo Boran pointed towards the seat at the head position of the eight-immortals table with lingering fear.

“Haah… I thought my life was about to end, but the two Judges just said that they were here to determine our family’s status because of a master’s request… Huh…”

Zuo Boran’s voice still trembled when he spoke. He had been in close contact with ghosts and gods. It was hard to imagine how wildly his heart was racing, but he was not energetic like one would be when listening to a storyteller tell a tale; rather, he was simply terrified.

However, by this point, a slight feeling of excitement was also rising and gradually intensifying. It didn’t take long for Zuo Boran’s complexion to go from pale to rosy.

Zuo Boran was a martial artist, after all. He rubbed his legs, got up off the ground, and walked to the eight-immortals table, and looked at the calligraphy. He remembered that Mr. Ji had said that he would go greet the City God of Juntian Prefecture. Sure enough, the Judges had arrived that very night.

Zuo Boran’s wife was a little skeptical upon hearing her husband say that he had met the Judges. But after looking at the calligraphy on the table, she thought it might be true. After all, it was a promise from an immortal.

It wasn’t until half an hour later that the two couples finally went back to sleep.

The next day, the news that Zuo Boran ran into the Civil and Martial Judges in his house spread among the descendants of the Zuo family, and then the Yan family gradually learned about it as well. However, the Yan family shop all their own people, and they would never spread any information outside.

Four days after Zuo Boran met the Judges at night…

There had been a strange phenomenon in the Yan family shop these past two days. The twenty or thirty muscular blacksmiths of all ages were not smithing iron, but were instead seriously making scabbards.

Some people worked together to provide a single assembly-line from shaping to polishing to oiling, while others completed their entire process independently. It was just like a traditional handicraft workshop. When they thought about making a sheath for an immortal’s spiritual weapon, the group of craftsmen grew even more excited.

As for the instigator of this incident, he was currently touring the capital city of Juntian Prefecture, unaware.

When he arrived in the teahouse where he had first gone to inquire about the news when he had initially arrived in Juntian Prefecture, Ji Yuan wanted to finish listening to “The Legend of General Huang,” but the storyteller in the teahouse had already changed, and so the story was different.

“Sir, please come in. We have soups, fried dumplings, and freshly brewed teas!”

A tea specialist saw Ji Yuan standing at the door for a while without entering, so he walked over the door to greet him.

Ji Yuan just smiled and shook his head, turned, and left without saying anything. The storyteller had changed, and the story was no longer “The Legend of General Huang,” so he was less interested.

The tea specialist scratched his head as he watched the gentleman walk away. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who couldn’t afford a pot of tea.

Ji Yuan didn’t use any techniques or spiritual energy, but instead simply walked slowly and directly out of the city and towards the Yan family’s shop on the bank of the Yuanzi River.

This time, Ji Yuan didn’t plan to disturb the others any more than he already had. What needed to be done had been done, and there was no need to alarm the people from the Yan family. When he reached the bank of the Yuanzi River, Ji Yuan used a concealment technique to disappear, before entering the Yan family’s shop.

Something was a little strange today. There was no sound of hammering iron in the Yan family shop, but there were a lot of sounds of friction on wood and discussions coming from the back of the blacksmith shop.

Ji Yuan first returned the umbrella that he had previously borrowed without asking, and then followed the sound and smell to the back of the Yan family’s workshop.

“Hiss…”

In a rare occurrence, Ji Yuan took a slightly exaggerated breath.

Up until now, there had been several things in this mortal world that could shock Ji Yuan, but not an excessive amount. The current situation was one of them.

Under several large saw that under a few large canopies, twenty or thirty shirtless blacksmiths were all constructing and polishing scabbards. Only the unfinished products were still in their hands; dozens of finished sheathes were stored on the shelves and piled on the ground beside them.

They were all different, from the selection of materials to the style, from the color to the carving…

‘Did the Yan family take the wrong medicine? ’

At this thought, Ji Yuan suddenly laughed, understanding the reason. He himself was root of this problem, as the “immortal.”

Just looking at how many scabbards they had created, he had no idea how much manpower, material resources, and funds they had spent. Originally, Ji Yuan had only planned to leave a hundred coins in payment for the scabbard, and then leave a note to inform them.

However, there were now so many scabbards, and Ji Yuan didn’t want to be the one to pay for all of them.

To be honest, with so many scabbards, aside from those very fancy ones, Ji Yuan liked any of his options. He quietly walked to a wooden rack near the end, reached out, and grabbed a simple light green wooden scabbard. The scabbard disappeared with him when he touched it.

After that, Ji Yuan hesitated for a moment. With a somewhat helpless look on his face, he took out two ingots of silver from his sleeves, each being valued at one tael, and threw them gently towards Elder Yan, who, despite being in his seventies, was still busy polishing a new scabbard.

“Bonk- bonk-“¹

The two silver ingots actually hit Elder Yan’s head with two crisp sounds from the soft force. The latter thought that someone was playing a prank on him, and subconsciously caught the silver that fell from his head. He became inexplicably furious.²

“Who was it? Which bastard threw money at me?”

At this moment, Ji Yuan’s teasing voice came faintly from afar.

“Who asked you to make so many scabbards? I only have one sword. You can sell your scabbards to make up for the rest of the labor!”

The sound of the voice grew further and further away, until it became obvious that it had left.

Old Man Yan immediately covered his mouth. There was a lot of cold sweat on his forehead. Did he just curse at an immortal?

At this moment, all the craftsmen stopped their work when they heard the sounds. For a moment, the blacksmith shop was completely silent. Many people secretly glanced at Old Man Yan to see his reaction.

After a dozen breaths, they confirmed that the immortal had most likely left, and had no intention of making a fuss. Elder Yan suddenly realized an important problem and immediately shouted at the top of his voice.

“Whose scabbard was chosen? Look quickly and see whose scabbard was chosen. Which scabbard is missing? Everyone, look around!”

“Yes, yes, yes! Let’s see which one is missing!”

“The one I have in my hand isn’t finished yet… “

“Why the hell are you still working on it!”³

“Please be me, please be me!”

“It must be me!”

A group of craftsmen were checking the shelves beside them and the pile of scabbards on the ground, hoping to find that one of them was missing.

“Ahahahaha… It’s me! It’s me! My scabbard has been chosen! Hahahaha… My green lacquered wood scabbard is gone from the end shelf! Hahahaha! It must have been taken by the immortal Let’s go!!!”

A blacksmith in his thirties was so happy that he almost jumped around and danced, pointing at the wooden shelf and laughing wildly.

Many blacksmiths nearby still refused to give up and continued to turn over their works, but in the end, they could only come to the same cruel conclusion.

At last, everyone looked at the elated blacksmith, pouting and sighing, and gave him very perfunctory congratulations.

The man was feeling very proud, but then he saw the elder leaving in the direction of the ancestral hall. He immediately slapped his head and remembered that the silver had not been given to him yet, so he hurriedly chased after him.

“Elder, elder! That silver, you should give it to me, at least one ingot! It was given to you by the immortal, elder!”

“Hmph, you also know that this was a gift from an immortal, but you have no idea what to do with it! It would be a waste of a heavenly gift to give it to you. I will take it to the ancestral hall and place it together with the ancestral tablets. Everyone can see it when we burn incense to pray!”⁴

Elder Yan didn’t even turn his head back, and instead quickened his pace, leaving only these words. It shocked the man so much that he stood frozen still on the spot.

1. T/n: BONK– My dude. My guy. Ji Yuan. Don’t throw metal at people’s heads.
2. T/n: You just got chunks of metal lobbed at your head, there’s nothing “inexplicable” about getting mat at that
3. Lit: “are you still making a fart?” i.e. something useless
4. T/n: Alright everyone who wants to join in the line of furiously hitting Elder Yan with a broomstick say aye