buying and selling
While Lu Juezhen was still looking up expectantly, Tang Qi and Hu Xingche had already quietly ambushed nearby, following the traces he had left behind.
In the darkness, someone emerged from the cave entrance. Two men carried a rough cloth bag. After the man had completely walked out, they put the bag down, and Tang Qi discovered that it contained a girl.
The girl's legs were tied up, and even her head was covered with a black cloth. In the dim night, Tang Qi couldn't see their expressions clearly, but he could still tell that the girl was wearing a wedding dress.
Wearing a wedding dress in the dead of night? Tang Qi frowned.
Before he could figure anything out, the girl was roughly shoved into the sedan chair that was already waiting nearby.
She had barely stepped inside when the gongs and drums suddenly sounded, and the bridal sedan chair was carried out by four people, swaying and rocking.
"Boss, want to join?" Hu Xingche asked, tilting his head.
Tang Qi shook his head, glanced over there, and said, "Someone is already squatting over there."
Sure enough, Cheng Junshi appeared not far away the next moment. After what happened before, the atmosphere between the two was strange, especially Tang Qi, who now didn't even dare to look Cheng Junshi in the eye.
Cheng Junshi, on the other hand, seemed much calmer, crossing his arms and saying to them indifferently, "I'll go after them."
Tang Qi finally looked up at him, then turned away awkwardly and said, "Be careful, don't get hurt."
Cheng Junshi chuckled softly across from him: "You're worried about me?"
Provoked by him, Tang Qi suddenly looked up into his eyes and, in a fit of pique, said shamelessly, "Yeah, I'm just worried about you. What's wrong? Are you trying to say you don't need this concern again?"
He mentally guessed that Cheng Junshi's next words would definitely be something like "Stop worrying unnecessarily," but to his surprise, Cheng Junshi just smiled even more happily, and then looked at him earnestly and said, "Thank you, that's very helpful. I'll be careful not to make you worry."
Tang Qi was taken aback. After realizing what he had said, Cheng Junshi had already disappeared into the moonlight and chased after the wedding sedan chair.
"Boss, are we just letting Shaoqing go after him alone?" Hu Xingche asked blankly after Cheng Junshi's figure had completely disappeared.
Tang Qi, finally snapping out of his daze after being called out, raised his chin and said, "You know he's the Vice Minister, right? Besides him, who among us is qualified to go and get reinforcements?"
Hu Xingche suddenly realized: "Boss, so that's what you were planning!"
Tang Qi's lips curled up again: "His pursuit of that wedding sedan chair leads directly to the mastermind behind this deal. Given Cheng Wang's status, it wouldn't be difficult for him to get troops from the nearby county government for help. As for us—"
He stared intently at the cave entrance where the people who had just emerged had come out, and laughed, saying, "I'm going to make them bloom in two places at once, so they won't be able to attend to each other."
Hu Xingche, who was lying next to him, whispered, "So, boss, what do we do now? Should we just charge in—ouch!"
He suddenly covered his head, which had been slapped by Tang Qi, and looked at him with a wronged expression, asking, "Boss! Why did you hit me?"
"We don't know anything about what's going on inside. What would the two of us do if we charged in now? Are we just going to be sitting ducks? Or do you think it looks good to be covered in swords?" Tang Qi said quietly.
"I was thinking... Boss, you can take on ten men all by yourself, and I'll lend a hand from the side. We can just fight our way in, rescue the people inside and Lu Juezhen, and then everyone will be happy, right?" Hu Xingche's confidence waned as he spoke.
Tang Qi snorted coldly, annoyed by his words: "Have you ever heard of 'two fists can't beat four hands'? What do you mean by 'one against ten'? Do you take me for some tiger or beast? I'm just an ordinary person, not that powerful."
Hu Xingche pouted and muttered in a low voice, "I don't care, the boss is the best in my heart."
"What did you say?" Tang Qi didn't hear clearly.
"I didn't say anything, I just said I understood," Hu Xingche quickly added. Tang Qi looked away, still somewhat doubtful.
"Boss, what are you waiting for now?"
Tang Qi curled his lips into a smile, his eyes brightening again as he said, "We're waiting for another opportunity. We have someone lying in wait among us."
Lu Juezhen, who had been entrusted with an important task by Tang Qi, was now huddled in a corner. Through his unremitting efforts, Lu Juezhen finally gained a preliminary understanding of his surroundings.
The dungeon they were in could actually be simply understood as a shop, and the people who were captured were the goods sold in that shop.
Jiao Niang, Zuo Ou, and the group of people guarding outside were the shop's employees.
Every seven days, someone would come to select the goods. The goods would travel through different routes. Some girls were beautiful and would be dressed in wedding attire to become a concubine for a man, or worse, they would be chosen by a family to arrange a ghost marriage for their young son.
Another option was to be bought by human traffickers and sold into slavery. However, those chosen to take this path would have their tongues cut out and be sold to extremely remote places, thus eliminating any possibility of them being found.
This is a huge, dark human trafficking site.
"Jiao Niang! Um, I...I need to use the restroom!" Lu Juezhen calculated the time and figured that Tang Qi and the others had arrived almost immediately, so he deliberately made an excuse to go out.
Jiaoniang glanced at him with a displeased expression, then gestured with her chin to the person next to her and said, "Open the door."
Lu Juezhen breathed a sigh of relief. After a while, he had figured out Jiaoniang's personality. As long as she didn't think about running away, Jiaoniang basically wouldn't refuse any other reasonable requests. Lu Juezhen subtly curled the corners of his lips.
Just as he stepped out, preparing to lift his skirt and leave, the beautiful woman's voice suddenly came coldly: "Wait a moment."
Lu Juezhen stopped abruptly, then stiffly turned to look at Jiao Niang. Jiao Niang's eyes were indifferent, and after a few seconds she suddenly spoke: "Why are you walking so fast? Do you even know the way?"
Lu Juezhen choked for a moment, then saw Jiao Niang wink at the person next to her: "Come along with us."
Lu Juezhen was surprised that it was Zuo Ou who set off, and his face instantly fell, especially when Zuo Ou stared at him with ill intent. Before Lu Juezhen could even speak, Jiao Niang suddenly struck Zuo Ou's face with her wooden stick: "Did I call you? What are you doing following along? Are you looking for death?"
Jiao Niang scolded Zuo Ou and then said to the girl next to her, "Ju Yue, you go with her."
The girl called Juyue nodded and then led Lu Juezhen slowly out. Behind them, the scolding of the beautiful woman and the "thump thump" of the wooden stick still echoed. Lu Juezhen finally figured out who the absolute boss of this "shop" was.
—Jiaoniang.
"Boss! Boss! It looks like someone else is coming out!" Hu Xingche whispered to Tang Qi, and the two of them shrank back while cautiously looking in that direction: "Is it Lu Juezhen? It looks a bit like him."
Lu Juezhen was led out by Ju Yue and turned into the outhouse. He was facing away from Ju Yue. He had been looking around for a long time but had not seen Tang Qi and the other person. He did not know if they had arrived yet.
Just as I was hesitating, Tachibana suddenly spoke up from behind me: "What are you still standing there for?"
"Oh, oh, oh." Lu Juezhen snapped back to reality, his hand instinctively reaching for his belt. After finding nothing, he suddenly realized something and froze on the spot. Ju Yue's gaze grew increasingly suspicious. Lu Juezhen quickly turned away, rubbing his hands together and feigning shyness as he pleaded with Ju Yue, "Good sister~ don't look at me like that, I can't properly enjoy it~"
The sound he made almost made him vomit. Just as Ju Yue frowned, someone suddenly knocked on the back of her head, causing her vision to go black and she fell into Hu Xingche's arms behind her.
Tang Qi and his companion finally emerged from the darkness. He smiled and raised his hand to greet Lu Juezhen: "Hi, long time no see, Miss Lu~"
"Brother Zhengye—!" Lu Juezhen almost threw himself at Tang Qi, his voice full of grievance: "Why did you take so long to get here!"
Lu Juezhen looked around again and asked, "Where is my master?"
“He went to chase after someone else,” Tang Qi replied.
"Yes!" At this point, Lu Juezhen finally remembered the important matter and hurriedly blurted out all the information he had gathered: "This is a huge human trafficking site, and a girl was just picked—"
“We saw it; Cheng Shaoqing went to chase after her,” Hu Xingche said.
Unexpectedly, Lu Juezhen shook his head and said, "There's more than just this one road. There are about five cells inside. I don't know how many people are imprisoned in each cell. There are six in total, including me, in the cell I'm in. There are about three guards in each cell. The man who arrested me is called Zuo Ou. He is in charge of guarding the cell next to mine. The leader in this cell is a girl named Jiao Niang."
"A girl?" Tang Qi asked in surprise.
"Hmm, she looks to be a few years younger than my master, but she's very powerful. Even Zuo Ou wouldn't dare to speak dissent in front of her. But that's not the point. What I want to say is that the girls imprisoned in this dungeon are actually 'goods' to be chosen. At a fixed time each month, someone comes to see them. Some, like tonight, are chosen to be brides, while others have their tongues cut out and are sold into slavery. They take a different, dark path, which goes through the back of the dungeon."
He spoke incredibly fast, as if afraid of omitting anything: "The road you take from the back will change hands several times, and once you leave Jinan, you'll never find your way back."
Lu Juezhen suddenly grabbed Tang Qi's hand, his face full of urgency and seriousness: "Brother Zhengye, what should we do?"
Tang Qi's eyes dimmed and his mind began to race. He didn't believe that such a systematic trade route could exist without the support of the government.
He then thought of Cheng Junshi. He was confident that Cheng Wang wouldn't be foolish enough to go directly to the Sishou County government office to call for reinforcements. Otherwise, when Cheng Wang returned with "reinforcements," the situation would reverse, and they would be wiped out in one fell swoop.
“We don’t have enough manpower right now, so we can’t alert them. We’ll make plans after your master returns with his men,” Tang Qi finally said.
"Won't it be too late to wait for Shaoqing to return?" Hu Xingche spoke up quietly from the side. "If the first person is sent away tonight, there's a chance there will be a second and a third. Are we just supposed to wait silently?"
"Yes, Brother Zhengye, we can't just sit here and wait to die!"
“We’re not just sitting here waiting to die,” Tang Qi said calmly, looking at them. “You’ll see a dozen or so thugs in the dungeon—”
"Boss, we can sneak in and fight!" Tang Qi slapped him on the head again and said quietly, "Fight what? What you can see is only what's in the open. Do you know how many are in the shadows? You're talking big without even knowing the situation. When you rush in, you'll be the first one to lose your head."
While they were still arguing outside, the people inside were getting impatient. Jiao Niang sat on the bench and glanced at the door several times. When she saw that Lu Juezhen had not returned for a long time, she became slightly suspicious.
"Why haven't they come back yet? Ah Yun, go check on them." Jiao Niang glanced in that direction and gave the order.
"Yes." The girl called A-Yun accepted the order and walked out.
It was very dark at night. She went out and could hear voices in the distance, but the voices stopped before she got close.
She walked a short distance away and shouted sharply at the people over there, "Ju Yue? Is she ready? Jiao Niang is already urging her!"
Meanwhile, the three people who were facing away from A-Yun looked at each other, sweating profusely, and none of them dared to utter a sound.
Seeing that no one responded, A-Yun continued walking in this direction. The place was so narrow that it was already the limit for three people to stand. If A-Yun got closer, they would have nowhere to hide and would definitely be discovered.
The footsteps grew closer. Lu Juezhen swallowed hard, met Hu Xingche's gaze, and both of their eyes simultaneously filled with despair.
That's it.
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