Astartes of the Bear School

Chapter 1571 1543. Qian Zifeng

Saito Yoshitatsu's move of sending troops and monsters to take over Mount Tatsuya must have made the original craftsmen here feel uneasy.

After all, although this world has methods and legends such as Onmyoji taming monsters and turning them into Shikigami, and Buddhist monks using Buddhist teachings to convert monsters, people can use these methods and legends to enslave monsters or cooperate with them.

However, Saito Yoshitatsu's action of directly ordering the monsters to release foul air and disappear on the main traffic roads in the mountains without saying anything did not show any goodwill or possibility of cooperation.

It is clear that it is using force to oppress.

The swordsmiths actually don’t care who the daimyo of Mino Province is or who they work for. After all, no one in power can be ruthless to them, a group of technical personnel, right?

Furthermore, Saito Dosan's retirement from Buddhism was announced to the world several years ago, and Saito Yoshitatsu is the legitimate current daimyo.

So at the beginning, the knife makers didn’t even think that the domestic situation had any impact on them.

But when those monsters appeared on the mountain with undisguised viciousness, this neutral attitude of not caring about anything immediately collapsed in the face of the other party's obvious attitude.

It may not be your business, but they don’t care about your lives at all!

Under such circumstances, the group of people who were most sensitive to the crisis fled to the culvert in the mountain that day.

As expected, those who were slow to react to the malicious intent and did not escape did not seem to be regarded as valuable technicians by Saito Yoshitatsu at all. Instead, they were exploited like slaves!
Although the Japanese archipelago is also backward, it is still a feudal society after all! Who has ever seen such a scene?
Please make some progress, even if it's a bit feudal?

Is it really like being exhausted to death by forging iron in a big forge, or being roasted to death by the fire? !

How is this situation better than the concentration camps in World War II?

Looking at the crazy look on Saito Yoshitatsu's face now, if he really finishes the task, it is possible that he will kill all of these technical personnel!
There's no doubt about it, if you want to survive you must plan to escape!
A series of logical reasoning and reasonable guesses had been mostly completed by the time Lan En landed.

But what he didn't expect was that the person who organized the escape would be a girl who didn't look that young.

He looks to be in his early twenties and is about 1.6 meters tall.

He was wearing neat tapered trousers and straw sandals, and the wide cuffs of his shirt were tied to his body with ropes.

He has short hair and one eye. He wears an eyepatch made of a small katana disc-shaped guard tied with a rope on the eye that he doesn't know if it's sick or injured.

The physical disability did not seem to have any psychological impact on her, and she seemed quite energetic.

Lan En's sensitivity allowed him to accurately find the central figure in this small group that seemed to be in low spirits and almost on the verge of collapse.

That is this girl.

"Everyone, wait a minute!"

Lan's deterrence was revealed in his explosive yet restrained movements, while his shining cat's eyes and huge body amplified this deterrence exponentially.

And in this intimidating situation, the one-eyed girl stood up under Lan En's gaze, swallowed her saliva, and spoke nervously but without avoiding it.

"It seems that you, you are not a monster?"

"Can you please stand in the light so everyone can see you?"

She spoke cautiously and slightly timidly.

Lan En didn't care and nodded in response.

The girl was very responsible. She took a torch from the crowd behind her and moved towards Lan En with her hand raised, trembling.

Lan En's face was revealed. Under the firelight, even though this group of people were exhausted and weak, many of them still held their breath.

A low exclamation was uttered.

And under the firelight, Smaug also appeared in front of these people.

Only then did they see clearly that the sharp claws and hideous body of the man that had appeared in the shadows before were actually the appearance of this armor.

I immediately breathed a sigh of relief.

"That's great!" Immediately, someone in the crowd exclaimed in amazement.

The voice sounded like someone who had persisted to the limit and finally saw hope, so his mind went blank, so he seemed dazed.

"Is it Master Dao? Master Dao has finally come out and sent troops to rescue us?"

Amid the chaos, uncontrollable cries of joy began to emerge.

Only after Lan En shouted "Quiet" did the group of people manage to control their emotions.

After Lan En finished shouting, he lowered his head and looked at the girl in front of him again.

“Although there are some deviations, it can be considered as such.”

The demon hunter gave the group of people reassurance.

"Great!" The one-eyed girl breathed a sigh of relief, as if a heavy burden had been lifted off her shoulders. "My name is Qian Zifeng, you can just call me Xiaofeng."

"I was originally a swordsmith who traveled around to learn my craft. I heard about the big forging furnace here in Ta'e Mountain, so I came here to pay my respects and see if I could see anything. But I didn't expect that not long after I arrived at Ta'e Mountain, the mountain was surrounded."

"Qian Zi." Lan En subconsciously gritted his teeth when he heard the name, but he didn't say much. Qian Zifeng is equivalent to a knife maker who travels around to study.

This unique identity made Lan En look at her strangely.

After all, in this world, being able to travel around is considered a skill, let alone a one-eyed little girl?
Nowadays, Japan, which is already small, is divided into various daimyo and powerful families, and every time you cross a border you have to go through a checkpoint.

It is not impossible that a lone knife maker like her would be detained by the local lord as an ownerless technician.

Not to mention the thieves, bandits, monsters and evil spirits on the road.

But she still looked quite energetic as she walked along.
"Is Master Dao San going to come out of seclusion to teach Yi Long a lesson?" Qian Zifeng looked at the group of people behind him and asked hopefully, "Then can we, can we be saved? Can we leave now?"

"Taling Mountain has been under control for a long time. Monsters are guarding the passes everywhere. We don't even dare to go out to get food."

"Not yet, but you can eat something first."

Lan's answer disappointed many of them.

"Why?! Can't Master Dao San save us?"

"The army is outside now, but use your brain." Lan En didn't look at those people, but just looked up and greeted them. Then the fluffy ball understood and poured down a space expansion bag on his body.

A lot of brown bread and bacon jerky fell down.

Lan En continued as he stretched out his hand, "Think about Yilong's attitude towards you. Do you think you can survive after a fight?"

"What you should hope for now is not to fight immediately, but to fight after you escape."

After Lann distributed the food to these people who looked no different from concentration camp prisoners, they began to eat it with great difficulty.

As their stomachs began to fill up, their hormone levels stabilized, their emotions were brought under control, and rationality returned to their brains.

Their emotions no longer fluctuated greatly, and they began to imagine the situations they might face if Lan En's words really happened.

"That's right. No matter what, even if the army is already outside waiting to start a battle, we have to escape first!"

Qian Zifeng seemed much calmer than the others.

"In fact, we struggled a little before you came." Her one eye looked at Lan En seriously, "Although I don't think I can outrun the monster, but I have to do something to survive, right?"

Lan En looked at her wry smile and nodded in agreement: "Don't laugh at yourself. You want to stay alive, so you try every possible way. No matter how outrageous the method you come up with is, it is the result of your best efforts. No one can laugh at you."

"I am really relieved to be praised." Qian Zifeng touched his head and sighed. I don't know if he listened. "I have been secretly trying to contact some swordsmiths who didn't react at the time and were captured and sent to the big forge."

“That’s why we know that they will be roasted to death in there, without even being allowed to rest!”

"Although there's nothing we can do, we can still agree on a signal and run away together at the right time. After all, judging from the attitude of those monsters and the army, they don't want us to live at all."

"At the time, I just thought that I couldn't outrun the monsters, but I'd just outrun as many as I could. I didn't expect that I would actually be doing something effective now."

Lan En's eyes suddenly lit up: "You are too modest. You are really helping me a lot!"

The most troublesome part of this operation, in Lan En's mind, was always how to rescue more knife makers.

After all, they were too vulnerable in front of both monsters and the army.

In Lan En's plan, he had to organize the detained knife makers first, or at least let them know what the signals were when they ran away. This would take a lot of effort.

During these few days, Qian Zifeng contacted the swordsmiths in the big forge through unknown means, as well as the group of people who ran fast and were not captured. They should be the majority of the survivors on the Ta'er Mountain today.

"What's your signal?"

Lan asked bluntly.

"Explosion!" Qian Zifeng first tore off a piece of black bread from his mouth, chewing it with great effort while saying, "There are barrels of black gunpowder stored in Ta'er Mountain, in the gap behind the row of houses near the big forge."

"If it blows up, the house will collapse with it, and the noise will be loud enough to be heard in the big forge!"

"That gunpowder barrel was piled up with a bunch of boxes of sundries. I checked it earlier and it's still there! Those Yilong troops didn't find it!"

"Understood." Lan En nodded, indicating that he understood.

He jumped with his legs and grabbed the edge of the tunnel like pulling an onion from dry land.

The huge body is light and powerful.

But before pulling himself up completely, Lan En hung there with one hand and spoke to the people below.

"By the way, I suggest you don't eat too much for now."

"What's it saying?"

Qian Zifeng, with bread still stuffed in his mouth, looked up and asked.

"If you eat too much, it will be uncomfortable to run later, right? This is a piece of advice."

(End of this chapter)