Chapter Eighty-Two: Liang’s Despair

Winter days are short, and by the time they returned home, night had already fallen completely. By lamplight, his mother fastened the frog closures on Tie Xinyuan’s new clothes and stitched them onto the garments, every one of them a finely crafted looped knot.

Wang Rouhua took a careful look at her handiwork, then poked her head out through the window. Seeing that the light in her son’s room was still on, she tiptoed to the window and peeked inside.

Her son was a strange and clever little thing, the sort who gave her a headache; more often than not, she had no idea what was moving through that small head of his.

Under the lamplight, Tie Xinyuan was reading. Now and then, as he read, he would make notes by hand. That was a good habit: circle the things he did not understand and ask the teacher the next day. Given time and accumulation, learning would grow of its own accord.

Seeing that her son was studying attentively, Wang Rouhua quietly retreated. The child was growing up and was no longer easy to manage. At the very least, he no longer wanted to sleep in the same bed with her.

When Tie Xinyuan saw her shadow disappear from the window, he could not help but smile and shake his head. Outside, the moonlight was already nearly brighter than the oil lamp inside. What use was such secret supervision?

Besides, the moment his mother stepped out of the room, the fox would immediately raise its head in alertness...

Only after confirming that his mother had gone to sleep did Tie Xinyuan pry out the hollow brick from the wall and pull from it a bag about the size of a pillow.

Inside was the mushroom powder he had gathered over the past few years. Regrettably, after growing in the wild for several years, this species had slowly lost its poison, and its effect could not compare at all with the mushroom powder harvested in the first three years.

It seemed the saying that hardship breeds survival and ease breeds ruin applied equally to mushrooms. If Tie Xinyuan had not been so greedy as to expand production and deliberately alter the mushrooms’ living conditions, their toxicity would not have diminished so much.

Still, this time what he needed was precisely this kind of mildly stimulating neurotoxin. A pig’s body was too massive; expecting the drug to take effect quickly was impossible. Even if it did, the effect would fade again in a very short time.

A delayed mechanism was needed as well. The drug’s delay mechanism was a wax pellet: once the wax pellet, wrapped around the powder, entered the pig’s stomach, the outer layer of beeswax would melt away. The time required for gastric fluid to dissolve the wax was exactly the time Tie Xinyuan needed.

These past days, Tie Xinyuan had spent no little time dealing with those pigs. Feeding them mushroom powder laced with neurotoxin was a difficult business, and what worried him most was that once the pigs ate it, they might go mad.

Their hides were thick and their bodies rough; once driven berserk, their ferocity would erupt completely, and not even one or two burly men could subdue them.

By then, only the smell of mushroom powder would remain in those pigs’ keen noses. Wherever there was mushroom powder, they would charge there in a frenzy.

Tomorrow night, these fierce warriors would finally have their chance to show their might...

The beeswax simmering on the stove slowly melted. With great patience, Tie Xinyuan poured it onto a wooden board, then, before it had time to harden, pressed another board down upon it. After waiting a moment and then lifting it away, the mold board was left with a row of tiny semicircular cavities.

Using a spoon, Tie Xinyuan evenly filled each cavity with mushroom powder. Then he took the semicircular hot wax shell, quickly pinched the opening shut, and at last rolled it between his hands into little wax balls.

Staring at the oddly shaped wax balls, Tie Xinyuan frowned. He heated the other board and placed it before him, then stuffed the wax pellets into the cavities in the mold. After that, he pressed the other half of the board, which had matching cavities, tightly onto the one holding the pellets. After waiting a little while, he separated the boards again, tapped them lightly against the table, and more than a dozen crystalline, rounded wax pellets fell out.

Picking up one the size of a grape, Tie Xinyuan smiled and said, “Chemistry ought to be the most precise of all sciences. Too much or too little, and it will not work.

After so many trials, there should be no mistake now.”

The pigs that had eaten the mushroom powder numbered just over three hundred. The rest of those that had also been fed the powder had, unfortunately, been sent by Old Liang to the butcher shop and eaten by others, which left Tie Xinyuan worried that there might not be enough pigs to produce the desired effect...

After the temple monk who kept watch and rang the bell had struck the clapper three times, a basket of wax pellets sat before Tie Xinyuan. On top was a walnut-sized pellet, especially eye-catching; this was the special pellet he had made for the pig king.

Tie Xinyuan had tested it: with beeswax of that thickness, it would take at least an hour and a half to melt in a pig’s stomach. If it took longer than that, the pellet would be expelled intact; if shorter, it might not achieve the effect he wanted.

Therefore, the thickness of the wax pellets had to be controlled within a reasonable range.

Before the basket of wax pellets, Tie Xinyuan closed his eyes and went over his plan once more. It was flawless, with few remaining loopholes; and even if there were any, they were no longer things he could control...

What remained was how to persuade Old Liang to help him feed these pellets to the pigs.

Old Liang himself no longer had much courage left for living. He drank himself half to death every day, hoping to drink himself dead, but unfortunately he simply would not die.

The headman of the Butchers’ Gang was Old Liang.

At least, that was what the constables of Kaifeng County yamen said.

Tie Xinyuan did not see it that way. The Butchers’ Gang ought not to have had any headman at all. They should have been nothing more than a group of butchers who had gathered together of their own accord to form an interest group.

It was only that the Kaifeng County yamen needed to identify a real leader, and Old Liang, with his wealth and household, naturally became the de facto headman.

A county magistrate can ruin a household; a prefect can wipe out a family. Those words were not said lightly. Before the crushing force of the state machine, no matter how strong an individual was, he was only a mantis trying to block a cart.

This time, Tie Xinyuan had never intended to pull Xiaoqiao and the others into it. After all, the feud between the Dangerous Tower and Brother Seven’s noodle shop was a private grudge.

Borrowing another man’s strength did not make one a hero. Moreover, Tie Xinyuan believed this matter did not require Xiaoqiao and the others to show their faces.

Once unfamiliar faces appeared in the pigsty, suspicion would surely be aroused.

The fox leaped out of its sleeping basket, circled the basket of wax pellets once, and then seemed to remember something. After shivering, it returned to its basket and gathered all six fat little dogs that were whining and grunting under its great tail, not allowing a single one to run off.

At daybreak, his mother hurried off to the shop in Date Mound Alley, and Tie Xinyuan did not get up until the sun was already high overhead. After the New Year holiday, there was no need to go to school. Teacher Guo had taken his wife back to his hometown for the New Year, and the schoolyard was now empty, with not even a ghost in sight except for the disabled old soldier who served as the gatekeeper and had nowhere else to go.

His teacher’s wife favored him and had left Tie Xinyuan a key: the key to the teacher’s study. If he had no books to read, he could go there and fetch some himself.

Carrying the basket into the school, Tie Xinyuan asked the old soldier to boil some hot water for him. After returning from the pigsty, he intended to give himself a proper bath here.

He had heard enough about how sensitive a pig’s nose could be, and he was certain his body was now stained with mushroom powder. If the pigs went mad and charged toward the Dangerous Tower, he feared he might become the target of their rampage. If that happened, it would be truly reaping what he had sown.

Passing by the shop of Bull Three-Fears, Tie Xinyuan bought a large mutton wrap, then headed for the pigsty.

Before he even came near, he could hear pig squeals rising one after another from inside. He quickened his pace, only then realizing that the pigs had not been fed and were currently begging for food.

Old Liang stood alone atop the wall of the pig pen. His dark, leathery face had been turned iron blue by the cold wind. Today, he was the only person left feeding the pigs; no wonder they were so agitated.

When Old Liang saw Tie Xinyuan coming, he gave him a strange smile. “Young master Yuan is here to see the pigs? By all means, look all you want. After today, you may not get the chance again.”

Tie Xinyuan asked in surprise, “Why is that?”

Old Liang jumped down from the wall of the pig pen and said, “All the hands who fed the pigs have run off. Even if this old man had three heads and six arms, I still couldn’t feed more than seven hundred pigs.”

“If the pigs starve to death, you’ll be in serious trouble.”

Old Liang laughed. “Truth be told, yesterday you should not have covered me with a blanket, and you certainly should not have left a crack in the door. I had no intention of living through yesterday at all.

Because I owed you, I woke up today only to suffer this living torment.”

“In fact, you could leave.”

Old Liang swept the hair hanging in front of his face aside, revealing a glaring brandmark on his cheek. With that mark, no matter where he fled, so long as he was not in a military camp, he would be hunted down by the authorities.

Tie Xinyuan said nothing. He took the mutton wrap from the basket and handed it to Old Liang; the idea of Old Liang taking to the hills as an outlaw was not something he could bring himself to say.

Old Liang was not polite at all. He bit into the wrap and swallowed it in a few gulps before saying, “This old fool had eyes but could not see. The matter of tossing turmeric into the big pit at the Dangerous Tower to make the blood water run out—someone exposed it. The county yamen said nothing more and branded my face on the spot, charging me with spreading demonic lies and misleading the people.

A steward from the Prince’s residence also came to see me, saying I was not destined to survive the year. Damn it all, I’ve been tough all my life, and now at last I’ve met a blacksmith. No matter how hard the body’s bones are, they can’t withstand another man’s fire and water hammering. This time, I truly cannot get through this hurdle.”

Tie Xinyuan studied Old Liang for a while. The man did not seem especially despondent, and then he suddenly asked, “Do you mean to take revenge on them? How will you do it?”

Old Liang laughed. “This old man is nothing but a pig butcher. My ancestors were pig butchers, generation after generation, and a pig butcher’s way of revenge is naturally to butcher pigs. There are still seven hundred and fourteen pigs here. If I slaughter them at random, let the blood soak into their entrails, slit their large intestines so filth stains the meat—heh heh, I’ll make those bastards drink blood and eat excrement!”

Tie Xinyuan cried out, “If you do that, the magistrate will kill you and have your flesh eaten!”

Old Liang finished the wrap in a few bites, spread out his hands, and only then did Tie Xinyuan notice that his hands were covered in blood.

“I’ve already butchered sixteen. I’m going to slaughter the rest now and try to finish before dark. As for this old man himself—ha! I’ve lived long enough. After I finish the pigs, I’ll slaughter myself too. Boy, if you still remember the kindness between me and your family, then act as though you never came to the pigsty.”

After Tie Xinyuan had gone to look at the pig carcasses in one of the pens, he handed the basket to Old Liang and said, “Actually, there is a better way...”