After Retiring to the Countryside, I Was Recruited as a Matrilocal Husband - Chapter 9

The Huaining Army functioned as the elite garrison retinue under the Jiedushi of Huaixi. Ever since their supreme leader the rebel boss Li had been thoroughly battered into absolute isolation, a profound aura of decadence and stagnation had systematically spread throughout the military barracks.

With zero active campaigns to execute on their calendars, the completely idle mercenary troops had no choice but to rely heavily on rampant gambling to kill the long hours of the day.

It was precisely by leveraging her flawless, elite mastery of gambling mechanics that Zhang Zhaoge had successfully caught the calculating eye of the “Red-Headed Warrior” Du Bingqian.

A Red-Headed Warrior was a textbook definition of a specialized elite guard the absolute fiercest shock troopers deployed to spearhead the vanguard when a violent campaign launched.

While Du Bingqian operated nominally as a mercenary under Boss Li’s banner, the practical reality was that he had long since transitioned to function as a trusted personal retainer attached directly to the inner gates of General Chen Xian.

Under ordinary parameters, a raw recruit who had just entered the enlistment tracks like Zhang Zhaoge stood absolutely zero chance of unlocking Du Bingqian’s favor. This was particularly true given that while she was coded as a male in everyone’s subconscious, her physical features and vocal register completely lacked robust, aggressively masculine traits. Furthermore, her biological height yielded zero operational advantage among the columns of soldiers. Had she failed to survive the rigorous one-month mandatory onboarding boot camp, her transition to a permanent corporate track would have struck a wall.

She had honestly already prepared herself to execute a clean exit to hunt for a secondary profession. Yet, right at that threshold, Du Bingqian having been thoroughly wiped out on the felt until his eyes turned red tracked her down. He explicitly petitioned to study her gambling mechanics, promising that in exchange, he would not only seamlessly authorize her permanent onboarding status but would also formally adopt her into his inner circle as a junior brother. Under his absolute protection, not a single soul within the Huaining Army would ever dare ride roughshod over her authority.

Coincidentally, right around that calendar marker, Boss Li developed a severe illness from consuming beef. Seizing the exact opening, his forcibly plundered concubine, Dou Ying, successfully leaked cryptographic data straight to General Chen Xian. Armed with the intelligence, Chen Xian commanded his medical officers to smoothly administer a lethal poison to Boss Li, subsequently mobilizing his elite guards to execute a thorough slaughter of the warlord’s entire immediate family.

By the time the remaining inner-gate generals and regional commanders gathered word of the purge, Chen Xian heavily backed and elevated by his elite guards had already seamlessly usurped Boss Li’s extensive empire and corporate holdings, successfully positioning his track as the new supreme CEO.

Back when Chen Xian was preparing to launch the coup, Du Bingqian had quietly sought out Zhang Zhaoge, delivering an urgent prompt: There is a flawless operational window to instantly secure your permanent onboarding promotion right now. Are you game to execute the strategy?

Zhang Zhaoge’s eyes had rolled playfully, her mind instantly decoding that a towering corporate shift was imminent. Given Du Bingqian’s elite standing, he was bound to command absolute insider data.

Bypassing a single syllable of hesitation, she had instantly voiced her commitment to follow her Big Brother’s lead. After all, backed by a digital cheat system, a successful run would yield a massive promotion and an elite salary increase, while a catastrophic slip would simply trigger her escape protocols. An absolute corporate slacker (Mo yu ren) would never commit the blunder of living and dying alongside her employer!

Highly respecting her towering courage, Du Bingqian had smoothly installed her silhouette directly into the columns of Chen Xian’s elite inner guards.

Zhang Zhaoge had tracked the rear of the columns to execute a campaign of absolute slacking. The exact second the troops successfully breached Boss Li’s private palace, Chen Xian had delivered a thoroughly theatrical, textbook performance of shedding a single crocodile tear for his late master. Right on cue, Du Bingqian launched into the pre-arranged script, loudly petitioning the ranks to elevate Chen Xian as their new supreme Boss.

Zhang Zhaoge thought to herself that she recognized this exact script inside out had every single historical usurper since the dawn of time not executed their plays based on this exact sequence?

Prompted by Du Bingqian’s micro-signals, she had instantly echoed the slogans elevating Chen Xian to the supreme track, screaming the praises with the absolute highest register and intensity, aggressively fighting to brand herself as the premier vanguard supporter of the new regime.

Chen Xian had likely never encountered an entity operating with such absolute, flagrant sycophancy. Consequently, her profile instantly caught his eye, registering her presence permanently.

The mechanics unfolded exactly as Du Bingqian had calculated: she finalized her permanent onboarding status seamlessly, extracting a massive corporate upgrade to transition from a mere provisional foot soldier straight into the track of a trusted elite guard attached to the new Boss.

Subsequently, Chen Xian had delivered Boss Li’s severed head to the imperial court to tender his formal submission. The entire Huaixi conglomerate was smoothly rebranded as a state-owned enterprise, ensuring Zhang Zhaoge no longer had to navigate a permanent anxiety of being executed by the government as an anti-imperial rebel.

Furthermore, outside of extracting the basic daily rewards from her standard check-ins, she had successfully finalized a succession of system missions unlocking full masteries across a premium tier of skills: [Mastery of Martial Arts], [Mastery of Blade Mechanics], [Mastery of Horsemanship], and [Mastery of Archery]. Tracking Du Bingqian who had recently been formally adopted as Chen Xian’s godson to suppress a handful of minor regional mutinies, her battlefield credits successfully earned her a promotion into the specialized elite shock units as a Shock Guard (Zhai nei tu jiang).

Regrettably, following her massive promotion and salary increase, the golden era of her existence maintained its parameters for a brief three-month calendar window.

A senior lieutenant from Boss Li’s former faction, a man named Wu Cheng, harbored a ravenous desire to occupy the supreme executive throne himself. He maintained that since he and Chen Xian both occupied the highest tiers of corporate management, why on earth should Chen Xian extract absolute ownership merely by successfully seizing the official company seals, while an absolute corporate veteran like himself was left out in the cold?

Yet, executing a hostile takeover required a baseline justification. To buy the alignment of the remaining corporate elders, he launched a campaign of violence under the banner of extracting vengeance for their late Boss Li, cleanly assassinating Chen Xian.

Operating as a trusted confidant attached directly to Chen Xian’s lineage, how on earth could Zhang Zhaoge avoid being dragged into the lethal fallout?

Faced with the thorough purge Wu Cheng aggressively unleashed across the ranks, she absolutely refused to sit idly by to await her execution.

Extracting Dou Ying from the perimeter, she tracked Du Bingqian and his detachment of five hundred elite guards to execute an immediate, collective career jump marching straight toward the Eastern Capital to seek refuge under the Defense Commander, General Jia, who functioned as her current supreme employer.

Likely deeply anxious that permitting this specific block of mercenary troops to remain unified would invite the formation of an uncontrollable faction, General Jia had simply broken up their numbers, redeploying Du Bingqian to assume the post of Vice Militia Commander Tuan lian guan jian fu shi across Ruzhou, while she was dispatched to Lushan County to fill an active vacancy as a Vice Commander.

Although Lushan County operated under the civil administration of Ruzhou, the two systems functioned under completely independent parameters. Du Bingqian policed the military administration of the regional territorial forces (Zhi jun bing), whereas she operated strictly as a Vice Commander governing the local county garrison troops (Xian zhen bing). While both tiers answered ultimately to the supreme command of the regional Prefect (Cishi), they shared absolute zero vertical hierarchy between them.

Zhang Zhaoge calculated that playing the role of a local precinct captain in the absolute countryside was miles more free-spirited and comfortable than operating as a high-stakes bodyguard directly before the face of a supreme tycoon. Having been aggressively forced to churn through three different employers within a brief six-month calendar window with every single corporate shift triggering an absolute storm of blood and slaughter she, an operator who merely wished to execute a campaign of pure slacking, found the parameters far too intense. Her fragile, modern psyche was simply incapable of handling the stress.

Her consciousness floated back from the historical horizon as a crisp digital notification chimed directly beside her ear:

[System Alert:] You have successfully executed a continuous check-in track spanning 176 calendar days. Reward processed: [Menstrual Belt · Ultra-Absorbent Edition] $times 1$.

Snapping out of her trance, Zhang Zhaoge smoothly deposited the item into her dimensional storage ring.

While the system interface lacked the capability to aggressively scale her profile to the absolute peak of human luxury, it had successfully resolved a massive mountain of practical bottlenecks texturing her daily existence. Case in point: this specific line of premium menstrual belts meticulously engineered to cater to the parameters of the modern corporate workforce female yielded an exceptional caliber of convenience.

The item produced by the interface perfectly mirrored the visual appearance of the basic cloth menstrual belts utilized by local women in this era, yet its functional absorption efficiency completely outclassed even modern sanitary pads. An operator had zero need to harbor anxiety over lateral leakage, nor did she have to sweat the variable of being unable to execute a timely swap while running field operations out in the wilderness, eliminating any threat of staining her uniform trousers. Furthermore, it delivered a protective, soothing layer of warmth to mitigate pain for corporate females forced to pull shifts without the option of logging sick leave during menstrual cycles.

Zhang Zhaoge had already successfully hoarded over a dozen of them.

Outside of resolving her baseline biological hygiene parameters, the interface yielded a vast array of conveniences governing her daily life. The system likely parsed the reality that a multitude of modern rewards could never be safely displayed before the eyes of the locals; consequently, it had showered her kit with a premium storage ring.

This specific storage ring commanded a spatial volume of exactly 1 cubic meter an exceptionally rare item yield operating under an incredibly low probability drop. Throughout her entire 176-day check-in track since her transmigration, she had successfully extracted a grand total of only two.

The spatial matrix was incapable of sustaining biological organisms and its volume remained locked, so she habitually utilized it strictly to harbor commodities that were entirely absent from this historical era encompassing modern underwear, a heavy-duty military water filtration canteen, an entrenching shovel, a multi-functional outdoor survival blade, mosquito repellent, medicated liniment oil, jars of Lao Gan Ma chili sauce, cumin powder, chicken bouillon powder… along with private utilities like her menstrual belts that were highly inconvenient to display.

Mapping the rows of premium spices, Zhang Zhaoge instantly felt her mouth grow distinctly lonely.

Operating as a garrison commander indeed yielded a towering level of autonomy, yet it carried a single, massive downside the baseline culinary outlays inside the barracks barracks were catastrophically low-tier.

Two meals a day, consistently alternating between thin millet gruel, unleavened flatbread, or steamed buns (Mantou). While the rations barely sufficed to achieve absolute fullness, they possessed zero functional utility outside of that single target.

Back when she policed the inner gates as an elite guard for Chen Xian, she had been guaranteed a premium feast of mutton every three days on the calendar. In her current deployment, if she managed to extract a single micro-particle of minced meat across a ten-day window, it counted as an absolute miracle.

She desperately craved authentic modern barbecue, savory meat burgers (Rou jia mo), spicy pepper soup (Hu la tang), five-spice braised rabbit…

Zhang Zhaoge had absolutely zero intention of ever inflicting an economic or physical grievance upon her own person. She decisively resolved to march straight into the deep ridges tomorrow morning, executing a hunting campaign to secure a few wild rabbits and pheasants to aggressively supplement her private menu.

At that exact, concurrent threshold over at the Zhaoping country estate, Cui Jun was likewise aggressively organizing her teams of private retainers, preparing to launch them into the deep mountain forests to execute her logging campaign.