Childhood Friend or Destined Encounter? - Chapter 20

After dinner, Yezi took it upon herself to handle the dishes, while Luosang, true to her word, began teaching Fengya how to handle the rudder.

With a different student at the helm, Luosang wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as before. She explained the necessary precautions for steering in one go and then left Fengya to manage it herself.

The sea was calm and they were traveling a straight path, so operating this semi-automatic vessel wasn’t overly complicated. Fengya, naturally bright, caught on quickly. Before long, she was steering in silence while Luosang watched from the side, the air between them settling into an awkward hush.

Perhaps feeling the tension, Fengya looked for a casual topic to break the ice. “I’ve heard that pirates sometimes roam these waters. Have you ever run into any in all your years of sailing?”

“Not really. Pirates aren’t actually that easy to encounter. I usually travel on ordinary civilian boats that clearly don’t have much money. In an ocean this vast, the odds of a ship this small meeting pirates… well, you’d have to be incredibly unlucky.”

The words had barely left Luosang’s mouth when a gurgling sound echoed from beneath the hull.

What was that? Did we hit a whale? Fengya pricked up her ears, monitoring the movement around the boat. Before she could determine what kind of creature was underwater, six men with black cloths wrapped around their heads vaulted over the gunwale and onto the deck. The once spacious deck suddenly felt very cramped.

The leader raised a blade toward Fengya. “This is a robbery! Hand over everything of value, now!”

Fengya: “…” Luosang: “…”

If they were on land, Fengya was confident she could take all six lives with a single stroke of her sword. But on a small boat, she couldn’t unleash her sword qi or use techniques with too much destructive power. This left her feeling restricted, and for a moment, she found herself in a stalemate with the mediocre pirates.

Luosang was also cornered by two pirates. Though her martial arts were average, she had no trouble defending herself against opponents who were equally unskilled.

The deck was too narrow for eight people to fight comfortably. Fengya, growing impatient with the men crowding her, leaped onto the mast. Grabbing the sail, she swung through the air in a wide arc, kicking all six men into the water one by one.

She didn’t rush back down. Instead, she hovered above, surveying the water. Whenever a head surfaced, she sent a bolt of sword qi whistling toward it, carefully avoiding the ship’s hull.

After five strikes, five heads popped up and sank back down. She waited in the air for a long time, but a sixth head never appeared.

The pirate leader, seeing five of his brothers lost in an instant, was terrified. He quietly dove deep and retreated.

Normally, such a small boat wouldn’t have been worth such a fuss, but for some reason, no other ships had passed through this region lately. Seeing this little boat today, they had approached with a “even a mosquito’s leg is meat” mindset to get some practice in, never expecting to hit such a jagged rock.

Having dealt with the pirates on deck, Fengya suddenly remembered Yezi was alone in the cabin. Her heart sank.

“Stay here and guard the rudder, I’ll be right back.” Leaving those hurried instructions, Fengya rushed into the cabin. She searched quickly, but it was empty.

Just as panic began to set in, she noticed bubbles rising continuously from the water beside the boat. Looking at the way the bubbles broke at the surface, she knew something was alive down there. Without a second thought, Fengya dove into the sea, sword in hand.

While the six pirates had been ambushing Fengya and Luosang on deck, two others had slipped into the cabin to scavenge for loot, stumbling right into Yezi as she was washing dishes.

Seeing two strange, ill-intentioned men suddenly appear, Yezi frantically threw plates at them, trying to escape to the deck to find Fengya.

However, the two men blocked the only door. Even with her lightness skills, the space was too cramped to maneuver. In her desperation to avoid being captured, Yezi leaped through the window into the sea, hoping to swim around to the deck.

To her misfortune, the pirates saw how beautiful she was and abandoned their search for gold to jump in after her.

Though Yezi knew how to swim, she was no match for pirates who spent their lives on the water. She was caught before she could even reach the deck.

Fengya followed the bubbles underwater. Before long, she saw Yezi struggling as two pirates hauled her upward. Rage and anxiety flared in her chest.

It was difficult to release sword qi underwater, so she increased her swimming speed. Within seconds, she was behind the pirates, piercing one through with her sword.

Once the nuisances were dealt with, Fengya threw one arm around Yezi, who was drifting toward unconsciousness after swallowing sea water, and used her other hand to swim back to the boat with her sword.

Luosang, who had been watching the water, spotted them and quickly threw down a rope to pull them aboard.

Fengya laid Yezi flat on the deck and pressed her hands against her lower abdomen, forcing out the water she had inhaled.

After several tries, Yezi spat out a significant amount of seawater, yet she showed no signs of waking up.

Fengya checked her breath, it was steady.

Luosang, seeing that Yezi remained unconscious, was even more frantic than Fengya. She cried through tears and a runny nose, “Benefactor, what’s wrong? Please wake up, you can’t let anything happen to you!”

“Stop crying. I need to bathe her, or she’ll catch a cold when she wakes up.” Fengya interrupted Luosang’s sobbing and carried Yezi into the washroom.

Seeing Fengya so composed, Luosang assumed Yezi’s life wasn’t in danger. She wiped her eyes and went to help heat some water.

Conditions on the boat were limited. There was only one small bath bucket, making it a tight squeeze for two people. Fortunately, with one person unconscious, the skin-to-skin contact wasn’t awkward.

Fengya poured warm water over Yezi’s skin, which was so pale it was almost translucent. She watched the droplets slide down that jade-like skin, though she was in no mood for any romantic thoughts.

She had stayed calm in front of Luosang, but her heart was heavy with worry. She had seen Yezi fall into a coma back in Pingyang City and knew it was a constitutional issue, once she fell under, there was no telling when she would wake. This current state might not just be from the near-drowning. While her life wasn’t in immediate danger, the need to find the Ghost Doctor was becoming more urgent by the minute.

Fengya cradled Yezi in her arms, using her fingers to comb through the tangled dark hair. As she carefully smoothed the strands away from Yezi’s face, revealing a smooth, full forehead, a faint red mark flickered between her brows. It looked like a lotus flower. Fengya blinked, and when she looked again, the forehead was as clear as before.

How is that possible? I must be exhausted and seeing things. Fengya brushed the thought aside and focused on cleaning Yezi.

This time, the recovery was much faster. Yezi woke up by the following night.

Opening her eyes, Yezi immediately saw Fengya guarding her bedside. A warm, tingling sensation spread through her heart: It seems like every time I wake up, the first person I see is you.

Fengya had been exhausted these past two days and had fallen asleep with her head resting on her hand.

Yezi sat up and helped Fengya lie down properly on the bed, replacing her hand with a pillow. She removed Fengya’s boots so her limbs could stretch out comfortably, and finally tucked a thin quilt around her before quietly slipping out of the room.

Having slept for a day and a night, Yezi was wide awake. She went to the kitchen for a bite to eat and then stepped out onto the deck for some fresh air, where she happened to see Luosang muttering something to herself by the mast.

“It’s so late, why aren’t you resting?” Yezi walked over and saw several new protrusions on the floor and a set of blueprints.

“Benefactor, you’re awake!” Luosang was overjoyed, her voice rising sharply. Yezi pointed toward the cabin and made a “hush” gesture. Luosang understood immediately and lowered her volume. “Fengya and I are on shifts. She watches the sea during the day, and I take over at night.”

No wonder she looked so tired. Yezi pointed to the blueprints. “And what are you doing with these?”

“I want to install a system of traps on the boat. Even though Fengya is a powerful martial artist, the boat is quite large. She can’t be by our side every second of the day. To prevent what happened yesterday from happening again, I need to make something for self-defense. Look at this.” Luosang pressed one of the protrusions, and a net unfurled from the mast, covering the cabin entrance.

“The idea is good,” Yezi said, picking up the blueprints to examine them. “But the design could use some improvements. For instance, you could add hidden projectiles in these two spots to ensure that no matter where an intruder boards the deck, they are forced into the net’s range. And these two spots could use partitions, so even if an intruder has good lightness skills and dodges the first trap, they are forced into the path of the second one.”

As Yezi spoke, she took the pen from Luosang and began drawing on a blank sheet of paper. Luosang watched, slack-jawed.

She had only intended to design a simple trap to buy some time, but under Yezi’s hand, it had become something sophisticated and interconnected, even incorporating principles of the Qimen Dunjia. To think that she, a member of the Dunyi Clan, hadn’t even considered these layers.

The two of them worked together from night until dawn following the new design, and they actually managed to assemble a proper trap system. The only pity was that they didn’t have anyone to test it on.

Fengya didn’t wake until the sun was high. Seeing she was alone in the room, she didn’t even bother washing up. She grabbed her sword from the bedside and rushed to the deck to find the others.

Just as she reached the cabin door, three sandbags came flying toward her. She dodged two, but the third zipped right toward her face. She had no choice but to slice the bag open with her sword. Dust exploded everywhere, blurring her vision.

Suddenly, a net dropped from above. Relying on years of muscle memory, Fengya rolled away to dodge it, only to slam into a partition that hadn’t been there before. Another net unfurled from the partition, and this time, there was nowhere to run.

Entrapped in the net, Fengya tried to swing her sword to cut her way out, but the net tightened instantly, pinning her arms so she couldn’t move.

It all happened in a flash. Before Fengya could process it, she assumed villains had boarded the ship and feared Yezi had met with foul play. She was about to force her way out with raw internal energy, even if it meant internal injuries, when a familiar voice called out, “Fengya!”

Yezi saw who was in the net and hurriedly pressed the release mechanism. She rushed forward to support the disheveled Fengya, who was covered in white dust, and began wiping the grime from her face. Once Fengya could see again, Yezi turned to Luosang with a flash of anger. “Why did you use the trap on Fengya?”

Luosang rubbed her nose with an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I’ve been working all night and my eyes are a bit blurry. I couldn’t see clearly.”

But in her heart, she marveled: The traps the benefactor designed are truly incredible. They even caught Fengya. I wonder if adding some knockout powder to the sandbags next time would make them even better?

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