Chapter 51 – Nicknamed “Brother Biao”

Zhao Hu glanced at A’Dou’s head, which had a mask with rolled-up white eyes perched on it, and laughed even harder.
“You’re laughing at me? You look even more like an idiot! You don’t even have eyeballs! Hilarious!”

He turned his head and accidentally caught sight of the “trying-not-to-laugh” mask on the chubby kid’s head.

Then he looked at Jiang He and Shi An’s ox-head-and-horse-face masks.
The whole group just collapsed to the ground, laughing and rolling around.

Help!
Someone save me!
This is too funny!

“Uncle! Do you two want to wear one?” Xiaojiu asked.

All the kids turned in unison to look at the two adults.

Seven or eight heads topped with ridiculously funny ghost masks all staring back at them—
The sight made Shi Xian and Qin Xu pinch their thighs hard.

Can’t laugh.
I’m an adult.
I must be composed!

Nope. Too funny!

Shi Xian and Qin Xu turned their heads away with their eyes shut.

Calm down. I must calm down!

The others saw the two standing with their backs to everyone, their shoulders shaking uncontrollably.

“Do you want one?” Xiaojiu, thinking they hadn’t heard, asked again.

Shi Xian and Qin Xu frantically waved their hands to say no.

Since they didn’t want them, Xiaojiu didn’t bother insisting and instead picked up a burlap sack.

A’Dou, Zhao Hu, and Iron Bull followed right after. They darted forward to catch up with the group ahead, picked the right moment, and dropped down from above with their sacks.

The heir of Marquis Pingnan’s entourage looked up—
Before they could even process what kind of bizarre, ugly things were descending on them, their vision went dark.

A flurry of punches, like a torrential storm, came right after.

The chubby kid and the others charged in, throwing punches with great enthusiasm—every blow landing solidly, no mercy at all.

Inside the sack, the victims flailed helplessly, unable to block or dodge.

“Do you even know who I am, you ugly freaks?!” the marquis’s heir shouted.

“You’re the ugly freak! Your whole family’s ugly!” Shen Zhiyuan shot back, wearing a mask with nostrils exaggeratedly flared, not feeling ugly in the slightest.

“You’re exactly who we came to beat up,” Jing Xin replied.

“Name’s the same, never changed—people call me Brother Biao,” Xiaojiu said while throwing punches.

One by one, each of them was more arrogant than the last.

The sound of dull thuds and painful groans mixed together. The people inside the sack struggled desperately until they finally went limp like piles of mud.

Once they’d knocked them out, Xiaojiu’s group pulled the sacks off—
Then proceeded to loot anything valuable from the marquis’s heir and his men, stuffing it all into the sacks.

As expected, burlap sacks were truly essential home goods for robbery and looting.

Shi An glanced at the marquis’s heir’s luxurious clothing.
“Not stripping the clothes? They’d sell for money too.”

“You’re ruthless, kid!” Jing Xin said.

He knew it—none of these people were honest.

At that, Zhao Hu immediately stepped up and stripped the marquis’s heir of his fine outer robe, shoving it into his sack. The rest of the group’s clothes looked dull and shabby, so Zhao Hu didn’t bother with those.

With a big haul in hand, they slung the sacks over their shoulders and ran off.

“Let’s go home!” They were positively giddy after their little job.

“This mask is great, really matches my vibe. From now on, whenever I go out to do shady business, I’ll wear it,” Jing Xin said in the carriage, holding his mask like a treasure.

Xiaojiu took a glance at his—
It was a meme face wearing sunglasses and biting something.

She hadn’t expected it—on the surface he looked like a proper Daoist, but inside he was a flashy street punk.

“Village Chief, who’s Brother Biao?” Zhao Hu asked curiously, recalling what the chief had shouted while fighting earlier. The name sounded so awe-inspiring.

“That’s my title in the jianghu.”

Xiaojiu had once watched a drama with her cousin that featured a fishmonger called Brother Qiang. She’d really liked him and originally wanted to name herself Brother Qiang too. But in the end, she felt “Brother Biao” sounded even more domineering, so she went with that.

“When did you ever roam the jianghu?” Jing Xin looked at the little bean curiously.

Didn’t seem like it—yet at such a young age, she was already more arrogant than him.

“Starting today! From now on, I’ll make my name resound across the land!”

Xiaojiu threw her hands on her hips and laughed heartily, then began frantically calling to the system in her heart:
“System, quick, give me some background music that fits my powerful aura!”

The system was speechless, but still put on something it thought suited her—a Yunnan-style song-and-dance number.

‘If you can’t dance, learn to dance, brother moves, you move, the big river, the big sea…’

The moment the music started, Xiaojiu’s face turned green.

But somehow, her body moved with the rhythm on its own.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” she yelled quickly.

“I want the kind that goes, ‘Ruling the world, I charge wherever I please!’“

The system pretended to be dead and logged off.

Xiaojiu fumed and cursed the system in her heart!

From Jing Xin’s point of view, the little girl who’d just been laughing with her hands on her hips suddenly twitched her legs and butt a few times, then plopped down sulking for no reason.

Jing Xin was baffled—were kids nowadays always this strange?

Meanwhile, the group of men lying bruised and battered on the ground slowly regained consciousness.

The heir of Marquis Pingnan forced his swollen eyes open. His head felt heavy and foggy, and waves of pain shot through him like jolts of electricity.

A gust of cold wind hit, chilling him to the bone.

Looking down, he realized his outer robe was gone.

“Your Lordship, are you alright?” his servant and a few guards crawled over weakly from a short distance away.

Seeing them all fully clothed only enraged the marquis’s heir further. He kicked the servant.

“Go find me something to wear!”

The servant fumbled for his pouch, trembling.
“Your Lordship… all the money… the money’s gone.”

Looking around, he saw that everyone else had also been stripped clean.

“A bunch of useless trash! Take off your clothes now unless you want me to freeze to death!”

The servant hurriedly took off his own coat and handed it over.

The heir took it, but as soon as he sniffed it, a rank sweaty smell hit him.

He immediately threw it back.
“What is that stench? How long has it been since you last bathed?”

Scanning the group, he finally picked a guard who looked the cleanest and had him remove his coat instead.

The guard thought bitterly: If I’d known, I wouldn’t have bathed so often. Sometimes being too clean isn’t a good thing.

“Your Lordship, who were those people just now? Did we run into something… unclean?” the servant asked fearfully.

“How should I know?” The marquis’s heir’s face twisted with fury. He, a noble heir, had come to Yangping County only to be robbed twice in a row.

“A bunch of ghost-masked scoundrels! I’ll wipe out every last bandit in these mountains sooner or later!” He still firmly believed that the group from earlier were just local mountain bandits.

After tidying themselves up, they spurred their horses toward the capital.

In the carriage, however, the marquis’s heir lay half-dead from pain, dizzy with hunger, and without a single coin or valuable to his name.

He had never suffered such humiliation before. Still, after this incident, his father would finally have an excuse to petition the emperor for troops to eradicate the bandits—
And when that happened, the credit would surely fall to the Pingnan Marquisate.