However, two fists couldn’t beat four hands—let alone over a dozen burly men who did farm work year-round and wielded long-handled weapons.
No matter how sharp the dagger in Fu Songcheng’s hand was, he couldn’t fight off all these NPCs.
His stamina was draining rapidly.
A brute with a fleshy face spotted an opening, hefted the thick wooden club in his hand, and swung it at Fu Songcheng’s back with a sharp whistle of air.
To shield Shen Ming behind him, Fu Songcheng took the blow head-on.
With a dull thud, a sweetness rose in Fu Songcheng’s throat, and his body lurched uncontrollably forward two steps, dropping to one knee on the rough concrete.
A blinding wave of pain spread from his spine, as if the bones themselves had been shattered.
“Zhang Xinci!” Shen Ning screamed, her voice tearing.
The instant she turned her head, she lost focus.
Two villagers seized the chance and lunged from left and right, one kicking Shen Ning hard in the abdomen.
Shen Ning crashed heavily to the ground, her brass knuckles scraping out a grating sound against the concrete.
Before she could get up, three shovels crossed and pinned down her neck and shoulders, nailing her dead to the ground.
“Run! You bitch, run again!”
The man stepping on her spat a thick wad of phlegm onto the ground.
The battle turned in a matter of minutes.
Fu Songcheng was pinned in the middle by four burly men with long staves. Every time he tried to rise, he got a heavier blow to his knee or shoulder.
He gritted his teeth and swallowed the blood in his mouth, his dark eyes like a trapped lone wolf, fixed dead on the village secretary standing not far away.
The six rescued women huddled by the roadside like a flock of lambs awaiting slaughter.
They watched the invincible “Zhang Xinci” beaten down, watched Shen Ning—who had given them hope—trampled underfoot. The light in their eyes was rapidly extinguishing, replaced by the familiar, bottomless despair.
The village secretary walked slowly in front of the women, hands behind his back.
The sound of his shoes stepping in puddles was like a death knell striking their hearts.
“See that?”
The village secretary’s voice was still gentle, yet carried a bone-chilling cold. “All of you, go back. Live your days properly with your men.”
He turned his head, took a thorn-covered switch from a villager beside him, and tossed it at Wang Xiu’s feet.
“Wang Xiu, you’ve been here the longest of this bunch. That deadbeat man of yours borrowed a lot of money from the village to buy you.”
The village secretary pointed at Shen Ning, pinned to the ground and covered in blood. “Break the legs of the woman who led the way. I’ll count it as atoning for your crime by merit. Your man won’t hit you anymore after this.”
The air seemed to freeze at that moment.
All eyes converged on Wang Xiu.
This woman in her thirties—hair disheveled, skin and bones—wore a worn men’s shirt that her “husband” had worn for too long.
She trembled violently, her gaze fixed dead on the blood-stained switch on the ground, a suppressed whimper like a wounded beast’s coming from her throat.
“Hit her!” the villager beside her roared impatiently. “If you don’t, tomorrow we’ll throw you into the dog pen in the back mountain!”
Wang Xiu’s legs went soft as noodles. She slowly crouched down, her trembling fingers touching the rough switch.
“Sister Xiu, don’t…” Shen Ning squeezed the words out of her throat with difficulty, blood continuously seeping from the corner of her mouth. Her system was issuing warnings—she could leave the instance at any time.
Wang Xiu gripped the switch and slowly stood up. Her hollow eyes swept over the men’s faces—some familiar, some strange—but over the past seven years, they had together woven a net called “hell” that had strangled her alive into a walking corpse.
She saw “Zhang Xinci,” pinned by long staves yet still trying to rise, and Shen Ning, beaten bloody to protect them.
They could have run on their own.
They hadn’t needed to bother with burdens like them.
Seven years ago, she too had been a girl on a university campus dreaming of the future; over seven years, she’d been treated as a breeding machine, chained, raped, beaten.
“I told you to break her legs—are you deaf?!”
The village secretary lost patience and raised his hand to slap Wang Xiu across the face.
Just as that palm-leaf-sized hand was about to fall, Wang Xiu suddenly lifted her head.
In those once-numb, deathly still eyes, something bone-chilling suddenly burst forth—a deep-seated hatred suppressed for seven years, fermented for seven years.
“Ah—!!!”
A scream of utter savagery tore through the night sky.
Wang Xiu didn’t strike Shen Ning. Instead, she whipped around, gripped the switch with both hands, and with all her strength, lashed it viciously across the village secretary’s face!
Crack!
The thorn-covered switch instantly tore apart the village secretary’s mask of hypocrisy, carving a gash so deep it showed bone across his face.
One of his eyeballs was even hooked and burst by the barbs—blood and screams erupting at the same time.
“Ah! My eye! Kill her! Kill them all!”
The village secretary clutched his face, rolling wildly on the ground.
Everyone was stunned by the sudden turn of events.
Even the villagers pinning down Shen Ning and Fu Songcheng instinctively froze for a moment.
And it was precisely in that moment of frozen hesitation that, like a signal, the fiercest wildfire on this suppressed land was ignited.
“We’re not going back! Not even if we die!”
The enraged villager was about to swing his club at Wang Xiu when the woman beside her—Liu Qin—suddenly lunged at him like a mad dog.
She had no weapon, so she opened her mouth and bit down hard on the man’s ear.
The man let out a pig-slaughtering shriek, blood spattering all over Liu Qin’s face.
“Fight them! We’re dead either way!”
The remaining four women went completely mad as well.
The shackles of decades of being penned and tamed shattered completely in that instant. With no fighting skills, they grabbed stones and mud from the ground, even the shoes their companions had dropped, and hurled them frantically at the men around them.
They clawed at men’s eyes with their fingernails, drove their knees into their groins—like a pack of wolves driven to a dead end, erupting in suffocating madness.
Mutual destruction.
The men who had tyrannized at will day after day, for the first time felt true fear from these women they had treated as livestock.
“Good!”
Fu Songcheng seized the opportunity.
He ducked his head to avoid a sweeping blow, rolling flat against the ground like a leopard. The dagger in his hand precisely severed the Achilles tendons of two villagers.
“Ah—”
Screams rose one after another. The once-impenetrable encirclement was torn open in an instant.
Fu Songcheng stood up and wiped the blood off his chin, his eyes cold as ice.
He didn’t bother with the small fry. He walked straight toward the village secretary, still howling on the ground.
He grabbed the village secretary by the collar and hauled him half-upright, pressing the cold dagger dead against his one remaining good eye.
“Everyone stop!”
Fu Songcheng’s voice wasn’t loud, but it carried an intimidating force.
Seeing their village secretary subdued, the villagers who’d still been trying to resist stopped one after another, standing in place with their clubs raised, not daring to act.
“Shen Ning, get them in the car.”
Fu Songcheng ordered without turning his head.
Shen Ning reacted instantly—the black minivan the village secretary had arrived in was their lifeboat.
“Get in! Get in the car, quick!”
Shen Ning pulled up the still-frantically-biting Liu Qin and Wang Xiu and stuffed these six women—covered in blood yet bright-eyed—into the back seats of the minivan.
The keys were still in the ignition; the engine was even still humming faintly.
What the village secretary had prepared to catch them had now become their chariot to freedom.
Shen Ning got into the driver’s seat and smoothly shifted gears. She had rehearsed the scene of driving away to escape countless times in her mind—in this moment, her body’s muscle memory moved before her reason did.
“Zhang Xinci! Get in!” Shen Ning shouted.
Fu Songcheng struck the village secretary hard on the neck with the flat of his blade, knocking him unconscious, then tossed him toward the villagers like a bag of trash.
The instant the villagers scrambled to catch the village secretary, Fu Songcheng’s figure flashed—he yanked open the passenger door and jumped in.
“Hit the gas! Drive through!”
Fu Songcheng barked.
Shen Ning bit down hard and floored the accelerator.
The engine let out a deafening roar, and the black minivan, like a steel behemoth, rammed ruthlessly into the few villagers trying to block the way.
Thud! Thud!
The dull sound of bodies being flung through the night was especially heavy. The remaining villagers scrambled and dove to the sides of the road in terror.
The minivan crunched over the scattered clubs and shovels, broke through Ya’nan Village’s final line of defense, and like an arrow loosed from the string, sped madly down the concrete road leading down the mountain.
The cabin was filled with the thick stench of blood, sweat, and earthy mud.
No one spoke—only heavy, ragged breathing.
Wang Xiu gripped Liu Qin’s hand tightly. Blood still lingered at the corner of Liu Qin’s mouth, but her eyes were fixed unblinkingly on the window.
As the minivan wound steadily down the mountain road, the dense, suffocating primeval forest around them gradually began to thin.
Who knew how long they drove—the horizon gradually began to show a sliver of fish-belly white.
Dawn tore apart the heavy darkness. The first ray of sunlight pierced the morning mist between the mountains and slanted into the cabin, falling on these scarred women.
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