Daomu Biji: The Southern Archives

The two girls were both quite young. They walked over calmly, dragging the corpse as if they had done it several times before.

Zhang Haiyan and He Jianxi were right on the path where they would dump the corpse, so they had to keep retreating. The girls were approaching quickly, but the corpses lying on the ground made it difficult for the two men to retreat any further. They ended up having to lie down among the piled-up bodies.

He Jianxi’s face wound up pressed directly against a cold corpse. He was so frightened that he wanted to get up instantly, but Zhang Haiyan held him down.

It was only after the body was discarded that the girls started talking again, but the sea breeze made it difficult for Zhang Haiyan to hear anything clearly. When the breeze blew, the headlights on the ship’s mast moved, and the lights flashed across the area.

Zhang Haiyan saw that the two girls were very similar in shape, and they were wearing tight-fitting shirts and short tops. Their figures and arms were amazingly good and looked very delicate and slender. They had shoulder-length hair and were wearing masks on their faces.

He recognized the masks. When he worked as the plague god of the sea, he used to wear this kind of mask. It only exposed the mouth, so the people on board remembered that the plague god had blades in his mouth whenever they thought of him.

The dragon princess’s face (1) was painted on the mask in many different patterns. There were a lot of stalls selling them during the coastal worship rituals, and he had bought a lot of them.

One of the girls started to search the bodies, taking out the identification documents and money before putting them in her pocket.

The lights turned again and illuminated the scene for a brief moment.

Zhang Haiyan’s position allowed him to take a peek. The woman who was squatting down had longer hair that was blowing in the sea breeze. That, coupled with her mask, made her look very beautiful.

At this distance, Zhang Haiyan could directly spit out his blades and pierce through that face that might be good-looking. After that, he could raise his head, and the other girl wouldn’t even be able to make it further than three meters.

But for some reason, he felt that the girl’s standing posture was a bit familiar.

He didn't do anything.

The two girls didn’t stay. After putting something beside the corpses, they turned around and walked away.

Zhang Haiyan and He Jianxi sat up. He Jianxi crawled out of the pile of corpses, leaned over the side of the ship, and vomited into the sea. The smell of blood and dead bodies made him feel extremely disgusted. Zhang Haiyan, on the other hand, stood among the pile of corpses feeling awfully puzzled.

“What’s going on with this ship?” He Jianxi asked him.

Zhang Haiyan inspected the wounds on the corpses and found that they all had small, but very deep wounds on their necks. The wounds almost penetrated all the way through their necks and hit their brainstems.

He felt that the wounds looked familiar. He had all sorts of questions in his heart, but he couldn’t remember what kinds of weapons would cause these kinds of wounds. He just thought that they looked very familiar.

“They might be pirates. These girls are so ruthless but handle things so neatly. I can tell that they’re trained at first glance,” Zhang Haiyan lied.

Unlike pirates in the Caribbean, pirates in the South Sea often didn’t have ships. They would sneak onto merchant ships and pretend to be performers or merchants before hijacking the ships and demanding a ransom from the owners.

Generally, if the communication between the pirates and owners went well, the pirates wouldn't harm the passengers’ lives. But they would definitely kill all the able-bodied guards without exception. It was very similar to what they had seen just now.

Piracy in this region was a hereditary lifestyle. There were children killing people with knives, so it wasn’t surprising that young girls were doing it as well. 

But these two girls didn’t look like pirates at all. Moreover, the Qing dynasty and the warlords carried out several attacks more than a dozen years ago that almost defeated all the pirates in the South Sea. It didn’t make any sense that they would suddenly appear again, and on the Nan’an, no less.

“Pirates?” He Jianxi fell down, wiped his mouth, and said weakly, “Then we have to inform the people on board.”

“Wait a minute. They’ve killed so many people but didn’t throw them into the sea. There must be other reasons.” Zhang Haiyan looked at where they had gone, which was the inner cabin of the ship.

The VIP guests stayed in the buildings on the deck of the ship, while the inner cabins were filled with the workers and lower-class guests. The two young girls had walked down there.

The way one of the girls walked was giving Zhang Haiyan a sense of déjà vu. Where had he seen it before?

****

TN Notes:

(1) The dragon princess is the dragon king’s daughter. The dragon king is a Chinese water and weather god. People will worship them for good luck if they go out on ships.