Chapter Forty-Eight: Infiltrating the Naval Camp

The Naval Command was not built within the building of the Fleet Administration, which managed the affairs of ships in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces. After all, during that disastrous maritime calamity years ago, the Fleet Administration had been infiltrated to the point of ruin and had played a notorious role in several disgraceful defeats while clearing the seas. Precisely for this reason, the renowned Marshal Hong, tasked at the time with suppressing bandits in the southeast, rebuilt the navy at Nine Lakes and established a separate official office there.

Kou Li gazed at the nearby naval camp, his brows furrowed. Nine Lakes occupied a perilous location, with sheer cliffs to the north, an outlet to the sea to the south, and high, thick walls enclosing it on all sides. The soldiers patrolled with fierce vigilance, muskets ever primed to fire. These weapons, while perhaps less effective than bows at long range, were far superior within fifty to a hundred feet, displaying the nascent form of modern firearms.

“My brothers in the clan told me that Black-Faced Xiong, greedy for glory, sent a shipment of rare maritime goods, planning to bribe his way to officialdom. When the opportunity comes, our brothers will help us get inside, and then we’ll act accordingly—”

“Footsteps! Too many!” Kou Li abruptly interrupted E Zi’s excited narration, giving the other three a warning look.

Sure enough, moments later, a blaze of torches illuminated the night, revealing a mass of soldiers encircling them—men who strode with the ferocity and confidence of dragons and tigers, a rare sight among the southern troops, marking them as elite.

“Admiral… Chief Naval Officer… Shen,” the Mad Swordsman Chu San read the officer’s badge in the firelight, his eyes widening, “Naval Admiral!”

The rank of Admiral was the highest military post in the region, especially in Guangdong, a place of unique importance. The Naval Admiral was a man of immense power; countless wealthy merchants and nobles had tried desperately to curry favor with him. Why would he come personally for a mere surrender of peasant bandits?

More crucially, with so many soldiers surrounding them, there was no way the four could slip in unnoticed, even with the help of the civil servants.

“Impossible. That hawk Shen is infamous for his pride—how could Black-Faced Xiong possibly persuade him?” E Zi’s cheeks were flushed with agitation.

Admiral Shen Bing was a great hero of the sea-clearing campaigns. Not only was he skilled and eager for battle, but he was also utterly ruthless. He showed no mercy to pirates, nor to officers who performed poorly in combat; he had executed at least eighty to a hundred men. To secure his scorched earth tactics, he had driven tens of thousands of coastal villagers inland, slaughtering entire villages that resisted.

Along the coast, the name Demon King Shen was more feared than any pirate.

How could such a notorious figure be here?

“Most likely for the Sunken Gold,” Ghost Shadow Wu Ying said grimly. “And in the end, that old rogue Zhu Baozi managed to get his hands on it!”

“Sunken Gold? Isn’t that just a legend?” Chu San exclaimed.

Wu Ying spread his hands, most of his ten fingers severed, some with bone exposed. He sneered, “You know how I, the greatest thief in the southeast, was caught by the Water Dragon Gang? It was all for a map of the Sunken Gold treasure.”

Sunken Gold was the most famous legend in Lingnan since the opening of the seas: a common fisherman, caught in a once-in-a-century storm, was swept into the deep ocean, lost for seven days and nights, his food and water gone, nearly dead. In that moment, a massive whirlpool appeared, dragging both him and his boat under.

When he awoke, he found the seabed mountains made of pure gold, with several well-shaped sea caves in the middle spewing liquid gold—the Sunken Gold.

That fisherman eventually escaped and, with the gold he carried, became the richest man on the coast.

Kou Li’s eyes flickered; like most, he’d always believed it to be an exaggeration born of Guangdong’s gold rush. But if it were real—seabed, gold wells, whirlpools—such oddities could only be explained as traces of immortals.

Traces of immortals, perhaps.

“Damn, they’re going in!”

As the drawbridge rose, the four watched helplessly as the group, led by the civil servants, entered the naval camp. With thousands of soldiers stationed inside, any direct assault would be suicidal.

“They’re gone!” Ghost Shadow and Kou Li exclaimed together.

With Kou Li’s enhanced vision, he noticed that after the Naval Admiral entered, all sentries—hidden and visible—around the camp had been withdrawn, except for two soldiers at the drawbridge. At this moment, defenses were at their weakest.

“Pity. If it were as before, my Shadow Step technique could have crossed the channel unseen,” Ghost Shadow’s mouth twitched. For his movement technique, the soles of the feet were crucial; now, with both big toes missing inside his cloth shoes, his perfected skill had been halved in speed, and crossing the water would inevitably cause a splash.

Kou Li glanced at him. His martial style encompassed fists, palms, feet, claws, knees, elbows—every method of exerting force. But only movement techniques were truly rare, requiring the intricate coordination of skin, muscle, and fascia. Among the Four Great Trainings, the training of skin was most essential for lightness and unique movement.

“I’ll go!” Kou Li said without hesitation.

“You!?”

“Your movement is inferior to mine,” Ghost Shadow said coldly.

“I never said I’d compete with you,” Kou Li replied, removing his shirt and taking a deep breath. His abdomen swelled with a frog-like croak, blood and energy accumulating, bloated as if pregnant. With a gentle dive, he sank into the lake.

The night was as dark as ink, the lake water dense and brooding, like a fine inkstone, with only a few jagged rocks breaking the calm. Nine Lakes was half-manmade; originally it was small, but Marshal Hong had turned it into a naval base, conscripting all labor within a hundred miles, cutting mountains and opening the sea, spending three years’ taxes from six southeastern provinces, pouring in endless resources to expand it into a harbor for hundreds of warships.

Thus, from their position to the naval camp, the lake seemed vast but was not actually deep. Many channels existed for transporting supplies. Ghost Shadow’s plan was to use these barriers for nimble movement, breaking into the camp.

As for Kou Li, once submerged, he did not surface for a full incense stick’s time.

“He’s dead?” Chu San croaked. Even fierce fighters like them, with powerful lungs, could hold their breath for half a stick at most—beyond that, they would drown.

“No. He’s an internal martial arts master—such men can circulate energy throughout the body and even breathe through the dantian, so he can endure far longer underwater!”

The two bored guards cast jealous glances back. Though Demon King Shen was infamous among both civilians and officials, he was known for loving his soldiers. His first words upon arrival had been, “If there’s good food and drink today, why should pirates have it if my brothers cannot?”

Though this weakened their defenses, no one cared. A pirate assault on soldiers would have been big news ten years ago, but five years back, for fifty miles along the coast, not a single pirate dared linger. With so many heads taken, hundreds of coastal garrisons were no mere decoration.

And everyone knew the real purpose of this surrender banquet: the old rogue Zhu Baozi could no longer handle the hard cases, trying to play the virtuous while being anything but, and he cared about this matter even more than the officials, forbidding any foreign force from causing trouble.

“Would love a drink,” one guard muttered, then suddenly froze. Amid rippling water, he thought he saw a pair of eyes watching him—eyes fierce, bestial, cold, like those of a water ghost.

Those eyes surfacing from the water foretold his death.

Kou Li, just in case, killed the first guard in an instant, his five toes gripping the ground like a tiger, simultaneously pouncing on the second. With a twist of the arm, his tiger form shifted to human, clamping the man’s throat so he couldn’t cry out.

Yet the second guard had some skill; at the moment of crisis, he bit his teeth, dropping suddenly in a falling horse stance, inserting his right elbow to block Kou Li’s shoulder, and stabbing his other elbow, hidden from view, toward Kou Li’s gut, with a spiral force.

This was called the “heart-piercing cannon” in southern boxing, or “elbow gun” in northern boxing—a killing technique on the battlefield. If struck, the intestines would rupture instantly, even armor would be useless.

But since mastering the breathing technique, Kou Li’s reflexes were sharper. He blocked with a flick, a muffled thud, then sprang to the wall corner, shielding himself and absorbing the opponent’s force. Using the wall’s impact, he shook off the other’s joints, then hooked with five fingers—crack—the man’s head drooped limply.

Nearby, there was a commotion. Kou Li turned and saw Ghost Shadow had already stripped the cloth armor off another corpse, nodding in acknowledgment.

As expected, Ghost Shadow was astonishingly swift!

Kou Li did the same; despite the sentries’ withdrawal, patrols would soon notice the anomaly, so they had to act fast.

Suddenly, his forearm ached. Kou Li looked and saw a faint bruise, fading quickly, but the opponent’s blow had at least beginner-level power.

“Military killing fists—so the government’s spread is real,” Ghost Shadow sneered.

“Killing fists…” Kou Li recalled what his senior brother had told him about assassination fists—dark fists were one thing, killing fists another, but the latter his brother had seemed deeply wary of.

Military arts, killing fists—so the killing fist was a style circulating among the government troops, fiercer and deadlier, like the old weapon arts.

In ancient times, boxing was discarded mainly because it was useless in large-scale battles—no matter how advanced, it couldn’t withstand cavalry and arrows, a mere chicken rib. Only when merged with Daoist alchemy and the Four Great Trainings did it shine anew.

If today’s boxing were fused with weapon techniques and spread, it would be terrifying—imagine tens of thousands of boxers, even at basic level, clad in iron armor, fighting with ferocious, unstoppable force, like an armored torrent overwhelming all.

Could the power of the martial world truly stand against it?