The two of them, Lao Er and Lao San, were hugging each other, dead drunk. Lao Da looked at them with a wicked grin on his face, thinking to himself that it must have been quite a scene when they woke up in the morning.

  Tie Shan slowly walked out of the yard and into a small forest behind their house, where he began to urinate against a newly grown sapling. Suddenly, a knife was placed on his neck, and by the moonlight, it appeared to be an old-fashioned hatchet.

  Tie Shan seemed to be completely unaware, still focusing on his water exercise, a moment later the knife holder sighed and put away his own knife, Tie Shan also cleaned up and turned around.

  A man wearing a night-traveling outfit but without a mask looked at the iron mountain, with an axe tightly grasped in his hand, its blade emitting a cold glow like snake fangs.

  "Aren't you afraid I'll kill you?" the man in black asked calmly.

  "If you wanted to kill me, you would have done it a long time ago. Why wait so many years?" Tie Shan was not intimidated by his threat, and from the sound of it, the two seemed to have known each other for many years.

  "I really didn't expect that Zhao Chuhao's carefully planned assassination of the mountain bandit leaders would actually be you few people."

  "What a coincidence, I really don't know how you ended up looking like this either."

  "It's a long story, I didn't expect that after parting ways back then, you would still be staying in the mountains and have developed to this scale now, it's really beyond my expectation." The man in black pulled up the corner of his mouth, making the scar on his face even more sinister.

  "You're also coming back for the first time since you left the mountain, aren't you? I heard that someone was beheaded in public for murder a few years ago, wasn't it you?"

  "It was me, I really died back then."

  "So what brings you back this time? You're not really here to kill me, are you?" Tieshan asked jokingly.

  "To be precise, it's kill you." The man in black said slowly.

  The two men looked at each other for a long time, then suddenly burst out laughing and hugged each other tightly. It turned out that the man in black was actually Zhu Laojiu who had been ordered to come up the mountain, and the group of people he met in the mountains back then were actually Tie Shan and his gang.

  "By the way, after all these years, I still don't know what your name is?" Tieshan finally asked the question that had been hidden in his heart for many years when he met his old friend from the mountain again.

  Zhu Laojiu fell silent for a moment before saying with a hint of emotion: "What I was called back then doesn't matter now, nowadays I'm called Zhu Laojiu."

  Tieshan listened and knew that something must have happened to this friend, and it was definitely not a good thing, otherwise he wouldn't have abandoned his original surname and name.

  "What's with your face, Brother Zhu?" Tieshan decided to change the subject.

  "I'll take care of it myself."

  "Hmm?" Looking at the scars on his face and combining it with the fact that he had changed his name, Tieshan roughly understood.

  "It seems you're having a tough time too, never mind, being alive is something to be happy about. Come on, let's go have a few more drinks." Iron Mountain said as he pulled Zhu Laojiu to continue drinking in the courtyard.

  "Come on, finish the bowl." After three bowls, Zhu Laojiu's face was also flushed with red, and it seemed that the friendship between the two people who had not seen each other for many years had not decreased, but instead became even deeper.

  "Brother Zhu, you just said Zhao Chuhai was trying his best to kill us brothers, and then you said he came to kill us. Are you now working for that turtle son of a bitch Zhao Chuhai?" Iron Mountain asked with some intoxication.

  Zhu Laojiu raised his head and downed a bowl of wine, wiping the wine from his mouth as he lay down, saying: "That's right, I'm now doing things for him."

  "Huh... Is it because he saved your life?"

  "No, I saved my own life; he just awakened in me the desire to live."

  "That year, I heard from you that the outside world had changed and hurried down the mountain to find my enemy in Pinggu County. Perhaps God also pitied me for waiting so many years, and soon after entering the city, I found him on the main street; at that time, we passed each other face to face, and although I had changed my appearance over the years, he couldn't recognize me, but he still had the same demeanor as before. Looking at his face, I couldn't suppress my desire for revenge, so I took out the axe from my waist and stabbed him to death."

  Tie Shan also secretly admired him after hearing this, they had robbed and killed merchants in the past, but they didn't have the courage to kill someone openly on the street like Zhu Lao Jiu.

  "After that, I was sentenced to death by beheading after drinking, and then I was rescued by Zhao Chuhai. In order not to cause unnecessary trouble, I used a hatchet to destroy my own appearance. For so many years, I have been helping him do some dirty things, and killing you is the last transaction between us."

  Tie Shan stopped the bowl that was lifted halfway, looked at Zhu Laojiu and asked: "That piece of cloth was also thrown into my room by you, wasn't it? When I saw the signature of the mountain people on it back then, I had a premonition."

  "That's right."

  "If you're here to kill us, why tell us about it."

  "After all these years, I've developed a habit of only believing half of the information Zhao Chuhai provides. So before coming to the mountain, I had my men investigate you, and that's how we found out your identities, as well as what happened four years ago outside Pinggu County."

  "You won't be able to complete your mission if you don't kill us, will Zhao Chuhao let you off?"

  "Haha, do you think he'll let me off if I kill you? The moment I went up the mountain, I knew he wanted to get rid of me too, and the ones who took action were his trusted subordinates."

  "So you want to join forces with us, we avenge, and you live?"

  Zhu Lao nodded in agreement with his idea.

  "Alright, let's join forces and take down those people together. But Brother Zhu, you have to help me with something." Tieshan asked Zhu Laojiu for a favor.

  "Go ahead and I'll help as much as I can."

  "I want you to help me pass something up."

  "What thing, handed over to whom?" Zhu Laojiu asked in puzzlement.

  "A ledger, I want you to present it to the commander-in-chief of this bandit-suppressing army. Do you really think Zhao Chuhai wants to kill us for no reason? It's all because of this ledger, back then he cut off our livelihood, and we secretly started doing highway robbery."

  One day, we robbed a convoy transporting lumber. We thought it was just a blind deal at first, but unexpectedly, when dismantling the horse cart, we found this booklet in the clamps, which recorded the detailed accounts of Zhao Chuhai's embezzlement of official grain. It wasn't until then that my brothers and I realized we had made a big mistake, and it was because of this booklet that Fourth Brother died."

  "But Pinggu County is under Zhao Chuhai's control, and we don't have any connections with the higher-ups. That's why I wanted you to hand it over to someone who is not influenced by Zhao Chuhai. And this Yan Wang Qin Wei Qian Hu is exactly the kind of person that Zhao Chuhai doesn't dare to provoke, and can also reach the ears of the king."

  "Alright, I'll do it for you. I'll get someone to hand over this account book. Anyway, Zhao Chuhai wants me dead too, we've already fallen out with each other. Besides, it's still unclear who will die in whose hands." Zhu Laojiu said with a hateful tone.

  "Alright! Before the rebel army arrives, you and I will get drunk tonight..."

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