Ever since the inn was graced by this group of deadbeats, Yuelai Inn had never been short on business.
In the early morning darkness, these deadbeats eagerly awaited outside for Yang Ge to open the doors for early tea.
At night, only when the moon reached the treetops did these deadbeats leave the inn in twos and threes, tracing the moonlit path.
And no matter whether it was sunny or rainy, these deadbeats would arrive punctually, rain or shine.
They even turned Yang Ge, the respectable store manager of Yuelai Inn, into a pitiful hard worker with schedules from eight in the morning to nine at night.
Several times, Yang Ge was so annoyed that he wanted to close the doors and let Huang bite these soulless creatures...
What left him speechless was that the number of martial artists who continued to flock to Yuelai Inn significantly increased after Li Qing checked in.
Although not all martial artists were deadbeats.
But even if only one in a hundred was a deadbeat, with the base number of visitors being so large, there were still plenty of them.
Dozens of deadbeats, old and young, male and female, righteous and evil, poor and rich, from the south and the north... It seemed like there was a strange attraction between deadbeats, as once they entered the inn, they simply couldn’t find their way back out.
Because there were more and more deadbeats in the inn, normal martial artists could hardly get a word in edgewise.
No matter what they said, the deadbeats would just go, "Ah yes, yes, yes," "Ah right, right, right."
Furthermore, with Yang Ge and Li Qing being the main bosses, they generally treated these martial artists with various agendas as if they were air, making it quite difficult for the normal martial artists to stay at the inn.
A case of sifting gold from sand, leaving behind nothing but the pebbles...
Dozens of deadbeats, day after day, cooped up in the inn, sharing all kinds of dialects and slang while drinking and making merry, boasting and bantering, laughter and curses flying together, cowards and loudmouths mixing, all kinds of old and trivial martial arts grudges and hatreds being displayed in bizarre and unexpected ways...
The whole inn turned into a sprawling episodic martial arts sitcom, where everyone was both a protagonist and a supporting character.
This added a plethora of spices to Yang Ge’s homebody life, with the sheltered little princess Zhao Miao delighting daily in gossip, blissfully oblivious to anything else.
The inn consumed twenty pounds of sunflower seeds a day, enough to fill a whole cart with hulls!
One midday, just after the lunch rush, as the deadbeats were about to enter the much-enjoyed session of shooting the breeze and boasting, Hu Qiang from the upper-right Battalion of the Imperial Guard showed up...
Yang Ge stood behind the counter, sipping his green tea: "Ah!"
Sitting at the table by the door, Li Qing also sipped his green tea: "Ah!"
Yang Ge shot Li Qing a glance, then turned and smilingly said to Hu Qiang, "Getting a promotion is great news, why the long face?"
Hu Qiang with a mournful expression replied, "Second Master, I really don’t want to return to the capital, I wanted to stay by your side and serve you for a few more years..."
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"Pfft."
Yang Ge turned his head and sprayed out a mouthful of tea, coughing as he scolded with annoyance: "I’m not old yet, who needs your damn serving?"
Hu Qiang whined, "Every word I say comes from the bottom of my heart..."
Yang Ge waved his hand, cutting off his lament: "If you just want to extort a farewell dinner, that’s easy enough; whatever’s available in Luting, I can get it for you. But if you’re entertaining thoughts of having me pull some strings for your office, you’d better scram early. Trading in official titles and such seedy business, dare you come to me with this? Have you not been disciplined for a long time, is your skin itching for it?"
Hu Qiang quickly responded, "No, it’s not that, I just don’t want to return to the capital. I’d rather go to your main base in Jiangzhe..."
Yang Ge pointed to the door: "The door’s right there, smoothly roll yourself out!"
Hu Qiang, with a mournful face, dawdled and wouldn’t leave: "Second Master, you don’t understand, the other brothers don’t welcome us from the upper-right Battalion. Those of us from there, getting a menial job like feeding horses or guarding a warehouse requires begging up and down. I previously offended people from the Eastern Factory, and though they couldn’t touch me in Luting, once back in the capital, wouldn’t I be hacked to pieces?"
Yang Ge curled his little finger, digging into his ear, and skeptically replied: "What you’re saying is true?"
Hu Qiang immediately raised three fingers: "If I speak even half a lie, may thunder strike me down, may horses trample me as I step outside!"
Yang Ge thought for a moment, then asked, "Who signed off on your promotion notice?"
Hu Qiang immediately leaned in and whispered: "Song Jing, the Town Governor of the Northern Town Prefecture, they say he is from the Song Family of the State-Defending Duke’s Mansion and has a higher status than our Shen..."
Yang Ge vaguely guessed, maybe some noblemen were dissatisfied that he wouldn’t let noblemen meddle in Dongying, they couldn’t do anything to him directly, so they started taking it out on his subordinates instead... Perhaps they were also harboring a little hope of weakening his power and eroding his influence.
He asked: "How many brothers from our office have been transferred out recently?"
Hu Qiang replied, "Since you went to Dongying last year, a batch of our brothers from the Luting Hundred Household Office has been gradually transferred out. It had calmed down when you returned before, but in the last few days, it started up again... the brothers who received transfer orders have been packing up at the office, embarrassed to bother you, so it’s just me, old Hu, shamelessly disturbing you."
His daring to trouble Yang Ge, of course, was not just because he was "shameless" as he claimed.
As someone who had been with Yang Ge since the days when Yang Ge was the covert chief of Luting, Hu Qiang was sure that his old boss held a certain degree of fondness for these old subordinates...
Not to mention, having followed Yang Ge for so long, for all the real dangers they faced, Yang Ge had never let them handle it; instead, he would rather face it himself than use his subordinates as expendables.