Lan Tian, if she were just a child of a few years old, might have been tricked into eating like these little brats. Consuming so much candy, she would at least be in a drug-induced stupor for two or three days. By the time she woke up, it would have been too late—the dishes would be cold, and she wouldn’t be able to tell north from south. As days pass, she might even forget her own parents, let alone where she came from.
Lan Tian didn’t tell them that there was something wrong with the candy. Even if she did, the little brats wouldn’t believe her. She watched them all eat. It was better for them to be drugged so that they wouldn’t mess up her plans later at night.
One of the little brats saw Lan Tian wasn’t eating and asked her curiously, "Why aren’t you eating? If you don’t want it, can I have it?"
The other children munching on candy all gazed at Lan Tian earnestly.
The sedatives used by the traffickers were of the lowest quality, and too much could harm the body. Lan Tian worried that if one ate too much they might turn into an idiot, so she divided one each to everyone, then sat aside and began to meditate.
It didn’t take long for the drug to take effect: two slumped onto the bed while another two fell to the floor. Lan Tian went down and moved them onto the bed, lying down beside them.
The moonlight outside the window shone diagonally through, and Lan Tian, lying on the bed, suddenly opened her eyes. Her bright pupils shone like stars. The little figure hopped off the bed and moved to the pile of firewood by the window.
Lan Tian snapped a dry branch and carefully selected from her Sea of Consciousness two Arrays, a small entrapment array and a small illusion array.
Standing quietly at the head of the bed, Lan Tian looked at the several children drugged into unconsciousness by the candy.
In the vast sea of people, sharing the distress with the children was a kind of fate. As both cause and effect, casually rescuing someone could be considered accumulating merit for herself. She crawled under the bed, calculated the position, and began to dig a hole to bury the stones.
This was Lan Tian’s first time performing Array Formation. She followed the principle like drawing a gourd based on a sample, first setting up the trapping array, then the illusion array. Thankfully, the room had been long uninhabited, and the floor’s soil was quite loose, making it not so difficult to dig. With a jab from the branch into the soil and a lever, a small hole was made. Once the stones were placed inside, Lan Tian stepped on them to ensure they wouldn’t be kicked away by those three.
It took about an hour for Lan Tian to set up the two Arrays, with fine beads of sweat appearing on her forehead. Lacking spiritual energy, the effectiveness was significantly reduced; she could only rely on the natural light of the sun and moon for the Array Formation, hoping it would be enough to deceive them.
After burying the last stone, the situation in the room changed, and no one could be seen on the bed anymore. The effect was decent, not a wasted effort. Lan Tian smiled with relief.
With the matter of the children settled, and no worries left behind, Lan Tian moved two arm-thick logs, tied the ends with straw firmly, almost like a makeshift ladder, laying one end on the window and the other against the foot of the bed.
Lan Tian glanced at her new corduroy red clothes, too eye-catching; she’d be easily spotted walking about. She went to the head of the bed, took off her red clothes, and then snatched the clothes of a boy lying on the bed, switching them out. As she climbed up the branch, she lost her balance and fell halfway up the first time. The second attempt was no better, her hands failed to secure a grip, and she fell again.
Lan Tian took a deep breath and exhaled, calming herself down. Once her agitation settled, she began to climb again.
She climbed like a monkey, sticking her butt out, grasping branches with her hands, and stepping on the trunk with her feet, climbing slowly step by step. Though it seemed just a few steps away, it felt like a deep chasm lay between them.
Lan Tian glanced back, retracting her gaze to avoid increasing her psychological burden, until her hands grabbed the window sill. As she raised her foot to climb over, she breathed a sigh of relief, releasing her grip and falling down, landing painfully on her butt and exclaiming in pain, "Ow, ow!"
It was a quiet night, and along the tranquil mountain path, a shadow could be seen moving in the distance. Drawing nearer, one could see it was a five or six-year-old child, running along the road in the darkness.
Lan Tian ran along the mountain path, never stopping. When she reached a fork, she would calculate her approximate location. After several hours of continuous travel, Lan Tian was completely exhausted, dizzy and staggering forward with little awareness. Passing through the fifth village, she turned in and dozed off in a haystack at the village entrance.
As dawn barely broke, villagers came out to work, and someone noticed a child asleep on the haystack. Upon closer inspection, they realized it was an unfamiliar child. Since people who went to the market the day before knew that several children had gone missing, they hurried to the village chief’s house to report it.
Empathy filled their hearts – who didn’t have children? Those damn traffickers, if caught, deserved to be executed a hundred times, to suffer in the eighteenth layer of hell posthumously, to be rolled over by the mountain of knives and fried in the oil cauldron, never to be reborn.
Lan Tian was shaken awake to find herself surrounded by unfamiliar faces, which gave her quite a scare as she instinctively looked for a way to escape.
"Don’t be afraid, child, where are you from?" A middle-aged man with a square face and around forty or fifty years old squatting in front of Lan Tian asked, trying to sound as gentle as possible.
Lan Tian looked up at him, and although the man had a similar aura to her uncle, full of fierce energy and authority, his eyes were honest, not seeming like a bad person.
The other villagers kept their distance, indicating his influential status in the village. Importantly, Lan Tian did not feel any malice from him.
Carrying fierce energy, the man must have killed before, and not just a few. At his age, to have killed and still be revered in the village, he must have been a soldier, a slayer of enemies. Soldiers usually have a strong sense of justice.
Lan Tian held back her tears, her eyes brimming but not falling; she displayed the expressions of a truly scared child to perfection. The panic, fear, and dread of someone who had a narrow escape from death.
"Uncle, someone covered my nose... Yesterday I went to the town market with grandma, and when I woke up, I was in a house, after that... I don’t know anything," she said, her words coming out disjointed and out of order. The onlooking villagers understood that the child must have been snatched by traffickers, and they could imagine the scene, each of them itching to go after the kidnappers.
Everyone bombarded Lan Tian with questions – Where are the traffickers? How many children were taken? How many people were there? Were they men or women? How far away was it? Should they get a bullock cart to go there? Lan Tian shook her head to every question, staying silent and leaving them disappointed.