CHAPTER 349: CHAPTER 77: MASTER ANGLER

Yezi took out a few sets of clothes, found a pair of scissors, and roughly trimmed his own hair.

After descending from the suspension house, Yezi bowed to the structure and whispered, "Mama, father, wait for me to avenge Old Stone and find Xiao Xian, and I will bring her back with me."

After leaving home, Yezi did not directly leave the village but went straight to Li Quqi’s silver workshop and took out the Meteor Crystal that Fiji had given him before passing away.

Yezi thought it over. To make it easier to carry, he needed to do some work on the Meteor Crystal, because according to Fiji, it was a very important item that absolutely could not be lost. It would likely be needed in the future to confront the Yan Beast.

In a corner of the workshop, Yezi dug up a hole and pulled out several silver blocks he had buried. That clever lad had always skimmed a little off the top when helping Li Quqi with silver making. Over the years, he had saved up several jin of silver blocks.

He stoked up the charcoal and pulled open the bellows. The hard features of Yezi’s face shone brightly in the red glow of the fire.

The hissing flames melted the silver blocks into a pool of liquid white. Yezi then took a hammer and straightening tools to craft a male ring for himself.

With the technique Yezi had learned from Li Quqi over the years, he could have created a craft with more intricacy, but right now, he didn’t have the time to be that meticulous.

About an hour later, around one or two o’clock in the morning, the furnace fire in the Li Family’s workshop finally extinguished. Yezi brushed the ring until it was polished; it was an ordinary ring, less than two centimeters wide. The only conspicuous part was the colorful stone inlaid on its face.

Yezi slipped the ring on his finger and then secretly engaged a small mechanism, fixing the ring firmly in place.

Once everything was prepared, Yezi tidied up the workshop, making sure that Li Quqi would not notice that anyone had tampered with it. Feeling the silver making tools and the handle of the bellows, Yezi was suddenly flooded with emotion. It might be quite some time before he could touch these silver smithing tools again.

"My old pals, wait for me to finish my business, and I’ll come back to join you," Yezi muttered as he left Dongnan Miao Village, looking back with every step he took.

After leaving Dongnan Miao Village, Yezi took the train from Bai Family Ancient Town, heading northward. Yezi hadn’t considered other modes of transport. Although Li Quqi had taken Yezi through the three southwestern provinces in recent years, they mostly traveled by foot and by train, so Yezi had always thought that trains were the most convenient means of transportion in and out of the mountains.

Taking the train to Beijing, with several transfers along the way, Yezi had never been on such a long train journey, and, carelessly, he made a mistake.

Around the third day on the train towards Beijing, he had passed through Guizhou and Hunan and reached the border of Hubei. The stale smell on the train had robbed Yezi of his appetite.

While at a station in Hubei, Yezi heard a fruit seller outside the station. He hadn’t eaten properly for several days, and the dietary differences between the north and south were significant. In Guizhou, he was used to sour and spicy food, but in Hunan and Hubei, it was authentic spicy food, which Yezi wasn’t accustomed to. Hearing that there was fruit for sale, he thought of buying some to fill his stomach.

Just as he got off the train, the fruit-selling grandmother spotted him wearing ethnic minority clothing and struck up a conversation.

Seeing that the grandmother’s age was close to that of the Red Locust Great Wizard, Yezi felt a pang of regret. He had been in too much of a hurry when he left home and hadn’t had the chance to visit the grandmother. On second thought, the grandmother’s cultivation was much fiercer than Mama’s. Had she seen him, there would’ve been no escaping.

After a few moments of casual conversation, he completely missed the train’s boarding time. By the time Yezi hurried onto the platform with a few pears in his hands, the train had already departed, leaving not even a trace behind.

Left with no choice, Yezi had to buy another train ticket. But after asking, he learned that tickets to Beijing had been sold out two days earlier. He could either wait for a ticket two days later or take his chances waiting for someone to return a ticket.

Yezi had never been to Hubei before. Looking at the money he had left, it was almost spent, and staying for two additional days was definitely out of the question. He had no choice but to wait with his pears at the ticket window.

He waited until nightfall, and the ticketing staff had left for the day, still with no sign of anyone returning tickets. Yezi had no choice but to leave the train station with a shrug of his shoulders.

It must be said that his luck wasn’t great. The station where he got off was a small one with only one trip to Beijing per day, and the small station was located in a remote town where finding a place to stay was difficult.