Love from the Male Protagonist's Harem

Chapter 66-The Start of the Black Market Part 1

Translated by Snowfall77

The black market was inherently unregulated.

And since it was unregulated, its location obviously needed to be very, very remote, very, very inconspicuous, and preferably with an ambiance of austere gloom.  Someplace a normal person wouldn’t go near.

Lastly, it needed to not be in [Order] territory.

Black Rock cave was the chosen place.

However, contrary to its name, Black Rock cave was not singular.  Above the Baigu wasteland, there were many dark caves.  To reach the black market, you entered a cave at random, followed the path within all the way down, until eventually reaching the vast underground cavern that’d been excavated beneath the wasteland.

The wasteland carried the name ‘Baigu’ due to long past events.  People said that originally the area hadn’t been a wasteland.  After all, it was only about 300 or 400 miles away from Lingxi Peak, a place of natural beauty that nurtured the talented.  No, Baigu wasteland had once been a treasured location with feng shui, having mountains to one side and rivers coursing through it.  Yet as time passed and the chaos of wars broke out, a battle had taken place on the wasteland.  Dying was inevitable for any person; it would indeed come sooner or later.  But, to be driven to your death without mercy——

A Daoist monk had decided to interfere in a battle between mortals.

Going against heavenly law, the Daoist monk assisted one side to victory.  Whether the victor of the battle was the Daoist master’s nephew, grandson, and even a later descendent was unknown, yet what was painfully clear was that ordinary soldiers couldn’t just brandish a weapon and defeat someone who’d cultivated.  And after the battle, those dead soldiers’ corpses overflowed with grievances, their bones refusing to decay.

Natural feng shui was gradually engulfed by the resentments of the dead.  Living things perished too quickly, and people who passed through the wasteland heard the weeping of demonic spirits during the day and the night, wailing their hatred of an unjust heaven.  As time went on, fewer and fewer people were willing to pass through the old battle site, and the wasteland grew ever more desolate.

While the black caves were in fact made from the heaped skeletons of the dead.  Originally they’d been bone-white, and people had said ‘the white bones are crying.’  However, as the wind slowly covered them with sand over hundreds of years, bone, stones, and sand solidifying together, everything turned pitch-black.  Due to the wasteland’s changing appearance, people no longer talked about ‘white bones,’ and instead called the area Black Rock cave.

At present-

At the black caves’ entrances, about double the heighth of a person, figures would gather.  Some would be cloaked, some masked, and some so wrapped up it was impossible to tell if they were human or not.  If they had anything they wanted to sell, it would be beside them, with the price clearly marked.

Since a person had to go through a black cave to reach the black market proper, there’d also be individuals squatting at the entrances, selling small items.  After properly bribing some petty boss, they would spread out a rag and put their worthless toys on it, thus creating numerous smaller, surface-level ‘black markets.’

Currently, a tall character covered in a ragged black cloak that dragged on the ground was silently making their way through such a small ‘black market.’  Wearing a large and fierce bronze mask that, despite missing a little piece of the chin on the right-side, revealed nothing of the wearer’s face, the person walked inordinately stiff and slow, each step making the abrupt sound of wood hitting hard ground.

However, because there were some many eccentrics and oddballs in the vicinity of the black market at any given time, no one paid the tall character much attention at all.

Taking three steps into the black cave, the tall person saw a wooden desk with a jar half-filled by copper coins and a small ledger on it.  Behind the desk was a short person wearing an ugly toad mask, and draped in enough black cloth to making distinguishing their gender impossible.  Standing atop a stool due to their stature, the toad mask person stretched out two morbidly babyish hands, one holding a writing brush, the wrist resting on the ledger, and the other hand grasping a copper coin.

“Ten coppers coins for entering my territory!  No bargaining!”   Seeing that someone was approaching, the toad mask person shrilled in a sharp, thin voice that sounded as if they were being choked, giving anyone who heard it an uneasy feeling.

The tall person fished out ten copper coins with a clatter, throwing them towards the jar.  However, toad mask person raised the petite hand holding the writing brush and the ten copper coins were instantly suspended midair!

“Hold on!”  Toad mask person waved their writing brush, their strangled voice laden with fierce maliciousness: “I have to count to make sure there’s ten!  Anyone who cheats me of my money will not have a good death, won’t die a natural death!!”

The tall person retracted their hand back into their black cloak, letting the much smaller person count the coins frozen in the air.  Once toad mask person had indeed counted ten coins, the person waved their hand again and the coins fell into the jar.  Writing something down in the small ledger, the thin, nasty voice continued: “You didn’t cheat me, I won’t strangle you to death, no one will throttle you dead, heehee, heehee……you may go about your business, heehee, heehee……”

Other people coming and going through the black cave ignored the toad mask person, many of them used to the person’s strange words.  No matter how venomous the toad mask person got, it was only to be expected.

It was a puppet, a puppet made from the corpse of a two or three year child who died due to poverty.

There had been made many such puppets made from innocent children abandoned to die on the streets by dirt-poor parents who couldn’t afford to feed them.  Or even children who’d been cruelly murdered in a fight over family properties.  And once the spirits found out the cause of their deaths, hatred for their families consumed them.  Boiling in resentment and grievances, they were trapped within their own corpse, unable to reincarnate.

Dead because of the lack of money or others’ greed for it, captive to their odium for their family members, such puppets would be frantically obsessed with wealth.  Then the unscrupulous living could exploitively turn them into a puppet who’d ferociously guard money.

And anyone who threatened said money would be the recipient of a vicious curse.  If the cursed person didn’t have a sufficiently powerful fate, their financial future would be quite bad, they’d be haunted by nightmares, and altogether live an extremely misfortunate life.

Otherwise known as the ‘curse of the wealth child puppet.’

阴气森森    [yīn qì sēn sēn]

an atmosphere of austere gloominess

白骨   [bái gǔ]

bones of the dead

钟灵毓秀zhōnglíngyùxiù

(of a place) endowed with a natural beauty that nurtures people of talent

a place endowed with the fine spirits of the universe; This well-endowed region has brought forward men of talent