At that moment, Zhang Ming had no plan for how to get the girls out of the fort unnoticed. Preparing for that would take time, which meant that for the near future he would have to hide them underground and wait until a chance to escape appeared. The hastily dug pit was completely unsuitable for such a purpose. It resembled a grave, tight and uncomfortable, where the girls could easily fall ill, and it was not a reliable hiding place for three living people.

  After thinking it through carefully, he decided to improve the hiding place a little while most of the gang had gathered in one spot, finishing off what they hadn’t managed to drink the previous evening. The revelry was filled with noise, shouting, and booming laughter; sometimes drums thundered, and somewhere nearby came clumsy plucking on a guqin taken during the last raid. A hoarse, off-key voice was bawling a song about bandit life. Another opportunity like this would not come again anytime soon.

  In his past world, he had once dug a cellar for storing vegetables, so he had a rough idea of what to do. Zhang Ming pulled up the floorboards, set aside the pigsty door, and got straight to work. The shed wasn’t big enough to expand much, but there was still room for three people to lie down with their legs stretched out.

  The night was clear. Moonlight streamed through the cracks in the shed walls. In the distance, the bandits shouted over one another, loud and rowdy. With an iron pick, Zhang Ming loosened the soil, filled baskets with a shovel, and carried them outside when full. Soaked with sweat and covered in dirt, he moved around the livestock yard like a ghost, dumping the soil and stones where no one would notice.

  Used to grueling training, Zhang Ming worked without rest, like a machine. His muscles burned, his hands blistered and bled, but he wrapped them in cloth and kept digging. The first level of Body Tempering made him far stronger and more resilient than an ordinary man.

  In just two hours, he managed to dig a spacious cellar where an adult could not only lie down but stand upright. It started at the back wall of the shed and stretched across most of its central area. Zhang Ming carefully leveled the walls and floor, shaping them into an almost perfect cube.

  From time to time, he stopped to catch his breath and glanced at the captives. They had eaten all the rice and were quietly chewing the meat, taking turns drinking water from the tall bamboo flask. To his surprise, the girls didn’t try to escape even once. They only watched the ground near him warily, too afraid to meet his eyes. Still, they looked far more alive than the captives locked away in the bandits’ storage, who were like empty shells without souls.

  “Phew, let’s keep going,” Zhang Ming sighed, returning to work. “The cellar turned out pretty well. Now I just need to reinforce it so the walls don’t collapse…”

  When he’d laid the wooden floor in the shed earlier, he’d been left with plenty of planks, logs, and other scrap wood collected from around the area, even a few sturdy doors he had taken straight from people’s homes when they weren’t around. Worried the materials might not be enough, he grabbed his tools and went to look for more. Luckily, the night was clear.

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  More than five hundred bandits lived in the fortress, and numerous buildings were piled one atop another. Zhang Ming searched the ones closest to the stables, where there were the fewest people, and there he borrowed some straw mats, blankets, and a ladder. From the loft of one granary, he pried loose an existing trapdoor, frame and all, using his axe and pickaxe. On his way back to the shed, he tore a few good planks off someone’s barracks wall.

  Despite his hurry, Zhang Ming stayed alert. At the slightest suspicious sound or voice, he hid in the shadows with his hand on his sword hilt, waiting for danger to pass. His eyes glowed from beneath his tangled hair like a predator’s, lying in ambush. The drunken bandits stumbling out to relieve themselves had no idea how close they were to death.

  Using the gathered materials, Zhang Ming built the cellar’s floor, walls, and ceiling, turning it into a wooden chamber beneath the earth. He didn’t forget to include a hatch leading outside. He fastened the structure together securely with iron nails he had ripped from various fortress buildings, then covered the outer layer with burlap to keep sand from falling in and finally buried the whole thing under soil.

  “Flawless,” Zhang Ming muttered, admiring his work. “A finished cellar in just over four hours. Heh! I need to break through to the second stage of Body Tempering soon, then I’ll be even stronger.”

  On the leveled dirt floor of the shed, only the trapdoor from the granary loft stood out, the entrance to the hideout. It also served as an air vent, so he couldn’t just bury it again. As a finishing touch, Zhang Ming restored the shed’s wooden floor properly this time, laying thick logs as supports and nailing planks on top. After carefully sweeping away every trace of the dig, no one could have guessed that a secret shelter now lay beneath the old shed.

  “This section of the floor comes off,” Zhang Ming showed the girls, “and under it is a hatch to the room where you’ll stay.”

  “Underground?” blurted the middle girl, clapping her hand over her mouth in fright.

  “Yes. If you want to stay alive, that is.”

  “Mm.”

  “See that pot? That’s your toilet.” Zhang Ming handed a large clay pot to the eldest girl. “Put this lid on top to keep the smell down.”

  “Mm,” she nodded.

  “There’s a pigsty next door, so a little smell won’t be noticed — but you’ll suffocate yourselves if you’re not careful. Keep an eye on it. I’ll come as often as I can to clean it out.”

  “Mm.”

  “The other jar has food. If you ration it, it’ll last two days. I already carried a bucket of clean water into the cellar — here’s the ladle. Understood?”

  “Mm,” she nodded again.

  “Seems I didn’t forget anything,” Zhang Ming said, finishing his explanation. The only thing left was to help the girls down into their new shelter.

  “Hey!” a voice called from outside, followed by the creak of the shed door. “What are you doing in here, huh? Making a racket loud enough to wake the dead…”

  Moonlight spilled inside, falling on Zhang Ming, filthy with dirt and the three terrified girls. A smug grin slowly spread across the drunk bandit’s face, as if he’d just found buried treasure. He had noticed a shadow moving in the dark earlier, then heard the hammering sound. Following it out of idle curiosity, he now stumbled upon a precious secret and three girls for his amusement.

  “Well, well, rookie! Ha-ha-ha!” he laughed. “Now you’ll be crawling on your knees before…”

  Zhang Ming’s eyes flashed with murderous light. In an instant, he was upon the intruder, pickaxe in hand. The tool whistled through the air and smashed almost clean through the man’s skull. The body collapsed to the ground with a dull thud.

  Standing over it for a few breaths, Zhang Ming picked up a shovel, pulled the pickaxe free from the corpse, then grabbed the body by the arm and dragged it away from the shed. There, he began digging another hole, smaller this time.

  “Hic…” the terrified girls covered their mouths with their hands, following him with wide, frozen eyes.