Had brotherhood become obsolete? Qiu Ranke swore he’d treated his brothers sincerely—charging to the front during robberies, withdrawing last, and when dividing gold and silver, apart from keeping reserve funds, he’d distributed almost everything to his brothers. No matter how much trouble his brothers caused outside, he’d never shirked responsibility. Why would everyone betray me together?

Cheng Jiu’s steel blade swept past his eyes. Qiu Ranke dodged slightly too slowly, and a wound appeared on his brow bone. Blood covered his eyes. He squinted through half-opened eyes and kicked Cheng Jiu away with a divine dragon tail sweep. His elbow struck heavily against Hua San’s kidney area, and the wound on his shoulder and back tore open again. Qiu Ranke discovered he was becoming somewhat dizzy. Not good—this was a precursor to excessive blood loss. If he continued to tangle with them, he would likely perish here.

Gaoshan Yangzi gently waved her lady’s fan, covering half her charming face, and said with tittering laughter, “Zhang Zhongjian, you should stop persisting. If you keep persisting, you’ll die. Be good and let us capture you—there are benefits for you.”

“Bah! Even if you gave me a slut like you, I’d find you filthy. Just you wait—I’m coming over right now to cut off your dog head!” As Qiu Ranke spoke, he retreated, kicking a large wooden chest over the ship’s railing. His body also fell downward. Just as he leaped from the railing, he sighed in disappointment, because the chest didn’t fall into the water but landed on an extremely large fishing net. Stepping on the chest, he leaped up once more, only to have an even larger fishing net drop from overhead.

He swung his blade to cut through the net above his head, but a barbed harpoon viciously pierced into his thigh. Qiu Ranke was dragged onto the deck like a fish. Two throwing spears passed through his arms, pinning him to the deck.

Qiu Ranke raised his head with difficulty and could only see a pair of crystal-clear, lustrous legs. From above his head came Gaoshan Yangzi’s laughter: “So you like looking at women’s legs? You’re not an honest man either.”

Victor or vanquished—Qiu Ranke had always believed this. Now that he’d become a prisoner, he closed both eyes, letting Gaoshan Yangzi ridicule him as she pleased. He could only pity his own lofty ambitions, which had now flowed away like water heading east.

Qiu Ranke felt the weapons being pulled from his shoulder and leg. He clenched his teeth—no matter how much pain there was, he uttered not a word. His body was stood upright, and someone was helping him stop the bleeding. Gaoshan Yangzi used her long fingernail to extract a drop of blood from Qiu Ranke’s face, waved it before his eyes, then put her finger in her mouth and sucked greedily.

“Zhang Zhongjian, this world is no longer suitable for people like you to wander about. How about I send you back to the Li Jing couple? You need to be supervised.”

Qiu Ranke raised his head, wanting to smile, but a sharp steel needle pierced through his cheek, passing between his teeth horizontally. His entire mouth could no longer open.

“You’re very valuable—you can’t die now. War between the Great Tang and Goryeo is on the verge of breaking out. We need you to stay alive so we can exchange you with Li Jing for what we need. From now on, one bowl of thin porridge daily—I expect you can survive on that. As soon as we defeat Yun Ye, he’ll soon come to keep you company, perhaps along with Prince Wei Tai.”

“I, a grand Goryeo royal consort, have been cast adrift on the great seas consorting with pirates. I’ve already brought shame to my ancestors. If not for Goryeo’s great cause, I should be sitting in the deep palace educating all under heaven. But now Goryeo faces crisis after crisis, and I have no choice but to exhaust my efforts.”

Gaoshan Yangzi, who had been in high spirits just moments ago, suddenly became extremely downcast. She had risked life and death for Goryeo—why still couldn’t she win Yeon Gaesomun’s heart?

After two full years as a royal consort, she remained a virgin still—this was both a joke and a humiliation. That woman Yun Ye had sent back actually had the audacity to return holding a child, claiming it was Yeon Gaesomun’s. What shocked Gaoshan Yangzi even more was that Yeon Gaesomun actually believed it. His ecstatic appearance pierced Gaoshan Yangzi’s heart.

Yeon Gaesomun didn’t care how Gaoshan Yangzi treated Ronghua Nü. Even when Ronghua Nü was assigned by Gaoshan Yangzi to do the most menial work in the palace, he remained indifferent. But that child enjoyed genuine princely treatment. Of the twelve retainers in the Yeon family, four were specifically serving that child. No matter what Ronghua Nü was doing, every day she had to nurse that two-year-old child. According to the Yeon family’s rules, children needed to be nursed until age three.

Ronghua Nü willingly did the work of scrubbing chamber pots. No matter how formidable the assassins Gaoshan Yangzi sent, the next day their heads would be hung in the palace. What Gaoshan Yangzi found most intolerable was that whenever Yeon Gaesomun went mad, the first woman he thought to ravage would invariably be Ronghua Nü. When others saw Ronghua Nü the next day, covered in bruises, struggling to scrub chamber pots, they all found her very pitiable. Only Gaoshan Yangzi didn’t think so. She felt the pitiable one was herself. That body covered in bruises should be hers. She should be the one happily complaining to the maids about the king’s roughness, not some lowly woman scrubbing chamber pots.

Long fingernails broke in Gaoshan Yangzi’s clenched fist, blood flowing from between her fingers. She looked at the warships on the sea surface and took a deep breath. Obtaining power was her choice. Yeon Gaesomun had satisfied her demands—the Goryeo naval forces were at her command, and even during the fiercest battles with Gao Jianwu, he’d never withdrawn them.

Goryeo’s farmers no longer farmed—they were all at war. Goryeo’s merchants no longer did business because they were at war. Goryeo’s craftsmen no longer worked, also because they were at war. The entire country had nothing else to do except fight wars.

When farmers don’t farm, there’s no grain—they needed to purchase from Silla and Baekje. When merchants don’t do business, there’s no circulation of goods. When craftsmen don’t work, common people have no implements to use. How could one maintain the normal operation of this country? Only robbery remained as a path forward.

Gaoshan Yangzi exhausted all her strength in robbery. She robbed Tang people, robbed Baekje people, robbed Silla people, robbed Arabs. When resources were most scarce, she didn’t even spare the Japanese.

The phoenix crown atop her head had been personally placed there by Yeon Gaesomun. The ceremony was so grand, unprecedented throughout history. Yeon Gaesomun had spared no expense in using the last bit of gold to create golden册 pages for her. Every single character stated that Gaoshan Yangzi was the Empress of Goryeo.

“Your Majesty the Empress, a small boat has drifted out from the strait. There seems to be someone aboard.” Cheng Jiu respectfully came forward to report.

“After careful inspection, bring it over. I want to see it personally.” Hearing the Empress’s voice seemed like a bestowed favor to Cheng Jiu. He puffed out his chest and went forward to give orders.

In this world, only two people were unmoved by her beauty—one was Yun Ye, the other was her own husband. These two were precisely the people Gaoshan Yangzi most wanted to captivate.

An unmanned small boat swayed unsteadily out from the strait with the waves. All the pirates saw it. On the wooden boat stood a wooden stake. An Arab was straddled atop it. A sharp wooden stick protruded from his mouth, covered with purple bloodstains. On his chest were deeply carved three large characters: “I’ve arrived.”

Gaoshan Yangzi covered her nose, forcibly enduring the corpse stench as she circled the body once. She discovered that apart from those three characters, there was no other message. Yun Ye seemed to simply be saying: “I’ve arrived.” Completely the manner of a greeting.

“Throw the corpse into the sea, burn the small boat. Tell the Mai family brothers and Old Man Hu not to act rashly. This is Yun Ye’s psychological warfare tactic—just ignore it.”

Cheng Jiu immediately sent signals to those two pirate groups. No one liked being pirates generation after generation. Qiu Ranke didn’t know what his brothers really wanted. He could never have dreamed they wanted simply to stop being pirates. They had money, they had beautiful women—why continue drifting on the sea? It was time to hide away and be wealthy gentlemen. If they could avoid hiding and enjoy all this openly and honestly, that would be best.

What Gaoshan Yangzi had paid out were merely a few worthless noble titles, and these pirates had chased after them like flies smelling blood. In contrast, turning Kui Liu had been more difficult—at least Kui Liu had demanded three more singing girls than they had.

For an entire day, things continuously floated downstream. Sometimes it was a chest—opened to reveal a dismembered Arab pirate inside. Sometimes it was a wooden plank with a pirate nailed alive to it. This constant harassment of the pirate groups continued. When Gaoshan Yangzi grew impatient and ordered everyone to ignore it, a small boat drifted beside the pirate ships and suddenly caught fire. The small boat was actually filled with fire oil. After exploding, it quickly set a pirate ship completely ablaze. To avoid affecting other warships, Gaoshan Yangzi had no choice but to order that pirate ship scuttled.

Gaoshan Yangzi didn’t care about such small losses. Yun Ye couldn’t possibly hide in the strait forever without coming out. There, his massive ships could unleash infinite power. Unlike Qiu Ranke, Gaoshan Yangzi didn’t believe Yun Ye had lost his mind and was idly wandering the seas with Li Tai. He must have some secret he couldn’t reveal. She very much wanted to know what that secret was.

If it was those five ships of spices, that wouldn’t warrant the appearance of two important figures like Yun Ye and Li Tai. Those spices were wealth to others, but their appeal to Yun Ye and Li Tai was far from sufficient. Unless it was a way to rapidly enrich a nation, or a secret relating to a country’s rise and fall, Gaoshan Yangzi believed the greatest possibility was that Yun Ye had solved the mystery of how Arabs obtained spices.

Everyone wanted to know where the Arabs’ spices came from. The desert wasn’t a place that could produce abundant spices, so why did they have endless supplies? Those tribal chieftains in the desert were all filthy rich because of spices.

Gaoshan Yangzi had also secretly attacked a tribe, killing every person in the tribe one by one before the chieftain, yet still couldn’t extract where the spices came from. That tribal chieftain believed preserving the secret of the spices was far more important than his tribespeople’s lives.