Chapter 290: This Life

Two years later, Meng Hao was thirty-five years old. It had been nine years since he left home. However, during that entire time, he had only lived in two places, the river and the forest.

This year, he ran into a gang of bandits.

Bandits are generally killers, but they didn’t kill Meng Hao. Perhaps it was because of his worn scholar’s robe, or the scholar’s pack that he wore on his back. He certainly looked down on his fortune. The bandit leader was a beautiful, seductive woman. She asked him a single question.

“Can you keep financial records?”

Meng Hao shook his head. However, they took him anyway. They led him to their mountain fort, which was really a stockaded village where more than a thousand people lived. Most of them were the family members of the bandits, including quite a few children.

It was arranged for Meng Hao to become a teacher, which mostly involved instructing the children how to read. He didn’t have to teach anything very complicated. They just needed to be able to read bank notes and understand basic messages, things that any good bandit should be able to do.

This was a requirement laid upon all the bandits by the beautiful bandit Chieftess.

Time trickled by. Meng Hao adapted himself,...