The Emperor’s Daily Nitpicking

Kevin had a complicated look on his face, and his gaze was distracted.

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Oswald, who had rarely seen this look on his face as if he was dying, gave him a sidelong glance and said, “Why are you looking at me? What is your expression?”

“You’re old now and have become fully-fledged1become fully fledged (a derogatory reprimand): used to describe a person who is not only independent, but one who no longer obeys others and seeks no advice from those whom are maybe more experienced.
You’ve used how to oppress people with the imperial power.” Kevin sighed in a pretentious manner.

Oswald’s veins throbbed.
“…..”

He finally couldn’t stand the bastard anymore, and slapped the pen and leather bag in his hand on Kevin’s chest, held the written paper scroll, and left without looking back.

It wasn’t strenuous to clear up the battlefield, but it wasn’t easy either.

The scattered weapons had all been picked up by the Wujin Iron soldiers and cleaned up, putting together into rows of about thirty swords, a dozen short sabres, and piles of arrows.

The weapons of Kevin and his men were well marked with the lion’s head of the Jinshi Empire, which was easily recognisable.
The remaining swords might have come from the previous intruders.
But the swords were simple and unadorned, and the clothes on that row of stone statues were so ordinary that they couldn’t be distinguished from ordinary people, making Kevin and the others couldn’t get any information about the identity of the first intruders.

So, who could the intruders be? Did the Beifeicu Empire send them? Or from the small city-states like Leiyin City? Was it also to deal with the petrification disease caused by the plague? Or was there another reason?

Questions after questions arose in the crowd’s minds, but they could not find any answers for a while.

After gathering all the weapons they could use, the Wujin Iron soldiers followed Oswald’s instructions to pile up the corpses of the dryads on the ground and set them on fire to avoid further trouble.

As soon as they had moved a few of them, they cried out.

“What’s wrong?” Oswald didn’t like the sudden movements, and Kevin fitted his temperament perfectly in this aspect.
After all, His Excellency Fassbinder’s mental integrity could not be measured by the standards of ordinary people.

The leader of this time’s small squad of Wujin Iron Army raised his finger and pointed to the dryad’s corpses in front of him, rushing this way.
“Your Majesty, these strange creatures’ corpses have dispersed.”

Oswald frowned.
“What do you mean dispersed?”

Kevin had finished checking a few empty rooms and had just turned around when he heard this, so he followed Oswald over to the side.
“What happened?”

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“Commander.” The leader saluted Kevin and greeted him.

Directly in front of his toes, the corpse of a dryad was lying curled up, and there was nothing wrong with it just by its look.

“Your Majesty, please look at this dryad.
Do you think there’s anything special about it?” The leader had relatively more contact with Oswald regularly and was not as afraid of him as the others.

Oswald lowered his eyes to look at it, then withdrew his gaze in disgust and said, “It’s especially ugly.”

The leader: “…..”

His Majesty, the young and handsome emperor, probably looked at himself too much regularly and had always been insensitive to looks.
He had always thought he was not a shallow person and would not fall prey to pretty faces.
But in reality, he was only insensitive to looks because he had a slightly higher aesthetic threshold –

Those who were good-looking in his eyes were all in the “average” category, while those who stood out were at best in the “good-looking” category, and the rest were basically between ” not too good-looking” and ” not even average.”

Because the overall range wasn’t too wide, it gave the Emperor the illusion that his “self-perception was more about substance than appearance.”

But the old dryad lying on his back really pushed Oswald’s aesthetic limits, and he felt sorry for himself even if he had to look at it more than once.

The leader coughed once and used the tip of his sword  to point at the dryad, saying, “Your Majesty, please look at this.”

As he said this, he flicked the tree spirit’s body with the tip of his sword.

In the blink of an eye, the dryad, which was still dead, suddenly turned into a pile of dust and debris mixed with dead branches and leaves and crumbled down.
A gust of wind from nowhere swept through, and the tree spirit was dispersed into the air like dust in the forest.

“Cough –” Oswald frowned, clenching his fist against his lips and coughing twice.

Compared to Kevin, who had spent many years on the battlefield, Oswald was practically a clean freak.
Although he had grown up with minimal contact with his relatives and was confined to his old estate, he was still generally a young master.
And with a compulsive housekeeper like Ian to keep him in line, it was hard for him not to pay particular attention to these.

He especially hated this kind of dust, and from the sand ghosts before him to the tree forks now, they all liked to grind their own corpses to their own detriment.

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He gave a disgusted “tch” and swept away the dust with two heavy swings of his hand.
“What’s going on again now?”

The leader shook his head.
“I also don’t know.
There was another one lying over here earlier that had been dispersed just before I spoke to you.”

“Give the sword to me.” Oswald grimaced and took the long sword from the leader, flicking it through the remaining dead branches and leaves on the ground.

Once the fragments had dispersed, they were no different from the ordinary dead leaves piled up on the ground of a typical forest, brownish-black from the slight dampness.

The Wujin Iron Army, who was responsible for clearing the battlefield, all encountered this situation – the tree spirit corpses, after being left to lie for a while, changed their appearance to what Oswald and the others had seen when they touched them.

It wasn’t long before the ground was covered with a thin layer of dead leaves, and the fragments were lost in the mud.

“I actually think this is what this place was supposed to look like.” Nick couldn’t help but say.

The crowd listened, neither scoffing nor retorting as they felt the same way.

“The ashes of these things are truly a bit unique, ah…..” Dan thought about half of the haw fruit he had just eaten; maybe they had also absorbed much of this stuff.
His face immediately turned even greener.

The little lion, Ben, pretended to be sophisticated and patted him, saying in a serious tone.
“It was already turning in your stomach.
Don’t think about it anymore.”

Dan: “…..”

Those who handle cinnabar were stained red, and those who work with ink were stained black2Idiom: you are the product of your environment..
He felt that this youngster didn’t learn anything from following that little white face commander and only learned to talk.
It was so f**king fantastic!

“What were these tree forks actually…..” Oswald asked in a low voice as he returned to the eaves and stared at the layer of dead leaves from afar.

Kevin shrugged, looking as if he wasn’t quite sure.
After a moment’s pause, he spoke up, “What do you think…..might be living next to a graveyard?”

Oswald thought about it for a moment and said, “Gravekeeper?”

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Kevin didn’t say anything.

His beautiful dark eyes were glossy and translucent like it was covered with a layer of organic coloured glass under the fluorescent light of the insect sacks.
Because his eyes were slightly downcast, his thick eyelashes cast a dark curved shadow beneath his lower eyelids, giving his gaze an added layer of unspoken complexity.

Oswald gave him an odd look, thinking why was he looking as if he was going to die again.
He thought of the time he had asked a question, and this bastard had taken the opportunity to block him backwards.
He couldn’t fall for it twice this time, and he’d be a fool to ask him again.

Who knew that this time Kevin would just look at the dead leaves for a moment and turn away, with no intention of continuing to talk.

Oswald: “…..”

His Excellency Fassbinder was probably the only one in the Jinshi Empire who dared to leave the Emperor and walked away by himself…..

In front of this cavernous settlement was a winding path lined with the same sky-high trees and dense grass, the insect lamps illuminated the first half, but the second half had no such privileges.

From a distance, the path goes from light to dark, with no end.
It was as if a huge black beast’s mouth was resting at the end of the path, waiting for someone to walk in on their own.

Kevin stood at the end of the winding path, staring at the darkness for a moment with his arms in his hands before casually picking an insect lamp from the side of the path.
He was just about to take a step when he heard a rustle of footsteps on dead leaves from behind him.

“Are you going to look in front?” Oswald’s low voice approached from a distance.

Kevin turned his head and looked at him with raised eyebrows, nodding with an “mm.” “Why? Does Your Majesty want to go too?”

Oswald’s face was still cold in the light of the insect lamps, handsome and aggressive because of the protruding brow bones and deep eye sockets.
He turned his head and raised his hand as if he wanted to call the Wujin Iron soldiers and the Giant Beastman to go with him.

“No need to call for them.” Kevin pressed his hand down and shook the insect lamp in his hand.
“There’s no problem upfront.
We’ll just look at whether there’s a sign or not.
It’s enough to have a light.”

Oswald’s shallow, almost transparent eyes squinted slightly.
“Everything becomes no problem when they come out of your mouth…..”

With a sneer on his lips, he reached out, picked an insect lamp from the side of the road, and said with a lift of his chin, “Enough.
Let’s go.”

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Kevin let out a laugh and walked forward in stride.

The sac wrapped around the lamp had been cleaned and looked oddly good in his hand, swaying and bouncing as he walked.

Oswald hadn’t bothered to look closely at it before, but now he couldn’t resist bringing it up to his eyes and spinning it around to glance over it.
“What is this made of?”

“The large intestines.” Kevin picked that word when he could obviously say sausage casing.

Oswald: “…..”

He almost threw the dirty thing in Kevin’s face.

Kevin turned his head to see Oswald’s green-as-hell face and quirked his lips as he asked, “Has the young master’s mysophobia recurred again?”

He f**king knew the bastard was doing it on purpose!

Oswald resisted the urge to throw the insect lamp away and turned his head with a taut face, looking down at Kevin, who was alongside him, and saying with a cold smile, “You can only flaunt with your mouth, Your Excellency Fassbinder.
Have you ever seen a young master who was a head taller than you?”

He had already taken offence at Kevin’s teasing in a tone that leant towards elders, and now that he had been called that, he was even more offended.
The last “young” word was used with great emphasis.

Kevin brushed it off.
“So what? Everyone is shorter for almost a head than you except for the Giant Beastman.”

As he walked on, he stopped in his tracks with a shake of the insect lamp and sighed.
“Ah, we’re here.”

 

[1] become fully fledged (a derogatory reprimand): used to describe a person who is not only independent, but one who no longer obeys others and seeks no advice from those whom are maybe more experienced

[2] Idiom: you are the product of your environment.

1become fully fledged (a derogatory reprimand): used to describe a person who is not only independent, but one who no longer obeys others and seeks no advice from those whom are maybe more experienced2Idiom: you are the product of your environment.