I just became the Pirate King, and you're telling me I also time-traveled at the same time.

Chapter 1110 He's the boss wherever he goes

On the third day after he moved in, he tried to walk around the area, but got lost halfway through. In the end, he was led out by an old rat spirit with a sick leg.

The old rat spirit was the manager of this mountain stronghold. He was so old that even he didn't know how old he was. When he walked, his tail dragged on the ground, making a rustling sound. He spoke so slowly that an impatient person would die on the spot.

Pigsy officially became the mountain king half a month ago.

In half a month, he lost a lot of weight, not the lean physique that comes from training, but the haggard appearance caused by being overworked.

His robe was so dirty that its original color was no longer visible, the cuffs had two holes worn through, and there was an oil stain on the collar that had been rubbed on at some unknown time.

His nine-toothed rake leaned against the chair, a dry grass stem hanging from its teeth, it was unclear when it had gotten there.

"Your Majesty!" a voice called from the cave entrance.

Pigsy shuddered and instinctively sat up straight.

A little demon tumbled and crawled in.

This little demon was a gray fox, not yet fully transformed. It retained the fox's pointed snout and upright ears, and had a fluffy tail trailing behind it.

It was wearing a leather armor that was obviously too big, and one shoulder of the armor had slipped down, which it would lift up with its claws every few breaths.

Pigsy couldn't remember its name.

It wasn't that he didn't want to remember, but there were too many little demons in this mountain stronghold. There were seven or eight fox spirits alone, and each one looked almost the same. He had been there for half a month and still couldn't tell them apart.

"Your Majesty! Something's happened!" The little fox demon ran to the table, but braked too suddenly. His foot slipped on the stone surface, and his whole body slid forward, his chin hitting the edge of the table, and his tail curled up behind him.

Pigsy rubbed his temples.

"What happened now?"

"The black bear is back in the back mountain! It's back again!" The fox demon mumbled, rubbing her aching chin. "It says it wants to see the king, and if we don't let it see him, it'll smash up our mountain gate!"

Pigsy closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

This is the third time the black bear has come in the past two weeks.

The first two times they came, they came to challenge him, saying that his position as the mountain king was not legitimate and that Black Wind Cave had been the territory of the bear demon since ancient times, so why should a pig demon occupy it?

When it first came, Pigsy was quite polite, offering it a bowl of wine and saying that he was only temporarily in charge and would give up his position once a suitable monster was found.

The black bear left after drinking, but returned five days later, saying that there was no more suitable monster within a radius of three hundred miles of Black Wind Cave, and told Pigsy to get lost now.

Pigsy was in a bad mood that day, so he slapped it with his rake and sent it flying three miles.

I didn't expect it to happen again today.

Pigsy stood up and grabbed the nine-toothed rake.

As he walked, the hem of his robe dragged on the ground, leaving a trail of dust on the stone surface.

When he reached the cave entrance, he glanced back at the half-bowl of chilled wild vegetable porridge on the table.

This is his breakfast today.

It wasn't that he wanted to eat wild vegetable porridge, but rather that the mountain stronghold's granary had run out of supplies yesterday.

The mountain village he took over had only three bags of moldy millet and half a vat of over-pickled vegetables in its granary.

The sunlight outside the cave was wonderful.

The air in the mountain valley carried a scent of pine resin and soil mixed together. Occasionally, birds would call out from the treetops overhead, chirp a couple of times, and then fly away.

In front of the cave entrance was a patch of flattened yellow earth, with various odds and ends scattered on the ground—an axe with a broken handle, a cracked water vat, half-dried herbs, and a straw sandal that no one knew who had left there; there was only one, the other was nowhere to be found.

The black bear stood in the middle of the yellow earth.

It was a typical black bear spirit, nearly ten feet tall, with its entire body covered in shiny black mane.

He had dressed up specially today, wearing a necklace made of wild boar tusks around his neck and a red cloth strip tied around his head, which fluttered in the wind, making him look like a raw recruit ready to go to the battlefield.

It was carrying a stone axe that was about half a person's height. It was called an axe, but it was actually just a large, flat stone tied to a stick with vines. The blade of the stone axe was so blunt that it could be used to crack walnuts.

"Pig Demon!" The black bear saw Pigsy come out, raised his stone axe and pointed it at Pigsy's face, "Today I'm going to...!" "Get out of the way!"

The black bear paused for a moment.

"What?"

"I said move aside." Pigsy stepped out of the cave and used the end of his rake to push the black bear aside, as casually as if he were brushing aside a pile of annoying fallen leaves.

He walked to the edge of the loess land and glanced down the mountain.

A winding mountain road winds its way up from the foot of the mountain, half of which is covered by weeds, and some sections are even completely swallowed up by bushes.

This is the only way for Black Wind Cave to connect to the outside world.

He came up this road two weeks ago, and along the way he saw abandoned farmland, dried-up irrigation ditches, and hunters' cabins that were half collapsed.

This mountain isn't poor, it's barren.

The mountains within a hundred miles were filled with monsters of all sizes, and the area that Black Wind Cave was assigned to was the worst.

"Do you have anything to eat?" Pigsy asked without turning his head.

The black bear slowly lowered its hand that was holding the stone axe.

"What?"

"Food." Pigsy turned around, pointing with his rake at the black bear's belly—not as a threat, but to the thick layer of fat on it. "You must have eaten a lot to have that much fat on you. Do you have grain? Meat? Any extra?"

The black bear was stumped by his question.

It's here to fight, not to trade grain.

It opened its mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, uttering a hesitant monosyllabic sound: "Yes?"

How many?

"Three wild boar legs," the black bear said, in a tone as if reporting a task, "and half a vat of pickled fish and some dried mushrooms."

The peaches are almost ripe, but not quite fully ripe yet.

'

"Okay." Pigsy interrupted him, "Go back and pack the things, and send them over tomorrow."

"You don't need all of it, just half will do."

It took the black bear a full three breaths to react.

Why should I bring you food?

Pigsy carried his rake and walked up to the black bear, then reached out and patted it on the shoulder.

He was more than half a head shorter than the black bear, but when he patted the black bear on the shoulder, the black bear unconsciously bent its knees.

It wasn't because of the suppression of demonic power, but because the way Pigsy patted its shoulder was too natural, so natural that it was like a superior comforting a not-so-clever subordinate. This kind of aura suppression had nothing to do with cultivation level; it was purely the muscle memory left by Pigsy after serving as Marshal Tianpeng in Heaven for thousands of years.

"Because you can't beat me," Pigsy said. "The first time you came, I treated you to drinks and spoke nicely to you because I thought you were a reasonable person."

The second time you came, I chased you three miles away because I felt you needed a lesson.

"This is your third time here today," he said, pinching the muscles on the black bear's shoulder with just the right amount of pressure so the bear could feel the strength in his fingers. "You're not going anywhere now."

Black Wind Cave is currently short-staffed.

Don't you want to be the king? Start by being a steward.

"If you manage it well, you can have this mountain later."

The black bear stood still, its mouth opening and closing repeatedly.

It had prepared its challenge lines for half a month, but they all got stuck in its throat. It had prepared several versions of the opening, some bold, some fierce, and one was a seven-character quatrain that it had learned from listening to storytelling in a teahouse at the foot of the mountain. But Pigsy didn't follow its script at all.

It looked down at the stone axe in its hand, then at the nine-toothed rake that Pigsy had draped over his shoulder, and finally threw the stone axe to the ground.

"What's it to you?"

Pigsy turned and walked into the cave, counting on his fingers as he went.

First, the granary.

Second, the mountain road.

Third, water source.

"How many years have you been fighting with the neighboring mountain over that stream behind the mountain?"

"Forty years," the black bear said.

"Take five people over tomorrow, divide the stream in two, and build a stone dam. We've been fighting for forty years and still haven't reached a conclusion, just because both sides only know how to fight and not how to build a dam." He walked into the cave entrance, then came back out, and pointed with a rake at the debris scattered on the yellow earth, "And these things too."

Call a few lesser demons to clean up the cave entrance before this evening.

A broken-handled axe has been lying on the ground for half a month without anyone picking it up. Are you waiting for it to grow legs and run back to you?

The black bear looked in the direction of Pigsy's rake and saw the broken-handled axe.

It had walked across this yellow land dozens of times, never noticing the broken-handled axe on the ground.

Pigsy had been there for half a month when he noticed it.

"Listen up, everyone!" Pigsy suddenly raised his voice, which echoed several times in the ravine.

There were a few little demons sunbathing on the loess land, but they all jumped up in fright at his shout.

A toad spirit that was dozing on a rock suddenly tumbled over, lying on its back with its four short legs kicking wildly in the air.

"From today onwards, the rules of Black Wind Cave are changing." Pigsy slammed his rake into the ground, the teeth of which were all driven into the mud. The mud splattered onto the hem of his cassock, but he didn't care. "I don't care how you behaved before, but now you'll follow my rules."

The first rule is: no fighting when the granary is not full.

If you want to fight, fine. If you win, you'll get an extra 10% of the grain.

The second rule is that garbage must not be piled up at the entrance of the cave.

Anyone who throws anything into the cave entrance will have to spend a month moving stones from the back mountain to repair the road.

The third rule—find someone to manage the accounts, someone to manage the grain, and someone to manage the personnel.

Raise your hand if you agree, let me see who's there.

The little demons looked at each other in bewilderment.

A weasel spirit quietly hid the half-eaten, unidentified bone behind its back.

The overturned toad demon finally flipped over and sat on the ground, panting.

The black bear stood at the entrance of the cave, a red ribbon fluttering in the wind. Its expression had changed from "I want to challenge you" to "How did I suddenly become the one in charge?"

The little fox spirit was the first to react.

It poked half its body out of the cave entrance, its bushy tail held high, and shouted into the cave at the top of its lungs, "Did you hear that!"

"Everyone out! The King is holding a meeting!"

More and more little demons emerged from the cave: a gray pangolin, a tall, thin creature with two deer antlers, a water snake spirit with blue skin that glided as it walked, and seven or eight other miscellaneous little demons whose names Pigsy couldn't recall.

They stood scattered on the yellow earth, some still hugging their straw mats for sleeping, and others with half a piece of wild vegetable in their mouths.

Pigsy looked at them and counted them in his mind—there were thirty-two in total.

This doesn't even include those who go out to patrol the mountains or those who do business at the foot of the mountain.

Black Wind Cave has nearly fifty monsters, more than the monkeys of Flower Fruit Mountain.

That night, Pigsy sat alone on a tiger-skin chair in the cave, with a bamboo slip in front of him that he had found out from some corner. The bamboo slip had seven or eight holes eaten by insects, and he was writing and drawing on it with a worn-out brush.

Several lines of text were written crookedly on the bamboo slip:

The black bear will deliver half of the stored grain tomorrow. If we can't get more in three days, we'll have to go down the mountain to buy more.

But he had no money.

All the money in the cave was spent by the previous mountain king. To be precise, the previous mountain king used it to exchange with a passing traveling merchant for a bronze mirror that was said to be able to ward off fire. However, the bronze mirror turned out to be fake and faded after being exposed to the sun for a day.

The road—the mountain road needs repair, but repairing the road requires tools, and tools require money, so we're back to square one.

Black Bear will deal with the water-stone dam issue tomorrow, but brute force alone won't do the job; someone needs to be able to draw water pattern diagrams.

"Are there any people in the mountain stronghold who know how to draw formations?" He asked around, and the answer was always the same: shake your head.

There are too few people—too few who are truly capable.

Of the thirty-two little demons, fewer than ten are truly capable of fighting, about fifteen are capable of working, and the rest are either too old or too young.

The old rat spirit with the ailing leg had difficulty even walking, but it was the only one in the cave who could read.

The only monster that can read is a mouse.

Pigsy threw the pen on the table. The pen rolled once on the bamboo slip and fell to the ground.

He leaned back in his chair, staring blankly at the stalactites on the cave ceiling.

A drop of water condensed on a stalactite on the cave ceiling. The droplet hung there for a long time before finally falling and dripping onto his nose.

He was too lazy to wipe it, so he let it run down his nose.

He began to wonder—if the monkey were here, what would he do? The monkey would probably summon all the lesser demons, demonstrate a set of earth-shattering supernatural powers, and then all the lesser demons would follow him wholeheartedly.

The monkey never has to worry about granaries or mountain roads; he's the boss wherever he goes because his fists are big enough that all problems are smashed before they even reach him.

If Chu Yang were here, what would he do? He probably wouldn't take on this mess at all.

He had walked alone in the desert for so long that he had long been used to being alone.

He doesn't like to get involved in things, nor does he like to be managed. In this situation, he will most likely say "This is not my business" and then turn around and leave.

But if he decides to stay, he will start by repairing roads without saying a word.

He doesn't speak, he just does things.

The monkeys didn't initially obey him just because they listened to him—they only began to respect him after watching him practice each punch countless times, sharpen each dagger to the point of cutting a hair, and observe and remember the progress of each monkey.