Benton had a leisurely breakfast in the inn the next morning. His first task of the day was to find an orphanage. With the understanding that he wanted to donate food, the innkeeper had given Benton directions to one, and he didn’t want to arrive there too early and disrupt whatever their normal routine was.

When he finally made it to the place, it was even worse than he had feared. Kids were running around everywhere. A quick count of those outside yielded twenty-three kids mostly old enough to be scanned—in the F range across the board—and there had to be more in the rickety two-story building. And every one of them he saw was thin, too thin.

He asked one of the kids who ran the place and was told he needed to talk to Mistress Gong.

“Is she the only adult here?” Benton said.

The kid shrugged. “Some of the older ones of us help out.”

Yikes. Some of his friends back on Earth had ended up with three kids, and they’d felt outnumbered even with having two adults. Caring for so many by herself must be a nightmare for Mistress Gong.

The kid agreed to lead him through the house in return for a copper bit, and Benton passed at least a dozen or more kids from toddlers ranging up to maybe eight or ten years old using the bedrooms as playgrounds.

“Mistress Gong! Mistress Gong!” the kid yelled. “We have a visitor.”

Benton heard her mutter “What now?” before she appeared from a doorway. Ragged was the only way to describe her. She was in at least her late fifties and her filthy, tattered dress was askew. There was a baby in her arms and a toddler clinging to her right leg, so she had effected a staggered walk to drag the child along with her.

Yikes.

She showed no emotion at seeing a cultivator in her orphanage. Actually, she showed no reaction at all, simply staring at him silently.

“Greetings, Esteemed Mistress Gong,” Benton said. “I heard you were doing good work here taking care of orphans and hoped to make a donation.”

“Sure. Whatever. Just, I don’t know, leave it downstairs. There’s an empty bowl in the kitchen. I’ll be down to put it away after finishing changing the babies.”

Strange. Benton had never seen anyone so worn down by their circumstances that they didn’t even seem to care if someone was offering to give them money to help out. “May I ask how so many orphans came to live with you? And how many are you taking care of exactly?”

“I don’t know. Fifty? Some of the parents died and some left. Some, who knows?”

The tragedy of the place was breaking his heart, and he seriously considered taking all fifty of the orphans with him to the village. There were two serious problems with that idea, though. One, he didn’t have the infrastructure in place to take care of so many children, even if some of them were nearly adults by society’s standards. Of course, he could seek help from the mayor, who surely could arrange babysitting services as long as Benton was paying for clothing and feeding and a little extra on top.

Unless it was a complete emergency, he thought asking favors before establishing a long-term relationship with the mayor was a bad idea. It gave the village too much leverage in whatever deal they ended up making.

Two, a much more pressing reason, the forest near the village was teeming with spirit beasts. Benton felt pretty good about protecting the people in the caravan as it currently was. Almost all of them, after all, were cultivators, the twins were exceptionally capable of hunting beasts, and he had the guard to defend the rest of the group.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Adding in fifty kids sounded like a recipe for disaster. All it would take was for a child or two to run off into the woods for a potty break while Benton and the twins were otherwise occupied. Murphy’s law said that event would take place at just the wrong time, and all Benton would find of the kid would be a pair of bloody sandals, if that much.

He would not allow that to happen, especially when there was a better alternative—take a few of the kids with him and get the orphanage some resources so that they could survive until he returned.

“Would you accept help if I could hire someone to assist you?” Benton said.

“Yeah. Fine. Whatever.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be back later.”

Benton left a thousand taels in the bowl where Mistress Gong had directed his donation to go and resolved to come back before lunch to make sure the kids were fed.

As he walked out, though, the first thing he noticed was the complete absence of children in sight, which was really weird considering the scene when he’d entered, but the second thing he noticed likely explained the first.

Two men, presumably part of the town enforcers given their resemblance to the men he’d met at the gate, stood fingering the hilts of swords hanging from their waists. He mentally tagged them Thug Three and Thug Four.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” Benton said.

“We heard you came to give the orphanage a donation,” Thug Three said. “That was mighty generous of you.”

“Thanks? Is that a problem?”

Thug Four was chewing on some kind of stick, and he took it out of his mouth. “Well, yes. See, you didn’t pay the donation tax.”

“Donation tax, huh?”

“Yep,” Thug Three said. “Donation tax.”

Benton sighed. “You’re really going to rob an orphanage?”

“Hey, hey, hey, hey,” Thug Four said, making a downward motion with his hands. “Not rob. Tax. It goes to support the town.”

“Yeah. All that support going to the town is so very evident. I love what you’ve done with the place.”

“Look, you can hand over a little more of a donation to pay the tax,” Thug Four said, probably trying to sound like he was being reasonable, “or we can collect it from the nice mistress here.”

Benton had no doubt that, if he paid them, they go take whatever was inside, too. No wonder Mistress Gong hadn’t been exactly enthused about the money.

“Or,” Benton said, “I can kill both of you right here, right now, and no one has to worry about any tax.”

Back on Earth, he hadn’t been prone to threatening people, but then again, he didn’t exactly have a lot of run-ins with true scum in his old life. He found that, after having to lie and bluff his way through surviving in Sixth Flawless Flowing City, it felt nice to mean exactly what he said.

“You can’t do that,” Thug Three said. “The Town Lord protects us.”

“When was the last time Fatty Ren moved his ass out of that enormous chair? Protect you? Yeah. Pull the other one.”

Both the enforcers drew their swords, and Benton took just an instant to consider his actions.

Despite his words, he did not want to get in the habit of killing easily. He might be living in a cultivation world, but there was still room for ethics. To kill or not to kill? What was the ethical thing to do?

Or a different question, was the world a better place with or without enforcers who were so far gone into whatever self-delusion they lived under that they really felt it was okay to rob starving orphans?

When put that way, the answer was simple. Without.

With a thought, his spear was in his hand, and he swung. Thug Three’s head separated from his body, and both thudded to the dirt. Benton swept the corpse and head into his ring, bringing his count of bodies to dispose of to an even twenty.

Thug Four glanced from his dead friend to Benton, his eyes wide with fear.

“Take me to your leader,” Benton said.

The man brightened. “The Town Lord’s palace is that big building over there.” He pointed. “I’m sure you—”

“Not Fatty Ren. The Town Manager. What’s his name?”

“Yu Xieren.”

“Take me to him.”

Thug Four seemed resigned to his fate as he led Benton toward the center of town until stopping outside a mansion that, although being smaller than the Town Lord’s palace, certainly appeared more opulent with statuary everywhere and a grand entrance framed with columns that appeared to be made of real gold. A few servants worked on a garden in the front. All of the servants were relatively young, attractive females, and all wore short outfits that most of society would consider scandalous.

Benton had seen everything he needed to see. With another swipe of his spear, Thug Four’s head was separated from his body.

Instead of storing it in his ring, Benton tossed it up to the door for the Town Manager to deal with and left, stalking toward the Town Lord’s palace.