Slavepits of the Undercity 02

 After finding the rescued captives in the Happy Valley, Bo-Jing and his crew, along with Bangqiu returned to Khanbaliq.  Nar-Nuteng had elected to stay behind in the Happy Valley and train with Beatriss.  Although Bo-Jing had sometimes denigrated the girl's prowess in battle, he admitted that her unique way of looking at things was often useful and enhanced his own decision-making.  Finding his men too obliging and Bangqiu too selfish, Bo-Jing was glad to meet Salt, a plucky team-player with a mind of her own plus nascent magical abilities. 

The party set out early in the morning and encountered a group of imperial guards.  The guards recognized Bo-Jing's status as a baghatur and seemed embarassed when it become apparent that they were going to the same place.  While Bo-Jing and his friends were seeking to infiltrate the monastery, the imperial guards had been charged with-- guarding it. Reaching the monastery, Bo-Jing learned that their previous entry point was no longer an option.  The stables had been reduced to rubble, with broken boards, large stones, and garbage blocking the passage that had once allowed access to the lower level.  This was the point the guards were expected to patrol.  With feigned naivete they suggested that if Bo-Jing had business with the monks inside, he should present himself at the front gate.  Their solemn duty was to remain "right here directly in front of the ruined stables no matter what might be happening somewhere else such as at the front gate-- way over there on the other side of the monastery from where we couldn't possibly be expected to see or hear anything anyway."

Following the guards directions, the party found the entrance, a roofless gatehouse with two portcullises and a courtyard beyond.  The monks in the courtyard seemed welcoming, pausing in their work of lading a cart to greet the visitors, but soon showed their duplicitous nature.  The monks opened the outer portcullis and, once the party had entered dropped it closed without opening the inner portcullis.  When Bo-Jing drew his sword and threatened him, they turned the heavy cart toward him and blasted him with a stream of boiling oil.  Bo-Jing sustained little in the way of burns but his armor was damaged and all of his men sustained minor injuries from the splash.  More seriously, it seemed likely the monks had the means to cause more mayhem from behind the near-complete safety of the portcullis.

Bangqiu stepped forward and blasted the monks with hot steam.  As they ran away from their machine, he used his magic to become invisible and levitate over the inner gate.  Bangqiu found the winch room and raised the gate and allowed his comrades inside.  Then he assumed bird form and flew away.

The monks, with their poor weapons and threadbare robes showed little appetite for combat without the protection of a gate between them and Bo Jing's sword.  They fled to their ramshackle dormitory and Bo Jing led a charge toward the temple.  In the gloomy, cobwebbed sanctuary, dominated by a huge statue of a man with a sword raised above his head, they found the head priestess and her minions.  She hexed Bo Jing and his man-- Ganyul and Ganwei were transfixed, while Bo-Jing shook off the paralyzing magic and responded with a curse of his own.  Clenching the Eastern Coin in his palm, he castigated the deceptive priestess as she rose her hands to cast another spell; she froze as if his on the head, blinked and wandered away in a stupor.

And so the battle was on.  A dozen captives, in chains, turned on their captors who were cut down by Bo Jing and his men.  Ryu tended to Ganyul and Ganwei.  Salt watched from the shadows until a monk in black robes slinked up behind Bo Jing with a wicked dagger.  A bolt of blue energy from Salt struck the man in the back of the head.  He cried out in shock; Bo Jing spun on his heel and cut him down.

The panicked priestess stumbled toward the statue and bent over to open a trapdoor.  As she raised it, the statue's sword swung down and killed her.

The captives cheered.  Bo-Jing found the key to unfasten their chains and together with his friends, led the newly-freed people out of the monastery.

Like the others, they were mainly from the "Southern Empire" of Zhou Song.  They would not be safe in Khanbaliq and could not make the long trip home unaccompanied.  Most had lost their families in the war and were grateful to start a new life in the Happy Valley.

Slave Pits of the Undercity 01

tl;dr:

Bojing and his crew go to explore a monastery which has been transformed into a place of human trafficking. Walking in the front door, Bojing saw a woman on a bunk and Nar Nutang yelled that the woman on the bunk was a shape-changing monster and Bojing listened and killed the woman but the woman wasn't a shape-changer but a real slave.

Bojing and the crew saw some ""MONKS" and a merchant; Bojing, a powerful baghatur, stuck fear into the monks' hearts forcing them to run. The slave merchant's two powerful bodyguards remained, one with the abilty of shooting meteorites the other a powerful warrior that the mighty Bojing even struggled with but the crew defeated the bodyguards and recovered the keys to rescue the slaves.


"AKSHULLY":

When Bo-jing learned from Ryu that innocent people were being pressed into slavery in the shadow of the Kanbaliq's walls, his heart hardened against the Emperor. He promised Ryu that we would cleanse the monastery of this wickedness, free the enslaved people, and one day depose the cruel despot who misused his power in this way.

Beatriss knew about the monastery and its ugly secrets. Besides the corrupt monks who received captives from the outskirts of the empire and beyond, Beatriss warned her new protege about shape-changers and a lizard that turned people to stone. After her months-long absence from home, Beatriss herself would return to the Happy Valley. Based on these warnings, Bo-jing and Nar Nuteng both bought mirrors.

Based also on Beatriss's advice, Bo-Jing, Nar-Nuteng, plus their sometimes associate, sometimes rival Bangqiu, along with Ryu and Bo-Jing's men-at-arms, entered the monastery through a secret door and based through several halls so long ruined that their original purpose was impossible to know. They encountered a horde of undead creatures whose chilling touch caused temporary paralysis. None of the party was lost in this encounter, but Bo-Jing elected to choose another entrance to gain access to the actual monastery.

Bo-jing led the party in breaking into the stables. There, the party encountered a group of monks whom were so terrified at the sight of the fearsome baghatur that they fley in terror. A woman who had been hiding in the loft space peered down. "Who is there?" she called. "Who will save me from this place?" Something about the young woman's helplessness put Nar-Nuteng on edge and she warned Bo-Jing of the seductive shape-shifters. Bo-Jing charged up into the loft area and angrily killed the too-good-to-be-true ingenue.  She screamed and bled and died and her body did not revert to a gray, alien form.  She was not a monster but a true victim, killed by the one she thought would rescue her.

Bo-Jing was despondent and blamed Nar-Nutang.  Bangqiu rebuked him for being too emotional.  But Ryu patiently explained that he alone was responsible for his mistake and that he must accept it and learn from it and give his focus in the moment to rescuing other slaves.  

The party found their way into a series of tunnels dug under the monastery and inhabited by disgusting ant-men.  With the power of his magic coin, Bo-Jing drove away the ant-men and the party navigated the labyrinth to arrive at the lair of the resident slave lord, a greasy-looking man in leather armor.  While contending with a dozen cowardly monks and several ferocious giant weasels, the slave lord escaped.  Rifling through his belongings, they found some useful information about the work of the slavers including contacts in other cities.

The party continued to explore and discovered a series of cellblocks, where they encountered a group of monks negotiating with a merchant sought to purchase and enslave a number of the people imprisoned there.  Alarmed by the heavily-armed intruders, the monks and the merchant were put to flight while the merchant's bodyguards stayed in place to guard his retreat.  A blast of steam from Bangqiu killed one of them while Bo-Jing defeated and slew the other in trying hand-to-hand combat.  A search of the surrounding storage rooms located the keys and the party freed about a dozen prisoners.  These people, mainly young women from Southern Zhou were glad to leave the monastery but feared being left alone in a city where they would be regarded as enemies.  Bangqiu suggested that they should be taken all the way to the Happy Valley and resettled there.

Interlude: Bo-Jing in Khanbaliq

 Bo-Jing and and Ganbaatar presented the Southern Coin and enjoyed a week of congratulatory banquets and interrogatory private audiences. The Emperor granted a one-year tax holiday to Ganbaatar and his people. One of the Emperor's Ministers insinuated that Bo-Jing had not kept his possession of the Eastern Coin a secret and that the Emperor was prepared to appoint Bo-Jing was prepared to appoint him to the post recently vacated in Blue City.  Concealing his concern as to whether this was an offer or a threat or both, Bo-Jing simply restated that he looked forward to returning to his post in Banua and continuing to serve the Emperor there.

During this time, Ryu visited the local Monastery of the Two-Fold Path, located just outside the walls of Khanbaliq.  He was shocked and dismayed to find it was being used as a holding place for captives who would be sold as slaves-- many of them to the Emperor himself.

Bo-Jing made a private vow that he would rescue these slaves, restore the monastery to its intended purposes, and one day punish the Emperor.