In fact, the matter of traveling is not difficult at all for a young man who has been wallowing in the mountains and rivers around the small town of Yanguan since he was a child.
Going up mountains and rivers, catching fish in the water, and setting traps to catch wild game are all commonplace. Walking dozens of miles of mountain roads and going back and forth between the town and the surrounding mountains and fields several times a day is even more commonplace.
However, heading east from Yanguan Town, ten miles away from the town, this is the farthest place that the former helpless small town orphan has ever walked.
It's strange to say. I don't know if it has something to do with the former Yanguan Formation closing the access for outsiders, or because some people don't want him to leave the town too far. In short, he doesn't seem to have really thought about leaving the town. Passed ten miles away from the town.
It was just like when someone warned him not to go more than nine feet away from the shore after entering the Xuannv Lake.
Although he continued to grow up over the years, and no one even deliberately restricted the distance of his feet, he was really like a ghost beating a wall, and he never walked out of that place that seemed to have been marked by someone. The circle range is like drawing the ground as a prison and stopping at the point.
So when he actually held a bamboo hiking pole and carried a medium-sized luggage package on his back, he kowtowed to both sides of a small hill at the foot of Zhelongbei Mountain, and then completely walked away from that mountain. After leaving the ordinary town, he truly realized for the first time that he seemed to have really stepped out of the small world that he once knew all about.
Fish leap in the sea, birds fly in the sky, water hits three thousand miles away, and you soar up to see the blue clouds.
——
The moment the boy walked out of the small town, thousands of miles away in the east, there was the Chengyun Empire, the imperial capital Chang'an.
This is known as the only pearl of a continent in Liguanzhou. It was not named this way at the earliest. It was only changed to Chang'an after changing dynasties and taking the meaning of "long-lasting peace and stability". Then it became the capital of the Chengyun Empire. It has been thousands of years.
Chang'an City is huge, and the royal palace city on the north side alone is larger than the Liangzhou City in the northwest, which Chu Yuanxiao did not have the opportunity to set foot in for thirteen years.
Outside the palace city there is the imperial city, and outside the imperial city there is the city wall. The three cities are ringed with a symmetrical layout, neat squares, and wide streets. This shows the planning intention when building the city and the importance attached to it by the Chengyun royal family.
The height of the city wall of the palace city is also much higher than that of the outer city wall, so as long as you stand on the top of the city wall covered with feather forests, you can see the Dragon Head Plain in the northeast corner of Chang'an City, and you can also vaguely see the structures built on it. That tall and luxurious independent palace is better than the royal palace.
There is the Zhuguo Ancestral Hall of the Chengyun Empire, also called the Royal Ancestral Temple. It enshrines the memorial tablets of the deceased emperors of the empire. It also houses the Zhuguo elders who have been accumulated by the successive dynasties since the founding of Chengyun.
There are three main reasons why Chengyun Empire can become a third-grade empire, and the Zhuguo Ancestral Hall is one of them.
At this moment, there was a girl in white with a delicate face and big round eyes, standing quietly on the Golden Light Gate tower on the west side of the outer city of Chang'an, looking at the endless mountains to the west.
Today, the girl does not carry a sword on her back, but hangs the pair of swords together on her waist. The sword is named Wannian, and the sword is named Daxia Longque.
Next to the girl in white is an extremely charming woman, also in white. As always, she does not have a sword on her body, but she is holding a medium-sized wine gourd in her hand, and there is a small wine gourd tied around the slender waist of the gourd. A bright red braided tassel rope hangs down long, clean and beautiful, and was woven with care.
The woman in white, Li Twelve, was slowly holding the gourd and drinking while looking at the little junior sister who was looking westward silently with an expressionless face.
She actually knew why the little girl was standing here at this moment. It was simply because of the fish-dragon jade pendant and the Zhuguo Ancestral Hall located on the high plateau in the northeast corner of the Imperial City.
In fact, when she was in Liangzhou, when the little girl gave the jade pendant to the boy as if she was angry, she once reminded him that some things can be known without guessing. The scene earlier today That's clear evidence.
However, when he saw his precious little junior sister standing on the city wall facing west, looking for a long time without coming back to her senses, the world-famous Ye Yu Sword Immortal became humorous for no reason. After taking a sip of wine, he started teasing her. A sulking little girl.
"When my little sister traveled around the world, she once visited Tushan Mountain at the southern end of the Middle-earth Divine Continent. She originally wanted to see the legendary ancestral land of the Nine-Tailed Clan, but she just listened to the introduction of the local people. I saw the equally famous Wang Fu Stone again."
The woman in white smiled and spoke mid-sentence, and took another sip of wine, "It's just that when I saw my little girl looking so intently at Liangzhou thousands of miles away, the little senior sister felt inexplicably that the solitary piece of land had stood on the cliff of Tushan. The year-end stone has come to life again, and it has traveled thousands of miles to come to our Liguanzhou?"
The young girl Li Yuyao was still sullen and angry, but when she heard this joke, she couldn't help but turned her head and glanced at the young senior sister beside her. Although she didn't say anything, the target of her obvious anger had already been changed. direction.
Seeing the little girl like this, Li Twelve was not worried. Instead, he smiled and started to take a step further, "You think that if all the princes and sons of the emperor, the proud sons of heaven, knew one by one that the imperial pearl they cherished so much would be in the right position. The first-grade Princess Changle, whose true heart is attached to a poor young man from the countryside who they once thought was an eyesore, will her heart be broken into eight petals and fall to the ground with a clang?"
Hearing this, the girl pursed her lips helplessly, "Senior sister, don't you feel a pity that those old men didn't lock me up?"
Ye Yu Sword Immortal raised his eyebrows when he heard this and said with a smile: "How can you do that? You see, little senior sister, are you afraid that you will be embarrassed when you come back, so are you here to help you fight? If those old men are indiscriminate, little senior sister I will take you back to Lishan!"
Lishan Mountain is where the gate of Xihe Jianzong is located.
Li Yuyao did not speak directly when she heard this. She first turned her head and looked through the open front and rear doors of the city tower to look at the imperial city in the distance and the ancestral hall further away. Then she turned to her senior sister and said weirdly: "Little Senior sister, if you talk like this, I think you are a little too disrespectful of those bad old men."
Standing on the city wall of the Imperial Capital, the Imperial Palace and the Zhuguo Ancestral Hall were all within sight, but it was really impolite to openly say that he wanted to snatch the little girl away from here.
However, the female Sword Immortal who was drinking wine with a wine gourd did not care at all about this, "It doesn't matter, as long as your first ancestor does not come out of seclusion, and your Zong Zhengqing does not take action, the other people, although the young senior sister will also You may not be able to beat it, but if you just want to run away, it should be no problem."
Li Yuyao was not angry when she saw that the young senior sister was so careless and demoted a group of her family's Zhuguo ministers to nothing. She even curled her lips in a good mood.
As the eldest daughter of His Majesty the Emperor, she is loved by all. Among the royal children of the entire empire, except for her eldest brother Li Cong, who has been extremely smart since childhood, she is the most favored one. Otherwise, she would not have been given the title of first-class eldest princess at such a young age before leaving the imperial court.
The reason why the emperor's brother is so valued is because if nothing happens, he will be the future emperor of the empire. Half of her favor comes from the love of her father, the emperor and her mother, and the rest is because of her cultivation since she was a child. His talent was so outstanding that he was valued by the Zhuguo Ancestral Hall.
When she was a child, she didn't understand. She just thought it was a good thing that everyone liked her. But it wasn't until she grew up that she realized that glory was often a shackles. The older she got, the more dazzling her talent was, and the shackles became stronger. It's heavy and always makes people unable to breathe.
Back in the small town of Liangzhou, when she gave away the fish dragon pendant, on the one hand, it was indeed useful to her new friend, and on the other hand, it was indeed out of spite, because the piece contained The jade pendant with a ray of dragonborn soul came from that ancestral hall before it got into her hands.
The girl shook her head and stopped thinking about some unhappy things. Instead, she turned her head and looked at the little senior sister beside her who had a calm expression and was still drinking. She turned her bright eyes slightly and smiled as she thought about it.
The little girl has never been one to suffer easily. She has not forgotten what the little senior sister said before when she teased her about being Wang Fushi.
So looking at the wine gourd in the hand of the little senior sister who didn’t know who gave it to her, she smiled and said: “When I was in Lishan once, I went to hang out in the small town at the foot of the mountain with the eleventh senior sister. She ate among the sea of clouds. After drinking too much wine, he told me a lot of stories in a daze, little senior sister, do you want to listen?"
Hearing this, Li Twelve paused unnoticeably while raising his hand to drink. However, he returned to normal in just a moment. He took another sip of wine and said calmly: "Tell me, let me see how big a fight you are going to have with that dead girl." Can you relieve your anger by fighting?"
The eleventh and twelfth disciples of the founder of the Xihe Sword Sect actually joined Gongsun's sect on the same day. It was only because she, Li Twelve, was a little drunk at the time that her reaction was half a beat too slow, so she was dismissed. That dead girl named Chi Yuhu was one step ahead of her and ranked eleventh.
So in the following years, as the second generation founders of the Xihe Sword Sect, Eleven Chi Yuhu and Twelve Li Zhu, they have been quarreling about who is older and who is younger, and it often turns into a full-scale martial arts, each drawing a sword to fight. Have a fight.
In the eyes of a lot of younger disciples of the Xihe Sect, these two second-generation ancestors are the two most arrogant among the group of second-generation ancestors, except for the new disciple who has just entered the door. When juniors fight in front of each other, they never care whether they lose face or not, and the reason for the fight is so simple that it is a bit exaggerated. It is just to rank who should be the senior sister...
Li Yuyao, a little girl standing at the top of the city, gloated a little when she heard the little senior sister's casual question: "Senior Sister Yuhu said that there was once a drunken drunken girl who leaned on the wine table and accepted a gift from someone else. She was drinking wine gourd, but she didn’t even see who gave her the gourd. After she woke up, she had been thinking about her for many years, and she was still seriously braiding red strings for the gourd. Maybe they would meet again in the future. If you don’t know, you can pull out your sword and poke holes in people without even knowing it!”
Listening to the smiling tone of the little girl, the woman in white just smiled without saying anything. She raised her hand and took another sip of the peach blossom wine in the gourd. Then she looked up at the endless mountains outside the city, her eyes calm and silent.
The fate between people is sometimes hard to say.
She indeed could no longer remember what the man who took advantage of her drunken state to gently place a freshly dried gourd on her table looked like.
Even, it may be like that dead girl Chi Yuhu said, we meet again in the world, we don't know each other, and we fight each other.
Many years ago, she had always thought that since that person had put down the gourd, he would definitely come back to her later. However, after waiting for many years, she seemed to have gotten used to him not showing up again, and he might not see her again in this life, but this seemed to be the case. Nothing bad.
Even if we meet, we should not know each other or think about it, but the peach blossoms are fragrant.
——
Including the day he left town, the young Chu Yuanxiao drove for three days through the mountains and fields. When it was dark on the third day, he finally reached the entrance of a valley.
Through the sunset that had not yet dissipated on the horizon, he could vaguely see the chaotic scene of piles of rocks and jagged rocks in the valley in front of him.
The two highest mountains on both sides of the valley each collapsed in half for unknown reasons. The rocks under the cliff were also different from other places. They all seemed to have been carefully beaten with a hammer. It was broken into powder. After an occasional gust of wind, you can see countless stone powders blown away like continuous loess.
The young man inexplicably remembered that the night when the old monkey and the Yunlin Sect priest Jiang Chang temporarily left the town, the sky was like thunder.
Moreover, this valley seems to be different from the 200-mile mountain road that the young man passed in the past two days, because the entire valley is silent, not a single roar of beasts can be heard, and not a single bird can be seen, just like this place , has become a desperate place that the wild beasts and birds wandering around in the mountains are unwilling to enter.
Seeing that the sky was getting dark and he had to find a place to rest, the young man looked at the valley in front of him and hesitated. If even the birds and animals were not willing to settle here, then he would enter it and stay for one night. This choice Whether it is correct or not is really hard to say.
When I used to work with the old Liangtou in the small town, the old man always seemed to have many endless stories to tell him. At first, he would tell stories about various people in the small town. Later, when he talked about more content, he would also tell some old stories about gods and ghosts passed down from generation to generation from time to time.
For example, there are mountain temples, such as the City God's Temple, such as the Earth Temple, or the River God Hebo, or some spirits who cultivate spiritual wisdom in the mountains, and some people's souls do not enter reincarnation after death and become ghosts wandering in the world...
Chu Yuanxiao didn't know if there was any relationship between the ghosts wandering the world mentioned by Old Liangtou and the ghost clan behind Mr. Mo Da who visited Yanguan Town on the night of the Spring Equinox, but now he I have to go out alone, travel far away, and sleep in the wilderness at night. Sometimes I feel a little cold on my back, and I don't dare to close my eyes and sleep without lighting a fire.
It was just getting dark tonight, and he just happened to walk all the way to the entrance of this deserted valley. There were still no birds or animals in it. This didn't seem to be a good sign.
Just when the young man was in a dilemma, a slightly thin palm gently placed on the young man's shoulder, and at the same time a dry and hoarse voice sounded behind his head, "Since you are here, why don't you come in?"
At this moment, Chu Yuanxiao felt a chill going all the way up from his lower back, straight to the Tianling Gai!
Damn it, is it possible that whatever you want comes to you? !
The sky was dark, there was no one around, and the young man who was walking alone was in danger of death, but one of his legs seemed to have been filled with molten iron, making it impossible for him to even run away!
It’s no wonder that the young man was timid, but the voice was too abrupt and didn’t sound like a living person. It reminded him inexplicably of the Heavenly Book Lianshan who once lived in the bronze bell. However, the voice was dry, but not sinister. But the one behind him is just gloomy...
The young man who felt a little weak all over gritted his teeth and held the package that had slipped from his shoulder to his hand. He tightened the bamboo stick in his hand with his other hand, and then slowly turned his head to look at him with an ugly expression. behind.
I have even seen the Ghost Marquis of Fengdu. Am I afraid that you are a lonely ghost?
At worst, it's just a pale face. I'll fight you!
When the poor young man with a stern look and a soft heart turned around with a determined look on his face, what he saw was not the pale grimace he had imagined with blood flowing and eyes flailing, but a smile on his lips and a teasing look on his face. I have to admit that he has a very handsome smile.
The man was dressed in black and looked young. He seemed to be smiling but not smiling. Who could he be if he wasn't that bastard Su Sanzai?
The young man suddenly felt a slight weight on his body and was a little out of strength. His face turned extremely ugly in an instant, and he cursed: "You stupid Su Sanzai, do you know that you can scare people to death? You are here to scare me in the middle of the fucking night. Is it fun?!”
The young man in black was not angry after being scolded. He still had a smiling expression. He just slapped the young man on the back of the head and said cheerfully: "You little bitch is not big or small. I am half your master. How can you talk?" ?”
Some weak-legged teenagers rolled their eyes when they heard this, "I haven't used your money yet! What kind of half-master are you!"
Su Sanzai shrugged, rolled his eyes and said, "You make it sound like you can bear it for the rest of your life. It will happen sooner or later. It's useless not to admit it."
Chu Yuanxiao was too lazy to talk nonsense with this sick bastard and simply sat down on the ground. But to be honest, he seemed to feel a lot more at ease when an acquaintance suddenly appeared in the wilderness in the middle of the night.
But I heard the young man suddenly squinting his eyes and saying with a half-smile: "Don't you know that some spirits who are successful in spiritual practice, or ghosts who have become Taoists, have some transformation abilities?"
The young man who had just swallowed his heart from his throat was stunned when he heard this, and stared blankly at the young man with a sneer smile on his face, "What do you mean?"
"Meaning, how can you be sure that I am not a mountain ghost who has successfully cultivated in the mountains? When I saw you arriving at the door of my house, I became very itchy and wanted to trick you into the mountains, then skin and bones and devour you. Can you order some food or fill your stomach?"
This sudden coldness in his words made the young man's face turn pale again, and he took out the money from his arms without hesitation.
But the young man did not read out the four words directly. Instead, he held the slightly larger copper coin in his hand and rubbed it, then raised his head and looked at the young man in black carefully.
Seeing that the man's face suddenly turned gloomy again, and even started to change in a strange direction, the young man suddenly laughed, "Su Sanzai, I remember you said at the beginning that you might be a talented actor who has buried your talent, but Now I think you may think too highly of yourself."
When the young man opposite who originally had a gloomy expression suddenly changed his face when he heard this, he raised his eyebrows and said with a smile, "Oh? What should I say?"
Chu Yuanxiao snorted and sneered, "You tricked me into using this money, and then I recognized you as half a master. This plan is quite good, but are you acting too exaggerated?"
"Really?" Xiaoxiao, the young man in black who was ridiculed, suddenly looked strange again, "It seems that I have to let you see what it means that seeing is not necessarily believing, and your brain may not be easy to use."
As soon as he finished speaking, the sky and the earth suddenly became dark. You couldn't see the stars and the moon when you looked up, and you couldn't see your fingers when you stretched out your hand. Demonic winds were everywhere between the sky and the earth!
The originally smooth and delicate skin of the man in black began to become bits and pieces dry, like dead wood, his eyes were as red as drops of blood, and his voice once again became the dry and gloomy look before.
"If you have a visitor, please come with me to visit me!"
…
