"Ahem, ahem, Tie Zhu, don't talk nonsense in front of the general." The toothless old man hesitated, glared at his child Tie Zhu, and cautiously looked towards Su Lin with his cloudy eyes. .
"It's okay, you can tell me. I haven't been to this town for a long time, and I also want to know... what happened to the town after Hui'er's incident." When he said this, it was obvious that Under Su Lin's deliberate cover-up, there was a darker look in his eyes.
"Let me tell you." The old man was afraid that if the child said something wrong again and made General Cheng unhappy, it would be bad, so he started to talk lightly.
Although no one had mentioned it for a long time, the old man knew clearly that Cheng Jinghui, Cheng Yaojin's child, was on the upper reaches of the Zimu River. It was said that he picked up something strange and became weird and crazy from then on.
Since then, the upper reaches of the Zimu River have been banned by the surrounding yamen because of strange things that happened in the past. It was not until many years later that people almost forgot about that incident, and only one after another people dared to go upstream to fetch water. Laundry.
But it is said that those who often fetch water and wash clothes by the river will slowly experience certain changes in their bodies after a period of time. At first, they just cough, then their bodies will slowly dry up, and finally they will grow something like fish scales. of armor. What's more, there will be several strange tails growing out of the back of his butt.
For some unknown reason, the water downstream was seriously polluted and mixed with a large number of impurities. This water was obviously unsuitable for iron smelting. Because when impurities are mixed in, it will seriously affect the quality of the manufacturing tools, and often if ten pieces are made, only one or two may be able to meet the original standards.
It is precisely because of the relatively low yield that the products that could have been made with only a dozen taels of silver were sold for more than a dozen times due to the large amount of wasted materials.
Under this situation, Old Toothless wanted to close his shop and stop for a while. However, they not only made farm tools but also weapons for soldiers. Although the town was small, there were many people or officials who came here to see it.
There are also a large number of wealthy gentry who have customized a large number of weapons in their stores, saying that they are used to protect their homes and fields. They are all respectable people. If the shop can generate normal revenue and can manufacture iron tools in large quantities, this will naturally not be a problem.
But the problem is that because of the river water, they cannot provide iron tools to the officials and gentry who placed the orders as scheduled. Even when he proposed to make another batch for them without raising the original price of iron smelting after the river water was polluted, those People also refused.
Because even if it is not profitable, it is still nearly ten times more expensive than the previous price. As long as those people are not stupid, they can purchase ironware from other places.
The toothless old man thought so too. He also wanted to stop delivering iron tools to them by explaining to these people the reasons for the special circumstances in recent days, and even decided to return the deposit to them in full.
But they asked the old man to sell the iron tools he had made in the past few days to them at the original price, and the remaining orders should be based on the previous purchase order. If the goods could not be delivered on time, in addition to the principal, they would return three times the original price as compensation.
The old man still wants to maintain the friendship with those people in the past, but in the face of the vain money and interests, those people will never admit that they have any friendship with you, and even say that they will either deliver the iron tools at the original price and on the original date, or else They brought soldiers and domestic slaves to smash the ant blacksmith shop that he had worked hard for decades.
In desperation, in order to keep the shop, the old man had no choice but to dismiss his former employees, compensate these people for almost all the savings they had earned over the past few decades, and sell all the iron tools he had made to them at the previous price.
Even in this difficult situation, they never thought of going to the upper reaches of the Zimu River to fetch water.
But if the water problem is not solved, it means that the cost of making each iron tool is extremely high, and even the selling price is astronomical. But most people in the town are ordinary people, and how can they have so much silver and copper coins? Go buy iron tools.
No matter how good the reputation they had accumulated before, the sustainable high prices, and the quality of the iron tools was not as good as before, their business became increasingly bleak, until finally there was often no customer in the small shop all day long. Come.
And Su Lin and the others were the first customers to visit their Ant Blacksmith Shop today.
Tie Zhu thought that Cheng Yaojin was a general and that his family's money must be endless, so after seeing that the old general Cheng Yaojin liked that axe, he directly increased the price of the ax more than twenty times.
But how did he know that the person he met was a fake general? It would be no exaggeration to say that he was now a breeze on both sleeves, and he was not poorer than five taels of silver.
Seeing that the shop was on the verge of bankruptcy, even though his father firmly disagreed, Tie Zhu still avoided his father one night and pushed a cart and a bucket alone towards the Zimu River.
He replaced the water used for blacksmithing with the water he pushed in, and lied to his father that he had used a special method to filter out impurities in the water.
The toothless old man was doubtful. After using the current water to make iron, he found that although the quality was still not as good as before, the yield was obviously much higher than before.
Su Lin felt a little strange when he heard this. Logically speaking, if the river water is polluted, shouldn't it slowly flow to the downstream after the upstream is polluted?
Normally, it shouldn't be that the impurities in the water upstream are denser, but instead it's clearer upstream.
He waved his hand, interrupted Tie Zhu's speech, and asked: "Is there still the previous water source here? Take a copy and show it to me."
Tie Zhu looked at his father with a very embarrassed expression. The old man coughed violently again, hunched over and said, "I later learned that this was taken from... the water from the upper reaches of the Zimu River. I made the iron pillars fall down. So General, there is no water in the store."
As the toothless old man said this, he coughed continuously for a long time.
Since arriving in this town, the first one is the father of the bride, and the second one is the father of the blacksmith shop clerk. Their experiences seem to be particularly miserable.
I just don’t know if most of the people in the empire would have suffered the same fate when they truly entered the Tang and Ming Empire.
Su Lin knew that he entered this world from a small program called "Death Closed Loop". Seeing that other people were constantly breaking through levels and appearing in various places in the closed loop world, there were also novices and veterans. He Then you know that this kind of breakthrough is by no means a one-time task.
It is possible that after returning to the real world, he will still enter it again. Besides the forest scene in front of him, what he is most exposed to is the Tang Ming Empire information input in the closed-loop world.
For example, the Nanyang County that Su Lin had seen before, the desert border where Old Man Qihuang appeared, and the small town far away from the capital that he was now exposed to.
Everything here seems to tell him that the next breakthrough is likely to be within the Tang Ming Empire.
Although he had only completed his mission here for two days, he had an intuition that he would be in contact with this huge empire next, and weren't the couple of agents also from a special agency of the Tang Ming Empire?
Su Lin knew that now was not the time to express his feelings. He looked at the boy in the store and continued: "You can continue talking about the rest."
He vaguely felt that before going to save people, he should first find out what mysteries were hidden in the river.
The first time was when he took the initiative to go to the teahouse to inquire about information and heard the legend about the Zimu River, but this time he heard the rumors about the river again on the way to buy an iron axe. Such important information, no matter what, Sulin wanted it. Go check it out.
Thinking of this, he realized that when he heard the legend of the River God for the first time, he was only focused on finding his bride and had forgotten such an important source of pollution.
Did he really forget it? Maybe there is some kind of power here and he just doesn't want him to remember it.
Just listen to Tie Zhu continue to say: "After my father took me from the water upstream and used it several times, in addition to the obvious improvement of the iron tools, my father also suffered from a strange disease."
Su Lin just wanted to say, isn't that strange disease the current cough? Unexpectedly, Tie Zhu suddenly said: "Every night at midnight, my father always walks towards the upper reaches of the Zimu River. If I hadn't watched him, he might have..."
"Zi Shi?" Su Lin's eyes flashed. He paid special attention to this time. Just when he was about to ask, the old man impatiently interrupted the child's speech:
"Tie Zhu, what are you talking about? I...why didn't I know about this?"
The toothless old man coughed violently again, and he deliberately suppressed it. After a while, his entire face was swollen and turned purple.
"Dad, look at your chest, maybe you don't even realize it."
As Tie Zhu said, the toothless old man couldn't help but be confused. He turned his back to Su Lin and looked at his chest. He found that it had been covered with dense scales for some time, and the surrounding skin was even more dense. Like black dead branches, they stretched straight towards his body.
"Why, how could this happen?" The old man suddenly collapsed helplessly on the ground.
When Su Lin saw the old man suddenly reacting so violently, his mental power quietly released, and he took in all the strange things about the toothless old man's body.
Black stripes, isn't this? Isn't it consistent with the previous situation where Lu Xueyan and the others were controlled by the little lizard?
When he examined the old man's body more carefully, he found no trace of the little lizard's movement inside.
However, due to the sudden loss of control of the old man's emotions just now, the black object accumulated on the chest of the toothless old man began to swim around like a wild horse that had escaped the reins.
Following this, the old man's face became darker and darker, and the turbid color in his eyes disappeared, replaced by a color as deep as the black on his chest.
"Jie Jie, Jie Jie," several bird songs that no one could understand suddenly came out of the toothless old man's mouth.
Tie Zhu went to see his father anxiously, but the old man suddenly turned around and bit his neck. Fortunately, the old man had no teeth and did not bite off the artery in Tie Zhu's neck.
Even so, a piece of skin was still torn off from Tie Zhu's neck, and the bloody scene on his neck could be vaguely seen, and with a burst of black smoke, it instantly disappeared from all over the little guy's body.
After seeing this situation, Su Lin promptly kicked away the old man who was biting Tiezhu.
At the same time, he made an inexplicable cry: "Fire of Nothingness, burn!"
Suddenly, the white flame that Su Lin had left in the old man's body by feeling his pulse began to burn along with the blood around the old man's body.
After losing his first prey, the toothless old man had already lost his mind. He wanted to continue biting the child who was very tempting to him.
But when Su Lin appeared in front of him, the old man changed his mind and directly opened his deathly black bloody mouth and rushed towards Su Lin.
But as Su Lin's words stopped, the old man's body immediately felt like falling into a furnace. He felt as if his whole body was about to be vaporized, and his eyes and brain were filled with blazing flames.
"What did you do to my father!" Seeing his father fall to the ground in pain again, Tie Zhu's eyes suddenly turned red, he picked up the iron tool next to him and wanted to fight Su Lin.
Perhaps, he really shouldn't trust these officials too much. If he hadn't suddenly asked, his father wouldn't have been like this.
