After staying one night at Fengjiazhuang's inn, Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai set off in a hurry and continued on their way to the southwest.
The next day, they came to Jining from Yanzhou.
Jining was still a "prefecture" in the first year of Emperor Taizu's reign. Yanzhou was affiliated to Jining Prefecture at that time. However, later Taizu named his tenth son King of Lu and vassalized Yanzhou, so Yanzhou was promoted to Jining was demoted to a state.
Anyway, these two places are right next to each other. Administratively, anyone can trick the other. You will understand this by looking at the map, so I won’t dwell on it.
Here we still have to talk about this "King Lu".
Don't get me wrong. The King of Lu who was personally conferred by Taizu Zhao is not the same person as the King of Lu whom we are going to mention right now who is still alive. There is a gap of more than three hundred years between these two people.
"Lu" is a title.
The emperor basically granted vassal kings based on the names of places (most dynasties were like this, but there were exceptions. For example, the Song Dynasty had names with auspicious characters). Those whose fiefdoms were in Shandong were called King of Lu, those in Sichuan were called King of Shu, and those in Liaodong were called King of Shu. King of Liao; some are named directly after counties and counties, such as King Huainan, King Chenliu...
The title of prince is hereditary and is usually inherited by the eldest son.
In other words, King Lu's eldest son will still be called King Lu after he succeeds him. As long as this line of incense continues, the "King of Lu" will always exist, but the person with this title may have changed dozens of times. .
So what's up with names like "King Lu Huang" and "King Lu Ai"?
Those are all names given to dead people. The character in their names is "posthumous name". Posthumous names are summarized by others based on the virtues or experiences of the person's life after death, such as "civil and military success", "Jie Zhou" "Youyang"...these words were added after death, not while alive.
If you dare to call a living prince King Lu Yang, then he will most likely kill you on the spot.
To sum up, the King of Lu in our story does not have the middle character, let alone his son Zhu Xu.
If Zhu Xu can officially succeed King Lu in the future, then he may really be called "Huang" after his death. However, whether this "if" will happen, I believe you all know in your heart...
Let's go back to King Lu. His surname is Zhu Mingcheng. He is already seventy-three this year. According to the saying, he is "living on a rough patch."
Seeing this, some people may want to say, why do all the descendants of the Zhu family in your book have single names? This is not in line with the etiquette of the Ming Dynasty.
I have to reply to you. What I am writing about is the Da Ming of a certain parallel universe, not the Ming Dynasty we are familiar with.
I know that in the Ming Dynasty, only Zhu Yuanzhang's twenty-six sons had single names, and all of them had the character "木" next to them. I also knew that the Lu family should follow the principle of "Zhao Taiyang should be healthy, watch longevity and longevity, and promote hope and prosperity." The twenty characters "Da, Kangzhuang meets Benning" are named after the cyclic typesetting combined with the radical characters of "Fire, Earth, Metal, Water and Wood".
But every time I write about a person from the Old Zhu family, I have to look up the generation and name... Isn't this too troublesome? It’s not like I’m the prince, so why should I worry about it?
Therefore, in the Dazao in our book, the rules of "Twenty-Six Generations" no longer exist, and the rules of fire, earth, metal, water, and wood are retained.
Back to business...
The king of Lu, Zhu Huo, and the current emperor, Zhu Fu, were of the same generation, but they were more than twenty years apart in age.
Zhu Hao is a man who has survived in this life - he has a good life and is the eldest son.
Prince Dashu's rule of recognizing the legitimate son rather than the concubine made the fate of the legitimate son and the concubine completely different.
Even if Zhu Hao doesn't make progress, he doesn't have to worry about his future livelihood. Therefore, he has done almost nothing else in his life except eating, drinking and having fun.
Of course, you can't say how miserable he is. If it were you...if you knew from the time you were sensible that you would be financially free in your life, would you still work hard?
Anyway, I won't.
Because I am the same as everyone here, even if I don’t have financial freedom now, I don’t work very hard.
He also said that Zhu Hao had lived in this way for more than seventy years. If there was anything that worried him in these years, it should be that before the age of forty-eight, he only had a daughter, no " son".
This matter is a big deal in the prince's family, because the prince's position is passed down from male to female. Even his legitimate daughter can only inherit part of his fief and the title of a princess. If the remaining fief and the palace are not If the son comes to inherit, the court will take it back.
However, Zhu Hao married so many wives and concubines, and it happened that all of them gave birth to daughters.
And because Zhu Hao started to indulge in drinking and sex at a very young age, after the age of forty, he completely lost his fertility. In today's terms, it is infertile.
Therefore, when Zhu Alo was forty to forty-six years old, none of his wives had any more children. Needless to say, Zhu Aler should understand this... There must be something wrong with him.
Unexpectedly, when Zhu Hao was forty-seven, his third concubine, who was more than ten years younger than him, actually got pregnant again.
How did you get pregnant? Then you can refer to the traditional cross talk "Tie the Doll".
I won’t go into details about such sloppy traditional art passages here, because our book is obviously in an even more sloppy state.
As for Zhu Hao...he's not stupid either. He naturally doubts that the child is not his.
However, firstly, he had no evidence to prove that the third aunt had committed adultery with an outsider, and secondly, people at that time did not have a full understanding of infertility, so they still had some luck.
Therefore, he pretended to be confused about this matter for the time being...
Until the day when the third aunt gave birth, Zhu Aler stood outside the room and waited for several hours, and finally waited for a cry.
The midwife took the baby out and showed him, hey, it’s a boy, and he does look a bit like him.
Zhu Hao thought about it: Could it be that God really has the vision to allow me to have a child in my old age (people's life span was short at that time, and I was already called an old man at the age of 48)?
That day, after he handed the child over to the nanny, he immediately ordered someone to strangle his third aunt to death and bury her quietly.
What kind of logic is this?
It's simple: he has many concubines, and if he kills one, he won't feel too distressed. But on the contrary, if he lets this woman who may have cuckolded him alive, it will make him continue to doubt, struggle, and feel aggrieved...
Therefore, even if he could not confirm whether the third aunt had stolen someone, he would rather kill him by mistake than release him by mistake.
As for children, he is another standard...
Although he is also not sure whether the child is his, he can keep the child for now and wait until the baby grows up to see if it looks like him before making a decision. He should try his best to avoid killing by mistake.
Double standards? Vicious? Is it cold?
Yes, but this is real human nature. In a specific era and under a specific environment, you may have the same logic as him.
To make a long story short, seven years passed in the blink of an eye.
The baby boy that the third aunt gave birth to was Zhu Huan, who had been fostered by Zhu Huo's wife. He hardly left the house and saw no one else. The whole palace was silent about the existence of this child.
This... is to make two preparations: first hand, if Zhu Huo grows up to look like Zhu Hao, then he will naturally declare that this is the eldest son born to his wife; second hand, if Zhu Huo grows up to look like Zhu Hao If it doesn't look like him at all, then he will be killed and it will be treated as if there has never been such a person in the palace.
Zhu Yue was very lucky. Although he had no blood relationship with Zhu Hao, he inexplicably looked like Zhu Hao when he was a child.
Zhu Hao watched Zhu Huo grow up year by year, and he really looked like himself, and gradually he believed that this was really his son.
Only then did he feel a little sorry for his third aunt in his heart. Of course...it was just a little bit.
All in all, when Zhu Huo was seven years old, Zhu Hao suddenly announced officially that he had a son, and he was already seven years old. He also said that he was born to his first wife.
He had also thought about it. If the court asked him why he did not report the birth of a son, he would pretend to be confused and say that he had forgotten because he was old.
But how could the imperial court not know about his dirty tricks? Which prince's palace doesn't have elaborate works arranged by the imperial court? What if people get paid for free?
However, precisely because they knew the details of the child, the court turned a blind eye; because the person responsible for monitoring also felt that the child did look like Zhu Alder and should be his biological son. According to the "nothing" According to the principle of "concubine", no matter which mother gave birth to him, Zhu Hao's eldest son will always be him, and there is no need to bring out the incident of killing the third concubine back then.
In this way, at the age of seven, Zhu Xu finally had a legal identity, and reported to the court and confirmed the name "Zhu Xu".
Of course... Zhu Huo himself was still young at the time. He didn't know about the cock-crowding and dog-robbery incidents of the previous generation. He also always thought that his own mother was Zhu Huo's first wife.
Time flies and years pass by.
In the blink of an eye, the little prince has grown up, and Zhu Alder has grown old.
Although Zhu Hao is not dead yet, the real power of Prince Lu's palace has already fallen into Zhu Xu's hands.
The sphere of influence of Prince Lu's Mansion has continued to increase over the years. According to our geographical understanding today, it has expanded to the entire Jining area and surrounding areas.
Among all the surviving princes of Da Zuo, King Lu can be considered a very powerful one. As the actual person in charge of King Lu's palace, Zhu Xu is undoubtedly the one who can call the wind and rain and do whatever he wants in the land of Jining.
The Fire Lotus Sect, which relied on him as its backer, was also rampant in the countryside and was lawless.
No, right in front of them, when Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai were queuing up to enter the city gate, they encountered the Fire Lotus Sect's "Setter".
This group of Fire Lotus cult members are dressed in black uniforms with a fire lotus embroidered on the chest and back. They either carry knives or swords on their bodies. Most of them walk with their nostrils in the sky, swaggering and domineering... If we don't say that they Being religious, I thought they were uniformed bandits.
Today they set up a card here, and the excuse they used is - last night, a thief broke into the palace at night with evil intentions. Fortunately, the palace has the Fire Lotus Immortal stationed there. As soon as the thief entered the courtyard, he was frightened by the Immortal's power. He vomited three liters of blood and held his head. After escaping, the Great Immortal did not chase the bandit in order to protect the safety of the palace. However, the bandit must not have escaped from Jining area. Therefore, from now on, the Fire Lotus Sect will search travelers coming and going at various city gates in order to capture the bandit. If Anyone who disobeys will be punished as a traitor.
"Come on, come on, come on, come on! Don't wait any longer. Take out everything in the bag yourself. Don't let me do it!"
But he said that among the seven or eight Fire Lotus Cultists at the city gate, the leader was standing under the city gate with an unsheathed sword in his hand, shouting and gesturing for the people behind to follow them.
This group of people said they were "searching for thieves", and they even pretended to be holding a portrait in their hands. In fact, they had no intention of catching thieves at all, they were just searching for oil and water like "flying geese plucking their feathers."
The rich scrape some money, the poor scrape some things, and when they meet a pretty girl or daughter-in-law, they still have to do something...
If anyone "doesn't cooperate" with them, they will bluff, yell, beat, and surround you, saying that you are an accomplice of the bandits. Who dares to resist?
The people nearby also know what happens if they offend the Fire Lotus Sect. They have long been used to being bullied by these gangsters. They dare to be angry but dare not speak out. They can't tolerate this "toll". It's over.
"Hey! Those two at the back, I'm talking about you! What are you two doing sneakily? Come here quickly!"
After queuing for a long time, finally... it was Sun Yixie and Huang Dong's turn.
The two of them obviously cannot accept the search easily, because they have too many shady things on their bodies and in their bags...
Leaving aside the pile of gadgets used by Taoist priests for practicing magic, the key point is that their baggage also contains a large amount of gold, silver, banknotes, poisons, hidden weapons, lime powder...
If only 30% of these things were found, the other side would be shocked. If all of them were found, they would definitely call for reinforcements and arrest the two of them.
So Sun and Huang were queuing up, observing, and muttering quietly... just discussing how to pass through this city gate.
"Hmph!" Sure enough, when faced with the Fire Lotus cultist's shouts and questions, Sun Yixie put on a completely different attitude from ordinary people, "Who do you think you are? Sir, what are we talking about? I need to report to a guy like you. ?"
"Huh?" The brother holding the knife was stunned at that time.
He had been standing at the city gate for a long time, and no one had dared to talk to him like this. Even the dignitaries who entered the city in sedan chairs ordered their servants to offer them money respectfully, saying After a few kind words, he was let go.
"Hey~ Are you crazy?" The Fire Lotus Cultist holding the knife said, raising the knife and shaking it in front of Sun and Huang, "Do you know who you are talking to?"
"I don't know, you should tell me." Huang Donglai choked back.
When they said these two sentences, the surrounding Fire Lotus cultists also felt that something was wrong, so they all gathered around.
"Haha...hahahaha!" When the little leader with the knife saw that his accomplices were coming over, he became more courageous. He sneered for a while and said to Shuangxi, "Okay, Xiaosha, today grandpa I will let you I understand, you two should stand firm for me!" As he spoke, he straightened his back, hit the bridge of his nose, raised his chin, and proudly continued, "Sir, I am the Qinglian Hall of the Fire Lotus Sect. The fifth seat - 'Immortal Killing Sword' Peng Er!"
