During the ten days of fate
, Yang Qiu did not send any more messages, but Chen Huichun did send a reply letter, which responded to Qiu Che's doubts without hiding it.
He said that he had heard that the two people were in trouble, and suddenly remembered that there was a fork in the river leading to the border of Nanyi, and his master Jiang Bo had always lived in this area.
So he tried his best to send a message to his master, asking him to help pay attention to whether there were two people with extraordinary looks around.
If so, please help them and let them stay for a while.
Qiu Che was relieved when he learned about it.
The only doubt was "Why did Jiang Bo adopt so many children in Taoyuan Village, and why did he look so young?"
Less than three days after the foot massage, Qiu Che finally received another message.
This time the letter was written by Yu Ming.
Now the three forces in the court are fighting fiercely, and Ye Ming City has sent people to watch day and night to observe whether anyone is taking advantage of the situation.
But to no avail.
The man behind the scenes seemed to have acted on impulse. After completing his plan, he disappeared without a trace.
The emperor, on the other hand, seemed to be annoyed by the noises of the courtiers. He even claimed to be sick during the morning court today. It was unknown whether it was true or not. The
empress dowager used the excuse of visiting the sick, and on the way she ran into the crown prince and the third prince who were going to serve the sick, but they were stopped outside the palace.
It is said that the crown prince's temper has become worse recently, and he even smashed several vases in the main hall of the East Palace.
The Dali Temple has never been able to find out their case, and has never been able to give an explanation as to why Yuan Fu appeared there.
Qiu Che and Li Qingwu have been missing for too long, it has been a month, and most people have already assumed that they are in danger - otherwise why would they not come back?
Even the emperor, while acting heartbroken about his daughter's whereabouts, tried to comfort Wang in both open and covert ways, saying that it would be better to just hold the funeral.
Fortunately, Wang learned about the news in advance and knew that they were still alive, so they didn't really hold a funeral for them.
Since they couldn't catch the person behind the scenes, they couldn't wait any longer.
On the last day that Qiu Che made the bow and arrow, the two had packed their bags and prepared to return to the capital.
She used a carving knife in the yard to carve the last stroke on the back of the bow. The carving knife was polished by her every day, and it was restored to its original state. It must be said that Li Qingwu did not cut corners when selecting materials.
The bow and arrow were made smooth and beautiful. Except that there was no dye to color it, it was still very delicate.
Li Qingwu couldn't let it go when he received it. On the way to Jiang Bo's residence, he kept looking at the bow behind him, and his eyes were full of love.
Qiu Che wanted to show it to her first, then take it back and give it to her after dyeing it. It was not easy to carry it on his back now.
But she immediately refused, saying righteously that it didn't need to be dyed, and the sandalwood color was also very beautiful.
Qiu Che took back his hand that was suspended in the air, and watched her protect the bow like a baby, touched his nose, and didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
When the two arrived at Jiang Bo's residence, there were two or three middle-aged people sitting around Jiang Bo, respectfully asking him for advice.
Hearing the noise, several people stood up. One of them greeted them with a smile: "Sister Aning, Miss Qingqing, why are you here to see Uncle Jiang together today?"
Qiu Che simply saluted them: "Uncles... Uncle Jiang, we are here to say goodbye."
Several people were surprised. Before they had time to ask more questions, Uncle Jiang seemed to have expected it and handed the book on the stone table back: "Okay. That's probably the plow cart. If you want to make it, you will have to think about it for a while..."
Several people nodded in agreement. Because Uncle Jiang was still there, it was not convenient to ask them more questions. So before leaving, they just showed them a regretful and kind smile: "Come back here often when you are free."
"Sure."
After they left in twos and threes, Uncle Jiang picked up his broken bowl of Jinlong Snow Lotus Tea, blew on it, and said calmly: "Sit down."
Even though his simple clothes revealed a bit of sadness, his calm and immortal aura was still very eye-catching.
Qiu Che was not polite and pulled Li Qingwu to sit down. "Are you uncles here to ask about the plow cart again?"
"Yes."
"Uncle Jiang knows a lot," Qiu Che nodded, whether intentionally or unintentionally, "You don't look much older than them, how come you seem to know everything?"
"I'm old, and I've lived a long time, so I naturally know everything I should know," Jiang Bo frankly flicked his robe, and the long white beard on his chin trembled as he spoke. "If I tell you my age, it will scare you."
Qiu Che was very interested: "If Uncle Jiang is willing to tell you, I don't mind listening."
"This year..." Jiang Bo paused, raised his finger and counted, "I'm more than a hundred years old."
Qiu Che was really shocked this time, and looked at Li Qingwu, not knowing whether he was joking for a moment.
In this era, the average life expectancy of healthy men is mostly around fifty, let alone a hundred, even over fifty is considered longevity.
It is really rare to live a hundred years and look like a seventy-year-old.
Jiang Bo smiled: "Don't be afraid to believe it. To be honest, there is nothing wrong with this... I was the medicine man of the Saint of Nanyi back then - medicine man, do you know what it is?"
Qiu Che sat up straighter and said seriously: "... a person who tests medicine?"
"To be precise, a slave who tests medicine."
"I am one of them."
Outsiders only know that the Nanyi people are good at poison and witchcraft, but they don't know that this is not a talent they are born with.
This twisted race has long been corroded by the group of people who pursue power in its long-term development, and its pillars have been corroded by the group of people who pursue power, and it is empty inside.
The Nanyi people regard poison as their heaven and worship the one who is best at poison as their king. In order to compete to become a saint or saint, the princes and princesses will be arranged by the royal family from an early age to have an exclusive medicine man.
The purpose is to allow them to practice poison and witchcraft at any time.
Most of the selected medicine men are healthy, very young, and have a certain degree of drug resistance. They are all slaves of Nanyi and must be orphans.
Jiang Bo is one of them.
They must be slaves because slaves cannot resist.
Orphans will not have relatives to stand up for them.
There are many people like him who have been trained as medicine men by princes and princesses since childhood, but very few can survive to adulthood.
With inhuman perseverance, Jiang Bo watched one partner after another die from the poison. He
resisted until the fourth generation of the Holy Son ascended the throne. He was over seventy years old, but still healthy and lively.
As the only medicine man who has served four generations of Holy Sons and Holy Daughters, he also has a bit of face. From serving princes and princesses, to serving only the elderly who have become Holy Sons and Holy Daughters.
Generally speaking, at this time, the Holy Sons or Holy Daughters have already firmly sat on the throne, and will not often practice with medicine men, and the torture they suffer will be much less.
But sometimes Jiang Bo looks at the clear, painful and confused eyes of those suffering orphans, and always thinks of himself when he was young.
There were also those companions who died before adulthood.
But he was just a slave, and he couldn't even protect himself.
So on one occasion, when one of the medicine boys who had always respected him could not hold on and escaped from the palace to ask him for help, he chose to escape.
The guards searched his residence. In order not to be implicated, when the child was dragged away, he turned his head and pretended not to see the other's gaze, but talked to the chief guard in a relaxed manner.
In the midst of the laughter and chat, he heard someone whispering that the emperor had sentenced the boy to death by chariot.
As the name suggests, the five horses are torn apart.
Later, for a long time, Jiang Bo always dreamed of the child, dreaming that the other's hands, feet and head were broken into two halves, jumping around, and smiling in the dream said to him: "Jiang Bo."
"Why didn't you save me?"
"You deserve to be a slave."
"You deserve to be a lowly medicine boy for the rest of your life, and you will never be free."
It is hard to say whether it was the curse of the boy in the dream, or the prophecy that he hated himself for watching coldly.
In the end, this sentence was indeed fulfilled in him.
The fifth generation chosen to become the Saint of Nanyi was the sister of the fourth generation Saint, named Shen Xiao.
Serving her was much easier than serving several Saints and Saints.
This Miss Shen had a very bad relationship with her brother. Because she was angry with him, she worked hard to make herself a Saint.
She was stubborn and a little strangely simple. She never took action on the old, weak, sick and disabled. She only tried drugs on wild animals that were caught.
She always said, "We are all human beings. Why should we divide slaves and superiors?"
She liked to cook. Sometimes, she would make some flower cakes by herself and share them with Jiang Bo and other inferior slaves to show her gratitude.
This made Jiang Bo always have a good impression of her.
After getting along with Jiang Bo for a long time and opening their hearts, she also told Jiang Bo that she wanted to pull her brother down from the throne, sit on the position of the king of this country, and change this damn slavery system.
Jiang Bo expressed his support for her ambition. He also had great expectations for Shen Xiao, hoping that she could create miracles and end the old social system that had lasted for hundreds of years.
Unfortunately, this was later heard by some ears on the other side of the wall and passed to the ears of the monarch.
In the end, Shen Xiao's grand plan was only halfway through, and her brother was furious and hurriedly sent her to Daxia as a spy.
If successful, it would be beneficial to the country and not a loss.
If failed, it would be more to his liking to eliminate the imperial sister who openly coveted his throne.
And they had all heard about Shen Xiao's fate in the rumors in Daxia.
She used the alias "Xiao" and called herself Xiao Xin.
She clearly had a good future, but because she lacked love in her childhood, she cared too much about those unimportant emotions that would only hinder people's steps.
In the end, she died in a dream of love that she created for herself.
People who are obsessed with indulging in a false thing will eventually drown in it.
As an accomplice of the "secret talk", Jiang Bo naturally did not escape punishment.
He did not even have time to feel sad that such a good master had left him, and he returned to his previous life as a slave, and was even thrown into the homes of ordinary people, working like a cow or a horse for them, and being beaten and scolded like an animal.
This is a very common scene in the Nanyi where slavery is rampant.
But Jiang Bo is old and can withstand all kinds of poison testing, but he can't withstand this kind of beating.
One time he finally couldn't stand it anymore and found an opportunity to run away from that family.
- Just like the child who escaped from the palace.
At that moment, their fate trajectories overlapped strangely.
Jiang Bo did not dare to stop. He was ragged and begged all the way north, towards the border, just wanting to be as far away from the capital of Nanyi as possible.
One day, he went astray and entered a dense forest.
In a daze, he was so hungry and tired that he almost fainted.
So he picked a flower and stuffed it into his mouth.
Fortunately, it was the dense forest of Nanyi, and the flower was the legendary rattan grass.
He survived.
Unfortunately, rattan grass is not used in this way.
He swallowed the magic medicine raw, and even though his body had long been immune to all poisons, he still had a high fever for three days afterwards. During this period, he was unconscious, but he still remembered that he could not stop, otherwise he would be captured and taken back as a slave.
When he was hungry, he ate the grass roots in the dense forest, and when he was thirsty, he crawled to the river to drink water. He stumbled all the way and finally came to a river.
Looking up, it was clearly the autumn moon season, but there were peach trees all over the ground and peach forests all over the mountains.
There were countless peach petals floating in the river, making the river water clear and a little pink.
It was like a fairyland.
It is difficult to enter this place but easy to exit. Anyone who has entered once can magically enter the second time regardless of whether he remembers the route or not.
However, it is difficult for people who have never been here to see this rare paradise in heaven and earth unless they have acquaintances to lead the way.
Since then, Jiang Bo settled here.
His body was healthy enough, so the medicinal properties of the rattan grass could not be exerted, so it filled another defect of his -
it made Jiang Bo grow slower and slower.
Until a year later, it stopped completely.
It was as if time had forgotten him, and even his gray hair on his temples never grew any longer. He
still looked like a human, but he didn't need to grow his hair and nails every day, and he didn't need to eat. He could survive by drinking water.
He was a human, but not like a human.
The immortality that so many people pursued was just what he encountered by accident.
But for him who originally only wanted freedom, this was just a punishment that made him unable to live or die.
Honey to others - arsenic to him.
He didn't realize it at first, until he realized that he was free, and finally he was a little dazed.
After the trance, he was ecstatic, and then the whistling almost drowned his loneliness and confusion.
As a slave for most of his life, he had long forgotten how normal people live and how they should live.
He began to subconsciously recall his youth, many of his former companions, and the boy who died tragically because of his indifference.
The guilt that had accumulated over the years suddenly overwhelmed him like a mountain. He didn't know whether it was because he was free and had nothing to do, or because he was atonement for that indifference.
After realizing that he was immortal, he would go out to travel every once in a while. Except for Nanyi, he had traveled to almost all other countries, both north and south.
Relying on the medical skills he had learned from years of osmosis in the Nanyi Palace, he filled his stomach while picking up many children.
Some were still infants, and some were already teenagers.
Chen Huichun was one of the first children he picked up when he was a teenager.
He used his guilt to water a huge tree in these children, and tried his best to protect them with his shade so that they could grow up safely.
It was as if he was saving himself and his friends who were helpless and confused when they were young.
It was also as if he was making up for the boy who had nowhere else to go and came to him but was stabbed in the back.
Jiang Bo said: "When these children grow up, some will go out, and some will stay here. I will let them go or stay."
For his long life that he didn't know when it would end, it was a great fate to meet each other.
After listening to this, Qiu Che and Li Qingwu were silent for a long time.
The main reason was that he didn't expect the truth to be so simple, and it was also shocking.
No wonder Jiang Bo said that he was immune to all poisons, no wonder he recognized the rattan grass, and no wonder he said he would not covet it.
So that's it.
After a long while, Qiu Che sighed and said, "...As you can see, we have to leave now."
Jiang Bo stopped talking and asked, "Don't you need to recover?"
Qiu Che moved his hands and smiled, "I'm almost well."
"You won't tell Xiaoya and the others?"
Xiaoya was the name of a girl in the group of children. She liked to play with Li Qingwu the most and often mentioned the word fairy sister.
Li Qingwu also smiled, "I'm afraid they will be sad if they know, so I'd better not tell them and leave quietly."
"Okay." Jiang Bo nodded, took a big sip of the almost cold tea in the bowl, and said, "The exit of Taoyuan Village, just walk along Taohua River, don't go off the road, keep going, and you can reach Liangzhou next door."
"When you get to Liangzhou, you can find a horseman and go back to where you want to go in three days at most."
"Jiang Bo, don't ask more questions?" Qiu Che said, "Just let us go like this?"
Didn't he ask them why they were in such a hurry to leave?
Jiang Bo looked at her in confusion: "...what else?"
Qiu Che originally thought that he saved himself and Li Qingwu, even if it was at the request of his apprentice, there must be a price.
But now looking at Jiang Bo's expression, and thinking about what he just said...
it seems that she has stayed in the court of intrigue for too long, and is used to judging others by her own mean heart.
Thinking of this, Qiu Che nodded, and said no more. He stood up with Li Qingwu and saluted again:
"Then, thank you for saving my life. If there is a chance to repay Jiang Bo in the future, we will not refuse if we can do it."
"See you later."
"See you later."
Although it is said like this, generally speaking, when people say this, there is basically no meeting later.
Qiu Che didn't know what Jiang Bo was thinking. She turned around naturally and took Li Qingwu's hand to leave. But after walking a few steps, she suddenly turned around and called, "Jiang Bo."
Jiang Bo was holding a tea bowl, and he didn't expect her to turn back suddenly. He was stunned for a moment: "...What's the matter?"
"Maybe immortality is not a punishment?" Qiu Che smiled faintly, "I think it's because you are a bodhisattva and bless all living beings - God can't bear to let you die early."
Jiang Bo smiled bitterly, but when he came back to his senses, he saw that the two slender figures, one tall and one short, had gone far away.
Under the peach tree, there was a green and a red. The one in green clothes carried a simple bag, and the one in red clothes
was holding their fingers, which complemented each other so well.
Jiang Bo sat under the tree for a while, thinking with some melancholy that seeing off the figure of the old friend seemed to be his destiny for half his life.
He should have been used to it, but parting always makes people sad.
If those monkeys knew, they would probably be lost for a long time.
Thinking of this, Jiang Bo stood up with the help of his cane, and walked slowly to the place where the two of them had lived for the past few days, intending to clean it up.
The next time he brought a new child back, there would be no shortage of accommodation.
But when he pushed open the wooden door and walked to the empty table, he saw a bulging bundle on the table.
Once he untied it, many things rolled out of it.
Rouge, lip balm, small wooden swords, gold ingots made of paper, large wooden ships... and even peach blossom cakes, which can be said to be dazzling and varied.
These things were all wrapped well in boxes or cloth strips, and it can be seen that they took a long time to make.
Qiu Che only needs five days to make a bow and arrow.
In the remaining five days, she has been with Li Qingwu, making these gifts for friends.
Old friends, and children.
Jiang Bo was stunned for a long time, opened the box containing the peach blossom cake, and pinched a piece to eat.
This cake is very beautiful, and it is also carved with peach blossoms.
When he put it in his mouth, the taste was a mess, and Jiang Bo's expression was distorted for a moment.
As soon as he tasted it, he knew that the piece he was eating was most likely made by Qiu Che.
But the next moment, Jiang Bo sighed and laughed again. In
an instant, he remembered the saint Shen Xiao who was still young and high-spirited in front of him decades ago.
She also made such flower cakes, and even the taste was almost the same.
Speaking of which - the girl named Qingqing seemed to have a similar face to Miss Shen Xiao...
Jiang Bo stared at the peach tree outside the window that blooms all year round. Seeing the peach blossoms falling as usual, he thought with some melancholy.
It turns out that the so-called parting... does not only leave sadness.