After the scribe went out, a few more whispers came from outside the liquor shop, the content of which was vague, but it was not difficult to guess who was speaking.

After Xiao Chao was picked up by the scribe, there were still two drinkers left in the wine shop, and when the sound outside the house faded away, the drinkers sitting at a table by the door also got up and called Boss Xiao to settle the bill.

Boss Xiao recognized the guest who came to the store in the evening, and hurriedly greeted him with a warm face.

This well-dressed but always neat strong man is not only a frequent customer of the wine shop, he never takes credit, and rarely gets drunk, and every time he comes to the wine shop, it is estimated that it is almost evening, and his behavior and habits that seem to be limited to a certain category naturally make Boss Xiao have an impression of him.

But since the first time the strong man patronized the liquor store, he has always been a loner and a relatively withdrawn person. The customers who come and go to the wine shop every day are not all residents of Kyoto, and Boss Xiao will not deliberately check the identity of the drinkers, but for more than a year, Boss Xiao, who has been in contact with this strong man in the business, has not even obtained any information about the identity of this person, which is very strange, and at the same time makes Boss Xiao more and more wary of him.

The strong man paid for the wine and pushed the curtain out and left.

Kyoto is near the sea, and the wind is fast, and most food and beverage businesses will hang leather curtains on the doors to block the wind after winter. Although the spring is strong in the current season, people can still feel a trace of the chill of the spring tail in the morning and evening, and the wine shop has few people, and it will open until late at night, so the leather curtain hanging on the door of the wine store has not been removed.

The leather curtain was thick and stiff, and after being lifted by the strong man who went out, one of the corners of the skin never calmed down, curling to reveal a hollow, slightly pouring wind into the wine shop. The night wind in spring is gone, and the cold wind of winter night is as cold as a knife. But Boss Xiao was still diligent and immediately walked to the door, ready to pat out the folds of the leather curtain.

Maybe it was because on today's night when business was not very good, he met three people who made him feel strange at once, so subconsciously, Boss Xiao couldn't help but be curious, lowered his body slightly, and looked out of the wine shop through the hole in the leather curtain.

The streets were empty. Boss Xiao's peaceful gaze couldn't help but froze for a moment.

The strong man should be a practitioner, Boss Xiao has usually seen a lot of drinkers with martial arts, he has reason to be sure of this, but the strong man disappeared without a trace after going out, which seems a little weird.

Generally speaking, people who are slightly drunk should walk unhurriedly, because they come to the liquor store but do not drink heavily. Most of them are people who come for wine tasting and are in a good mood.

The strong man came after the evening, and the wine was drunk slowly, and no one else came to tell him what to do in the middle, and there was no money for the wine at the end, so why did he run as anxious as a rabbit after settling the wine money?

Boss Xiao was puzzled for a moment, and then he suddenly thought of a possibility in his heart. For this reason, he couldn't help but half-open the leather curtain and take a big stabbing step outside. But he quickly stepped back again, lowered the curtain, moved his lips silently, and finally sighed lowly.

In fact, the possibility that Boss Xiao thought of was extremely probable.

However, the actual situation needs to be slightly modified.

The strong man seemed to leave like a frightened rabbit, but in fact he walked out of the liquor store with the mood of a cheetah. The plain-shirted scribe who left one step ahead of him and the drunken Xiaochao were the frightened rabbits in his eyes. It's just a pity. Based on his true identity, he is at most a fierce dog of the master's family, and although the two people who go forward are the prey that the master's family needs, they may not be frightened at this time.

Follow Lin Shan's orders. In the morning, they left the old house together, and Jiang Chao said goodbye to him halfway, and then he went to the wine shop of an old acquaintance to learn to drink.

The wars that lasted for several years in the last years of the Zhou Dynasty and the chaos in the supply of materials that would inevitably have brought about the death of the dynasty led to the separation of relatives and the destruction of families on the land of the whole country, and at the same time there were a huge number of orphans. Most of these children are left with mental defects due to the sudden disaster of their originally peaceful families, and it is difficult for them to be educated by others except for their own parents. The helpless children have limited ability to work, and most of them wander with other people who have fled from the army. In the evacuation teams, which lack supplies and care, children die of hunger and disease every day.

Children who have been honed by real life and can survive to the end are growing rapidly, and some of them are even deformed beyond their age limit. They knew that Kyoto had always been a place where dignitaries and nobles lived, and that the emperor at that time would not care about the stability of the people's livelihood, and the place where he lived must be the last place to catch fire, so most of the surviving children of the displaced people chose to blend into Kyoto.

Even if they live a begging life in this place, picking up the leftover food residues from the swill dumped in the garbage heaps of those large families will have a better chance of survival than wandering in other places, which is that those children have lost their dreams and happiness in the cold reality, and finally there is only one hope left to live, and they have only found this way out.

Jiang Chao was one of many orphans who fled to Kyoto and blended into the city to beg.

Except for the part of this group of children who have died for various reasons in the past ten years, some of them have become little beggars forever. This is mostly because the spiritual pillars in their hearts have collapsed, and they have nothing to do but passively rely on the charity of others to survive. Such people are pitiful and hateful, and it is difficult to integrate into the life of normal people.

There are also some people like Jiang Chao, who rely on the labor of selling coolies to make a living. They either braved the danger of fierce beasts to cut wood deep in the mountains in exchange for living expenses, or went to the port near the sea in Kyoto to fight goods and earn some hard-earned money.

Due to the complexity of Kyoto's population, the imperial court issued a restrictive regulation for homeless orphans, and although it maintained the security of the capital on a large scale, it inevitably required the sacrifice of some people's interests. A person like Jiang Chao, who has no ancestral home to follow, even if he has a sound body and hope for the future, no matter how hard he tries, he can only live at the level of low-class coolies.

However, there is a semi-open secret among the high-ranking people in Kyoto, that is, among the high-ranking officials and nobles in Kyoto, there are many people who take in such homeless orphans and train them to become their own dead soldiers. What is even more surprising is that the original source of this statement is actually the garrison of the inner courtyard of the palace.

In fact, if you think about it carefully, if the original statement is true, maybe the purpose of a certain emperor's family to take in these children is good on a macro level.

Many of these children are extremely high in congenital elements, or they are in Zhimin or physique. If they are allowed to wander outside, they will continue to be one of those who die of sickness and starvation; Either it is to waste the talent in the strong labor of daily survival; Perhaps there is also a result, which is to become a very difficult villain to deal with, and endanger the lives of ordinary people.

The family is broken and difficult to repair, and what they need most physically is only three full meals a day, and the lack of spirit is the most complex and critical. This group of children's way of thinking was still in the growth stage of the war and life was severely bruised, it is not easy to learn well, but if taught well, this group of people will become a group of behemoth new forces, because they have not yet lost the power of creation, they have tasted the taste of survival, more skilled than ordinary children to master the perseverance of the disposition, more able to keep the faith of survival again.

It was only rumored that among the children who were included in the royal compound, this idea was the original version, and the benevolent intentions were relatively intact; However, when some of the other nobles in Kyoto began to follow suit, the purpose of this practice became more and more local; In addition, when the nobles began to engage in similar activities, the street children in Kyoto had already been selected by the royal family, and the remaining street children had some problems with their qualifications. In this way, between the dead soldiers and the masters of the house, who were trained by the homeless children, the slave master rule gradually emerged.

If his identity is exposed face-to-face, Jiang Chao will find that he and the strong man who has been following him not far behind him since he left the wine store are actually the same passerby, but the one who took him in a few years ago was the commander of the Kyoto garrison who represented the royal family, and the strong man was one of the last batch of homeless children who were selected and taken away by a certain high-ranking official.

However, even if this identity is not exposed, Jiang Chao still has an impression of this person, because he feels that this person seems to have always wanted to find out his identity, and this feeling has lasted for more than a year.

Jiang Chao's identity in the eyes of ordinary people is that he is a woodcutter who supplies firewood for the Xiao family's wine shop; The strong man was a coolie who unloaded and carried bags for merchant ships in the port every day. Jiang Chao knew that the strong man was called 'Tie Da', not because he had brothers below him and was the boss, but because he was big and was famous for his strength among the coolies who carried goods in the port, so he got his name;

But Jiang Chao and Tie Da are both suspicious of each other's identities. The reason is very simple, both of them know that the other party is a practitioner, Jiang Chao has been chopping firewood for so many years, but he has never been injured, and Tie Da is carrying bags in the port, and it has been rain or shine for more than a year, which shows that both of them have good kung fu. The reason why people with such martial arts skills do simple and repetitive labor every day is that this kind of work is simple and unchecked, and it is convenient to hide their true identity.

Of course, most of the people who think this way are extremely observant and meticulous, or they are people who have been assigned by someone.

And when it comes to this, Jiang Chao belongs to the former, and Tie Da belongs to the latter.

Originally, Jiang Chao wanted to continue to maintain this unclear relationship, as long as Tie Da didn't mess with him, he didn't want to have more complications on the issue of identity. In the past year or so, except for Tie Da, no one has ever doubted his identity, and before the assignment of the Commander-in-Chief has been issued, protecting his identity is his most important task at present.

But now that the task has come down, he has to change his way of doing things in order to accomplish it...... (To be continued.) If you like this work, you are welcome to vote for recommendation and monthly passes, and your support is my biggest motivation