Gu Qing felt that the matter of returning to her old business was not reliable at all, and it was best to let someone persuade the Fang family and let her untie the knot by herself. For this kind of person who already has some mental problems, the only way to do this is to let the people closest to him enlighten him more.

She thought that she appeared in front of the Fang Clan, and the delirious Fang Clan was afraid that she would be strangled to death as a demon, so it was better not to see her again, and just pay attention to the situation in her courtyard at all times.

Li Ming decided that in addition to reading every day in the future, he would go to the Splendid Academy to accompany his mother. He felt that if he stayed, his mother would listen to him.

His mother's virtue is at a loss, even if his father is going to divorce his mother after he comes back, he admits it, and he will support his mother well in the future. But he couldn't accept it when he watched his mother weaken as if she had hysteria.

Gu Qing saw that Li Xiaodao had made up his mind, and he didn't dwell on it anymore. She would think more about how to save the Fang clan and the child in her womb, but if the Fang clan really couldn't cheer up all the time, she could only wait for Li Mao to come back and discuss what to do.

Just when everyone in the Xinguo Mansion was looking forward to Li Mao's return to the house soon......

In the Zichen Palace, Chu Rui, who received the report from the visitor, was shocked and accidentally fell down the fold in his hand that was about to be approved.

"What do you say? Xin Guogong and his party are missing? There was a turbulent wave surging in Chu Rui's heart, "Didn't you just come five days ago, saying that you were about to reach the boundary of Fenzhou?" ”

"Qi Shengshang, originally it was normal, when it was folded, it was possible to reach Fenzhou after Luliang to the west. The more than 100 Xiao cavalry battalion men and horses brought by Xinguo Gong are all good hands in the army, and many of them are from Fenzhou, who are not only familiar with the local customs, but also brave and good at fighting, and everyone thinks that there should be no problem......" The spy felt that this matter was simply too strange: "But within a few days, all the men and horses of the Xinguo Mansion disappeared in the territory of Luliang!" ”

"Ridiculous! Absurd! "If the eyes can kill people, then the spies kneeling on the ground are already dead.

"That's more than a hundred, not ten people! How can it be that all of them are missing without a trace? When you have a trick in Fenzhou, can you change so many people? ”

"Have you looked closely? Is there a strongman in Lu Liang? Were there any traces of a fight along the way? Have there been any changes to the officials and errands of Fenzhou Racecourse? ”

"Shengshang, it is still snowing in Fenzhou one after another during this time, and there is no trace of it. There are no bandits and robbers in Luliang, and the locals often walk that road, and it is very safe. There has been no change in the Fenzhou Racecourse, and the horse corpses have not been burned recently, and it seems that they are still waiting for the arrival of the imperial envoy. ”

These spies are a force cultivated by the emperor, and there are hidden people in various post stations, this person is the secret agent in a certain section of the road post station in Fenzhou, and the last time the secret fold was able to enter Beijing smoothly, it also relied on the strength of these secret agents in Fenzhou.

"This Fenzhou Racecourse first fell into one of my senators, and now I have lost a team of elite divisions! How deep is the water in Fenzhou? Chu Rui felt that the layout and planning for so many years were a joke, and he thought that even if he didn't grasp the situation, at least he wouldn't fall behind.

Looking at it now, he doesn't even know who is standing behind the other party and what his purpose is!

How bold is it to dare to attack the imperial envoy and the team of the prince?

The matter continues to be explored. It is imperative that the security of the faith country is found safe and sound. Chu Rui looked at the kneeling spies on the ground, "I don't believe there are no clues at all, check!" Check it out! ”

"You can't say much about this matter with anyone, leak a word, and see you at it!"

"Yes, Holy Lord!"

The spy left, and Chu Rui sat in the throne for a long time and couldn't come back to his senses.

If Li Mao really had a case, not to mention the handwritten letter he handed over to Old Taijun Qiu, let alone let Li Rui enter the world and let Li Ming reorganize his power......

If the only two men of the Xinguo Mansion's generation, Li Meng and Li Mao, both sacrificed their lives for the country, there would be a family of orphans and widows left in the Xinguo Mansion, and the only housewife who could manage the house would still be a ...... who would mutilate her nephew

Chu Rui felt that his head had begun to hurt.

Absolutely not, absolutely not!

If so, who else will dare to do things for him in the future! What else to talk about centralization!

In the territory of Fenzhou, among a nomadic tribe in the desert grassland.

Li Mao, whose right hand and leg were wounded, was being smeared with fishy herbs by an elderly herdsman, while a sturdy woman came in and out, constantly carrying hot water.

These people are all high-nosed and deep-eyed, and they look very much like the Hu people who were rushed back to Moxi by the original emperor, only Li Maozhi, who grew up in the military camp since he was a child, said that the eyes of these people did not have faint blue and green, and they should be Hu people of other races.

A few days ago, Li Mao and his men and horses were attacked by unknown troops in the territory of Luliang.

Each of them carried a crossbow and rode a horse, carrying a longbow behind them, and was clearly a light cavalry accustomed to riding and shooting. The □□ of continuous fire is not easy, and it is generally only rationed to the elite in the army, Li Mao is in charge of the armament on weekdays, and it can be seen at a glance that this is an improved hand crossbow that was only supplied to the border cavalry the year before last, and it can carry five crossbow arrows at a time, and it does not need to be loaded halfway, and the only drawback is that the range is very close.

Who would have thought that these weapons that should have been in his hands would have made them suffer a big loss now!

Li Mao and his party were ambushed, their numbers were far less than the enemy, and with the loss of seventy or eighty men, Li Mao and the rest of the people escaped from Lüliang, and were pursued and killed by the pursuers all the way, panicking. Later, the remaining few people led away the pursuers, and Li Mao buried himself in the snow and hid all night, and then escaped.

It's just that although he escaped the pursuit, he later fainted due to excessive blood loss.

Thanks to the down jacket, gloves, fleece jacket and fox pants that his mother had prepared for him before leaving, he did not freeze to death in the snow. Especially his down jacket, which is airtight and extremely light, is not so cumbersome when he escapes.

It's a pity that he followed his brother's path and became a civil servant, if he had learned his father's invincible skills, those soldiers of the cavalry battalion would not protect him......

Li Mao gritted his teeth and rattled, eager to eat the flesh and blood of those people.

"Don't use such force, as soon as the muscles are tense, the wound will easily collapse." An old man with a white beard on his face smeared medicine while persuading Li Mao not to get angry in Mandarin.

Li Mao didn't know where Lu Dao was, nor did he know who the weathered old man in front of Lu Dao was. As soon as he woke up, he was in the tent, and the old man was speaking something he didn't understand at all, and kept wiping his body with hot water.

He felt that he must have a fever, his face was hot, but his body felt cold. The old man stripped him cleanly, and wrapped him naked in a quilt made of sheepskin, with his down jacket pressed on it.

There is a brazier lit in the tent, and this tent is made of some kind of leather and nitrate, which is impermeable, but it does not make people feel stuffy.

"You're a Han official, aren't you? Our leader said that if we wanted to survive, we had to find the Han Chinese officials to call the shots. But you are a big official, and you have been injured so badly, how can you help us? Hey, you Han people, God has given you fertile land and vast fields, why don't you cultivate them well, and come to rob us of our pasture? The old man babbled a lot, saw Li Mao's confused eyes, and said, "You can't understand the Chinese language?" It's okay, I don't understand Chinese either. It's because you don't understand me that I'm talking to you, and the young men of the Qiang tribe don't like to listen to Turku's nagging......"

Although Fenzhou is not in the extreme west or north, the place where the people live is not in the center of Fenzhou, but further west. They lived in pursuit of water and grass, made their home in the Hetao area, and when they were thirty years old, they looked like men in their forties and fifties in the Central Plains.

Li Mao had never suffered hardship, and although he was thirty years old, he still looked white and pure, so the old man of Turku thought he was still a young man, and treated him like those young men in the tribe.

Although Li Mao couldn't understand the words of this Hu man, he also felt that he was not hostile. If it weren't for the rescue of these herdsmen, he would have frozen to death in the snowdrift, so he was very grateful to the old man, and endured the pain of the wound and said:

"This uncle, under Li Mao, can you understand what I said?"

Turku was very happy to see Li Mao talking to him, and nodded again and again.

"Do you understand? Great, may I ask this uncle, where is this place? ”

Turku continued to nod.

"Uncle? Belch? Goose goose goose, song to the sky? ”

Turku nodded anyway.

Li Mao: ......

Could he just nod?

Seeing that Li Mao seemed to be very conscious, Turku hurriedly threw the herbs into the medicine bowl, got up and ran out of the tent.

After a while, a tall man in a sheepskin jacket walked in. He had a full beard and a short dagger at his waist, and when he opened his mouth, it was as if a bell was ringing in the whole tent.

"I am the leader of the Desert Prairie Karma, and my name is Suluk. Who are you, this Han friend? Why was it buried in the snow? His Chinese language was very blunt, but Li Mao had already been dizzy when he heard the old man's inexplicable dialect before, and he was overjoyed when he heard this man say a familiar sentence.

"Do you speak Chinese? Fabulous, superb! I am Li Mao, but I am ......" He was about to say that he was the Duke of Da Chu, but then he thought that these Hu people probably didn't know what the Duke of Lu Dao did, so he changed his words: "I am an official of Da Chu, and I came out to inspect for the emperor, and then I was chased by an unknown army on the road, so I went into the snowdrift to hide." ”

Thanks to the snow, he hid in the snowdrifts and was able to hide from the noses of the hounds that the group was carrying. I just don't know how these people found him in the snowdrifts.

Li Mao is in charge of the military department, and he grew up next to his father since he was a child, so he naturally knows who the people of Lu Dao are.

The Han people called them Qianhu, one of the Hu people who lived in the Western Regions after the Xiongnu. Seventy years ago, a Hu tribe rose up in the Western Regions, fighting all the way from west to east, and all the way to the Central Plains. This group of people originally lived in the Western Regions, but they were driven to the Central Plains by those Hu people, and later settled in the Central Plains and took root.

The first emperor raised troops, and the group of Hu people were finally driven back to the Western Regions. Because this group of people did nothing wrong, and the number was small, the first emperor did not embarrass them, and let them continue to graze cattle in the Hetao area of the Central Plains for a living.

Just because they look very similar to the Hu people who plundered the Central Plains, for so many years, the Qian people have been discriminated against by the Han people, except for some Han people on the border of Fenzhou and Ganzhou, who will trade with them and occasionally exchange some cattle, sheep and horses, they usually do not communicate with each other.

There are a lot of good horses in the Fenzhou Horse Farm, which are the horse breeds that are exchanged for these people.

The leader of the Qiang people named Suluk grinned happily when he heard that Li Mao was really an official of Da Chu.

"The official of Da Chu? Very good, very good, I was just about to find Da Chu's official complaint! What are you doing in Da Chu? Does it go to your horse farm? ”

'Horse farm? Could it be that he is talking about the horse farm in Fenzhou? Complain? Li Mao suppressed the doubt in his heart and nodded.

His title is a first-class duke, but his official position is that he is a third-class soldier of the military department, and his subordinates are in charge of the armaments of Dachu, and the horses are naturally one of the armaments.

"I'll take care of it to the racecourse. I am the official of the horse farm herd. ”

"Shangguan? Is that their leader? Yes, you said you were sent by the emperor to inspect ......"

As he spoke, Suluk didn't know where he learned it, so he actually knelt down and howled at Li Mao:

"Lord Qingtian, you have to be the master for us!"

This bearded man screamed and directly stunned Li Mao.