Chapter 9: The Dusty Truth

Gao Yingshu stood aside, looking at all this in her eyes, she also felt that Lin Muzhi's conditions were too harsh. But she has a special identity, she was originally the daughter of the King of Shu, and it is not good to stand directly on the side of comfort, and she can't let the two of them be so stiff, looking at the stubborn temper of these two people, how can one of them be willing to bow his head first?

"I said you two, why did you quarrel, the lives of hundreds of people are at stake, you can't calm down yourself, let the people outside do?" Gao Yingshu still decided to break the deadlock,

After listening to this, Anyi let out a heavy breath and asked Lin Muzhi, "What do you have to do before you are willing to go down the mountain?" ”

Lin Muzhi turned around, turned his back to An Yi, and said lightly: "The two of you come with me." With that, his right hand twisted heavily on the armrest of the Taishi chair he had just sat on, and then took the torch on the stone wall.

"Boom~"

On the stone wall on the right side of the study, a doorway more than one person high opened in response!

An Yi and Gao Yingshu followed Lin Muzhi and walked in, passing through a corridor: the stars in the night sky could be seen in front of them, obviously behind the cottage that they had already walked to. Lin Muzhi turned his head and said to the minion holding the torch at the door of the road: "Go!" Call five or six brothers! ”

"Yes!"

After a while, five or six mountain bandits came running with torches.

Lin Muzhi then led the two of them and these minions along the mountain road to turn two bends in front, came to a mountain col, and stopped at the edge of the mountain pass.

"Brother An, please look!"

Lin Muzhi and those minions raised the torches together, and now An Yi and Gao Yingshu saw clearly, it turned out that they were standing on the edge of a large earth pit dug by hand, and when they looked into the pit, it was densely packed with white bones! An Yi roughly looked, there are hundreds of them!

"Brother Lin, what is this?" An Yi asked:

"This is the famine in Brother An's mouth, at that time there were 600 brothers in our cottage, and after the famine, there were only 22 people left, and these white bones were left by them." He paused and said, "Brother An, do you think this doesn't seem to be as exaggerated as I said, it seems that there are only a hundred bodies in this pit?" ”

Comfort didn't make a sound, it was a default,

"Because they had just died and were thrown into the pit, they were dragged away and eaten by the living!"

Lin Muzhi's eyes were expressionless, and the fear of that disaster was still vivid and lingering.

As soon as this sentence was said, the comfort and Gao Yingshu were creepy, although An Yi was not as good as Gao Yingshu was a prince and nobleman, but he also grew up with a golden spoon, and the famine did not have such a big impact on them as it is today!

"Brother Lin, if I remember correctly, at that time, you had just ransacked the granary of Huayang County, and according to the laws of this dynasty, the grain storage of the official warehouse must at least ensure the rations of the population of the county for the next three months. Sichuan is the land of abundance, and all the grain stored in the official warehouses is basically guaranteed to be available for the next year, why are you so ......?"

Gao Yingshu asked Lin Muzhi suspiciously,

Lin Muzhi didn't answer, but looked at Anyi,

"Want to hear it?"

"I want to hear about it!"

Lin Muzhi waved his hand and signaled the surrounding minions to disperse, and the five or six minions left him with a torch, and scattered.

"The two of you must know about Huayang County's Lingzhutori, right?"

An Yi and Gao Yingshu nodded, Zhuzhi County was a Jinshi in the thirty-second year of Chongzheng in the Great Xia Dynasty, and a year later he became Huayang Zhixian with the help of his uncle, the then Sichuan Chengxuan Political Envoy Si Zuo Shenzheng, and the Chengdu prefect who was in office that year was An Yi's grandfather. In this way, Taketori has been a county for seven or eight years, and he is well-known.

Lin Muzhi continued: "We have always had a personal relationship with Taketori, and he will sell us low-cost official food every once in a while. ”

"And that's how you all trade?"

"We have a private agreement not to harass Huayang County and its surrounding villages. So we usually go to the nearby Shuangliu County to rob the squires, the local rich people or the passing merchants. We have a tavern in Huayang County, and after getting the silver, we will hide it in the cellar of the tavern, and through the opportunity to send wine to the county government, we will hide it in a barrel and give it to Taketori, and at the end of the year, we will give Taketori two additional barrels to be regarded as filial piety silver, and when the barrel returns to the store, it will also be filled with grain. ”

An Yi suddenly realized, no wonder the last time Song Zhong was arrested, the underground of the tavern was full of silver, and the co-authors were all taken for Zhu.

Lin Muzhi sneered: "Later, we learned that this dog official was very traitorous, but that was because we thought that Taketori was just selling some old grain to fill our pockets." Later, more and more of our brothers went on the mountain, and we plundered merchants more and more frequently, and we asked for more and more food from him. ”

He continued: "Five years ago, Taketori sent someone up the mountain to deliver a letter to my eldest brother, saying that the inspectors of the imperial court were coming to inspect the granary, and asked us to do us a favor and rush into the county seat to hijack the official warehouse. ”

An Yi gasped after hearing this, it turned out that the atrocity that hit the county seat five years ago was actually a drama of collusion between officials and bandits? Taketori's uncle became the political envoy of the Sichuan Chengxuan Political Envoy Department as early as the second year of his appointment as the magistrate of Huayang County, but he stayed in the county magistrate for seven or eight years, and it turned out that the mystery was here.

"Since it's acting, why did you kill so many people at that time and burn down the granary?" An Yi asked:

"Listen to me, we took our brothers all the way to the gate of the official warehouse, but we did not meet any decent resistance, and we all thought that it was just a show, and the food was taken away, but the result was ........ We didn't know until we opened the door of the official warehouse ........"

When Lin Muzhi said this, he turned his head to look at Anyi, and said word by word:

"The official warehouse is empty!"

"Empty?"

An Yi and Gao Yingshu almost spoke in unison, which greatly exceeded their cognition, a county with a resident population of more than 100,000 people, there was not a single grain of rice left in the official warehouse! This kind of thing is impossible to happen even in other counties, let alone a country of abundance like Sichuan, which has a high grain yield!

"You hundreds, no matter how big the demand is, you won't buy out all the official positions, right?" Gao Yingshu interjected

Lin Muzhi shook his head, "Impossible, we don't get a lot of grain every time we buy bamboo, and besides, we also have acres of land in the mountains, plus other villages and counties around, we don't just rely on this Huayang County to live." ”

"At that time, the eldest brother felt that something was wrong, so he told us to retreat quickly, and then suddenly someone threw torches into the official warehouse, and more than a dozen of our brothers who were still in the official warehouse were all burned alive! Then a lot of errands and soldiers surrounded us, and we had no choice but to ride our horses and rush out. We were fighting the officers and soldiers all the way, and there was no time to massacre civilians. He continued:

When An Yi heard this, he suddenly remembered that Jiang Ruyue said that his parents and Second Brother Zhao were killed by mountain bandits, so he asked Lin Muzhi,

"On your way back to the mountain, did you go to plunder Jiangjia Village by the way?"

Lin Muzhi: "The officers and soldiers seem to have been prepared, they are holding bows and arrows in their hands, and there are iron thistles everywhere on the ground, we ran out desperately, in order to cover us, my second brother was shot alive and dead, how can we have a chance to go to Songjia Village." What's more, Songjia Village is surrounded by the Qingshui River, and there is only one bridge to enter, so isn't it self-defeating where we go? ”

What Lin Muzhi said made sense, An Yi had been to Jiangjia Village, and he had an understanding of the terrain there, as he said that the mountain bandits at that time had indeed fallen into a desperate situation of hard fighting, and there was no need to go to a small village where there were not many people to loot.

Who is the "mountain bandit" that Jiang Ruyue saw? People from Taketori? According to Jiang Ruyue's statement, it is obvious that the gang of "mountain bandits" came to kill their family, and eighty percent of them were only because Jiang Ruyue went to participate in the village defense at that time, which caused Second Brother Zhao to become a substitute for the dead.

However, An Yi thought the other way, from the beginning of this, it was Lin Muzhi who said that the so-called "physical evidence" was also the "dead man's pit" left by the famine in his mouth, how could it be proved that what Lin Muzhi said was true? What if they were greedy, ransacked all the grain in the official warehouse, burned and looted, and then another one was a basin on the head of Taketori, who was not very clean?

"That being the case, then your private transaction should not continue because of this, but why did your big boss continue to send silver to the tavern in the city some time ago, so that he was arrested by Zhou Yunlong?"

Lin Muzhi continued: "Later, the Chengdu government transferred a large army to encircle and suppress the cottage, and we suffered heavy casualties, and many mountains and fields were helplessly abandoned. Although Huayang County is not an important border town, with our hundreds of people, we will definitely not be able to rush into the county government and kill Taketori. So Brother Song came up with an idea, he took the initiative to send someone to contact Taketori, pretending that the food shortage was unsustainable after we were surrounded and suppressed by the army, and bribed Taketori at a high price to buy food from him. In the past four or five years, Taketori has gradually relaxed his vigilance against us, and Brother Song has been preparing to do it when delivering goods to the county government a few days ago, but for some reason, the matter was exposed, causing Brother Song to also be in prison. ”

An Yi touched his forehead, the amount of information he received tonight was indeed a bit large, and his brain was aching faintly. For a while, he couldn't tell which was true and which was false. However, no matter who Lin Muzhi and Taketori are the most heinous people, they are all considered to have "criminal records", so it is good to face the confront, and it just so happens that the King of Shu is also under the mountain.

"In this way, Brother Lin, you take the brothers down the mountain, point to the right of Zhutori in person, and be a tainted witness in front of the King of Shu, and I will ask the King of Shu for the first two conditions, I don't think he will refuse. As for the third one........

After taking the head of this dog official and sacrificing it to your brother, I will give fifty taels to your brother out of my own pocket. ”

An Yi also kept an eye here, if things are really as Lin Muzhi said, he is willing to go down the mountain to correct the bamboo take, then the fifteen thousand taels should be regarded as Anfu to eliminate harm for the people, and it is a big deal to let the old man An lose two less mahjong games. If Lin Muzhi is unwilling to go down the mountain, it means that there is moisture as he just said, then he will find a reason to let Lin Muzhi go down the mountain first, and then deal with him again.

"Is that true?" Lin Muzhi raised his eyebrows,

"I have never done what I promised my friends comfortably." An Yi replied: "Brother Lin, Ying Shu and I will go down the mountain to report to the King of Shu, and three days later, we will welcome you at the bottom of the mountain!" ”

Lin Muzhi smiled slightly, "Okay! Deal! ”