At the end of the polo match, in the woods on the north side of the court, Tong Luo Puli, dressed in black, stood on the treetops, drawing his bow like a full moon, and the cold arrow was aimed at the happy little Langjun on the red colt.

The old man standing under the tree had already given the order to do it. But at the moment of Songxian, Tong Luo Puli, who was already as hard as iron, still hesitated a little.

The reason why she hesitated was not to sympathize with the little Langjun who was about to become the soul of her arrow. She didn't know who the young man Lang Jun on the little red horse was, and she didn't need to know at all.

As a senior horse bandit, Tong Luo Puli is still very professional, never ask what she shouldn't ask, never know what she shouldn't know, she is only responsible for wielding a knife to kill. However, she would not allow herself and her brothers to be dug up and sold.

Tong Luo Puli didn't know the masked old man under the tree. Before coming to Tingzhou, she received instructions from her employer that all actions in Tingzhou should be subject to the old man's arrangement.

At first, Tong Luo Puli didn't feel anything unusual about this mission, but as time passed, the uneasiness in her heart became stronger and stronger.

Tong Luo Puli often can't remember how long she has been a horse bandit. When she rode on horseback, wielded a scimitar to intercept caravans laden with goods, and drew her bow and arrows to chase down travelers scattered like lost lambs, she always mistook herself for a cruel and cold-blooded horse bandit by birth.

But after the horse fight, when looking at the blood splashed everywhere like the Sari Lang flowers blooming on the hillside of her hometown, Tong Luo Puli occasionally recalls her distant hometown and her miserable childhood.

Tong Luo Puli didn't know who her father was since she was a child, she was born with only a mother.

Her mother was neither a golden branch nor a noble lady, but a lonely and poor shepherdess.

Tong Luo Puli never understood what kind of confusion her mother made back then, what kind of man she met, and then she was stupid enough to have herself.

The only thing she was sure of was that the person she was supposed to call "Father" never showed up in her life again.

In Tongluo's fantasies, sometimes her father would be a hurried merchant, who would pass by by one day by chance, and have a night with a local shepherdess, and then leave with a cheap and pleasant satisfaction, without knowing what kind of evil would be left of his indulgence; Sometimes, her father would be a horse bandit who crisscrossed the grasslands, set his sights on the shepherdess of Tongluobu, forced her to become his own woman with a scimitar, and soon died in the struggle on the grasslands......

For his father, he had a thousand strange ideas with Luo Puli. But in any story, the father is active and negative; Mothers are passive and stupid.

This unchanging story outline is the same as Luo Puli's eternal impression of her parents, after all, for her parents, all she can have now is the vague and absurd fantasy in her heart.

With Luo Puli's childhood, it coincided with the chaos of the Mobei grassland. After the successful restoration of the Turkic Khanate, it tried its best to regain the glory of the Turkic Khanate that once commanded Mobei and shocked the Central Plains, but its revival was just a wild flower at the end of the road, because its strength was not as good as before, and it became a yellow flower of tomorrow in an instant.

The Tang Empire naturally did not dare to be careless in the face of the resurgence of the embers of the old enemy. Although there was a brief period of peace between the two, the inertia of confrontation between Mobei and the Central Plains, which lasted for thousands of years, still pushed the post-Turkic Khanate onto the trajectory of hostility to the Tang Dynasty.

The Later Turkic Khanate claimed to be the lord of the steppe, but the tribes that were subordinate to the Turkic Khanate, such as the Hui, Ba Ximi, and Qarluq, gradually realized the nature of the Later Turkic Khanate, and they all made private covenants with the Tang Dynasty, without any intention of martyring the old masters of the decadent.

Tong Luo Puli, who grew up in Mobei, understands that the choice of the tribes can be said to be very wise and decisive.

The Mobei grassland is barren and constantly conquered, and if any tribe wants to survive for a long time, there are only two ways to choose, either to become the strongest tribe by force, or to choose to attach to the powerful tribe as soon as possible. Other than that, there is no alternative.

Therefore, in the eyes of the people of the Central Plains, the names of the tribes on the grassland are varied and changeable, which dazzles and annoys the historians.

In the case of the Tongluo tribe, at the moment they were subordinate tribes attached to the Uighur Khanate; Before the rise of the Uighurs, the Tongluo tribe was a peripheral tribe of the Xueyanta Khanate; Further back, the Tongluo tribe was the core tribe of the Tiele tribe, which in turn was subordinate to the Turkic Khanate; If you want to look further, the Gaoche clan in the Wei and Jin dynasties and the Ding Ling clan in the Qin and Han dynasties were all active in the Tongluo clan.

Many weak tribes in the grassland, limited by survival, had to cling to the strong, and then were regarded as a natural part of the strong by the Central Plains Dynasty. The Xiongnu of the Qin and Han dynasties, the Xianbei of the Wei and Jin dynasties, and the Turks of the Sui and Tang dynasties were never single tribes, they were just the strongest tribes on the grassland at that time. Around them, there were a group of small tribes of all kinds huddled together.

This is also the reason why the khanates on the steppe always rise and fall suddenly in the history books of the Central Plains.

A clan, either by chance or by necessity, may establish its prestige after gaining the opportunity to become strong and prosperous through several conquests.

Then, like a snowball, a group of small tribes will come to cling to them. With the strongest tribe as the core and the dependent tribe as the limbs, a new and powerful khanate will quickly emerge on the steppe, destroying and overthrowing the previous ruling order and opening a new era.

The process is so fast that sometimes it may only take two or three battles.

After the establishment of the new steppe order, if the princes of the Central Plains were to fight and compete with each other, then the emerging khanate could lead hundreds of thousands of men to fight against the rich south. If you win, you will enter the Central Plains, and if you lose, you can also plunder.

If it was unfortunate that the Central Plains Empire was unified and united, the steppe khanate would wisely choose to bow its head and become vassals and obtain necessary daily necessities through trade.

The saddest thing is that if the Central Plains Dynasty is strong-blooded, vigorous, and determined to open up. The core tribes of the steppe khanate were likely to be defeated by the enterprising Central Plains Dynasty.

Once the core tribe is a little tired, the affiliated tribes will not hesitate to deviate, or move to the Central Plains, or start from scratch, or rebel against the old master. The former khanate that swallowed thousands of miles may fall apart and wither in the blink of an eye.

Compared to the sudden rise, this cycle of decline is often short, and sometimes it only takes a single battle! You don't see, the strong and tyrannical east. The Turkic Khanate was succeeded by the Tang general Li Jing in a surprise attack with 3,000 elite cavalry, and the country was destroyed in less than three months!

The Later Turkic Khanate, as the remnant of the powerful Turkic Khanate of the past, thought that it could command the steppe tribes to regain its former glory.

As everyone knows, the situation has changed fundamentally: the power of the Tang Dynasty has already penetrated deep into Mobei, the old subordinate tribes have their own thoughts, and the new strong people on the grassland are also ready to move.

Therefore, the Later Turkic Khanate was only a flash in the pan, lasting only more than 60 years, and under the siege of the Tang generals Wang Zhonghei and the Hui Hui, Ba Ximi, Ge Lulu and other departments, it became a yellow flower of tomorrow.

For the long history of the rise and fall of the steppe empires, the post-Turkic Khanate was just a small wave in the long river, and perhaps not even a wave, because it was neither famous nor wonderful.

Tong Luo Puli sometimes even wondered if anyone other than the historians of the Central Empire would remember this short-lived steppe khanate hundreds of years later.

But for Tong Luo Puli, this short-lived khanate and the wars it caused changed her life forever.

After time flies, memories always have a dim and warm aura like a sunset. Even though her childhood was already miserable, she occasionally remembered the joy of sitting on a high ox cart with a wooden wheel and following her entire tribe from pasture to pasture one summer day when she was a child.

At that time, the sky was blue and vast, the white clouds were soft and leisurely, and the eyes were silent, and the nose was full of the sweetness of grass and the tranquility of flowers.

But even such a humble beauty is a rare luxury for Tong Luo Puli.

In the winter when Luo Puli was 9 years old, a snowstorm raged on the grassland, white plagues were rampant, and the cattle and sheep of the tribe froze to death.

Within the war-torn post-Turkic khanate, all tribes were frantically expanding their populations and cattle and sheep. The emergence of the White Plague has made the major tribes intensify their oppression and plunder of the small and medium-sized tribes.

Speaking of which, the Tongluo tribe was not weak in the steppe at that time, and the leader Absi was appointed by the Usumish Khan of the Later Turkic Khanate as the Western Leaf Protector.

However, in the face of the vigorous rise of the Hui Ministry, the negligent Absi was caught off guard and fled in a hurry with his personal guards and strong people, not caring for the other old, weak, sick and disabled people in the Tongluo Ministry.

Having been alone for a long time to take care of Luo Puli's mother, naturally he couldn't keep up with the pace of the leader Absi's escape. The mother and daughter, as well as the few belongings they had in the tent, were looted away by the Hui Ministry.

In the steppe, women are always a precious treasure, and the victors generally do not kill the women of the defeated tribes, but plunder them all.

These women, young and beautiful, may have the good fortune of being the women in the tents of the victors' chieftains, and though they are of low status and humiliated, at least they do not have to do menial work; Those who are older and less beautiful will become servants who shepherd and milk the victors; The little girls, who had not yet grown up, either became rough maids or were sold to slave traders.

After being looted by the Hui Ministry, Tong Luo Puli is about to face the tragic fate of being sold as a slave.

When Luo Puli's mother found out, she resisted desperately and begged repeatedly that the Hui would never allow the Hui to sell Tong Luo Puli to slave traders.

Many years later, Tong Luo Puli still remembers the north wind that day when the ghost cried wolf and the bloody scimitar of the Hui Ten.