19-year-old Ye Xiaojun has broken away from the childishness of her girlhood and has become a beautiful woman with a calm personality. Due to some people's ideas, her marriage road has become extremely bumpy, although with the help of her sister Ye Xiaoluan, she finally won freedom, but this freedom is also relative.

The scholar family did not dare to marry a woman who was ready to enter the palace home, after all, no one wanted to attract the emperor's special attention. And the palace seemed to be aware of the embarrassing situation of the Ye family, so Zhou Hou personally summoned Ye Xiaojun and Ye Xiaoluan sisters, and instructed others to introduce a young army non-commissioned officer to Ye Xiaojun.

If it was in the past, the scholar family would naturally not marry a martial artist, let alone the Ye family, a famous family in the south of the Yangtze River. However, under the reform implemented by the emperor, the status of military attachés from new-style military schools is rising, and even because many scholars who have no hope of studying for the imperial examination have also chosen new-style military schools, many people have begun to distinguish between military attaches who graduated from new-style military schools and those who are old-style military ministers.

It is precisely because of this change and the queen's appearance that Ye Shaoyuan and Shen Yixiu, a couple who love their daughters with a heart, will ignore the criticism of other scholar families, and after understanding the background of this young non-commissioned officer, they decided to follow the queen's wishes and set up a marriage for the two.

Since the implementation of the reforms of the imperial court, the capital has actually become the birthplace of the promotion of the reform of the Ming Dynasty. The inhabitants of the city, from the high-ranking officials to the common people, consciously or unconsciously, have been reformed in terms of values and living habits.

After nearly four years of life in the capital, Ye Xiaojun and Ye Xiaoluan sisters have also made many changes, and they are no longer the Jiangnan ladies who are immersed in their own world and blindly entertain themselves with poetry and literature.

Under the promotion of Chongzhen, the spring garden party and the autumn competition have actually become the most important social places for the upper class society in the capital. The emperor's preference for sports also greatly drove the preferences of young people in the capital.

Today, if you want to be famous in the capital, it is no longer a difficult for ordinary people to appreciate the awkward poems, but in the dissection and criticism of social problems written in the vernacular, or the discovery of some scientific research, or having a good horse.

When a new, complex and energetic external world opened its door to ladies like Ye Xiaojun and Ye Xiaoluan, they were once confined to a small, quiet and unchanged small world, and naturally they were quietly broken.

Ye Xiaojun did not immediately agree to this family affair because of her parents' decision, and with the help of her sister Ye Xiaoluan, she quietly met the martyr who was valued by the emperor at a social event, and then nodded to her parents in agreement.

However, the two did not get married step by step, because this young non-commissioned officer named Zhang Hanyun joined an expedition to the Ussuri River. However, he has already met Ye Xiaojun, and he obviously loves his fiancée very much, even if he goes overseas, he has never forgotten to write a letter of greetings to Ye Xiaojun.

Although Zhang Hanyun could not write a few poems to Ye Xiaojun to express his lovesickness like those young scholars, he was able to write his adventure experience in the wilderness vividly in the vernacular, and it became an overseas strange story used by Ye Xiaojun and Ye Xiaoluan sisters to kill time.

On this day, when the first snow fell in the capital, the two sisters huddled in the room couldn't help but take out Zhang Hanyun's past letters and read them again, trying to find the interesting things about the reckless world that had no resemblance to the capital in the letters.

"The Ussuri River is a large river that runs almost parallel to the Coast Mountains, a large river that meanders but increases or decreases in volume depending on the season. Strangely, this river flows from south to north until it joins the Heilongjiang River, which is the opposite direction of most rivers in our Central Plains.

The summit of what we call the Coast Mountains, which stretches from the north of Vladivostok to the mouth of the Heilongjiang River, is also known locally as the Sikhote Mountains. The western side of the mountain range is gently wooded, but the coastal side to the east is steep and less grassy, and it looks like a great wall defending the interior.

Even before we arrived in Vladivostok, preparations for the expedition had already begun. Non-commissioned officers and cadets from the interior and geographical and botanical surveyors accounted for one-third of the expedition members, and the other two-thirds went to local naturalized people and local garrison soldiers.

The criteria for selecting the members of the expedition were swimming and a practical trade, and His Majesty allocated 5,000 dollars for this expedition to the Ussuri River. About half of this money was spent on the honorariums of the team members, but the results were good, and the number of people who applied for the expedition was five times as many as we wanted to recruit.

Of course, the players we picked weren't as reliable as we thought they were. Some of them talk a lot during the interview, and seem to know everything in the jungle, sounding like a good hunter. But such a person behaves fairly well when the weather is good and suitable for traveling. As soon as a few raindrops fell from the sky or spotted a mosquito, he turned his horse and ran back, complaining about why he had joined the expedition.

But it was those who were silent, no matter what kind of trouble they encountered, they would silently come forward and work with us so that our expedition could continue. We set out on May 3rd, and by May 15th, the team was missing one-fifth of its members.

The members of the expedition who escaped could not stand the dense forest of leeches and the small bites of the Ussuri River. But fortunately, those of us who came from the mainland were relatively well equipped, not only brought two pairs of boots, but also mosquito nets, hats with screens, mosquito repellent water, etc., which made most of us persevere until the end.

… Our guide, Orgie, is an interesting local and the hunter who knows the jungle best. He practiced the local shamanism and believed that all living things were human. For example, he often warns the team that someone is approaching. But then we found out that it might have been a bear, a lynx, or a herd of wild boars, or a herd of deer, or something that approached us.

Even though we have reminded him many times that there is a difference between animals and people, Olki has always insisted on his opinion, and what he often talks about is that there is a person living under the skin...

June is the summer season in the Ussuri region, and it is also the season of the most abundant rain. You can't believe how wide the Ussuri River is at this time of year. If it weren't for the trees exposed on the water, we wouldn't have been able to tell the difference, which places were lowlands in the valley and which places were the original river channels.

… The closer you get to the middle and lower reaches of the Ussuri River, swamps begin to appear on both sides, and there are obviously more swamps on the left bank. The high hills that crop out of the swamp are always crawling with all kinds of small animals. Red snakes, belly snakes or all kinds of voles... There are many species of birds in such a place, and I have seen about 20 species of birds.

… During the inspection, the secretary always got up an hour earlier than us, boiled porridge and tea for us, and woke everyone up for breakfast. It then takes an hour to prepare for the departure, and the team officially sets off at around 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning. At noon, take a big break, remove the saddle and pack, and let the horses rest. In the afternoon, we continued until about four o'clock when we began to look for a campsite to rest. Despite our efforts, we can walk 30-50 miles a day at most, because the roads are so difficult to walk, or there are no roads at all.

Every day my job is to collect the plants on the roadside, while the others catch birds and insects. During the break, we not only have to dry these plants into specimens, but also some birds into specimens. By the way, I will draw the path of the day on the map.

In the course of such expeditions, we also learned some lessons, that is, never walk in the dense forest in heavy rain. It's easy to get lost, and you can be swept away by a flash flood that suddenly erupts...

The expedition wasn't always so arduous, but we were able to find some unexpected pleasures, such as a delicious meal when we followed the bees to their nests.

Of course, sometimes accidents happen, we once found a huge wild honeycomb growing near the roots of a linden tree at a 45-degree angle. When we arrived, we found that it was not only us outsiders who coveted this nest of honey, but also a large group of black ants who came before us.

Wild bees guard the entrance to the hive, while ants gather densely opposite the wild bees. It's fun to watch them fight against each other, with soldier ants wielding their large clips in a frenzied self-defense, while wild bees keep attacking from above to prevent these ants from approaching their hives.

Ants will even split up behind the hive to attack, just like us humans do, but the wild bees quickly split up to deal with the sneak attackers...

The others and I watched the animal battle with relish, until two soldiers couldn't bear it anymore and poured boiling water on the ants, causing them to die in piles. It seemed as if the human intervention was the end of this rare animal war, but it wasn't until a soldier accidentally poured boiling water on the wild bees that they immediately targeted us.

The natives and soldiers reacted much more than we did, and they fled the way they came without looking back, and we didn't react until we were stung by a bee. It wasn't until it was dark that the soldiers decided to return, but they regretfully reported to us that the hive had been completely broken by passing bears..."

These descriptions of adventures in the distant jungle wilderness gave great joy and imagination to the two girls who had never left the city, and they read Zhang Hanyun's wonderful journey over and over again, imagining distant landscapes and stories.

This kind of pleasure of travel and exploration is obviously not comparable to a few sour rotten literati with a few incomprehensible poems. What's more, the poems written by these literati are not as good as the games of the two sisters.

Since the fifth year of Chongzhen, the eyes of the Ming people began to move away from the garden, the play, and the cook, and turned to the anecdotes outside the Ming Dynasty, and appreciated the beauty of overseas geographical scenery.