Ah Yu talked to Deng Ao about Guan Yi and others, but because Deng Ao had to be extremely cautious about what he wanted to do at the moment, it was already an illegal operation to bring Ah Yu and Deng Shuang to the house.

If it weren't for the fact that the person in charge here was Deng Ao himself, he would definitely be punished for his actions.

Hearing that he couldn't contact his guards for the time being, Ah Yu was a little worried in his heart, but he still agreed.

After all, when people are under the eaves, they always have to bow their heads.

Most of the people in the house are Deng Ao's subordinates, and there are also a few dumb servants who can't speak, the former is unwilling to have too much contact with Ah Yu, and the latter can't talk to her at all, but they can be regarded as the same way.

Quietly guarding a small house, such experiences still occupy a large proportion of Ah Yu's memory.

At the beginning, Ah Yu was still a little unaccustomed.

But after a few days, she was able to deal with it calmly.

On the contrary, Deng Shuang is very unaccustomed to it.

She seems to be restless, even if she is accompanied by Ah Yu, she will lose her mind from time to time, and often say things that do not make sense, as if it is difficult to bear the loss of freedom.

Deng Ao obviously knew about his sister's little problem.

However, things were so comparable, and many things all happened at the same time, so he didn't have any extra time to comfort his sister.

I can only ask my subordinates to send back the words of assurance over and over again, saying that after the things in hand are done, they will definitely send someone to send them to the border.

When the time comes, Guan Yi and the others will be found again.

If you want to talk about the reason why Deng Ao came to Yunzhou, if you pay attention to it carefully, it still has something to do with Wen Huan.

In the past, Wen Huan and Xie Huaining made up their plan to go out to study together in order to comfort their friends who had fallen into frustration for a while, and put it into practice.

And Yunzhou was the last state capital on their way.

At the beginning, they also spent a short New Year in Yunzhou.

As they get older, they still retain the spirit of their youth, and on the way to their daily trips, they will also deliberately buy some interesting books from bookstores around the world to send back to Kyoto as gifts for Azu.

In addition to the books in the bookstore, he even intended to ask the locals about all kinds of anecdotes, or mountain legends, and after compiling them, they became a new book.

When he was in Yunzhou, Wen Huan, according to his usual habits, inquired about various rumors with well-informed people in the state capital, among which the most mentioned was the barren mountains in Yunzhou.

I heard that a woodcutter went into the mountains to collect firewood, but unfortunately it happened to catch a heavy rain, and the woodcutter took the firewood he picked up to find a cave to shelter from the rain. Because the rain lasted for a long time, he even took a nap in the cave. In his half-asleep, he heard the sound of chains dragging over the ground, but when he opened his eyes, he saw nothing.

The woodcutter came out of the barren mountain unharmed, but when he returned home, he had a high fever, and the doctor he found was helpless about his illness.

And before he died, he told what he had heard in the barren mountains.

He said he heard the sound of black and white chains hooking souls.

And because he was a lonely man, even the corpse after death needed the help of the same villagers to pick it up, he told the same villagers that the reason why he died today was because he disturbed the ghosts and gods in the barren mountains, and now it is time to make up for the mistakes, please throw his body into the barren mountains, so that the ghosts and gods can see his fate, and they will not be angry with others in the future.

Such a mysterious story, under the promises of the speaker, it is difficult not to arouse Wen Huan's curiosity.

He also inquired about the woodcutter's fellow villagers if they had also encountered ghosts and gods in the barren mountains.

But I saw that the guy who sold the news turned extremely pale, as if he remembered something extremely terrible.

He said: "The woodcutter's last wishes, although the villagers did not fully believe his words, still did what he said. It's just that there are only a few places where they usually go to cut firewood, and some villagers don't believe that there are ghosts and gods in the mountains, but they never go back when they enter the barren mountains. ”

"The people of the village also tried to go to the mountains to find people in groups, but they did not find anyone, only the clothes that the villagers were wearing when they disappeared. The theory of ghosts and gods spread rapidly in the village, and no one dared to live at the foot of the barren mountain, and all of them managed to move away from the original village. Over time, the original village became vacant. ”

The man also carefully told Wen Huan the address of the empty village, apparently being asked more than once.

There are always some people who are very curious about these gods and ghosts, and want to verify them with their own eyes.

Wen Huan originally only listened to his words as a story, but after the people clearly told him the route to the village, he inexplicably wanted to go there in person.

After the story falls into reality, curious people will want to experience it for themselves!

Wen Huan didn't plan to go alone, he told his friends stories about the village and the ghosts, and successfully persuaded his friends to go with him, along with their temporarily hired guards.

From the village to the barren mountain, and then from the barren mountain back to the Yunzhou capital city, Wen Huan and his party did not find anything abnormal on the surface.

Like everyone who came and went back with a happy life, after returning to the capital city of Yunzhou, it was as if they had forgotten all about their previous trip to the barren mountains.

However, at night, a friend who lived in the same room with Wen Huan suddenly handed him two small stones.

The candles in the room had long been extinguished, and the moonlight that came in from the window lattice could only make them vaguely distinguish each other's movements, but it could not make Wen Huan distinguish the difference between the stones.

My friend's uncle worked in the Ministry of Works, and when he was temporarily staying at his uncle's house, he followed his uncle to visit the Ministry of Works, and he had a reflection on the mining incident.

He whispered to Wen Huan: "Today in the barren mountains, I left the team for a while under the pretext that I needed to relieve myself, and Guy found these two kinds of stones......"

People always have a particularly deep image of what they have seen with their own eyes.

When his uncle took him on a tour of the Ministry of Works, he happened to be smelting iron by a blacksmith, and there were some different stones mixed in the piles of iron ore at that time. He asked the blacksmith that it was said that the stone was associated with the iron ore, and if the iron ore was not seen when the stone was mined, but the stone had been dug up, then there was no need to panic, because the iron ore must be under the stone.

"The barren mountain is only a day's work away from the capital of Yunzhou, if there is iron ore in the mountain, it should have been reported to the imperial court as soon as possible, but now no one knows that there is an iron mine in Yunzhou, and the reason for it may be widely implicated......"

Wen Huan asked his friend again and again, and seeing that his friend still did not change his judgment before, he also had a little more guess in his heart.

When Ah Yu and Xie Huai'an went out, they stumbled upon a gold mine outside Kyoto, and now it seems that it is not impossible for them to find iron ore outside Yunzhou City.

Iron ore is just as important, if not more so, than gold.

Wen Huan asked his friend to hide the stones he had picked up, and when he went out the next day, he still followed his usual habits and did not show any abnormality.

Even in order to confuse outsiders who didn't know whether they existed, they stayed in Yunzhou for the New Year, and only left for their hometown after receiving a letter from home.

Actually, they would have wanted to go further south.

Compared with his friend's uncle, Mrs. Wen was originally the best talkative elder, and he was the only one who could easily meet the emperor. It's just that he is still taking the scholars of the White Horse Academy to the north to study, and he can't come back for a while, and he can't even catch up with Wen Huan's marriage, let alone help tell the emperor about the iron mine.

So, Wen Huan told the matter to Master Wen San.

After that, he and his friends were found by Deng Ao.

Although I don't know how Master Wen San contacted the emperor, and what kind of idea the emperor had to send Deng Ao out, but someone was finally willing to accept the tricky thing, and Wen Huan was naturally relieved in his heart.

was even happy because he was finally able to prepare for his marriage wholeheartedly, and then his happiness was almost ended by Ah Yu.

He never expected that Ah Yu would have the idea of going out for a long journey.

The little girl stayed in Kyoto, and she really let people out, and who knows what kind of trouble she will cause outside.

However, he can't be the master of Ayu, so he can only obediently send the little girl out of the house.

But he really didn't expect that the news of his iron mine would implicate the later Ah Yu.

Deng Ao took people to investigate in Yunzhou for a period of time, and determined that the officials in Yunzhou did not know that there was an iron mine outside the city, at least on the surface.

The emperor sent them, the people who probed the news, to take the lead in the first step, and the allocated army slowly rushed to Yunzhou in pieces, and after calculating the time, it was almost in the past two days.

He led people into the depths of the barren mountains, and before he found the iron mine, he was almost discovered by the bandits in the mountains.

After discovering the bandits hiding in the mountains, Deng Ao became more and more sure that there was something wrong with the barren mountains here.

After all, any person who has fallen into the grass and is a coward, who either wants to make his life better, or really hides in the deep mountains and old forests, they will also choose a suitable location, instead of being like the bandits in the mountains here, where there is no water source in the place where they set up camp, and they have to send people to fetch water a mile away every day, and they can know that there is a hidden secret at a glance.

After a long time in the barren mountains, Deng Ao and the others also knew where the missing villagers had gone, and where the sound of chains that the woodcutter had heard came from.

The answers to these can be found in the barren mountain iron mines.

The bandits seized the villagers, shackled them on their feet, and forced them to work around the clock to mine iron ore.

Deng Ao didn't know when those villagers were caught by the bandits, but when they found the villagers, those people were yellow and thin, as if a gust of wind could blow people away, and they looked particularly pitiful.

Seeing that the army sent by the imperial court would soon gather at the foot of the barren mountain, Deng Ao and the others kept an eye on the bandits for a longer time.

The place where they usually hide is still some distance away from the place where the bandits have set up camp.

Although the distance is farther, but vaguely, Deng Ao also found that there seems to be some kind of change in the cottage.

In recent days, those bandits have not driven the villagers to mine anymore, and even the few bandits who like to wander around the stockade on weekdays have disappeared, and the whole stockade gives people a sense of urgency that the storm is coming.

Deng Ao was worried, and even sent people to find the generals who led the troops this time, hoping that they could come over faster, so as not to change the situation at that time.

I have to say that Deng Ao's worries are very reasonable.

In today's cottages, it is true that when Deng Ao and others didn't know about it, there was an extra group of people in black.

The man at the head wore a silver mask that obscured his face, and around his waist was a wooden token, the same material as the one worn by the bandits, but with more fancy lines on it, which looked even more valuable when embellished with gold dust.

Judging from the token alone, the later man in black and the bandits in the cottage should be the same group.

This can also be seen in the owner's respectful attitude towards the man in black after they first entered the cottage.

However, after the men in black followed the owner of the village around the cottage, the masked leader looked at the owner of the village and the other bandits.

When Deng Ao led the army to the depths of the barren mountain, he thought that there would be a fierce battle this time, but who knew that they only found a group of villagers trapped in the depths of the cave, and the bandits in the cottage were all gone, disappearing without a trace.

After a careful search, they discovered that there was an underground passage hidden under the cottage.

The bandits who disappeared in the cottage were all in the passage, and none of them were alive.

The most surprising thing was that they were all kneeling on the ground facing south before they died, with a look of horror on their faces.

Li Quan gasped, he also saw the strange bandits in the tunnel later, but what surprised him was not the strange death posture of the bandits, but the fact that so many people died at the same time, Deng Ao and they sent people to observe nearby, but none of them recognized the situation in the cottage.

In the crowd, a voice suddenly appeared.

"The villagers who were captured were mining in the south, and I heard that many people had died in the mines, so maybe they were killed by ghosts and gods......

However, whether it is Li Quan or Deng Ao, they do not believe in ghosts and gods.

Rather than believing that ghosts and gods harm people, it is better to say that some people's methods of killing people have been superb, so that people do not notice that something is wrong.

But as long as it is done, there will always be flaws.

Although they may not be able to find out anything now, in the future, there will definitely be a day when the truth will be revealed.

After reprimanding the guy who was just talking with his brain, Li Quan directly led his troops and stationed them in the barren mountains, after all, the matter of mining iron ore had almost been assigned to Yunzhou Mansion at this time, and Li Quan's existence was to guard this mine, and there were young people in the province who dared to do anything wrong.