In this king's army, there are 7,000 soldiers of the Southern Kingdom, and there are 2,000 people who returned to the imperial capital with me, and the rest are all stationed in the south.

This time, Wei Tian asked me to take the soldiers of the Nanguo Mansion to repair the canal, and the 5,000 soldiers in the south will go all the way north along the canal, in the name of building the river and building embankments, but in fact, it is tantamount to telling Ning Guo that we are going to abandon the southern border.

The stupidity of this decision made the king want to tie up Wei Tian and throw him into the river. Not to mention the people of Nanguo Mansion, he is not distressed, just talking about the land of Nanguo Mansion, no matter how it is, it is also a place of my Dajin, which Wei Lang and I took painstakingly to take back then, and now I have given up letting the enemy country arbitrarily waste and wantonly occupy it, Wei Tian is afraid that this canal water is in his head.

It's hateful that the king can't turn against it now. Therefore, when he received the holy decree three days ago, he could only send Xu Guangzhao to write an urgent letter, informing the 5,000 soldiers in the south that when they evacuated the south and retreated to the north, they should be slow, delay, and turn into three steps in one step, so that they could quickly turn back in case the Ning Kingdom attacked. And this king will lead the two thousand soldiers of the imperial capital all the way south, quickly repair the river, and finally the two roads of our army will converge at the end of the canal - Nanguo Mansion, Yuzhou City.

The canal in July is densely packed with boats, prosperous and lively, but the water flow is stable and the river is wide, so the road is unimpeded and the boats travel very fast.

At this time, the sun was setting, I stood in the boat and looked out the window, seeing this scene, I not only thought of Emperor Yang of Sui, but also thought of Pi Yishao's poem "Bianhe Nostalgia":

As far as the Sui Dynasty died, it was a river, and it has been thousands of miles away. If there is no water temple dragon boat matter, Gongyu will not have much merit.

And it is true. Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty can't be summed up by the word faint monarch, after all, there are very few perfect people in the world, and the merits can be called brave, and the merits can be called saints.

I was stunned, this sentence seemed to be told to me by Qin Buxian some time ago, it was what her uncle had said, why did this king have a sense of unthinking and familiarity when he remembered it?

Some scenes float on the spiritual platform, halo by the sunshine of the heyday, it seems that the scenery on the mountain is beautiful, I stand on a high place with one person, looking at the distant river rolling eastward, I two of us ask and answer, quite a son on the river, said that the deceased is like Sifu reluctant to give up the posture of day and night. But when I wanted to see through the dazzling sunlight and see the appearance of the person next to me, this scene instantly fell into the river and disappeared in a flash.

It was really in a trance for a while before I came back to my senses, probably because I missed Qin Buxian a little, and only then did I think of what she had said, so I had such an unbounded illusion.

I took out the canal map that Qin Buxian gave me from my arms and spread it on the table. It is undeniable that she and Qin Shutong have really helped me a lot, if I hadn't gotten the mark of the damaged river point in advance, this king would have surveyed all the way, and I don't know when I arrived in Yuzhou City.

But when I unfolded the river map on the table, I noticed that something was very wrong......

When I was a child, I was very interested in maps, provincial maps, mountains and seas, and river maps, all of which I remember very well, and I can almost draw them silently. The canal map is a very simple one among these maps, so it is easier to remember.

But Qin Shutong's painting does have a lot of problems, not only the main channel of the canal, but also some of the natural rivers that flow into the canal, but the painting is not particularly complete, such as Fenshui is in, Qinshui is not in, Han water is there, Huaishui is not, and even some innocuous streams are very carefully outlined, while some vital rivers are missing.

I held my breath and suddenly realized that such an obvious and irregularity mistake was clearly not a careless omission on the part of the artist, but a deliberate one.

Then, this canal map is not a simple map, but should contain other important information.

The passage that Qin Buxian said suddenly came to his mind: "The carrier pigeon sent it early this morning was painted by Shu Tong, she only walked it some time ago, and she knows which rivers are intact and which ones are collapsing, you can only stay at the red dot mark, and the rest of the place can be skimmed by fast boat, which can save some time." ”

Early this morning, so time is urgent?

It was painted by Shu Tong, so Qin Buxian should have understood the meaning of this picture?

But why didn't she immediately tell the king the meaning of this picture, was it because there were people around her at that time who she didn't trust, so she couldn't explain it clearly, and she didn't even dare to come to me to whisper a reminder? Or did she not notice the message hidden in the picture herself?

I was silent for a while, and my fingers touched the nearest place marked with a red pen, Lingtai City.

The sunset glows through the panes of the ship and falls on the picture, and the red markers are illuminated by the light.

I was stunned, found out the color of dansha from the drawer, dipped it with a brush and drew a point in the blank space of the picture, dried it and put it on the edge of the pane, and carefully compared it with the residual sunlight, and really found the difference: the color of dansha is mined in ore, so it has a slight glittering ore luster under the sunlight, but the red dot mark in the picture is not so, the red is light and thin, light and sparse, like water, and there is no crystal.

After putting it on the tip of my nose for a moment, I was more convinced in my heart—

The red dot mark, not the color of dansha, is blood.

Why don't you use dansa pigment and mark it with blood?

Don't...... Could it be to remind this king that there is a danger of swords and blood in these places? Do these selectively drawn rivers also leave any information?

The last rays of daylight outside the window sank into the canal, and the river was in turmoil. I looked at this river map, and when I should be nervous, my heart became more and more calm.

The paper was re-laid on the table, and the side rivers in the picture were picked out one by one, and tipped them down on the paper, and when he put down the pen, he could only keep it as similar to it as possible, and the king did not know what these rivers meant, so he could only write down the names of the rivers beside them, hoping to find the hidden information from the names.

But when I wrote out the name, I found that the name group was not a useful thing, and I thought of the homonym again, but it was still disorganized and to no avail.

Outside the window, a gust of river wind staggered in, blowing the paper a little skewed.

Probably because of the providence of God, I saw that on the skewed paper, two rivers flowed diagonally up from below, converging in one place to form a clear "human" character, and I suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment rushing into my mind—can the shape of this river be composed of words?

But in the next second, the king denied this idea - this zigzag river is too different from the regular script with a square shape and straight strokes, and this shape is impossible to form the radical stroke structure of the regular script.

At this moment, the guard knocked on the door and told me, "Your Highness, you will be at the Lingtai River in an hour." ”

There is still an hour to reach the first red dot mark, but the king has not yet figured out the message conveyed in this picture, and remorse is growing in his heart, some time ago I was lying in the palace and living in depression and weakness, why don't you come and walk from the canal in advance, even if my heart is hurt and my body is not as good as before, but it is not so weak that I can't even sit on the boat-

Wait a minute!

Heartbreak ...... The winter solstice of the forty-fourth year of the Jin Kingdom...... Qin Buxian calculated a dense piece of paper...... The pen walks the dragon and snake, tactful and smooth, Haoran accessible, and does not show the edge.

This is not the regular script respected by the current dynasty, it was used by Qin Buxian in front of me, the official text of the Qin Dynasty, the small seal!

I quickly picked up my pen, turned all the rivers into strokes and combined them one by one, threw waste paper all over the ground, and finally when the hour was about to arrive, I assembled six small seal characters that could be clearly distinguished—

There are three robberies, and escape is the top.

There are three calamities on the river, and it is best to escape at the right time.

The king was taken aback, and the six blood-red words written on the paper made my eyes hurt, and my back was full of sweat.

It dawned on me in an instant: Wei Tian's purpose was not to use the matter of repairing the river to strain the king's army, nor was he deliberately tossing to cause the southern border to abandon the defense, but his purpose was to save the lives of me and the soldiers of the southern kingdom, who, along with the king, would die in these three calamities.

And this thousand-mile canal is the place where we are buried, when the time comes, sink into the river, fish and shrimp eat, only 2,000 white bones remain, even if they are salvaged, they can't even recognize their appearance.

At this time, the wind rose sharply.

The guard outside the door knocked on the door and reported: "Your Highness, the section of the Lingtai River has arrived." ”