I don't know if the people on the boat heard the faint sound of the bell, but I heard it clearly, and as it rang, the hairs on my body immediately stood up, for I always felt that the bell sounded like the bell that led the villagers to fill the river.

I gripped the rope hard, bent over to straighten my body, and looked up. The sun overhead was completely obscured by the clouds, and the wind was howling, as if there were many, many dead people screaming and screaming, and the hearts of those who listened were furious. The boats on the river were cleared in advance, and the wide river was endless and there was nothing. But just as I was trying to look into the distance, a black dot suddenly popped up from a far, far away.

The black dot is speeding on the surface of the river, and it is amazingly fast, and it does not take long for the outline to appear in the field of vision. At that moment, I felt panic and faintly excited, because I noticed that the black spot on the surface of the river seemed to be the unmanned empty boat that I had been chasing for a while.

The big bell hanging on the empty ship was constantly ringing, dull, as if beating a piece of broken copper and iron, without the slightest melodious connotation. The empty ship came so fast that it had completely exceeded the normal speed of the ship, and it rushed like crazy.

Not long after, the empty ship approached the water where the big ship was, and the people on board saw the empty boat, and all of them ran to the edge of the deck at once, and even the goatee sitting on the chair could no longer be calm, and his expression was flustered.

"Ghost ship! That's a ghost ship! One of the platoon men looked at him fixedly and shouted out in a lost voice.

The boatload of people were all panicking, including the goatee, and I could sense from their panic that they might have seen the empty ship in the past, and that it was something they couldn't handle.

The empty boat with the bell floated to a place thirty or forty meters away from the big ship, and suddenly stopped, as if it had taken root in the water, and did not move. The people on the big ship were at a loss, they carried a lot of weapons, and maybe even had muskets hidden, but those things were completely useless to the empty ship, and the empty ship had no one in the first place, who to shoot with the gun?

The gloomy wind accompanied by the hoarse sound of a bell sounded very strange and made people feel chills in their hearts. I couldn't hold on any longer, so I dropped the rope in my hand, and was hung upside down from the top of the mast with my head and foot, and the empty ship became a reflection in sight.

Suddenly, the bell on the empty ship began to ring rapidly, and when the bell rang non-stop, although I was suspended in mid-air, when the bell began to sound rapidly, I keenly felt that something had changed around me. I couldn't tell exactly where those changes had occurred, but I bent over, grabbed the mast again, and looked up.

On the surface of the river where the wind was howling, huge and orderly ripples began to rise layer by layer, and the big boat began to shake back and forth with the ripples, and the faces of the people on the boat became ugly, and the goatee was still a little assertive, and he couldn't care about anything, so he hurriedly ordered people to close the anchor and open the boat, wanting to leave in a hurry. However, the empty ship came to rest quietly on the other side, like a pair of gloomy eyes, watching them.

The ripples on the surface of the water continued to change, and gradually gathered around the big boat, and the people on the shore who were watching the excitement were also frightened, and they retreated far back like a swarm. In the middle of those rippling waters, something like a shipwreck mast slowly rose, with a ** rag wrapped around it.

When I first saw the mast coming out of the water, I thought it was a shipwreck under the water that had surfaced for some reason, but when I looked at it, my heart suddenly rose to my throat, because after the mast came out about three or four meters long, a pair of hands suddenly appeared.

The hands gripped the mast tightly, and then the owner of the hand surfaced, and I couldn't tell if I should call it a man or a corpse. It was shirtless, holding the mast with both hands, as if holding a flag. It had no expression, and its face was as dry as a stone.

After the person holding the mast surfaced, a large number of topless "people" appeared densely among the ripples, and those people had different appearances, but their expressions were surprisingly similar, and countless people seemed to be carved out of a mold. I was hoisted from the mast, and I panicked, and in a few minutes before and after, at least two or three hundred such "people" appeared on the water around the big ship.

"Oh my God!" Someone on the shore shouted, probably scared to the extreme, and knelt on the ground with a puff: "The dragon lord's river patrol Yin soldiers!" "

In the folklore of our neighborhood, some people fall into the river and never appear again, they do not see people alive or dead, and they disappear very completely, as if the world has evaporated. For this kind of bizarre disappearance, the people in their hometown do not think that they are dead, but were pulled away by the dragon lord to fill the river and accepted as their own river patrol soldiers. It is said that every year, there are a number of people who pull the dragon lord to fill the river, and if he pulls enough, he will give up, and if he doesn't pull enough, then there will definitely be accidents on the river. Therefore, after the dragon king temple along the coast holds a big sacrifice every year, someone will put the clay figurines of the burned hard state on clothes and push them into the river, the old generation said, this is equivalent to making up enough people for the dragon king, the number of people is enough, and the living people will be much safer when they walk in the water.

In the past, I was skeptical of the Yin Soldiers who patrolled the river, and this legend has been passed down for at least a few hundred years, but it is still unknown whether anyone has seen it with their own eyes for hundreds of years. At the beginning, He Lao in the village was gossiping with people, saying that when he and his wife went back to their hometown in Shandong, they had seen Yin soldiers haunting.

It was the first month of the seventh and sixth years, He Lao's crooked wife's maiden home was in Gaoqing, Shandong, and the husband and wife went back to Gaoqing to live for more than a month, and when they were about to go home, they encountered the continuous floods of that year. From August to September, the county organized the people to protect the berm to save themselves, but the water was so great that 20 or 30 villages in the county were flooded and thousands of houses collapsed. He Lao Wei is not a local, but there are so many cadres in the commune, as long as they live in the village, they must go to the river embankment to rescue them.

Near the village of He Lao's crooked mother-in-law's mother's house, there is a local largest dragon king temple, the temple is rumored to be a little god, before the liberation of the incense continues, after the liberation, especially into the Cultural Revolution, no one dares to blatantly engage in feudal superstition, but some old people still secretly run to worship.

During the Cultural Revolution, a group of Red Guards from Zibo broke down the four olds in various places, and once wanted to demolish the largest dragon king temple. But on the first night of the demolition, more than 20 of the more than 30 Red Guards vomited blood inexplicably, vomiting mouthful, and couldn't stop, which frightened the people in the commune, lest these young revolutionaries would die on their own ground, and tried every possible persuasion, it is estimated that those Red Guards were also a little cowardly in their hearts, and found an excuse to leave the village, which was regarded as letting go of the Dragon King Temple.

When the flood came, the entire village was flooded, and those who had not seen the Yellow River burst its banks could not imagine what it would be like when the flood peaked when it came. It is no exaggeration to say that the embankment of the Yellow River, which usually looks extremely strong, once encounters a flood peak, it is like a biscuit soaking in water, and a large part of the embankment will be washed away as soon as a big wave rolls over. At that time, the flood control team, the reserve team, and the local troops were all on the front line.

As soon as the flood came, the iron men couldn't hold it, and in the end, it was really no longer possible, and the people of the flood control team began to evacuate. When the team retreated, the lightning flashed and thundered, and He Lao was an outsider, who was squeezed by the locals and was forced to carry forward the style, staying at the end of the team to be responsible for the aftermath. When he was about to leave, the water level that broke the embankment was already very high, and lightning swept across the rainy night sky.

He saw many, many topless people, who didn't know where they came from, standing like wooden stakes around the dilapidated Dragon King Temple. He Lao Crooked yelled, and in the end, he was almost dragged to be criticized and fought as the residual poison of feudal ideology in the old society.

When the flood subsided, the whole village was washed into a flat ground, and all the houses collapsed, except for the Dragon King Temple, which remained in place without any damage, and it seemed that there was not even a single piece of tile missing. He Lao was crooked and honest, and he didn't dare to talk casually anymore, but he knew very well in his heart that it was because when the water came, there were Yin soldiers of the Dragon Lord guarding the temple.

I've always regarded He Lao's crooked words as bragging, as a story, just listen to it, but I didn't expect that at this moment, there would be such a large area of Yin soldiers around me.

"The Dragon Lord is furious!" A large group of people watching the excitement on the shore knelt on the ground one by one, and someone chanted: "In broad daylight, send Yin soldiers out, these lawlessness of the dog days, finally someone has cleaned them up!" "

Goatee may have heard these curses, but he didn't care about it at all, and desperately tried to get people to lift the anchor and start the boat, but the anchor seemed to be stuck by something under the water, and seven or eight men couldn't pull it hard, and Goatee called someone over to help, and finally reluctantly pulled the anchor up, but as soon as the anchor came out of the water, the people on the boat saw that on the anchor heads on both sides, there were two children, a man and a woman, and the two children were holding the anchor deadly, and looked up from the water to see the people on the boat who were pulling the anchor.

"Get out of the boat!" The goatee ran to the side of the boat, brushed aside the crowd, and threw up two drawn yellow paper charms, which were attached to the faces of the two children, and knocked them out of the anchor and into the water at once.

clang

The big bell on the empty ship rang one last time, and then came to an abrupt halt. At the moment when the bell stopped, the dense Yin soldiers around rushed to the side of the big ship, I don't know how many hands stretched out together, against the bottom of the big ship, I was hung on the mast, and suddenly I felt that the big ship tilted violently into dozens of degrees, and the people of the big ship were caught off guard, rolling and howling and rolling down from one end of the deck to the other.

I immediately understood that these Yin soldiers who appeared with the empty ship were trying to sink the big ship of Paijiao.