The area bordering the province of Julong and Baihua is the town of Prancing Horse, which is mainly engaged in the domestication of military horses. The town was the third largest of all the six small towns that belonged to the royal capital, but it had the smallest population, with only 4,438 inhabitants according to the last census of the reign of the former king Long Xingtian.

The town is populated by horse trainers, who have established twenty horse farms here to train excellent horses from all over the world. All the horses that could be sold at the horse farm were sold by the town's consuls, and the proceeds were then distributed among the major horse farms. Any attempt to establish other business channels is illegal without the permission of Longjun.

The main transportation route connecting the royal capital and the southern provinces, Songwei Avenue, passes through the town of Prancing Horse, just in the middle of two horse farms, and gallops on Songwei Avenue to see all kinds of horses on the pastures on both sides of the road. However, it is now a cold winter, the pasture is covered with a layer of snow, and many mares are pregnant and need careful care, so the horses are released much less often, and are occasionally placed in the leeward lowlands, and most of the time they stay in the warm stables to fatten and gain weight.

Most of the horses used by the powerful army of the Xianglong Kingdom were raised here. The horses for the royal family and the royal ministers were also sent from here, and since they were intended for the rulers and magnates of the kingdom, the stables trained them in their ability to read their way to ensure that each horse knew how to set off from the stables on the edge of Shenmu Square and run through the Dragon Avenue to the Songwei Avenue or the Virtuous King's Road. A few horses can know the road from Changning City in Baihua Province to Shenmu Square, and there are even more old horses who can travel back and forth between Jingyuan City and Wangdu in Giant Hammer Province.

Of course, such horses are very precious, and the number is very small, and there are only eight horses that can run back and forth between Jingyuan and Wangdu stables completely, respectively in Jingyuan and Wangdu, with four each, and each one is recognized by Ah Biao.

Ah Biao is a patrolman in the town of Prancing Horse, born in a very poor family in Hongyun City, Baihua Province, his parents died when he was a child, and his grandmother brought him to death when he was 12 years old, and he lived by begging alone. Later, he actually got a job in Prancing Horse Town, and became a road patrolman, which was thirty-one years, and now he is forty-seven years old, and no one is older than him in this business, and few people are more familiar with the horses that often come and go, as long as they are from the horse farm in Prancing Horse Town. The owner and trainer of a horse farm know his own horses, but Ah Biao knows the horses that come out of various horse farms.

The duties of the road rangers are set up only on the most important traffic arteries in the kingdom, and they ride horses, carry special horns, and gallop back and forth on the main roads at fixed points, and their job is to keep the roads clear and safe, so they must not only have a keen sense of hearing, skill, and repair carriages, but also know how to keep and protect horses. The patrol is particularly important to the royal dragon, if the staff of the royal court out of the road is delayed by some accident, they can blow the horn carried with the car, and the patrol man hears it and follows the sound to rush over, if there is a troublesome problem that cannot be handled, such as a robber who blocks the road, he must blow the horn to issue a warning. According to different accident horns, there are different blowing methods, and the distance of a horn's cry for help is limited, so there will be a patrolman patrolling back and forth at intervals.

Although the rangers ran back and forth every day, the number of times they were actually called for help by the horn was still very small, first, most of the problems could be solved by the coachmen of the carriage and the accompanying guards, and second, the bandit dens that blocked the roads and robbed the main roads in the kingdom were cleared many years ago. The horn makes a distress cry is a rare occurrence once a year.

The route that Ah Biao was responsible for patrolling was the entire length of Songwei Avenue in the town of Yuema, crossing the border between Julong and Baihua Province, that is, in Lujiabao, and what happened there had nothing to do with him. On that day, he had just run from the border to the outskirts of the town on horseback when he heard the sound of a trumpet, coming from the border area.

The long sound of the horn usually indicates that something is wrong with the carriage or that the people on the carriage have a special need to solve, but this time it was a short horn sound. The short sound of the horn sounded three times in a row.

Three short chirps indicate that a carriage is in danger.

The last time I heard this kind of chirp was two years ago, when a Chamber of Commerce's truck was robbed by several prison escape fugitives from Baihua Province, the goods were lost, the horses were taken away, and the merchants were killed, their heads cut off and laid out on the roof of the carriage in blood. That bloody case happened on the road of Ah Biao's patrol, Ah Biao witnessed the scene, and it took half a year to solve the case. At this moment, when he heard the warning whistle again, the hairs on Ah Biao's body stood on end, he reined in the reins, turned the horse's head, took out the horn and blew it, and warned the town, and then as soon as his legs clamped the horse's belly, the red-maned horse of * ran in the direction of the border.

Most of the carriages that traveled from the royal capital to other provinces could list the time of return, and the return time of these carriages would be counted into a list and sent to the relevant road patrolmen. Ah Biao clearly remembered that there was a carriage from Jingyuan to the royal capital, carrying the envoy of the dragon monarch, this carriage had left the dragon a few days ago, that is, the sword time on the day of Longyan, and now it had passed the time of the tree, if everything went well, this carriage would return to the royal capital before today's stove time. If something goes wrong with the people in this carriage, he will only have a problem if he wants to continue to eat this bowl of food that he has eaten for thirty-one years.

A sense of responsibility and the fear of losing his job made him gallop quickly. In winter, the road is a little slippery, some places are still soft snow, and in some places the snow has turned into ice, and although the horses are replaced with a layer of gelatinous horseshoe, the horses may still fall if they run too fast. But Ah Biao couldn't take care of it anymore, he just wanted to hurry to the place where the accident happened and see what happened.

Violent incidents occurred in the territory of the dragon on Songwei Avenue, whether it was a roadblock robbery or a murder, it was all done by bold people. The last time those murderers were death row prisoners escaping from prison, they were really outlaws. But this time...... If it is the carriage of the envoy of Long Jun, it must be equipped with guards, and there is nothing to be done about the idlers, so it seems that there should be more than one or two murderers who robbed them, and it is estimated that there is a group. Thinking of this, Ah Biao found that his underwear was already sweaty. If the envoy's guards can't solve it, what can he do when he runs over? But if something really happens......

He pulled the reins, slowed down, and quickly thought about various possibilities in his mind, and finally decided to rush to the accident site at a less fast speed, which was not necessarily the carriage of the envoy of Long Jun, but the carriage of the Chamber of Commerce who returned today. If the Chamber of Commerce dies or loses the goods, it is also very troublesome, but it is better than an accident with the envoy of the royal court.

The weather was cold, the snow stopped in the middle of the night, and the road was lined with empty fields on both sides, and the view was not bad, and in the distance was a low forest, dense with low trees, and the road disappeared at the bend of the trees. Ah Biao kept running along the road, he had to observe from a distance, if there were too many murderers, he had to stop, waiting for the reinforcements sent by the town after receiving his warning, at least more than twenty people would rush over, all of them were properly trained soldiers, it was enough to deal with ordinary murderers and bandits.

He stared at the end of the road, and gradually a yellow carriage came into view, running in his direction.

Two horses, no driver in the driver's seat.

Ah Biao's pupils constricted. On the day the carriage went to Jingyuan, he happened to rest in shifts, but he knew the two horses. In the carriage that returned to the dragon today, the carriage from Jingyuan to the dragon used two old horses who knew their way, and they didn't need the guidance of the coachman, and they knew how to run back to the stable yard of the royal capital.

The carriage was getting closer and closer to him, he looked carefully, and no longer doubted that this was the carriage that had come back from Jingyuan, and there was a cyan dragon on the top of the yellow carriage, and the dragon's head stood tall. Long Jun's envoy was in this car, in the carriage of the yellow canopy. Is he still there now?

He took hold of the reins, jumped off his horse, and stood on the side of the road, waiting for the carriage to approach, which was not very fast, and the old horses knew how to distribute their strength, and they would not gallop blindly without the driver urging them to speed up.

When the carriage approached, he ran a few steps, jumped up, supported the horse's back in the air, and then straddled his legs and landed firmly on the carriage, a maneuver he practiced so skillfully that he was confident that he would not make a mistake as long as the horse was not fast. He grabbed the reins and forced the two horses to stop, then jumped out of the carriage, drew his dagger from his waist, and walked towards the carriage door.

He stopped in front of the door of the carriage and shouted, "My lord, there is a patrol officer from Prancing Horse Town outside, I heard your horn, do you have any instructions?"

No one answered. He shouted again, still unanswered. He raised his dagger and opened the door.

The carriage was empty, there were no obvious signs of a fight, and it was impossible to tell if any belongings had been robbed.

Ah Biao breathed a sigh of relief, he had guessed that he might see a bloody corpse or something, but no one said that an accident had happened, but the envoy might still be alive.

It's just a possibility, albeit a little slim, but there's always a glimmer of hope. It is his job to make sure that glimmer of hope exists.

He climbed into his horse, took out his horn to warn again, and ran forward. If he can be the first to discover Long Jun's envoy, whether he is dead or alive, he will be considered to have completed the task. As long as the envoy is found, the higher authorities will be held accountable, and there will be no need to bear so much responsibility.

After running some distance, some black spots appeared on the snow in front of me. He judged that it was a man who had fallen to the ground, and that he did not know whether he was alive or dead. He breathed a sigh of relief and picked up his pace.

When he saw what the person on board looked like, he was taken aback.

There were four people in the middle of the road, a coachman, two guards, and the other was the envoy. Four corpses, all of which he was absolutely sure were corpses. No one can survive after such a big hole in the abdomen, so much blood leaks out, and the slush around them is dyed red.

He jumped off his horse and crouched down to examine the wound carefully.

It was a terrible wound, the whole person's abdominal cavity was pierced, as if someone had used a huge hammer to knock a large-caliber nail into the abdomen, and then pulled it out, leaving a neat wound. He thought of the beasts, there were some woods around here, and the black bears living in the woods did have such strange powers, and they did hollow out people's abdominal cavities, but he had never seen or heard of any kind of bear that could cause such wounds.

Ah Biao stood up in fear, his mind blank, and after a while, he realized another strange thing—the corpses had trailing marks on the snow, and intermittent blood stains dotted on them. The trail marks extended from the woods on the side of the road, and the men seemed to have been killed in the woods, and then dragged by the murderer all the way to the middle of the road.

Why did the murderer do this? As if he was afraid that no one else would find the four bodies. And why did these four men run into the woods? Did they run for their lives? Why did they run so far?

What they saw turned out to be so terrible that they gave up fighting here and ran to hide in the woods?

Ah Biao could clearly feel that his clothes were soaking wet. Now the whole body is trembling, and the whole person is like falling into an ice cave.

He should have gone to the woods to take a closer look, it was the scene of the killing. But he felt that his legs were weak, he could no longer take a step, and it was becoming more and more difficult to even maintain a standing position. Finally he bent his legs and fell to his knees in the snow, his eyes fixed on the wounds, the wounds that exposed his internal organs like a magnet, sucking his gaze and his courage away little by little, and the fear made him cry out, and he forgot to continue to blow the horn that fell to the ground.

Ah Biao collapsed to the ground and fainted.