"Ahem, ahem, iron pillar, don't talk nonsense in front of the general." The toothless old man slurred, glared fiercely at his child Tie Zhu, and his cloudy eyes cautiously probed towards Su Lin.

"It's okay, you come and hear it, I haven't been to this town for a long time, and I want to know ...... What happened in the town after Hui'er's incident. When he said this, it was obvious that under Su Lin's deliberate cover-up, there was a little more dim look in his eyes.

"I'll tell you." The old man was afraid that the child would say something wrong again, and it would be bad to make General Cheng unhappy, so he began to talk lightly.

Although no one has mentioned it for a long time, the old man clearly knows that Cheng Jinghui, Cheng Biting Jin's child, is in the upper reaches of the Zimu River, and it is said that he picked up something strange, and since then he has become weird and crazy.

Since then, the upper reaches of the Zimu River have been confined by the surrounding yamen because of the strange things that happened before, and it was not until many years later that people almost forgot about it, and only then did people dare to go upstream to fetch water and laundry.

However, it is said that those who often fetch water and wash clothes by the river, after a period of time, their bodies will slowly appear to a certain extent, at first just coughing, and then the body will slowly dry up, and finally some pieces of armor similar to fish scales will grow on their bodies. What's more, there are several strange tails growing out of the back of his butt.

For some reason, the downstream water is seriously polluted and mixed with a large number of impurities, and this water is obviously not suitable for iron smelting. Because after impurities are mixed, it will seriously affect the quality of manufacturing tools, and often ten pieces are made, and only one or two pieces may be able to meet the original standard.

It is precisely because of the relatively low yield of the finished product that the things that can be made for a dozen taels of silver can be made by a large amount of waste of materials due to the large amount of sewage wasted by sewage, and the price of the products produced has increased by more than ten times.

In this case, the toothless old man deliberately closed the shop and stopped for a while, but they not only made farm tools but also produced weapons for soldiers, although the town was small, there were many people or officials who came to visit.

There were also a large number of wealthy gentry who ordered a large number of weapons in their shops, saying that they were protecting their homes and fields. They are all figures with heads and faces, and if they are placed in normal times, the small store can make normal revenue and can manufacture iron tools in large quantities, this is naturally not a problem.

But the problem was that because of the river, they could not provide iron tools to the officials and gentry who placed the orders on time, and even when he offered to make another batch for them without raising the price of iron after the river water was polluted, those people refused.

Because even if it is not profitable, it is nearly ten times more expensive than the previous price, and as long as those people are not stupid, they can buy iron from other places.

The toothless old man also thought the same, and he also wanted to stop sending them iron tools by explaining to these people the reason for the special situation in the last few days, and even decided to return the deposit to them as it was.

But they demanded that the old man sell them the iron tools he had made in the past few days at the original price, and that the rest of the orders should be made according to the previous purchase order, and if they could not be delivered on time, they would be refunded three times the compensation of the original in addition to the principal.

The old man still wants to climb the old friendship with those people, but in the face of the silver and interests of those people, how can they admit that they have any friendship with you, and they also say that either the iron tools will be delivered at the original price and the original date, or they will bring soldiers and domestic slaves to smash this ant smithy shop that he has painstakingly run for decades.

In desperation, in order to keep the small shop, the old man had to dismiss his old buddies, compensate these people for almost all the savings they had earned over the past few decades, and sold all the iron tools they had made before to them at the previous price.

Even in such difficult circumstances, they never thought of going upstream to fetch water from the Zimu River.

But if the water problem is not solved, it means that the cost of making each iron tool is extremely high, and even the selling price is sky-high, but most of the people in the town are ordinary people, how can there be so much silver and copper money to buy iron tools.

Even if their reputation was good, the prices were sustainably high, and the quality of the iron was much worse than before, their business became more and more dismal, until finally the small shop often had no customers for the whole day.

And Surin, they were the first customers to patronize their ant smithy today.

Tie Zhu originally thought that Cheng Yanjin was a general, and the silver at home must be inexhaustible, so after seeing that the old general Cheng Yanjin liked the axe, he directly increased the price of the axe by more than 20 times.

But how could he know that the one he met was a fake general, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that he was now a clean breeze with two sleeves, and the whole person was so poor that he did not exceed five taels of silver.

Seeing that the small shop was on the verge of bankruptcy, even though his father resolutely disagreed, Tie Zhu still avoided his father and pushed the cart alone with a bucket in the direction of the Zimu River at night.

He replaced the water he was pushing and replaced the water he was now using to strike iron, and lied to his father that he had filtered out the impurities in the water by a special method.

The toothless old man was skeptical, and after using the current water to strike iron, he found that although the quality was still not as good as before, it was obviously much higher than the previous yield.

Su Lin felt a little strange when he heard this, it stands to reason that if the river water is polluted, shouldn't it be that the upstream is polluted and then slowly flows downstream.

Normally, it should not be that the water impurities in the upstream are more dense, but that the upstream is clearer.

With a wave of his hand, he interrupted the iron pillar and asked, "Is there any water source from here before, take a copy and show it to me." ”

Tie Zhu showed a very embarrassed face, looked at his father, the old man coughed violently again, leaned over and said, "Later, I know that this is taken from ...... After taking the water from the upper reaches of the Zimu River, I caused the iron pillars to fall. So General, there's no water in the store. ”

The toothless old man said this and coughed continuously for a long time.

Since coming to this town, the first is the father of the bride, and the second is the father of the blacksmith shop, and their fate seems to be particularly miserable.

I just don't know if most of the people in the empire will also suffer when they really enter the Tang Ming Empire.

Su Lin knew that he had entered this world from a small program called "Death Closed Loop", and seeing that other people were constantly breaking through and appearing in various parts of the closed loop world, as well as novices and veterans, he knew that this kind of breakthrough was by no means a one-time task.

It is also possible that after returning to the real world, he will still enter it again, and now in addition to the forest scene in front of him, what he has the most contact with is the information of the Tang Ming Empire entered in the closed-loop world.

For example, the Nanyang County that Su Lin had seen before, the desert frontier where the old man of Qihuang had appeared, and the small town far away from the capital that he had come into contact with now.

All these things seem to tell him that the next breakthrough is very likely to be within the Tang Ming Empire.

Although he was only here to complete the task for two days now, he had a hunch that he would come into contact with this huge empire next, and didn't the fast couple also come from the special agency of the Tang Ming Empire.

Surin knew that now was not the time to feel, so he looked at the young man in the shop and continued, "You can move on to the rest of the story. ”

He vaguely felt that before going to save people, he should first find out what mysteries were hidden in this river.

The first time was when he took the initiative to go to the teahouse to inquire about the news and heard the legend about the Zimu River, but this time he heard the rumors of the river on the way to buy an iron axe.

Thinking of this, he realized that when he first heard the legend of the river god, he only cared about looking for the bride, and forgot about such an important source of pollution.

Did you really forget, maybe there was some kind of power here that I didn't want him to remember.

I heard the iron pillar continue: "After my father took the water from the upstream and used it several times, in addition to the obvious improvement of the iron tools, my father also suffered from a strange disease. ”

Su Lin just wanted to say, isn't that strange illness the cough now. Who knew that Tiezhu suddenly said: "Every night, my father always walks in the direction of the upper reaches of the Zimu River, if I hadn't looked at him, he might have ...... long ago."

"Child?" Su Lin's eyes flashed, he paid special attention to this time, and just wanted to ask, but the old man impatiently interrupted the child's speech:

"Tiezhu, what nonsense are you talking about, I ...... this matter How I don't know. ”

The toothless old man coughed violently again, and he deliberately endured it, and after a while, his whole face was suffocated into a purple-red color.

"Dad, if you look at your chest, you probably didn't even realize it."

As Tie Zhu spoke, the toothless old man couldn't help but be confused, turned his back to Su Lin, looked at his chest, and found that it had already been covered with dense scale armor at some point, and the skin around him was like black dead branches, extending straight towards all parts of his body.

"Why, how could this be." The old man sat helplessly on the ground.

Su Lin saw that the old man suddenly reacted so much, and his spiritual power quietly released, taking into account all the strangeness of the toothless old man's body.

Black stripes, isn't it? Isn't it the same as Lu Xueyan's previous situation where they were controlled by the little lizard?

When he examined the old man's body more closely, he found no trace of the lizard's activity in it.

However, due to the sudden loss of control of the old man's emotions just now, the black object that had accumulated on the toothless old man's chest began to swim around like a wild horse.

Then, the old man's face became darker and darker, and the cloudy color in his eyes disappeared, replaced by a dark color like the black on his chest.

"Truly, truly", from the mouth of the toothless old man suddenly spit out a few bird words that no one understood.

Tie Zhu anxiously went to see his father, but the old man suddenly turned around and bit his neck, and it was also a loss that the old man had no teeth and did not bite off the artery in Tie Zhu's neck.

But Rao was like this, and a piece of flesh was torn off the neck of the iron pillar, and you could vaguely see the bloody scene on his neck, and with a puff of black smoke, it disappeared all over the young man's body in an instant.

After seeing this situation, Su Lin kicked away the old man who was biting the iron pillar in time.

At the same time, he let out an inexplicable low cry from his mouth: "Void fire, burn!" ”

Suddenly, the white flame that Su Lin had left in the old man's body by touching his veins burned continuously with the blood veins around the old man's body in an instant.

The toothless old man had lost his mind after losing his first prey, and he wanted to continue to bite the child who had seduced him.

But when Su Lin appeared in front of him, the old man changed his mind, directly opened his dead black bloody mouth, and threw himself at Su Lin.

But as Su Lin's words froze, the old man's body immediately fell into a furnace, and in his senses, it was as if the whole person was about to be vaporized, and his eyes and brain were full of raging flames.

"What did you do to my dad!" Seeing his father fall to the ground in pain again, Tie Zhu's eyes suddenly turned red, and he copied the iron tool next to him and wanted to find Su Lin desperately.

Perhaps, he really shouldn't trust these officials too much, if he hadn't asked suddenly, his father wouldn't have done this.