The thirteenth year of Emperor Ling, winter.

A small boat floated through the filthy ditch, and the people who sat on the boat crowded one after another were like shriveled peas, huddled in a narrow pod. The eight-year-old child was forced to shiver by the repeated alternation of cold and heat, and his hands and feet could not control the contact with the people around him.

The boat's draft was deep, making it all the more difficult for the journey, which seemed to have no end.

A lean monkey-like man seized the opportunity to grab the ignorant child, spew out a barrage of local slang, and threw him into the water. The child's strong desire to survive caused him to clutch at the man's arm, and the man's anger grew even more when his untrimmed nails scratched his arm.

A sharp hairpin rested against the monkey-faced man's neck.

"If you mess around now, the whole ship will capsize, and all of us will die." The girl lowered her voice and said, "Either you let him go, or I will pick your veins and kick your corpse down, and the boat will go faster." ”

The phrase "everyone is going to die" woke up the lifeless crowd, and a bunch of resentful eyes shone on the monkey-faced man.

The monkey-faced man stiffened for a moment, then slowly put the child down. The girl took the child by the arm and pulled him to her side.

"When you get to the ghost market, you still care about other people's lives and deaths, and you don't know how you will die when the time comes." The monkey-faced man sneered.

The girl turned a deaf ear, put away the hairpin, and touched the child's forehead. The child was tormented to the point that his teeth trembled, and he looked at her in horror. Her face was dirty, smeared with layers of sludge, and her wide, dirty clothes smelled of a strong stench.

The girl sat beside him without saying a word.

After a while, the bumpy ship under him stopped, but the child had long since lost the strength to open his eyes. In a blur, he felt himself lying on a thin back, and the tip of his nose was not the familiar smell of wheat, but a peculiar smell.

The child's discomfort overwhelmed her and she vomited on her back.

As he was terrifying whether he would be thrown down, the man paused and walked on. The ghost market was cold and dark, moss was growing everywhere, and he was placed in an inconspicuous corner, wrapped in a coat that did not belong to him.

The man's footsteps faded away, but the child didn't even have the strength to stretch out his hand to entangle her.

He almost thought he was going to die.

Just as he was about to lose consciousness, a bowl of boiling soup was handed to his lips. The child struggled to open his eyes and look at the face that was covered in black mud.

"You have malaria," said the maiden, "and if you don't want to die, listen to me." ”

The child took her hand and gulped down the hot water mixed with the fragrance of plants and trees. The warm current hit the limbs, and the child finally regained his weak strength, looked at her and asked, "What is this?" ”

"Artemisia annua." The girl put the broken porcelain bowl on the ground and rested against the messy clutter.

The child leaned over and asked, "Who are you?" ”

The girl was silent for a moment, and then said, "Curiosity kills the cat, you know?" ”

The south was hit by a plague of locusts, and the emperor increased taxes, and under the oppression of natural and man-made disasters, starvation was everywhere. The child could barely tell from the girl's accent that she was from Yanzhou, but there were many contradictions in her.

For example, she has delicate fingers, and her ten fingers do not touch the spring water, but she is hard-working, capable, agile and witty, like an old river and lake that has been crawling in the red dust of the market for decades; For example, she can't read and write, and even relies on people to read notices to her, but she has a lot of knowledge about all kinds of messy knowledge and can make good decisions.

The girl cured the child's malaria with boiled water in Artemisia annua, and then she had a little tail. He watched the girl go from a homeless person to a respite in the ghost market with her knowledge and forbearance.

Her face is always dirty, but her eyes are soft and bright, like a lotus petal. Occasionally, in the middle of the night, when no one was around, she would wash away the dirt from her face. The child stared at her jade-colored face, and only felt as if she was looking up at a bright moon.

In the fifteenth year of Emperor Ling, winter.

The child ran down the mossy stone steps, holding warm food in his arms. The small room was cold and damp next to the drainage ditch, and the girl put a bag of lime in the corner of the wall, so that the air was dry and refreshing.

"Tonight is Chinese New Year's Eve." The child put the food on the table, looked up as if pleading, and said to her, "I wrapped my clothes all the way back, and they are still hot." ”

In a ghost market, it's hard to get a bite of hot food.

The girl looked back at him, reached out and pulled away the shirt from his chest, and found that the skin on his chest had been blistered. The girl sighed, picked up the blisters with a fire-burned silver needle, and applied homemade ointment to the awkward child.

"I can eat anything, don't do it again." The girl said.

The child was a little frustrated and said, "Am I doing it wrong again?" ”

In fact, the girl never criticized him, she was tolerant and gentle to the point of being perfunctory, and there were very few things that could get her attention. The child wants to learn things from her, and she also teaches them with all her money, and never hides it. But the child always felt that she was far away from him, too far away to get close.

The girl was silent for a moment and said, "I'm leaving." ”

The child's eyes widened.

There was only one lamp in the stone-stacked house, which burned all day in the dark ghost market and kept it on her desk. The child goes out of the ghost market once every half a month and brings back a notice of abandonment by the government. The notices were neatly folded by her in chronological order and bound into a book with a needle and thread.

The child doesn't understand why she cares about the notices.

The people who live in the ghost market, even if the ground is turned upside down, has nothing to do with them. They were abandoned by the Imperial Dynasty and were maggots crawling in the ditches. When the emperor was glorious, the grace of the Ming monarch did not protect them; When the imperial dynasty declined, they were as small as grasshoppers, and they were powerless to recover. They passively and numbly watched the torrent of the times run over them, shattered and unconscious.

For more than a year, the girl quickly learned to read and write by sorting out books for the owner of the ghost market and doing things for the owner of the large and small workshops. She learns so fast that the child has the illusion that she is a talented person, and that the knowledge is only awakening in her mind.

"You can stay here." The girl said, "If you don't want to, you can take the money with you and go somewhere else." But before the thirteenth year of Xiangfu, you must leave the imperial capital and go south. ”

"Why?" The child was puzzled and said, "Lucky charm...... Thirteen years? ”

"Xiangfu" is undoubtedly an era name, but it is not the era name used today. An emperor may not have only one era name in his life, and even the emperor himself may not know when to change the next era name and what to change.

This sentence is inexplicable.

"Why do you want to leave all of a sudden? You don't like it here, I can walk with you! The child grabbed her hand urgently, and tears fell from her eyes in panic.

The girl hesitated for a moment, as if she had made a great deal of determination, and firmly brushed away his hand, and said, "I will only say this today, and you must not tell anyone, otherwise you will be killed." ”

A subtle wind crept in through the cracks in the house, making a thin whimper, like a ghost crying. The light behind the girl jumped slightly, as if an invisible ghost in the air trembled slightly. Her eyes were cold and mournful, like the way she looked at him for the first time—like she was looking at a wounded animal.

A kind of sadness after looking at the big picture.

"The Great Zhou died in the thirteenth year of Xiangfu."

——

Ten years of auspicious charms, midsummer.

"She left all the money and took the notices with her. Later, I learned that she learned about the operation order of the Great Zhou from those notices, and also understood the hopelessness of the Great Zhou. The ghost city lord whispered, "So she gave up the imperial capital and went to the north of the city." ”

During the reign of Emperor Ling, the north was not a peaceful place, and she was not sure where she could go, but she had a belief that supported her to move forward for no reason.

Everyone at the table fell silent.

Only Chu Zhixia pinched the flesh of his palm.

As early as when he was in Binzhou, Tan Yun told Chu Zhixia that the prescription for curing the plague was left by Shen Yu. There are many kinds of plagues, and in the era in which Shen Yu lived, there were no similar epidemics. It was as if she had imagined Binzhou's situation out of thin air, so she left a prescription.

At that time, Chu Zhixia had no thoughts at all, and "mother" didn't even have a vague shadow in her mind, just an unattainable noun. This incident only added a stronger mystery to the word "Shen Wei".

However, at this moment, the unbelievable proverbs were laid out in front of Chu Zhixia, and she realized the huge secret hidden in her mother.

"I saw her again, she was already the princess of Zhenbei, imprisoned as a hostage in the Akiba Mountain Residence. She was pregnant with your brother and was being watched by the Spirit Emperor, and I was too weak to take her away at that time. ”

The ghost city lord laughed lowly, his voice hoarse and helpless, "I asked her what that proverb meant. She said that if the king of Zhenbei won a great victory in the north, this proverb might be broken. ”

The king of Zhenbei won, and Shen Yu also died.

The ghost city lord didn't see her for the last time, and when he heard the news, he was still wandering on the rivers and lakes. All dust returned to dust, dust returned to dust, and ominous proverbs seemed to disappear with the death of the master.

"When Emperor Jin ascended the throne and changed the name of the year to Jingtai, I didn't take that proverb to heart. Until the twentieth year of Jingtai, there was a great drought in the world, and at the suggestion of Qin Tianjian, the emperor changed the name of the year to 'Xiangfu'. It was only then that I realized that the proverb was being fulfilled. ”

For so many years, the ghost city lord has been looking for blue-eyed snake gallbladder, just to refine the elixir that is claimed to be able to communicate yin and yang and foresee the future.

He wanted to verify Shen Yu's proverbs with his own eyes.

Chu Zhixia tried his best to suppress his slightly twitching throat and asked calmly, "What do you see?" ”

"In the thirteenth year of auspicious charms, in winter, the snow is broken." The ghost city lord spit out these words slowly and clearly, and looked at Chu Zhixia with a straight look in his eyes.

The barrier in Chu Zhixia's heart collapsed.

She knew that this was not a hallucination caused by the ghost city lord after taking the pill, but something that had already happened once, and it was likely to happen again. Chu Zhixia faintly seemed to hear the cold sneer of the ghosts and gods from the high heavens, mocking mortals for vainly trying to shake the established destiny of heaven.

"You will die, your brothers will die, Yunzhong County was slaughtered for three days and three nights, and none of them survived. Yongxueguan was defeated, and the Beidi people were like bamboos, and they took the hinterland of the Central Plains, and the Great Zhou Guozuo was cut off. The ghost city lord stared at Chu Zhixia and said word by word, "With your character, you didn't refute me because you knew it was true. ”

"That's not true."

Chu Shixia came back to his senses, looked back at the eyes of the ghost city lord, and said stubbornly: "The snow pass will not be broken, and the clouds will not be broken." The Beidi people have been eyeing each other for many years, and it is a matter of time before they go south. If the Chu family can block it once, it can block thousands of times. ”

The ghost city lord laughed out loud without concealment, not to mock Chu Zhixia's courage, but to laugh at her stubbornness: "The scale of the northern expedition of the King of Zhenbei is unprecedented, and even this has not broken this proverb. Nowadays, there are new policies that are not stable, the situation in Gyeongju and Binju is unstable, and the treasury is empty; Later, the imperial court wanted to negotiate peace with Beidi, everyone in the court was cowardly, and the emperor was afraid of the Chu family's high merit. ”

Shen Zhou, who was silent, suddenly stood up according to the table, looked at the ghost city lord condescendingly, and said with a dangerous look in his eyes: "I am grateful that you saved her, but if you talk to her like this again, I will cut your tongue." ”

Luo Shuangyi, who was listening quietly at the table, heard this, and looked up at the ghost city lord, like a beast waiting for an opportunity to move.

The ghost city lord choked at the unreasonable bloody hand man, and his arrogance disappeared for the most part.

"How do you know I can't win?"

Chu Zhixia's three souls and seven spirits suddenly withdrew from the bloody memories, and calmly looked at the ghost city lord and asked rhetorically. Chu Zhixia has stepped on his own blood and other people's lives all the way, not to be tied in front of fate. She arrogantly pressed her net worth and her family's rise and fall on the gambling table, and the gambling gods were unbearable to be enemies of others.

Master Dream Machine, Huo Wensong, Huo Wenqing, Huo Wenbai, Cao Jie, Deng Yu, the undispersed souls of these people are still lingering in Chu Zhixia's shallow sleep late at night.

There was no turning back for her.

If there is a south wall in front of her, she can only hit it and not look back.

"I kindly advise you." The ghost city lord frowned, "She saved me, and I owe her my life." You are her daughter, and I don't want you to die under this proverb. You and your brothers are retreating at this time, and there may be a glimmer of life. ”

"Even if we can make a living, we are far from the Chu clan after the Snow Pass." Chu Zhixia also shook his head and said, "The Chu family has retreated, do you want to let the people of the fly camp in the DPRK and the Central Government deal with Beidi?" I am afraid that in less than thirteen years of auspicious charms, the Great Zhou Dynasty has been destroyed. ”

"What does that have to do with you?!"

The ghost city lord jumped up unbearably, spun around in place anxiously, and said angrily: "Shen Yu is like this, and you are like this!" In the end, your Chu family is inherited by blood, and it is all a strong seed; Or is she just not a family with the fierce seed of the Chu clan in your clouds, and she doesn't enter the door? ”

The ghost city lord's eyes were blood-red and said: "Your heart seems to be very big, pretending to be a country and a mountain, but it is very small, and there is no place for the people in front of you." ”

The ghost city lord seemed to be reprimanding Chu Zhixia, who didn't know what to do, and it seemed to be complaining about Shen Yu who abandoned him. He has grown from a child who can't help himself to the current lord of the ghost market, but he still can't forget the light in the cramped house.

Although the lamp was not burned for him, it was only inadvertently illuminated his dim life, which was enough for him to comfort in this life.

He guarded this proverb for most of his life, living for it and dying for it, thinking that he would have no worries after it was broken, but there was an extra Chu Zhixia. Just as the ghost city lord couldn't save Shen Yu back then, now he can't save Chu Zhixia.

It's like history repeating itself.

Chu Zhixia avoided answering and said, "You can go." I will repay you for saving your life, and I will try my best to meet your requirements. This is the only thing I can't promise you. ”

"Even if you know it's a dead end, you won't retreat?" The ghost city lord said hoarsely.

"No retreat."

"Really...... Seeds. ”

"I believe that everyone has already guessed who my mother is when they see this."