"My lord, I really don't know what that guy did." The man looked up in horror at the iron man who had rushed into the house with a group of soldiers, and he couldn't figure out what big trouble he was getting into.

The city guard, who usually called him a brother, hid behind the two soldiers, his eyes nailed to the floor, without any intention of helping a few words for the silver coins stuffed every month, and even shrank back, for fear of having anything to do with it.

He usually does some non-compliant business, and his talents are diverse, from the transfer of small amounts of personal property, the collection of fixed bunk security fees, to the special dice lead metal pouring technology, and the scope and flow of the development have a small reputation in the industry. But Xiang Self has a clear positioning and a good point, how can he not put on such a big scene to arrest him, right?

However, it turned out that someone on the front foot came to tell him that the atmosphere on the street was not right and remembered to avoid the limelight, and someone on the back foot kicked his door open. It was still a big silver foot equipped with shin armor and foot armor, and kicked all the dirty words he was about to blurt out back into his stomach.

The group punched him up as soon as they entered the door, followed by an inexplicable interrogation about a lead dice victim.

Poor God, he just let his subordinates go to the door twice, thinking that the guy had a serious servant job, how could he pay back the part, but he hadn't done anything, so he was pushed to the ground by the east window.

"Did you force him to do this?"

What the hell did he do? The man lying on the ground only wanted to know this now, but the other party seemed to have tacitly acquiesced that he had something to do with the matter, and had no intention of explaining it at all.

"I really don't know! My lord, why don't you go through the accounts! Just below the corner floor. "The sword was on his neck, and there was nothing in his body that didn't hurt.

Now I really want to cry without tears, and I can't find the direction if I want to confuse an answer. Fortunately, he is still a bit of an outstander, and literacy and bookkeeping are the basic professional qualities required for debt collection.

"Maybe a different place will make it easier for you to remember, get out of the jail and think about it." The submissiveness of the man in front of him made Diego more and more agitated, and he waved his hand impatiently, and immediately a soldier stepped forward to take another unlucky man away.

He could see that the leader of this dynamic social group, who had a bit of a reputation among his neighbors, really didn't know anything about things.

But who cares? This guy was just one of a large number of people affected by the incident, and was essentially similar to him, the head of security at Rivers University.

Rivers University, which is equivalent to half of Westminburg's backyard, invites to an important banquet disappear out of thin air, and the suspect also disappears.

Approximately equally, someone broke into the Duke's backyard and took away the Duke's guests, considering that he was not a very patient person, he had better do something before the Thunder Fury fell, otherwise his fate might not be much better than the "results" that had just been dragged away.

It must be said that this is not an easy task, most of the people who participate in the banquet have another layer of identity that can be inherited, and they do not hesitate to contribute to issues involving their own safety.

Now the armed forces in the city are like hunting dogs out of the cage, biting people when they see them, and the relatives who have been with that damn servant are basically all caught, neighbors, relatives, and good friends.

But this can't help him, and the people who can get this university security director will not have bad brains. Isn't it okay for Diego to slap his thigh and develop reverse thinking to find negative related people who have a bad relationship?

This constructive angle proved to be meaningful, and given the notoriety of the leader of the social vitality group, it was easy to dig into the fact that he sent someone to collect gambling debts.

"Well, I've caught one." Knight Diego took off his helmet, still frowning, and took the ledger he found from the corner and looked through it.

It's not enough to catch one, and by the way, filling in his subordinates is just to prove that he hasn't done nothing, and he has to make more meaningful results to make up for his mistakes.

Listening to the news revealed by those colleagues who were also directly transferred by the duke, the matter has already become a bit clear. With his ability, he can't expect to play any key role, otherwise why didn't he choose to stay in Westminburg like Martin back then?

Thinking of this, Diego sighed again, feeling that the future was not bright, and waved back from time to time to look at the servants and soldiers who were scattered with coins on the table, "It's yours, hurry up, we'll leave in a while." ”

The crowd cheered and praised the knight's generosity, and gathered around the table to be distributed by Diego's hand. Diego was not very interested, and walked to the door with the ledger in his hand to flip through it, leaving room for his subordinates.

As a man with a flexible brain, Diego's grades in knight training were average, but his grades in the minor literacy and simple accounting courses were really good, which was used to prepare them for management after they had their own estates in the future, but unfortunately they were not included in the ability evaluation.

But perhaps because he had spent so much time at Rivers University, he had always felt that reading and writing was an important skill, and it came in handy, for example.

The quality of education of the owner of this account book is worrying, his vocabulary is poor, and in many places he uses simple pen and self-created symbols instead, but the writing attitude is quite serious, and reading at the level of Diego Knight is overkill.

He flipped through a few pages, but the content was lackluster, and the narrative was not very clear, enough to convict but not enough to figure out what had been done.

Diego didn't want this, he wanted to find out the transactions inside, to see if there was anything that could be explained as something related to the current events, if he couldn't explain it, he could also arrest someone and force it to explain, anyway, it wasn't a good bird.

This gang controls pickpockets on a street, extorts money, opens small black casinos, controls wins and losses through some shoddy means to make people owe large debts, and then lends money to squeeze out the last bit of oil.

They don't mind accepting any form of mortgage when the other party can't pay, including metal, property, or even people.

"Hell-deserving thing." Diego cursed, kicking the tied culprit hard, the pointed boot tips on the toe guards were no less effective than an awl, and the pain caused him to roll around a few times.

Diego had heard of such a face-damaging thing happening in the city, but he didn't expect it to be so rampant. In the past year alone, they have detained eight or nine people, and according to the seemingly low and high interest rate, they know that it is impossible to redeem them.

But he didn't see any of those people here, not a single one.

It is also reasonable that the gang cannot keep useless people for a long time, and there is no place for them to be useful in the business, so the most normal choice is to sell them and turn them into tangible benefits.

As the jingle of coins in the house subsided, Diego almost lost his patience and sped up his pages looking for buyers.

It can be seen that there are still few people who dare to do this kind of business in Westminster, and the two last year were sold separately after a few pages at the earliest. This made Diego a little puzzled, at this rate, the rest of the people should still be there.

In the last few pages of the record, roughly this year, he found the reason why the same buyer took at least six people one after another.

For such a large transaction, the buyer was given a very simple single letter or symbol on the books.

【One Circle】

"Who is this?" The ledger is laid out in front of the leader, and Diego points to the stick figure circle to find his next target. In terms of personal likes and dislikes, he felt that this buyer would be a good fit to appear on his list of achievements.

……

……

Searching for rat ants hiding in dark corners often inevitably involves setting foot in places that would undermine the knight's dignity, and Diego had been prepared for this, but he never imagined that there would be such a place not far from the city, which seemed to be detached from all traces of human creation.

According to his captive, what they were looking for was a wild crossing hidden in the area, controlled by the buyer who was only represented by the circle, and who was dealing with some business and tax avoidance that was inconvenient through the normal port.

Leaving the main road and turning into the wrong path where the grass was overgrown and the ground was almost invisible, the man bound by the rope led the procession forward, and the other end was firmly held in the hand of the servant, and circled several times.

Intuitively, they came to a forest near the river. Far from the development direction of towns and villages, on the hard-to-land that no one has ever thought of exploiting, some trees blessed by the water of rivers grow like crazy, retaining the disorderly and luxuriant appearance that nature should have.

Unlike the tall, straight oak trees that were cultivated in the universities, the varieties and shapes of the trees here are repulsive, as if the specially disrupted, confused branches thrive overhead, and the shadows of the trees that shade the sky weigh down the soft and crooked trunks of the inferior trees into a situation that threatens to lodge like weeds.

In fact, it was true that their path was repeatedly stopped by sloping logs. The corpses of these trees have rotted in the ground like the branches and leaves of the roof, turning into waist-high grass nutrients, and the damp cracks of the wood burst out of the colorful fungi.

Diego carefully stepped over the tall grass-buried barriers, inevitably drawn to the mushrooms.

Of course, those who grew up in the local area have not seen these things that enrich the table, but they grow here with amazing vigor, like the pompous flower arrangement art favored by some nobles, except that the flowers are replaced by brightly colored fungi and clustered together.

Brightly colored and rich to the point of being slightly unrealistic, the umbrellas, shingles, and bead-like varieties grow from the grinning, sunken defects on the lodging trunks, and the wet and soft mushrooms cover large areas of green and black bark.

The kind of exuberance on dead plants is so gorgeous that it borders on erosion, like the product of some kind of moldy cheese and jewelry hybridization.

A servant stepped on a section of rotten wood in a trance. With a slight clatter, his foot sank in, revealing that the interior had been completely hollowed out and occupied by fungi.

The strange touch of the crumbs of the umbrella cover and the slippery mushroom made him pull his foot out immediately, as strange as stepping into a living carrion.

As they went deeper into the woods, as they approached the wild crossing, it became more and more apparent, and even on the trees that were still erect, they would accidentally touch a clump of wet umbrella covers, and each time they landed, they suspected that they had broken the soft object.

The clumps of vegetation still obscured their view, and the leader had to stop frequently to discern the route. Holding his slave in the grip of his nose, he struggled to hold back a sneeze, and whispered uncertainly, "Do you smell like dust?" ”

Diego took a deep breath and made a silent gesture, "No, whisper......"

"Bell!"

The cacophony of metal scraping between them rang out, and a tremor in his waist and abdomen scattered the knight's second half of his sentence, and he went through half a breath of confusion as he watched a wooden pole with a pointed head and tail feathers bounce off and fall into the grass.

If it weren't for the fact that he had hallucinated because of his comfortable life for too long, the thing that had stayed in his vision for a moment seemed to be ...... An arrow?

"Enemy attack!"

(End of chapter)