Li Zhang

When Li Zhang and Zhiqing rushed to the vicinity of Dongping Village, they found that the way into the village was actually guarded by officers and soldiers.Zhiqing and Li Zhang felt uneasy, thinking about what they heard when they were asking for directions, they even wanted to go in and see what happened.So they turned back, detoured around Wujiapo on the back mountain, climbed over the mountain from the hunter's path, saw that there was no one guarding this side, and quietly entered the village.

It was dusk, and there was still a smear of clouds in the sky. It should have been the time when the smoke was curling up, but there was eerie silence all around.Zhiqing felt a little panicked, she held Li Zhang's hand tightly, and walked in step by step.

In the village built against the mountain, many houses have their doors wide open, looking like monsters with their mouths wide open.Farm tools and baskets were scattered in the yard, not a single chicken, not a dog, and not a single person.There was still a faint smell of blood in the air.

Zhiqing clenched Li Zhang's hand even harder.

This is a rather large village, surrounded by the Drum Tower in the center, and the wooden houses are lined up side by side along the mountain. Just looking at these houses, one can imagine the bustle and prosperity of the prosperous people in the past.But now, there are only the low whistling of the wind passing through the alley and the occasional creaking of wooden doors and windows.

The sky gradually darkened, and the surroundings became even more eerie.Li Zhang didn't dare to light the fire, so he pulled Zhiqing close to the corner of the wall, paying attention to the surrounding situation with all his attention.However, until they finished walking around the entire village, they didn't meet a single person or a dead body. The entire village seemed to have disappeared out of thin air!

Li Zhang and Zhiqing faced each other silently for a while, feeling heavy in their hearts, but they knew that it would be useless to stay any longer, so they walked back in the same direction silently.The houses on the mountain gradually become sparser, and the higher you go, the more open the houses are, and finally, the backs of the wooden houses are connected with the forest.

After they went around to look at the last room, they finally turned to the mountain road they came in.

Zhiqing was still in the initial panic and couldn't extricate herself, her heart was full of questions, but she couldn't ask a single word, her eyes were full of the cute smiles of the little sisters, and tears were streaming down her face before she knew it.

Suddenly, the foot of Li Zhang who was walking in front was empty, he reacted very quickly, took Zhiqing's hand and turned his wrist, and pushed Zhiqing a few feet away.There was a ground sink where he was standing. Amidst Zhiqing's suppressed exclamation, Li Zhang had already pulled out the seedling knife and pulled out his body that had sunk into half of his legs, slightly in the air. He stood up and gently landed beside Zhiqing.

They approached the ground carefully, and only then did they see a very small hole, less than three feet in diameter. The hole was dark, but there was a faint sound of breathing.

Li Zhang and Zhiqing glanced at each other, then whispered into the cave: "Who's in there?"

No one answered.

Li Zhang listened intently for a while, exchanged affirmative glances with Zhiqing, and said to the cave again: "Don't be afraid, we won't harm you."

Still no response.

Li Zhang decided to go down to have a look, Zhiqing was a little worried, wanted to stop but held back, and only said "be careful" to Li Zhang softly.

The hole was too small, so Li Zhang inserted the Miao Dao back into his waist and slowly poked it down.The hole was not deep, and Li Zhang quickly stepped on the ground, and the hole was only above his waist.He carefully poked around with his feet and found another horizontal opening, so he squatted down.Soon, he took out a still child from the horizontal hole, and quickly handed it over to Zhiqing.

Zhiqing was very surprised, took the child and sniffed first, and saw that although it was faint but continuous and steady, she felt relieved, then carefully felt his wrist pulse, and said to Li Zhang: "It's okay, I just fainted from hunger." , took the water bag from Li Zhang, and slowly fed the child some water.

This is a three-year-old Miao boy. Although the clothes are sloppy, it can be seen that they were once neat and bright. The silver collar is faintly shining in the moonlight.

They didn't dare to stay, Li Zhang carried the child on his back and Zhiqing set foot on the path, turned around the mountain ridge and dared to light a torch, but looked around but seemed to deviate from the direction.Zhiqing sat on the spot with the child in her arms, Li Zhang built a fire for them, and went to find the way around by himself.Soon he turned back and told Zhiqing that there was a cave not far ahead and a stream nearby.

They settled down in the cave, and Li Zhang cut down hay and branches, laid a floor for Zhiqing and the child, lit a fire, and set up a bamboo tube filled with water.Zhiqing put the child on the floor, broke the dry food by herself, boiled it in a bamboo tube, then picked up the child and fed him slowly, bit by bit, as carefully as a mother.Li Zhang sat across from him and looked at Zhiqing quietly, feeling that she was like that fire, which made people feel warm from body to heart.

Zhiqing looked up and saw Li Zhang looking at her with a smile on her face, blushed, and reminded in a low voice: "Brother should eat something too. Ah! These days, my heart has been disturbed, and I was in a hurry. Forget about that! The veil is wrapped in Yunnan Qiuji’s shortbread, it’s delicious when it’s hot!”

Hearing this, Li Zhang went to take out a plain handkerchief bag from his bag, and when he unwrapped it, it turned out to be a small paper bag with some oil stains oozing from the paper, so he opened it and took out two, clamping them tightly with wooden branches. , put it on the fire and roasted it over and over, and smiled while roasting: "No wonder I have to abduct it, it turns out that my sister is greedy."

"Where is I...greedy." Zhiqing's face turned even redder, pomegranate seeds that seemed to be dripping juice in the firelight, although she knew that Li Zhang was teasing herself, she still retorted seriously: "Zhiqing also only eats pomegranate seeds. After a while, I will share the food with my mother. I will always... remember it."

Seeing that he provoked Zhiqing's sad incident again for no reason, Li Zhang felt very remorseful, and quickly apologized: "It's my fault, sister, don't be sad."

Zhiqing lowered her head to feed the child, and said softly: "Zhiqing is not sad. Mother must be smiling with Daddy now. I am very happy."

As she spoke, she raised her head and looked at Li Zhang, her eyes were shining brightly, as expected, there was no trace of sorrow.

Li Zhang was speechless, but his heart settled down. He got up and sat next to Zhiqing, handed her the baked pancake, and said, "He can't eat too much at once, you should eat it while it's hot."

Zhiqing stepped aside: "You eat first! It's really delicious!"

Li Zhang had no choice but to take down the hot pancake, took a bite, breathed out from the hotness, but sincerely praised: "It smells so good!"

Zhiqing became complacent, seeing that the child had almost eaten, she stopped, and just about to put it on the floor, the child reached out and grabbed her clothes half-consciously, and she hugged her back again.

Li Zhang handed another pancake to her mouth: "Wake up soon?"

"En." Zhiqing replied vaguely, chewing intently.

"I don't know...whether he remembers..."

Zhiqing lowered her head and glanced at the child: "It's better...don't remember."

She thought of the dead Miao Village again, and her heart was filled with chilling horror, and then thinking of the flower-like beauty of the little sisters who had disappeared in that emptiness, she felt an indelible sadness and sadness.

Li Zhang remained silent the entire time, fiddled with the branches with his head down, looking preoccupied.

Zhiqing called him uneasily: "Brother?"

Li Zhang raised his head, looked at the worried Zhiqing, and said with some hesitation: "I...maybe I can find out what happened in Dongping Village."

"real?!"

"Yeah." Li Zhang slowly made up his mind, not wanting to hide it from Zhiqing, so he simply said clearly: "When I went out to investigate the situation, I found that some things from the past have not changed, so I can use them to investigate. It's just that , maybe because of this, I can't hide my suspended animation."

After hearing this, Zhiqing's expression changed a little, and she asked with a somewhat unsteady voice: "Brother, you mean, he...will come to you?"

Li Zhang frowned, remembering Sima Yi's overbearing with no room for turning around, he said with a wry smile, "Maybe."

Zhiqing held her breath for a long time, and slowly calmed down, looked at Li Zhang and said seriously: "Brother has already made up his mind, right? Then, Zhiqing is not afraid to follow her brother to live on the run!"

Li Zhang looked at her steadfastly, and slowly burst into a clear and stable smile: "Okay. We will live and die together, and we will never be separated!"

Zhiqing's eyes lit up again.

Soon, the secret guards operating in Ningzhou received the order to secretly investigate Dongpingzhai, and they were completely carried out because the order's standard specifications were the same.Soon, Captain Ningzhou's actions to massacre the village on the grounds of investigating and suppressing bandits were found out. According to relevant witnesses, although there were no survivors in Dongping Village, the soldiers who participated were not killed. It was enough to secretly buy one or two constitute evidence.Li Zhang looked at it, and continued to ask the dark guards to thoroughly investigate the implementation of the land equalization system in Ningzhou, and at the same time pass the verified information to Beijing with the highest standard.

The intelligence system of the dark guard is Jin Bai's painstaking work. Each state and county has its own network, and the network is managed in layers. The lowest level may be someone in the market who buys news with money. They are the dark guards who have been trained by the dark guard training center, and they are also divided into levels. The collected information is initially screened and summarized by the director, and then reported to the capital for summary.

When Li Zhang was in charge of the dark guard, what he did was the final summary. Due to the special circumstances at that time, he took over the dark guard network in the capital. He is very familiar with the dark guard system and has the highest authority to call it. , knowing how to arrange personnel, how to find key points, how to analyze intelligence and the hierarchical system of intelligence reporting, he naturally knows that the highest-level information can be sent to Jin Bai immediately-he still doesn't know that Jin Bai has been dismissed by Sima Yi, At present, Baishan is only in charge, and Mu Yan is in charge.

At the end of August in the second year of Jianping, as the secret guards continued to investigate the land grabbing incident in Ningzhou, a large number of officials involved in the case surfaced, from the governor down to the county magistrate, almost all of them could not be exempted from responsibility, and among them the biggest profit The author is Pingdu's brother-in-law Tan Jinbo.

Tan Jinbo's official residence in Ningzhou, Situ, is the actual operator of the land equalization system in Ningzhou. In addition to occupying many fertile lands by himself, he forged land deeds at the beginning of the implementation of the land equalization system and sold most of the fertile land that should have belonged to the imperial court to They turned the barren mountain land into confiscated land and distributed it to the landless civilians for cultivation. Because the profits were too high, in order to avoid envy and hatred, most of the officials were dragged into the water and committed evil together.

Li Zhang was worried that Pingdu was also involved, so he specially asked the hidden guard to investigate, and learned that he just turned a blind eye and didn't stop him, so he didn't go too deep.

In September, the report on the Ningzhou land invasion case compiled by Li Zhang was submitted to the capital again with the highest standard.The director of the Ningzhou Dark Guard had already noticed Li Zhang's existence when the Dark Guard began to investigate the situation in Dongpingzhai, and the counter-investigation on Li Zhang had been carried out for a long time, but because Li Zhang was familiar with the Dark Guard Network and very familiar with it, Be cautious and have not been able to expose Li Zhang's face.Li Zhang was worried that they would change their contact methods and channels because of this, but until the investigation of the case was completed, everything remained the same.

At the end of September, Li Zhang, who had been staying in Yunnan for a long time due to a thorough investigation of the land invasion case, left the temporary hut after cleaning up the last traces.He transformed himself into an ordinary-looking young man, went to Qiuji to buy fresh shortbread, and led his horse out of the city.

When passing by the closed Tan Mansion with high doors, Li Zhang casually stopped to take a look, and happened to see inside the wide open door, Tan Jinbo bowed his head and bowed to send Pingdu outside the door, and even held the horse for him himself.Li Zhang couldn't help taking a closer look at Pingdu, thinking about how much he knew about the land invasion case.

Pingdu felt Li Zhang's gaze almost immediately, and glanced coldly and dignifiedly. Li Zhang had already lowered his eyes. Pingdu saw that he was an inconspicuous young man. The more I thought about it along the way, the more I felt that something was wrong.

A team of officers and soldiers who were changing defenses came towards them, and Pingdu suddenly figured out what was wrong: Although the man was dressed as a civilian, his solemn standing posture was neat and tidy like a soldier, and he even had a familiar feeling... Zilai has a superb memory, and he never forgets people when he sees them. Now he repeatedly thinks about the appearance of that person just now, but finds nothing.He turned to think about that person's back, and immediately overlapped with a person!

Li Zhang!

Pingdu broke out in a cold sweat in an instant!

Li Zhang's death was just a trivial matter in the palace, Sima Yi certainly didn't want to publicize it, and General Dingnan, who only had military affairs in mind, never had the heart to gossip.He only knew that when the capital was besieged for the first time, Li Zhang, as Jin Bai's deputy, met once when he took over Zuo Zongping's post. Keeping the spirit, he is the model that he has always asked the soldiers to do, so his first impression of Li Zhang is very good. He has never gossip, and he even inquired about Li Zhang, knowing that he was from the guard camp of King Ning. It also suddenly dawned on me that the guard battalion brought out by the heirs of Duke Wei, who built the Wei army with one hand, is naturally not a spectacle for dudes.

Although later he heard that Li Zhang released Sima Yao privately but was protected by Sima Yiliu, which greatly reduced his impression of Li Zhang, but the fact that Li Zhang was Sima Yi's confidant was more real, so now when he thinks about it, he intuited He thought that Li Zhang was personally sent by Sima Yi to investigate the incident of robbing land and slaughtering villages, so he couldn't help breaking out in a cold sweat.

He immediately ordered the city gate to be closed, and Li Zhang must be left behind before making any plans.