The master said not to judge people by their appearance

"Thank you brother! Are you awake?"

As soon as Xie Yunlan opened his eyes, he heard Huang Yaowu knocking on the door. He didn't answer, but quickly got up and dressed, pushed the door and went straight out. Huang Yaowu asked behind him, "Brother Xie, how was the situation last night?" He didn't care reason.

Wei Chengzhi probably acted just like him, he and Wei Chengzhi bumped into each other at the gate of the prefect's mansion, and after a while, everyone sat in the main hall to discuss what happened last night.

Xie Yunlan first gave a brief account of Wei Chengzhi's deep sleep, so they went to the depths of the dream to try to wake him up. After speaking, he asked: "What did you encounter in the dream the night before, sir? What happened to Gesang? "

"Gesang..." Wei Chengzhi told how he met Gesang in the nightmare of massacring the city. He recalled, "After the city gate was breached, I took Gesang to find a place to hide."

At that time, Yuan Rong's iron cavalry was already very close to them, Wei Chengzhi knew that he could not escape, so he wanted to hide Gesang in the closet, while he went to attract the attention of Yuan Rong's people.

But when Gesang realized his intentions, he suddenly pulled him back, and stammered to him, "Follow, follow me."

Wei Chengzhi asked her where she was going, but she didn't answer, she just pulled Wei Chengzhi and ran towards the south of the city.

Not long after they left, they ran into a group of Yuan Rong cavalry. Wei Chengzhi had a bad heart, and he was ready to block these Yuan Rong cavalry and let Gesang run first, but these Yuan Rong cavalry didn't see them. , ran past their hiding place.

Wei Chengzhi didn't notice anything unusual at this time, he just thought they were lucky, but then they encountered other Yuan Rong cavalry one after another, sometimes they were almost directly photographed, but the other party still didn't notice them.

He felt something was wrong, thinking of Gesang Yuanrong's face, according to the statistics he and Huang Yaowu had made these days, there was no Yuanrong person in this dream.

He stopped and refused to go any further. He wanted to ask Gesang's identity, but he saw a sudden fire in Yazhou city. He didn't have time to ask any more questions, he just hugged Gesang tightly, and the two of them were engulfed in flames together.

Then, he returned to Yazhou City eight years ago.

The old Yazhou City has long been in ruins. Wei Chengzhi knew that he was dreaming, and he should wake up earlier, but he still couldn't resist the temptation to see his wife and daughter again in his heart. He returned to his room in Yazhou City. He pushed open the door of the old house with some trepidation, and a seven-year-old girl threw herself into his arms. Since then, he has completely indulged in this dream and forgot everything in reality.

"From this point of view, this girl named Gesang should be the dream owner." After exchanging information between the two parties, Xie Yunlan judged.

"Gesang is the dreamer of this dream of slaughtering the city..." Wei Chengzhi muttered, telling him rationally that this was the truth, but he also felt that Gesang would not have such terrible thoughts, she was obviously just a bit timid and shy child.

Like most girls, she likes beautiful skirts, delicious snacks, and playing with the wooden goshawk that Wei Chengzhi made for her. When they lived together in the dreamland, Gesang never said anything to the Xia people around him. She didn't show any hatred or aggressiveness. On the contrary, she was very afraid of them. The scope of her daily activities was the house and yard of the family. If Wei Chengzhi didn't take her with her, she didn't even dare to go out.

How could such a cowardly child be the dream master who tried to kill all the people in the city?

Xie Yunlan saw Wei Chengzhi's thoughts and said, "She is the dream owner, but the reason for her dream may not be what we first guessed."

Xie Yunlan also described in detail what happened to him and Shen Fan in the second dream. He recalled the courtyard where they were locked up, and said: "Gesang must have stayed in that place, and she may even be here now." There."

"Which place?" Huang Yaowu asked.

Xie Yunlan pondered for a moment, then shook his head.

When he and Shen Fan finally escaped there, the entire Yazhou City began to distort and crack. He became a wolf-headed monster, and now he doesn't even know what those people look like.

"There is a sycamore tree in the backyard of the house, and there is a stable with more than a dozen horses." Xie Yunlan said the clues he knew, "By the way, the identities of those people are very suspicious. They look like a caravan of merchants. But the horses are all good ones out of ten thousand, and they are deliberately starved to look weak and weak."

Huang Yaowu patted the table down as soon as he heard it, and said, "This is a horse smuggler!"

There are large expanses of grassland outside the customs, which are naturally suitable for raising horses. The horse breeds outside the customs are also leaner and stronger than those inside the customs. The cheap horses in the customs can be bought for only a few taels of silver, and the good horses outside the customs are even worth thousands of gold. A hundred times, one can earn so much by smuggling a horse, so naturally some people will take the risk.

They pretended to be traders selling goods outside the customs, and then replaced the good horses outside the customs with the bad horses they brought with them, and then brought these good horses back to the customs as horses for carrying goods. This kind of smuggling has been rampant in the past few years, and The soldiers guarding the city often don't notice that the horses used by these smugglers are different from the original ones.

Until Huang Yaowu took office, he loved horses so much that one day when he was on tour, he saw that the horses in the caravan were not right, and immediately arrested these smugglers.

After punishing a group of people, Huang Yaowu ordered the soldiers guarding the city to pay more attention to the horses passing through the caravan. As a result, the smuggling of horses decreased a lot. The general soldier did not have the eyesight of Huang Yaowu to muddle through the customs after being hungry and thin. Even Xie Yunlan only realized that there was something wrong with these horses after careful inspection.

"I'm going to lead people to search right away, and I will definitely capture these smugglers!" Huang Yaowu led people out angrily, there were still people smuggling under his nose, and he was simply ignored!

The few people staying in the house were not idle, Xie Yunlan said to Wei Chengzhi: "Sir, how is the list of dreamers?"

"It's still a little short, but most of them have been counted." Wei Chengzhi said, "I'll get it for Lord Hou."

After a while, he handed the list to Xie Yunlan. Xie Yunlan flipped through it, looked at the information recorded in the book and said, "There are more dreamers in the west of the city than in other areas."

"Yes." Wei Chengzhi said, "It was also the first person over there to fall asleep."

"It's not the distance that decides whether to be pulled into the dream realm, but the dreamer's consciousness. All these people are people the dreamer knows?" Xie Yunlan repeated what Shen Fan said.

Shen Fan nodded, and he added one more point: "It's not absolute. After the dream realm expands to a certain extent, the dream master can obtain information about people who are familiar with the swallowed person by devouring other people's dreams, even if those people She didn't know each other, but the dream of being swallowed helped her establish a connection with these people, and in the end, she could pull people from the whole world into the dream."

"So Gesang has not seen all of these people in the dream realm," Xie Yunlan said analytically, "but at the beginning, she probably met and had frequent contact with those people who entered the dream?"

"Yes." Shen Fan said, "The more familiar the dream owner is, the easier it is to be drawn into the dream realm."

Then Gesang's current location may be in the west of the city.Xie Yunlan continued to look through the list, focusing on finding the first batch of people who were pulled into the dream realm.

Wei Chengzhi helped him find it together, and the two flipped through it for a while, Xie Yunlan suddenly stopped on one of the pages, his eyes were fixed on a certain name, and some fragments flashed in his mind.

In the second dream, he was inexplicably familiar with the shopkeeper with the wolf head, but he couldn't remember it for a while. Looking at Cao Jinyu's name at this moment, he suddenly remembered that the sheepskin jacket worn by the shopkeeper was similar to that of Cao Jinyu. Jinyu's caravan seemed to be exactly the same, and Cao Jinyu's caravan happened to be eleven people.

He said how a small vendor selling walnuts and melon seeds could afford silk. It turned out that Cao Jinyu's real business was horse smuggling.

Xie Yunlan immediately asked someone to check Cao Jinyu's residence, but before he could find someone, he heard a case reported by the soldiers.

"Master Xie, there is a family of people in the west of the city who died in a strange manner. There are countless stab wounds on the body, but the clothes are intact."

"How many people died?" Xie Yunlan asked immediately.

"Eleven!" said the soldier, "Looks like a merchant, with a lot of goods piled up in the house."

Could it be... Xie Yunlan immediately asked the soldiers to lead the way, and the group rushed to the house where the crime happened. Xie Yunlan looked at the face of one of the deceased, and it was indeed Cao Jinyu.

Cao Jinyu was lying on the bed, as if he was sleeping before he died. He was wearing a comfortable and close-fitting silk underwear. The clothes were not damaged at all, but there were countless cuts on his body, so many that his body was stirred up like a piece of rotten flesh.

The death conditions of the other people were roughly similar, as if they were cut into pieces by a sharp knife that could penetrate clothing in their sleep.

"It's the influence of the dream realm." Shen Fan said, "After the dream realm can affect reality, the injuries they suffer every night in the cycle will be reflected at the same time."

Xie Yunlan also guessed it, but last night they clearly trapped all the Yuanrong cavalry in the ice river, how could Cao Jinyu and his party suddenly die suddenly?

"When did they die?" Xie Yunlan asked Wu Zuo.

After a general inspection, Wu Zuo said, "It should have been the night before yesterday."

The day before yesterday, that was it.Xie Yunlan thought, the day before yesterday was the night they fell, Cao Jinyu and others must have not escaped the disaster of slaughtering the city, and because they were the first to be drawn into the dream realm, the number of cycles was the largest, and the influence of the dream appeared first on them.

They are engaged in smuggling business, usually the gates of the yard are closed tightly, and they don't have much contact with neighbors, so they have not been discovered after their death the night before. Until today, the horses in the stables have eaten up all the food and grass, and they are very hungry. The neighing continued, which attracted the attention of the neighbors, only to find that all the people in this courtyard were dead.

After Xie Yunlan thought it through, he immediately took people to the backyard. The layout of the courtyard was exactly the same as what he saw in his dream. There was a plane tree on the left, a horse stable on the right, and even the water tank used to punish him was exactly the same.

The only difference was the horses in the stable. What he saw in his dream were good horses that had been deliberately starved and skinny, but now the horses in the stable were just ordinary bad horses.

This time, Cao Jinyu died in a dream before he could leave the customs and replace the bad horse with a good one.

So where would Gesang be?

Xie Yunlan ordered someone to search the house inside and out, and even tore open the pockets containing the goods, and there was no trace of the girl.

Xie Yunlan thought for a moment, then walked to the woodshed behind the house. The soldiers checked here, and there was no one there, but Gesang should have been locked up here. Xie Yunlan recalled the scene in his dream, the leaves of the plane trees were withered and yellow, it was late autumn , that is, about a month ago, it was the time when Cao Jinyu and others left Yazhou City and the nightmare cycle began.

What happened during that time period?Where was Gesang taken?

Cao Jinyu and his party all died. This seems to be an unsolved case, but in fact, there is still one person who knows the answer.

"Master, can I still see Gesang in my dream tonight?" Wei Chengzhi asked.

"Perhaps." Shen Fan said, "If she wants to see you, she will naturally appear in front of you."

"Master Hou, Gesang is not a bad boy, why did she create this dream realm, I'll go and find out." Wei Chengzhi said seriously.

"Okay." Xie Yunlan looked at him and agreed.