It gets dark very early in winter.
By the time we had finished our scones and lamb shanks, it was pitch dark.
In the darkness of the night, only the campfire in front of the tent lit up with a warm and hot light.
"Miss Wei, take a rest first." The five people had already divided the order of the night watch, and Zou Yun happened to be one person in front of Wei Yunlan. "I will wake you up when it's your turn."
"Okay." Wei Yunlan nodded slightly and led Heiyun into the tent.
In order to resist the wind and cold, the tent they brought was extra thick and spacious. Not to mention five people, even if ten people were lying down, it would be more than enough.
When going out, people no longer care about the separation between men and women. They just pulled a curtain in the middle of the tent, and soon they could hear snoring from the other side of the curtain.
Beside Wei Yunlan, Heiyun was lying on one side and Suihe was lying on the other side. After a while, they also fell asleep accompanied by the even breathing of the man and the dog.
Just after the Yin hour, Zou Yun gently woke Wei Yunlan up. The others around them were still asleep. The two looked at each other and quietly exchanged positions.
Wei Yunlan had intentionally moved lightly, but the moment she walked out of the tent, Heiyun, who had been lying next to the bedding, suddenly stood up and followed her.
"Why are you up too?" Wei Yunlan walked down to the fire and reached out to rub the top of Heiyun's head who was squatting close to him.
Heiyun raised his head slightly and rubbed Wei Yunlan's palm twice.
"You must be tired after traveling these days. Come in and rest for a while."
As soon as Wei Yunlan finished speaking, the dog's squinting eyes suddenly opened, and the tightly closed mouth also opened slightly.
He quickly put a finger in front of his mouth and nose to remind the others to keep quiet.
"Okay, you stay here with me."
A man and a dog sat side by side in front of the fire. Wei Yunlan took out a dried cured duck from the space. This was the one she bought from the butcher shop in the capital before she reunited with her mother's family.
After roasting the duck on the fire for a while, Wei Yunlan placed it in front of Heiyun.
Although Heiyun is smaller than the wild wolves in the mountains, his biting ability is just as strong as that of a wolf. He ate a whole duck in just five bites, leaving even the bones intact.
After eating, he returned to squat beside Wei Yunlan.
Like a guardian angel, he always stays by Wei Yunlan's side.
Looking at the jumping flames in the campfire, Wei Yunlan reached out and placed his hand on Heiyun's shiny and sleek back, combing its hair from time to time.
As if talking to himself, he whispered: "Heiyun, how did you get along when my great-grandfather was around?"
“Was the space back then much more beautiful than it is now?”
"I seem to have seen it in a dream. The space looked like this at that time. Birds were singing and flowers were blooming. It was full of vitality. You could enter and exit the space at will."
Having said that, Wei Yunlan tried again.
As usual, since she woke up Black Cloud from the space, she has never been able to send it back. Even if she concentrated on sending Black Cloud into the space, Black Cloud still sat beside her calmly.
To date, the largest living creatures she could store in her space were the group of poisonous scorpions. Wei Yunlan vaguely guessed that her space was gradually recovering its vitality, and now she could only store things with weaker vitality. When the space became larger and more vitality was restored, she would be able to store the black cloud and even the war horses and wild dogs.
I just don’t know how long it will take for that day to come.
As he was thinking, Wei Yunlan suddenly realized that something seemed to be falling from the sky.
Glancing sideways, white dots fell on the black and shiny hair of the black cloud, which was particularly obvious.
"It's snowing." Yun Lan spread out his five fingers, palms facing up, and those white dots fell on his palms and immediately melted into a puddle of water.
The palms become moist.
Along with the snowflakes, there was also an increasingly howling sound of the wind.
The hemp ropes used to secure the tent began to sway in the fierce cold wind. Wei Yunlan gathered his cloak tightly, stood up and walked to the side of the tent, took out the stones that had been stored in the space when the gorge collapsed, and pressed them on the two ropes that were shaking the most.
The tent, which was originally shaking, immediately became stable again.
In the drizzle of snow, the bonfire seemed to be going out.
Seeing this, Wei Yunlan followed the method used to light the bonfire before, lit a few more torches and threw them into the bonfire.
In the snow, the bonfire was burning, the sparks were jumping, the firewood was burning, and the crackling sound kept ringing in my ears.
Not long after, the people in the tent woke up one after another.
The snow didn't fall heavily, but it kept falling.
The sky was gradually getting brighter. It had been snowing for half the night, covering the originally barren plain with a thin layer of silver. When the sun shone on it, the thin layer quickly faded away.
Chen Yan and Wang Lu packed up the tent.
Zou Yun put out the bonfire and said to Wei Yunlan who was standing beside him, "Fortunately it didn't snow heavily, so it won't delay our journey."
Chen Yan also nodded and sighed, "Fortunately, we decided to take a detour through the plains to the north of the Helian tribe, otherwise it would be too dangerous to take the mountain road in the snow."
"Even on the plains, we can't let our guard down." Wei Yunlan did not look relaxed. Although it was the first time she faced such a situation, she knew that it was not easy to walk in such a place with endless surroundings and no reference points.
If you are not careful, you will lose your way.
Especially when the snow is heavy and the sun is hard to see.
Back on the road, Wei Yunlan began to prepare to prevent such danger.
She took the perfumed powder from her dowry box and sprinkled it at regular intervals along the way.
This is the scented powder used for fumigating clothes, produced by a shop under the name of Duke Xu's mansion, and the secret recipe is never passed on. The fragrance is very light but very unique. If you sprinkle a little on such a vast land, ordinary people can't smell it at all, but it can't hide it from Heiyun's dog nose.
In this way, even if the sky and the earth are covered with heavy snow, you won’t know which is east, south, west or north.
They can also know which is the road they have already traveled and which is the opposite direction they want to go.
The light snow continued to fall for three days and three nights without stopping.
On the fourth day, as expected, it started to snow heavily.
Their route was to go north along the plain on the east side of the mountain range in the north of Yandu Gorge, and then go around the mountain range to the west when they reached the end of the mountain range or the area where the mountain slope was slightly lower.
At the moment, the surroundings are flat, but in fact they are not far from the towering mountains.
The snow fell heavier and heavier, and Wei Yunlan became more and more uneasy, as if he had a premonition that something was going to happen.
When she lost count of the number of times, slowed down, and looked around, Zou Yun asked, "Is there something wrong here?"
I couldn't see anything through the hazy white snow.
Faintly, one seemed to hear a rumbling sound.
Wei Yunlan's expression was startled, and he exclaimed: "Not good, let's get out of here quickly!"
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