On the 28th, Frost falls.
The temperature in the forest is slightly lower than that at the foot of the mountain. In recent nights, mosquitoes have gradually died down, and the sharp sounds of autumn cicadas have gradually died down. It was not until the end of autumn and the beginning of winter that the south finally felt a bit chilly.
Since that day, Chen Que no longer went hunting. Every day after watering the vegetable garden and feeding the chickens and ducks, he would sit quietly in the yard, mending his clothes in the sun.
Children's clothes are not big and are much easier to make than those for adults. Chen would start working on them as soon as he had some free time. After Danxin came back from releasing the ducks at the river bank, she would sit down and help him tidy up the edges and cut the fabric.
After more than half a month, she had taken out seven or eight sets of small clothes, washed them, folded them, and put them in her own suitcase.
These days, Chen stopped taking the medicine secretly. He didn't feel anything at first, but later the disease became more and more severe. He always avoided Danxin when he was sick, but Danxin was not blind or deaf. He could see why the mute sneaked into the house.
The pain in his body today was so severe that he slipped and sat on the ground as soon as he entered the house.
Danxin, who was outside, heard the noise and hurriedly pushed the door open and squeezed in.
Even though the mute was in such a state, he still had the energy to gesture to her: "It's okay, I just lost my balance for a moment."
Chen Que's due date is approaching, but he has no experience at all. When Danxin was trapped in the brothel, she drank a bowl of contraceptive soup almost every day. She will never have children in this life, so she is not any better than this mute in this matter.
When she was young, she lived in a village and heard about too many women who died of illness due to accidental miscarriage. What's more, this was a case of giving birth in the mountains, without even a midwife. One mistake could result in two deaths.
Although Danxin looked calm on the surface, he couldn't help but feel anxious on the inside.
"Are you about to give birth?" Danxin squatted down and asked him.
Shen shook his head, he didn't know, the pain was almost the same as his usual attacks, except that this time it was particularly sudden and severe.
Danxin helped him onto the bed, then shook out the mattress and covered him with it. After much thought, she decided to go down the mountain.
Seeing that she was about to leave, Shen stretched out his hand on the mattress and gestured hurriedly: "It will be fine in a while, don't go down the mountain."
"I will go down the mountain and call a doctor for you," Danxin said, "I have saved all the money you gave me before."
But Shen shook his head and refused to let her go.
She said coldly: "You don't want to die yourself, why don't you think about it? If you don't hope for it to be born safely, just continue to suffer!"
Shen was startled, and felt a dull pain in his abdomen again. His face became darker and bluer, and finally even the little bit of blood on his lips disappeared, and sweat began to seep from his forehead and nose.
This must have been extremely painful, and he couldn't even raise his hands to gesture.
Danxin tucked the quilt for him, went back to the room to get the silver, thought for a while, went to the kitchen to get an axe, and then hurried down the mountain.
About an hour after she left, the couch was wet, and Shen suddenly had a premonition that she was really about to give birth.
So he gritted his teeth, got up, and walked to the kitchen, intending to boil some hot water. Unexpectedly, before he lit the firewood, he smelled a burnt smell, which seemed to come from the back room. Then he heard the strange cries of chickens and ducks coming from the other side of the fence.
Shen subconsciously pressed the hilt of the knife at his waist. Their courtyard was located in a remote area and few people came here. He lived in the deep mountains and had hardly seen any strangers.
Who could it be?
The dull pain in his abdomen made him a little unsteady, so he had to hold on to the wall with one hand and slowly move over. But the next moment, he saw the backyard fence covered with fluff and blood.
There was not a single chicken or duck left in the pen; they had all been hacked to death with knives.
The burning smell came from a small window in the back room that was not closed. Someone had started a fire in there and the mattress on the bed was all on fire. The flames shone brightly on his face, burning some blood into it.
Shen was stunned, and suddenly heard a strange voice coming from above: "Oh my God, why is his belly like this? Is it a man or a woman?"
"Monster," someone else said, "Isn't he a monster?"
Shen looked in the direction of the voice and saw a few young men rushing out from the woods. They were the people he had asked to chase away that day.
How did these people get here?
"Monster? Ha, even if he is a monster, I will kill him today! That arrow made me lie down for half a month," he said as he led the others downstairs. "That damn guy also deliberately dug more than a dozen stake traps nearby, causing us to lose a brother and almost killing me."
"We must avenge Xiaoliu today!"
"Revenge for Xiaoliu!"
However, Shen just stood quietly in the yard, without moving a single step. In their eyes, they thought he was intimidated by them and was so frightened that he couldn't even move his feet.
These people were holding axes and sticks in their hands, shouting as they rushed over, looking at Shen Que fiercely: "Grandpa is going to cut open your belly today to see what the hell you are!"
Before he could finish showing off, Shen Que suddenly pounced on him, and the unsheathed scimitar was against the vital point of his neck in an instant.
They looked at the man in the yard from afar. They could clearly see his forehead covered in sweat, his face was pale, and he could not even stand steadily. Also, seeing that he had no gun in his hand, they mistakenly thought that he was not aggressive. Who knew that this man was actually a wild beast, which pounced on him and bit his neck.
Seeing that the leader was held at knifepoint, the others dared not move.
"We can talk it over," the man's arrogance suddenly died down. He just wanted to seek revenge and save face, and didn't want to risk his life. "Brother, let's talk it over!"
However, Shen didn't listen to him at all. He hit him on the back of the neck with the back of the knife. The green-skinned man's eyes immediately turned white, and he leaned back and fell to the ground with a "bang".
This group of hooligans was just a mob. Without their leader, they immediately panicked and fled in all directions.
How could Shen Que let them go? He picked up a few stones from the ground and threw them at the back of their heads, knocking down two of them in succession. There was still one who ran away too fast, and Shen Que was about to chase him, but the pain that seemed to crush him came up again, forcing him to almost lose the ability to think.
By the time he recovered, the man had already run away.
No, no, he still had to put out the fire, and the clothes he had just finished folding...
Chen got up and carried several buckets of water back and forth. Fortunately, the fire was put out in time and did not spread. The room was dark, but his suitcase was not burned.
After putting out the fire, he was still worried, so he staggered out and cut the tendons of the three men one by one to prevent them from waking up and taking revenge.
When he was about to cut the man, a scoundrel woke up and saw what he was doing. The man immediately struggled to his feet, hunched over and crawled around. He screamed like a pig being slaughtered: "You, you, you killed someone! You killed someone!"
Shen's wrist was shaking with pain. He reached out and pinched the side of his neck hard. The man's eyes rolled back immediately and he fell silent again.
After dealing with these three ruffians, he was almost exhausted and slumped in the yard, tightly clutching the scimitar in his hand, which was a reward from the prince that year.
Chen Que was originally used to using **, or the flying needles soaked in poison. Xie Shiguan thought he was too violent, saying that it was not decent for a personal guard like him to use these weapons commonly used by assassins.
So he changed for the scimitar. When he first got it, Chen was not used to it, but over time, the scimitar has become a part of him.
But Shen felt that he might be dying soon.
It was as if something was tearing him apart from the inside out, but he was so distressed that he almost lost his mind, and used his sleeve to wipe the blood off the scimitar bit by bit.
Then he got up, touched the wall, and went back to the kitchen, boiled hot water, and cleaned the knife.
Just wait a little longer... He leaned against the uneven stone wall, looking at the blazing fire in the earthen stove.
Just keep boiling it a little longer. If it doesn’t work, use a knife.
His heavy stomach rose and fell slowly with his labored breathing, and his chest seemed to be filled with the smell of blood. He had bitten his lower lip at some point, and to relieve the pain, he rammed against the wall behind him almost in a self-masochistic manner.
The first few times he hit his head hard against the wall, blood came out and dripped down little by little, wetting his eyelashes and spreading in his eye sockets.
Shen's eyes turned pale and the sky outside the window gradually darkened. If the pain continued, he was afraid that he would lose consciousness soon. By that time, there would be two deaths.
If he had to die, he wanted to die in Kyoto, not die here quietly. He had endured so many hardships along the way, so how could he end up here?
He didn't want to die, and he didn't want the baby in his belly to die.
So Shen stood up again, tightly grasped the hilt of the knife, tore off his clothes somewhat powerlessly, gritted his teeth, and stabbed at the swollen abdomen——
The tip of the knife pushed in, and blood immediately gushed out, but Shen gritted his teeth and slowly pressed down.
Just bear it for a while! He gasped in pain, but he comforted himself in his heart that it would be fine if he just endured it a little longer.
At this moment, he suddenly heard a series of footsteps. Someone kicked open the door of the kitchen and shouted his name anxiously and panickedly: "You are crazy, let go!"
Chen Que's eyes were covered with tears mixed with blood. He vaguely saw Danxin's face. There seemed to be two women following behind her. One of them was not young anymore and seemed to be a midwife.
"It's too dangerous to perform a cesarean section to get a baby," the young woman asked Danxin to take the knife from his hand, and then took out medicine powder from the medical box to stop his bleeding. Then she asked anxiously, "When did your water break?"
But Shen didn't have the strength to gesture, and Danxin couldn't explain it clearly.
"Find a cleaner bed. This place is not suitable for giving birth." The woman sighed and turned back to say to Danxin.
The bed in the back room was burned, so the two women had to help Chen Que to Danxin's room. The two people Danxin found seemed very experienced and directed Danxin in an orderly manner.
"Don't let him sleep," the woman turned around, "Mother, please prepare the half ginseng we brought with us. If he can't hold on any longer, boil it and give it to him to drink."
At the same time, in Prince Yan’s Mansion.
However, it seemed as if Chen had really disappeared from this world without any reason. After the arrest warrant was issued, some ambiguous news was reported from time to time in the first half of the year.
But no matter how convincing and decisive the man's words were, in the end the prince always came to nothing when he asked people to investigate further.
In recent months, there is even less news reported in the newspapers.
If you dig three feet into the ground and still can't find the person, does that mean that he is really gone... No, it won't be.
Xie Shiguan clenched the wooden goose in his hand. Not long after it was broken that day, he begged someone to pick it up again. He glued it back together again and even put it next to his pillow before going to sleep, like a pervert in love with his lover.
It was clear that Ri Chen wanted to say something to him, but he didn't take it to heart at all. Thinking about it carefully later, he probably had signs that he wanted to escape -
That sudden resistance, that sudden self-abandonment.
If he had noticed it earlier... would he have let him slip away from his hands?
At this moment, there was a knock on the door outside.
Xie Shiguan calmly took the goose in: "Come in."
The person walked in slowly and knelt on one knee: "Your servant Xiaoman greets His Highness."
Under the candlelight, the man's face was blurred and his voice was almost unrecognizable. He was one of the king's death warriors. Unless there was something serious, these death warriors should hide in the dark and not be seen easily. Xie Shiguan rarely sent them out.
After all, they are death warriors. If they are exposed to the light too much, they will inevitably lose some of their value.
After searching for the mute for such a long time without any news, Xie Shiguan had long been suspicious of Shen Xiangzhi. All this news must have been screened and examined by him before reaching his ears. If he was determined to protect him, the news that would reach his ears would probably only be insignificant.
He had clearly mobilized all his forces, but Shen was just a mute. How could he have such great ability to conceal the truth?
So a few months ago, the prince secretly dispatched two death warriors to go south to investigate. It was not known whether the mute hid too well or the Shen father and son protected him too well, but for a while they could not find his whereabouts.
"Any news about him?"
The dead man was shrouded in candlelight, and his voice was low: "Your Highness, this time I went to the south of the Yangtze River with Guyu, and found this person in a mountain temple in the north of Gusu City. However, the abbot said that this person had left for several months and his whereabouts were unknown."
Xie Shiguan raised his eyebrows and his fingers unconsciously tapped the tiger-shaped porcelain pillow beside him.
"Guyu is currently staying in Gusu City, searching for this person's whereabouts. Once I have any information, I will report it to Your Highness immediately."
"Is this news accurate?" There was too much false information, and his hopes were dashed time and time again. Now he had hope again, but if it was still shattered, he would probably go crazy.
The assassin lowered his head and said, "Nine out of ten, it is said that this man is accompanied by a female slave, which is consistent with what the helmsman said that day."
He paused, then continued, "Mute, tall, with dimples on his cheeks when he smiles... these clues already match most of the pieces."
Xie Shiguan clenched his knuckles unconsciously: "If it weren't for him, I would have killed you."
The assassin bowed and kowtowed: "If it wasn't him, Guyu and I would have offered our heads, but please be at ease, Your Highness."
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