Liu Guanzhang and his direct troops slowly returned to Hanzhong to prepare and celebrate the achievements, and discussed the matter of letting Li Su go to Beijing to make a statement.

Liu Yan cut off the construction of fortifications at Jianmen Pass and Diaoyu City and entered the Xichuan Road. It is still secretly carried out now. It will take at least half a month later. The new fortifications are somewhat large, so Zhao Yun and Zhou Tai can detect it. When Liu Bei gets the notice, it will be at least June and July.

Therefore, when Li Su entered Beijing, of course, he could not know all this, so he could not make adjustments to this matter. He could only deal with it after he came back.

On the night of May 22, the Hanzhong Prefect's Mansion in Nanzheng.

Hundreds of giant candles were inserted into the lobby, which made the whole room bright and the atmosphere of the celebration banquet was extremely warm.

Liu Bei was drunk and the heat of the summer at the end of the fifth month of the lunar calendar, the wind and gangsters of Emperor Gaozu also came up. He sat and opened his official robe, drank with his chest exposed, and a maid next to him fanned hard.

"Drink! Brothers, all eat and drink well today! Don't get drunk! Let Boya, you, be healthy! Don't let him go if you don't pour it tonight! When the three of us feed mosquitoes in Bashan, smell the miasma, you should stay in Nanzheng every day to take a bath, drink sweet soup and ice wine."

As Liu Bei drank the sweet soup with iced wolfberry sauce like this, he laughed and scolded with smugness, Guan Zhang was not polite and grabbed Li Su to drink wine.

Li Su argued with joy: "No, no, I'm not idle in Nanzheng. I've sold the educational lottery. If you don't believe it, you can look at the accounts - I sold tens of millions of dollars, paid more than nine million yuan in bonuses, and made a net profit of two million yuan. Don't think that the money is small, this is just a pilot.

Moreover, I also sent a letter to Xicheng County in the east, so that the local tyrant Shen Kai gave up his faith in Zhang Lu and obeyed the jurisdiction of the court. I really couldn't drink it anymore... Gulululu..."

Li Su also worked hard to drink less. Usually, he didn't like to report on his work. Now he used all the trivial little contributions to express his merits.

"Okay, okay, don't force him to drink it if you can't drink it. Let's drink it ourselves! Just drink the wolfberry soup and accompany us for fun!" Liu Bei saw that he was not fake and knew his alcohol tolerance, so he signaled Zhang Fei to let go, and then the group of them became happy.

While drinking, he sighed: Li Su really understands life and can live! Liu Guanzhang has been beaten to death in Brazil for more than a month. After he came back, he saw Li Su fiddling out a lot of things to improve his quality of life.

On the eve of the banquet, Liu Bei went to Li Su's Marquis' Mansion and saw some craftsmen building copper pipes for water diversion. Liu Bei was shocked at that time, thinking that Li Su was so miserable that he wanted to be as debaucherous as the emperor, and finally had to take a shower with a copper fountain.

Later, I asked and found out that I wanted to take a shower because it was hot. Although Liu Bei didn't understand what it was about to shower for a while, his intuition told him that when Li Su made it, he must also let the craftsman make it a set, so that it would be fun when it was hot in summer.

However, Li Su made these copper pipes not only for showers, but also had greater ambitions. He was to create a thing that could be "warm in winter and cool in summer" - find a place where you could dig a deep well, insert this copper pipe system, and then build a water drawer to drive the ice water of the deep well, and turn it around the inner wall of the house for a few times through the curved copper pipes, take away the heat, and then pour it back into the well.

This thing is clearly a local water-cooled air conditioner. Liu Bei doesn't recognize it, but he believes that what Li Su has figured out must be enjoyable.

After entering Sichuan, half of my mind can be devoted to the great things in the world! I’m lazy all day long and thinking about what to do! And looking at which thin copper pipes are, it’s not easy to cast. If you want to use it for a room, the copper material consumed is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars of copper! It’s so extravagant!

Copper tube showers and water air conditioners are just the tip of the iceberg, so they have to be tried slowly. I guess they may not be able to be used this summer. However, Li Su still has many immediate snacks for the cooling of May, which opened Liu Bei's eyes after returning.

Ice drinks are no longer rare in the late Han Dynasty. Rich people will be chilled, but in terms of variety, everyone is accustomed to iced low-altitude rice wine or fresh juice.

Li Su asked someone to buy expensive peppermint oil from Hu Shang and mix it into sour plum soup to ice, which instantly made Liu Bei doubt his life and felt that the cool and cold drinks he had drunk in the first half of his life were all spicy chicken.

The most stylish one among these cold drinks is the iced wolfberry dessert. Liu Bei's eyes were straight when he ate the iced wolfberry soup for the first time.

The gouache may not know what the gouache is, but Li Su himself was actually quite curious - he heard about "goache" in his previous life because of his successful career and was often invited to the table for socializing. Then once a client invited him to drink Moutai, and the client was also a person who understood wine culture and insisted on proclaiming that "the ancient ancestor of Moutai was Gouache". To be honest, the evidence comes from "Records of the Grand Historian: Biography of the Southwest Yi".

But Li Su later studied the literature and felt that this was completely a historical origin for Maotai’s nonsense, and the real wolfberry sauce should be just a kind of jam. So after he came to the Han Dynasty in person, he was very interested in verifying it himself.

The word "口玉" is famous in the Records of the Grand Historian because it appears in conjunction with a highly famous idiom "Yelang's arrogance" - "Records of the Grand Historian: Biography of the Southwest Yi" records that "the King of Dian asked the Han envoy, "Who is the Han envoy is bigger than me," and Yelang is the same." Then the next sentence is a twist of the pen, which records that there is a rare specialty called "口玉", which is "the precious taste of Shu, and the market is from Yelang". The Han envoys are unforgettable to eat.

The only evidence was far-fetched by the bricks who later generations who gilded Maotai's history. "Moutai was produced in Guizhou Province, and belonged to Yelang during the Han Dynasty. Moreover, Maotai was the only sauce-flavored wine, and it had the word "sauce" with wolfberry sauce."

Since Li Su is so passionate about life, since he has entered Shu, he asked the merchants who have returned from Nanzhong that bought the specialty of Liuwang County wolfberry sauce and used it as iced desserts to taste it.

It turned out that it was indeed an extremely delicious jam. However, due to the jam processing and storage technology, the alcohol content is slightly fermented, which is similar to the alcohol content of the wine-sin chocolate. It is delicious, but it has nothing to do with Moutai.

After all, if Yelang/精品 is hot and there is no alcohol fermentation at all, it is impossible to just rely on the sweetness of fructose for anti-corrosion storage, and it will have been rotten long ago.

...

Liu Bei then played music and danced to enjoy the precious things that Li Suxin had invented in the middle of the night.

I rubbed and admired the educational lottery (made by bamboo pieces) printed on the front with "Addicted lottery is harmful to families" and the reverse with "Addicted lottery is good for education, addicted to lottery is harmful to the body. Arrange savings reasonably and enjoy a healthy life". I played with it for a while. I felt that Li Su is also quite conscientious, and invented gambling to make money and remind everyone to restrain themselves.

Then he used the alcohol to blow the lottery ticket and finally had some thoughts about talking to Li Su about his business - it seemed that he was still reminded by the iced wolfberry soup he had just eaten.

"Boya, hiccup, isn't Zhang Lu finished? When you return to Beijing this time, you should bring more wolfberry sauce to pay tribute to some North Korea-China relations, and be prepared for any trouble.

I'm not afraid to tell you that in the past, our promotion was "free from the palace repair money" and that was the personal inquiry by His Majesty. It was the way Bo'an Gong found. I guess even Zhang Rang and Zhao Zhong didn't know about it.

When we left Beijing, His Majesty was so weak that he couldn't get out of bed. This time, there might not be someone to join the old road. It would be better to bring some wolfberry sauce than to give money to do things."

Liu Bei also knew the allusion of "Meng Tuo got Liangzhou with one bucket" back then. It was better to pay tribute to the court than to give money in private.

Meng Tuo has Loulan wine and Yelang jam, and the symbolic meaning is no worse than that of others.

"I know, I will bring a few more stone jelly sauce, and prepare some Shushan wild tea and brown sugar. This shows that the Han Dynasty's government orders have arrived in the border again, killed the bandits blocking the Han envoys, and paid tribute with dignity." Li Su agreed, he knew better than Liu Bei about this, because he knew that if there was no accident in history, Emperor Ling of Han would have been burping at this time.

"Okay, then clean up and set off in the next few days, the faster the better."

Liu Bei had just finished giving orders and drank a few more drinks when he suddenly heard a confidant coming in at the door to report: "Report to the Lord of the House! There is a messenger from Chen Cang, which was sent by General Zuo. Xu Sima, who had just passed through Yangping Pass tonight, tried to inquire and learned that General Zuo sent someone to inform the Lord of the House that His Majesty had passed away a month ago. The envoy saw that it was too late, and even if he rushed to Nanzheng, he was staying at Nanzheng, so he was persuaded by Sima. He rested in Mianyang for a night and came to Nanzheng again tomorrow morning."

Liu Bei couldn't help but feel a little panicked.

The emperor died? This cannot be joked about.

There is no way, who made the road to Shu difficult? It would be normal for such news to be spread to Shuzhong in almost a month. If Huangfu Song hadn't been afraid that Liu Bei would deliberately "cover his ears and couldn't hear it", he would have sent someone to force him to notify Liu Bei, and Liu Bei would have been slower to react, if Liu Bei wanted to.

I just heard about the national funeral, and then continued to play music and dance. Isn’t it good? Although we just won a big victory, we should be celebrating our achievements.

Liu Bei thought about it, but immediately burst into tears and fell to the ground: "Your Majesty—"

Then he immediately ordered all the waiters and maids who were dancing and music and serving the banquet to retreat, and even some of the not-so-confident staff members asked them to retreat first.

However, iced wine and wolfberry sauce, and various barbecue delicacies continue to be placed on the table.

There were only Liu Guanzhang and Li Su left in the room. This was the most confidant. There was no need to act. There was no disrespect for continuing to eat and drink with true nature. Liu Bei also knew that the other three would not betray him.

"Boya, I have written all the memorials for His Majesty. Do you think you are pretending not to know now? Or wait a few days to write another copy for the new king?" Liu Bei pulled a roast chicken leg and asked seriously.

Li Su thought for a while: "I thought it would be better for me to set off tomorrow morning. After the messenger came, my brother said that the messenger you sent had already set off, the journey was difficult and I didn't know where to go, so the messenger didn't know that Your Majesty had already arrived at the silence."

Liu Bei was puzzled: "Why do you need this?"

Li Su: "The change of old and new is inevitable, and the center is unstable. A few days ago, I heard that before Your Majesty passed away, Dong Zhuo was appointed as the governor of Bingzhou, but he was stranded in Hedong for a long time and refused to go north to take office. Although my brother had just pacified Zhang Lu, outsiders were unaware of it. Seeing that I was reporting the victory at this time, it was inevitable that I would suspect that my brother was raising the enemy and respecting himself. He deliberately waited until Your Majesty passed away to complete his achievements and reported the victory to his life. Since this is the case, it is better to pretend to be sincere and serve the former master with all his heart. This is one of them."

Liu Bei raised his hand and interrupted: "But everyone who informed me has come, Boya pretended not to know. How do you explain that he didn't run into them halfway? How do you explain that he had never heard of His Majesty's death along the way? If you heard about it, shouldn't you turn back and rewrite the memoir?"

Li Su: "Then I can't go the same way as me. - A few days ago, I just sent an edict to my brother to set up the Xicheng. I can continue to go down the Han River and walk along the Han River and enter the capital. Shangyong is Yu Zuo in Hanzhong, and there are some believers in Zhang Lu. And it is easy to move down the Han River, but it is impossible to navigate.

Before walking this way, until Nanyang, I have reasons to 'not know that Your Majesty died'. When I really arrived in Nanyang and was close to Luoyang, I also have sufficient reasons to think that it is inconvenient to return to Hanzhong to exchange for the report, and I am urgently following the power. There is another advantage of this method, that is, I can move with a camera and control the time of arrival in Luoyang, and observe the situation first, so as not to hand the letter to those who are about to lose power. If you miss your brother's major affairs, you will definitely win the best reward for us. This is the second thing."

Liu Bei then breathed a sigh of relief: "Then let's arrange this, Boya is always relieved to act. Thank you for your hard work, you will set off tomorrow morning. Alas, you shouldn't drink you tonight, so drink more soup to wake up. Then, thousands of soldiers and horses will escort you to Shangyong, and you will recover Shangyong County by the way.

Yun Chang, you will set off tomorrow to guard Jiameng Pass for Zilong, and let Zilong go to Shangyong with fast horses. Be sure to catch up with Boya halfway to protect Boya back to Beijing. All kinds of rare tributes in Shu must be prepared overnight tonight."
Chapter completed!