Liu Chengzong stood on the roadside and watched Li Hongji leave.
The man from the northwest had enough to eat and drink, and with his broad shoulders carrying a whistle stick, he rode on the overwhelmed little donkey, roaring old Qin opera tunes with straight lyrics and high tunes, and disappeared into the desolate ancient road filled with yellow sand.
Perhaps it was because Liu Chengzong knew what this man did in the future that he felt an extraordinary sense of ritual about this scene.
In fact, he knew that Li Hongji just looked at him with a blank stare, and even if he was shameless, he would borrow a usury loan that would never be repaid.
The frontier army set off not long after Li Hongji left. In order to call back the liquor shop owner, he was the last one to follow the team.
They have military laws, and no one eats the wine from the liquor store, but they use a lot of firewood, and the shopkeeper's lame look doesn't look like he has a son to help chop the firewood.
The remaining five kilograms of mutton were all left to the shopkeeper.
Firewood is not expensive, nor is it worth five pounds of meat, but this is not a matter of whether it is expensive or worth it.
At least in Liu Chengzong's eyes, this is also a ritual.
With this ritual, they are soldiers; without this ritual, they are bandits.
Unfortunately, in the end, Liu Chengzong did not see what happened to the shopkeeper's daughter.
When the border troops crossed Mizhi, they did not meet Li Hongji on the official road. Liu Chengzong guessed that he was still shamelessly borrowing money from Ai Juren's mansion.
Later on the road, he thought about this person over and over again.
He felt that even if he, his brother, and Cao Yao were born in better times, it would be difficult for them to live a stable life. They would either become officials, generals, or bandits.
They are all risky professions.
But if Li Hongji were placed in a better era, he might really be able to live his life as an ordinary person.
It is a pity that troubled times are coming, and in the face of famine, war and plague sweeping the world, everyone will be crushed into a pool of flesh and bones, and the country will be smeared.
Going south were more difficult mountain roads. In the evening, they passed through Mizhi and walked to Suide. The border troops thought that there would be mutton to eat at night, so they started to set fire again and walked for a while.
Different from the nights in my memory four hundred years later, there is no light pollution in this era. Everyone seems to have night blindness. Some people really have it, and some people have difficulty seeing even without night.
Fortunately, there were still torches to illuminate them, allowing them to pass through the Wuding River, turn to the Huaining River, and walk more than 20 miles toward Qingjian.
Unexpectedly, after walking through Suide, they could not find a place to stay for a long time. It was not until the second watch that the hungry frontier soldiers finally found a dilapidated Shuxian Temple at the foot of Guandao Mountain.
The tree fairy is the companion god of folk belief in northern Shaanxi. It has a similar meaning to the fox fairy temple. The earliest was to build a temple for a thousand-year-old tree and kneel down to worship.
People believe that these gods have abilities far beyond their duties. They usually worship the one who is closer to them. Anyway, they are all gods, and they must have omnipotent divine power.
As for folk beliefs, generally the poorer and more isolated the place, the more believed it is. However, this has nothing to do with poverty or isolation itself. The main reason is that people born in these places are more likely to encounter problems that are difficult to solve.
There are even fewer solutions that can be taken, so there is really no choice but to rely on external things for psychological comfort.
It doesn't matter if it works or not, but if it's chaotic, no matter what the appeal is, it usually has to be done in a temple.
This has made the Ming Dynasty’s grassroots township gods very busy.
Using the smallest staff to solve the most problems has always been a difficult problem for towns and cities in every era.
To solve this problem, Sanjiao nunneries often appear in larger temples in northern Shaanxi.
The so-called Sanjiao nunnery means that there are Bodhisattvas in the temple, gods in the temple, and Buddha sitting in the temple.
It is normal to ask the Empress to send you a son, to ask Master Guan to treat your illness, and to ask Emperor Zhenwu to send you a son.
The ecological system that the Internet era pays attention to, and the logic of trying to catch all the sheep and kill them is nothing new.
As early as the beginning of the 17th century, the religious circles in Shaanxi had already implemented this.
As for this small temple with insufficient incense in the barren mountains and wild mountains, it is even more powerful and has a wide range of businesses. Basically, to the people around it, the old tree in this temple is an omnipotent immortal who can do anything.
The cave of Shu Daxian is also a three-religion nunnery. Taoist crowns are hung on tree branches, Confucian shoes are placed on tree roots, and cassocks are wrapped around the tree body.
On the west wall of the courtyard, there were still unknown ink marks of what year and month. Liu Chengzong lit up the ink with a torch, and saw the words: "Night dreams are ominous. Written on the west wall, when the sun shines, it turns into auspiciousness."
Seeing him laughing, he thought to himself that this would make his dream auspicious at night, so there would be no need to write it on the west wall.
This gave him a lot of sense of belonging to another memory - four hundred years of vicissitudes, a twitching of the right eye means making a fortune, a twitching of the left eye was last year's mother's feudal superstition.
The energy passed down from our ancestors is still the same.
The boiled mutton in the pot was very fragrant. Large pieces of coarse salt were sprinkled in, and nothing else was added. The smell also made Xiao Zuanfeng raise his head and squint his eyes. He straightened his long legs and followed the smell towards the big pot.
Sniffling as I walked.
Even the plum blossoms on his eyebrows have disappeared. When there is food, he will not run around even if he is released from the cage. He sleeps on Liu Chengzong's feet with his cowhide boots. He is so well-behaved.
After traveling all day, the border troops were very tired. Except for the fire soldiers who had to make fires for cooking, the others leaned against the wall and did not want to move.
A few clean-minded people took off their helmets and hair towels, sat next to the campfire and discussed getting some sulfur powder for a bath later. They used combs to pick out lice from each other's hair, then strangled the ones they caught and threw them into the fire.
The elder brother and Cao Yao used torches to outline the terrain in the Shuxian Temple, while the two chiefs, Tian Shoujing and Gao Xian, each led three or five subordinates, wandering around outside the temple and digging traps outside the courtyard walls.
At this time, Liu Chengzong was very idle. Everyone else was in the smallest military unit, but he had no subordinates, and he only ate and did not work.
He wears a sword and arrows all day long, and lets Hong Qi carry his armor. It looks like that, but he has nothing to do and is so idle.
I originally thought that I would have a war horse and go hunting during the march, which would also provide food for the team. Who would have thought that Yuhe Fort has a radius of forty miles, and the further south you go, the more desolate you go, and the vegetation on both sides of the official road is destroyed.
There is a place for him to hunt.
What's more, the further south we go, the more chaos there is, and the less we dare to leave the army, so we naturally give up on this idea.
At this time, Liu Chengzong sat down on the steps of the main entrance of Shuxian Temple, holding a copy of "Jin Ping Mei" to make paper. He used the torch light at the door and took a charcoal pencil to draw a map in his memory on the pages of the book.
This book was Liu Chengzong's favorite thing, and he asked a merchant from the south to get it when he was practicing martial arts with the government officials in Mizhi. It is a banned book.
The pages of the book were almost torn by him.
As for the charcoal pen in his hand, it is not a novelty. He just used a used pencil rod with charcoal sandwiched between it. Hard pens have always been available in ancient times, but they are not elegant items and cannot be used on the table.
They are only forty miles away from Qingjian, which is why they stay overnight at Shuxian Temple and dig traps outside the courtyard wall. Qingjian is almost the birthplace of the rebels in northern Shaanxi. There used to be a lot of thieves, but now these thieves
They all became rebels.
The names that Shan Liu Chengzong could name, such as Yi Zi Wang, Guo Tianxing, Hun Tianxing, and Eight Great Kings, were all from Qingjian.
The names of this group of people are more awesome than the others. The reason why they don't use their real names is simply to hide their identities. They were either frontier soldiers in the past, or they came from local surnames, and they all became bandits in this mountainous area.
There is only a hundred miles to go back to my hometown in Yan'an.
Note:
Pencil - ancient name: lead 椠, a tool for writing. Lead, lead powder; 椠, wood chips.
Volume 3 of "Miscellaneous Notes of Xijing" of the Han Dynasty: Yangzi said that when good things happen, he always holds a lead in his mind and carries a coffin, and he follows various planners and visits the four corners of the country.