It was already night when Liang En and the others hurried back to the county town. Fortunately, the Jinyiwei themselves had the privilege of being able to enter the city at all times, so their entry into the city was no different from usual times.
After arriving at the back door of the county government office and showing the tokens they carried with them, Liang En and Tian Zongqi were taken to the back hall of the county government office by a silent old man, and then the county magistrate wearing Taoist robes appeared in front of them.
"Why are all the bad things piled up together now?" After listening to Liang En's analysis, Magistrate Zhang did not show any surprise. Instead, he sighed.
"County Lord, what happened?" After realizing that something was wrong, Mr. Tian took a step forward and asked.
"Take a look, Mr. Liang, this matter has something to do with you, and it's not a secret, so you can take a look, but don't tell anyone."
The document handed over by County Magistrate Zhang was an express report. It only contained a few lines of text, but the content in it made Liang En and the others widen their eyes.
Because there is only one content in this express report, that is, the prisoners on the previous pirate ship sank during the transfer, and the prisoners drowned because of the handcuffs and scraps.
"This is impossible." Tian Zongqi shook his head after reading the note, "Not to mention that the guards responsible for escorting will make preparations in advance, it is not normal to drown in a calm canal, especially
Those two prisoners are still pirates."
"Yes, that's why I said we are in big trouble now." Magistrate Zhang sighed after sitting on the chair, then walked to the cabinet, flipped through the documents in the cabinet, took out some of them and put them on the table.
These documents all contain information about the canonization of gods within the county. After a simple inspection, the three people determined that the number of gods changed in the county from last year to this year has indeed increased a lot——
Since the terrain of this county is flat and most of the land has been reclaimed as farmland, there are not many ghosts and ghosts except for a few passers-by, so under normal circumstances the local gods are relatively stable.
But this year, the mountain god of a small mountain was inexplicably replaced. The reason was that the previous mountain god had problems in his cultivation, so he had to be replaced.
"Hiss—" Liang En took a breath when he saw this, because he remembered that Uncle Huang Yongnian, the River God, had to turn to ghosts and gods because of problems with his practice.
You must know that it is not common among practitioners to die due to problems in their practice. When two consecutive gods with similar identities have problems for the same reason, it obviously cannot be described as a coincidence.
New discoveries allowed them to expand the search scope, and as time went by, more and more pieces of information were picked out and put together. Finally, a map appeared in front of the three people.
This map shows the situation of hundreds of miles around Yuanhe County as the center, but it is different from the original map. There are now many red dots on the map.
These small red dots represented the gods that had been changed, and when they connected all the red dots together, they found a large net being slowly spread out in front of their eyes.
Before, they just thought it was unusual for too many gods to be replaced, but after marking it on the map like this, they discovered that the locations of the replaced gods were not randomly distributed:
Almost all the replaced gods are located near some important roads, water sources or high points. After connecting these points together, you will find a network that almost covers the entire Yangtze River Estuary.
Compared with this land, the network composed of the replaced gods can be said to be very sparse, but it can cover the entire area, collect information about the entire area, and even open or block a certain channel at critical moments.
The reason why everyone didn't realize that something was wrong before was because these gods were just small gods in remote places, and no one paid much attention to their changes.
It was only after summarizing the information that had been ignored before that Liang En and the others discovered that someone was consciously replacing those gods.
"War, a large-scale war is coming soon." Looking at the network of replaced gods on the map, Tian Zongqi, as a soldier, was the first to react.
Although he is only a low-level officer, as an elite who came out of the Habayashi Guards, Tian Eryi has a much higher level than those low-level officers in terms of overall situation and strategic vision.
"And the enemy is likely to come from the sea. As for the pirate ship captured in the past two days, it is most likely the enemy's forward reconnaissance force." Looking at the large net laid out at the mouth of the Yangtze River, Liang En continued.
He realized something was wrong with the pirate ship two days ago. Pirates who could sail long distances were veterans and were unlikely to foolishly run into a dead end like a river, especially when one's own ship had an advantage in speed.
"The attack on the mountain ghost before was probably the work of this group of people." Magistrate Zhang finally said.
"The mountain ghost is a top archer and a son of the jungle. What the other party did before was probably to mobilize the mountain ghost and even find an opportunity to eliminate them and avoid being attacked in the rear."
"From this point of view, the enemy who is about to launch an attack should also be a regular army, because ordinary pirates just go wherever they go and rob, so they don't need to prepare much supplies, and there are no supply routes."
However, after summarizing all the information, the room suddenly became quiet, because they found that the current situation had far exceeded the upper limit of what they could solve.
"If you give me ten days, I should be able to find a way to get some medicine and bandages." Liang En spoke, breaking the somewhat terrifying silence in the room.
"I have also mastered some Qihuang techniques. Although it is not comparable to the methods of a real doctor, I am better at dealing with large-scale casualties when there are enough people to help."
"Otherwise, I have no other choice. After all, I am just a maritime businessman. This is the limit of what I can do."
"This is already very good, Mr. Liang." Tian Zongqi smiled and patted Liang En on the shoulder. "It's not like I have no other choice but to lead my team on the battlefield with a knife."
"Shouldn't you report our current situation through Jin Yiwei?" Magistrate Zhang asked with some confusion. "As far as I know, Jin Yiwei should have a way to directly report to the Political Affairs Hall."
"But that's the right only for 100 households and above. I can only report it to my superiors." Mr. Tian Qi shook his head. "But there was another Mr. Jin Yiwei and a Baidu on the ship that sent the prisoners.
The household is directly under the general banner."
"I understand." Magistrate Zhang nodded. Since the other party was suspicious, it would be normal for the matter to be kept secret from the other party.
The room fell into silence once again, except for the expression on Magistrate Zhang's face that kept changing, until more than a minute later he seemed to have figured something out, and his expression changed from confused to determined.
"It seems that I can only use the method of reporting to the Department of Banking and Finance in a hurry. I hope our guess is wrong, and I also hope that if our guess is true, the Political Affairs Hall can come up with a solution to the problem we are facing as soon as possible.