Aggrieved Fish Sprite

The fisherman called ten boats and sent them before daybreak to a village on the highlands by the lake.

This fishing village is unusual, and the green-tiled cottages are neat and beautiful.

It’s rainy in the south, so it’s normal not to dare to live in a house with a thatch roof. It’s just that the people are poor, and bricks and tiles are also a fortune. Usually, such houses can only be seen in towns.The fishing village is barren and poor, and many people don't even have land, but this is obviously not the case here.

There are already some small caravans outside the fishing village, and they were also rescued by the villagers rowing boats. At the moment, they are busy transporting and taking care of the goods and bargaining with the villagers.

Two peasant women were carrying baskets covered with cloth, selling noodles and steamed buns near the caravan.

The caravan that the coachman Lao Qi belongs to has just arrived, and the manager is a little hesitant, afraid to buy those steamed buns, but the two men dressed as traveling merchants next to him have no such worries, and directly take out the copper coins to buy the steamed buns and start chewing with hot water .

"Thirty copper coins for Tongpu a night, a pot of hot water, and no food."

"The bed and the separate room cost three hundred copper coins, and ten steamed buns are given, and three meals are not included."

Hearing the villager's quotation, the traveling merchant immediately jumped up to protest: "It wasn't the same price when I came last month, it was doubled. Do you agree with Peng Xianren?"

The fisherman said disdainfully: "Look at what you said, when the wind and rain stopped, the people in our village were either boiling water to clean up, or rowing out to rescue people. They didn't sleep all night. What's the matter with the higher price? Except Ling Yaocun, do you dare to go to other places when there is a flood?"

"That is, the price of rice shops is still rising when the harvest is not in March. You are only allowed to raise prices yourself, and we are not allowed to ask for money?"

The people in the caravan were very annoyed when they heard the words, but they didn't dare to scold directly because of the reputation of the elixir village.

The coachman Lao Qi didn't care about that much, and yelled at the top of his voice: "Businessmen make profits, what about us hard-working people? Row the boat to save us, we should pay for the boat, how can we find a shelter from the wind and rain so that we can sleep Are you ashamed to ask for double the money? The money from selling the goods can’t go into our pockets, if the caravan manager refuses to pay, we can’t sleep in the grass?”

Everyone looked at the steward of the caravan where the coachman Lao Qi was, and it was written in their eyes that you are so stingy.

The steward of the caravan is a skinny old man with a goatee. He is not a fuel-efficient lamp. When he heard this, he immediately stopped and said, "I work for my boss. I come and go in the wind and rain. I don't go home all year round. The goods are not mine. They are broken." If it’s missing, I have to explain to my boss, now that it’s submerged in water, the money is not enough to pay for it, so where can I get hot food and hot water?”

For a while, the crowd was excited, and the entrance of the village was in a mess.

Meng Qi watched coldly for a moment, but was about to speak when Mo Li stopped him.

I saw an old man coming from a distance, surrounded by villagers.

"Don't make noise, spread out, Peng Xianren is here."

"It's Immortal Peng!"

The old man had white hair and beard, had kind eyebrows and kind eyes, and wore a tawny robe that was not like a Taoist robe, and a monk's robe was not like a monk's robe.

Beside him are a dozen or so powerful men, wearing gray and brown shorts and holding wooden sticks.

It was these warriors who pushed through the crowd and shouted the name of Peng Xianren, making the place quickly quiet down.

The coachman Lao Qi quietly withdrew from the crowd, and the eyes of the old man and others fell on Meng Qi Moli.

——Even if the two of them didn't speak at all, they stood out from the crowd and noticed it at a glance, and couldn't ignore it.

"Where did the two distinguished guests come from?" The old man known as Peng Xianren said with a smile.

He was very calm, as if he had seen too many outsiders with extraordinary identities, he was not flustered or afraid.

Usually, people who pretend to be gods and ghosts in the countryside have a guilty conscience and treat outsiders very cautiously, and wish they would leave quickly.

Mo Li didn't make a sound. Although he remembered the old things Mr. Qin said, it was already decades ago. How could Dr. Peng have become Immortal Peng?As a doctor, Qin Lu is most impatient with those sorceresses who burn talismans and turn them into ashes for people to drink, and he hates some local prescriptions that can't cure diseases. Half of Mo Li's views on the world come from Qin Lu, and he listened to the villagers over and over again. Calling Peng Xianren, he frowned secretly.

Meng Qi patted the water on the torn clothes (cloth), looked at the ink carp in a blink of an eye, and joked again: "Old man with a discerning eye, how could he not see that my friend and I were caught in a storm, and after falling into the lake, we almost became the son-in-law of the Dragon King? Fortunately, the Dragon King disliked him, so he came back with his life."

Ink Carp: "..."

The mouth of the national teacher is a deceiving ghost.

Meng Qi smiled easily, Peng Zelong's son-in-law couldn't do it, but Qi Maoshan's son-in-law was very promising.

Peng Xianren stroked his beard when he heard the words, and asked ponderingly: "May I ask if you two swam to the shore of the lake, or were you washed up by the flood?"

"What's wrong?" Meng Qi secretly glanced at Mo Li while speaking.

The ink carp nodded indistinctly, indicating that there was a difference.

At that time, Mr. Qin discovered that people who walked barefoot and barelegged in rice fields, swamps, river beaches, and reeds by lakes all year round were prone to disease, while places in the center of the lake and deep water were not.

Meng Qi said knowingly: "To tell you the truth, the two of us have never been to Pengze before. In the rainstorm, we didn't know the direction. We swam for a while with the water, and arrived on the shore by accident. I don't know where it is."

Peng Xianren nodded, at this time a warrior asked the reason, and came back and told Peng Xianren what happened just now in a low voice.

Immortal Peng raised his eyebrows, and said to everyone in the caravan: "The villager's own house, rice, grain, and firewood are priced, and I don't want to interfere with the price. After a while, the medicine will be brewed at the entrance of the village. You can drink a bowl to get rid of miasma."

The two traveling merchants asked cautiously: "Peng Xianren, how much is a bowl of that medicine...?"

"You don't need money." Peng Xianren said slowly with a compassionate expression: "When disasters come from the sky, good fortune rests with people. If you accumulate good fortune and don't get angry or dry, you can live a long life."

He said this, and then looked around the villagers, half of them quietly lowered their heads.

"The elixir village has been treating diseases and saving people for decades. I hope you will not be implicated by the injustices of the previous life and fall into the realm of hungry ghosts. Don't create karma in this life and affect the next life." Peng Xianren finished speaking as if persuading and threatening. He cupped his hands at Meng Qi, "The two honored guests are laughing at you. The people in the countryside have little knowledge, and Dou Da doesn't know a lot of Chinese characters. This way, please."

A [-]-year-old man bowed his hands and invited him, even the magistrate had to return politely.

It is because very few old people who live to this age are not country gentry, even the poor people have to do some superficial efforts to respect the old.

"Thank you for this, my husband will go first."

Meng Qi clasped his fist carelessly, and the villagers beside him glared at him, as if blaming him for disrespecting Immortal Peng.

Those villagers who wanted to speak out were immediately grabbed by others.

Before dawn, the caravan quarreled with the villagers, and few people noticed Meng Qi Moli.Now that it was daylight, and Xianren Peng greeted them, it wasn't that these villagers really "have never seen the world", so they chose to calm down.

Even the caravan of the seventh coachman got certain benefits. The villagers who provided houses and water were willing to reduce some money to let them rest.

Mo Li walked and watched, this fishing village is relatively rich, and there are no vegetables grown in the open space, but medicinal herbs.

There are several jars and earthen pots in the courtyard of every household, and the outside is covered tightly with black cloth.

"Your guest is from Luling County?" Peng Xianren took the initiative to ask, walking ahead without looking back.

Mo Li pressed Meng Qi's arm, and said in a deep voice, "No, from Kuaiji County."

Meng Qi squinted, it seems that there is no such strange disease near the seaside?

Yangzhou is very large and extremely rich.

The fief of King Ning of Chu Chu was in Luling County, while King Wu was in Kuaiji County, both of which belonged to Yangzhou.In addition, there are more than a dozen counties in Yangzhou. The Qi Dynasty was established by the Chu State.

King Wu's jurisdiction is relatively small, with only four counties in the north and east by the sea. However, the production of salt alone gives him an advantage among the three vassals.

Although King Ning's territory is large, many of them are relatively barren, with many mountains and hills. They are not as rich as King Wu, and their population is not as large as that of King Jing.

Unlike Jingzhou, which sticks to the natural dangers and blocks the river and does not communicate with the Qi Dynasty, there are no natural dangers in the area under the jurisdiction of King Wu and King Ning, and people cannot stop them, so some checkpoints are symbolically arranged.For caravans to go around, they only need to hire bodyguards to guard against bandits. It is true that there are often children of aristocratic families and literati traveling between the two places.

Immortal Peng was not surprised when he heard this, he just smiled and said: "The southeast is prosperous, the three Wu cities are metropolises, and Qiantang has been prosperous since ancient times. The old man has been famous for a long time. Listening to the two accents, the ancestors are from the north."

"That's right, the domain moved to Kuaiji with King Wu." Meng Qi agreed.

In fact, his official language is still the old Chu accent, which is only possible for the subjects who followed the vassal king to the south, and the official language spoken by people from southern aristocratic families is influenced by dialect, and it is by no means like this.

As for wearing Chu clothes, following the Chu system, and speaking in the Chu accent, these are things that the most old-fashioned and Chu-minded people will insist on.

The official system of the three kings is in a mess, and it has been changed to no avail, and the aristocratic family doesn't care who is the emperor, they only want their own family to prosper.

So a very strange situation was formed. The vassal king and the upper-level bureaucrats of Jingzhou and Yangzhou kept saying that the Chu Dynasty was orthodox. In fact, they had already changed the land tax and military strategy and policies implemented by the Chu Dynasty beyond recognition, and the family was loyal to a vassal king , secretly sent nephews to serve other vassal kings, and three parties bet.If it weren't for Qi's harsh law and the troubles of Jin Yiwei in Qi Dynasty, they would probably still want to go to Jiangbei to find a way out.

There are speculators, and naturally there is a way to go to the black die-hards, and most of them are literati.

They scolded Qi and insulted the Lu family, showing that they would never bow their heads to usurpers. A few people praised the different vassals and believed that they could unify the world and restore the glory of the Chu Dynasty. .

I don't eat vegetables, but I have to drink wine. I get together to drink, and when I get drunk, I write poems and poems criticizing current politics, weeping and cursing.

Regardless of whether it is a scholar of Jingzhou or a scholar of Yangzhou, as long as Huai Chu criticizes the government, he can quickly make friends with each other.

These scribes from aristocratic families did not want to stay at home or be officials, so they traveled around.

Peng Xianren thought that Meng Qi Moli was also like this.

——At the age of forty, when Chu died, he happened to be around the weak crown, and he had already married. It was the time when he wanted to show off his ambitions and scold Fang Qiu, and he might have passed the imperial examination of the Chu Dynasty.

Suddenly everything changed overnight, and the days got worse every day.

The three vassal kings who originally hoped to cross the river and suppress the rebellion and extermination of Qi did not live up to their expectations. They would just scramble for power and power in the south. They wanted to do a big business, but getting married and starting a business was a drag, so they could only swallow their anger or go around. Wandering, gathering with friends, crying after getting drunk.

Peng Xianren's expression was indifferent, and he was not prepared to continue talking about Meng Qi's topic at all. After walking for a while, he stopped in front of a big house with blue tiles, and said solemnly: "You two, please come in."

"Old man please first."

Meng Qi said casually and politely.

Some of those warriors followed into the house, and some directly guarded outside.

Immediately after entering the house, someone delivered two sets of clean clothes, which at first glance looked like Taoist robes and were made of fine cloth.

"There is nothing good in a barren village, please forgive me."

"Don't dare, I am very grateful to have my old man's help."

Meng Qi said this with a little sincerity, after all, they are clothes that don't cost money.

Judging from this posture, it seems that Peng Xianren does not intend to ask them for tea money or rent money.

The two looked at each other, and unanimously declined the servant who came up to serve, and went into the wing room to change clothes.

Wormwood was lit in the wing room, and there were several cloth bags containing medicinal herb powder hanging on the windows.

"Anthelmintic herbs." Mo Li sniffed it, and said, "The rest is refreshing."

They are all commonly used prescriptions in the south, nothing special.

Meng Qi had already changed into that muslin robe, which was different from the one worn by Peng Xianren, it didn't have any embroidery patterns, and the obscene clothes were also very ordinary.Quite a few literati in the south of the Yangtze River wear Taoist robes. They are not monks, but they are convenient and cool, and they can express their indifferent attitude towards officialdom.

Although Meng Qi didn't know the articles in it, after a series of accidents, his attitude towards clothes was as long as they were clean and not faded.

I'm going to lose my temper.

God knows how many pieces of clothes he "missed" along the way, and even the cloth he bought at a high price in the shop and picked out by himself would not be able to wear on his body. If he didn't know that the art of witchcraft is pure nonsense, Master Meng would suspect that someone cursed him not to wear it. It's gone.

But these seem to have happened after they met the doctor, especially the better their relationship, the faster they lost their clothes. Could it be that this is God's will?

The author has something to say: Providence: I don’t have one, I don’t exist, don’t talk nonsense