Judgement

Chapter 180 Suspicion

Chapter 180 Suspicion

After dawn, Chen Mengsheng and Xiang Xiaotian came to the riverside and knocked on the door of Zuda brothers' house.A woman in her 30s came out of the courtyard and opened the door. She looked at them sleepily and asked, "Who are you looking for?"

Chen Mengsheng made a bow and said, "Sister-in-law, are Ku Da and Ku Gui at home?"

The woman said: "Our man and his elder brother and sister-in-law spent most of the night working on the funeral of the blind woman, and they only returned home at dawn at five o'clock. What do you want to do with their brothers?"

There was a coughing sound from the south room at the back of the courtyard, and Kugui came out in his clothes and scolded: "Damn it, who is this? How can you survive the night if you don't sleep in broad daylight! Just falling asleep makes people You woke up, what happened again?"

When Kui Gui saw that it was Chen Mengsheng and Xiang Xiaotian, he was stunned for a while at first, and then laughed loudly: "You too... you have that thing growing on your face too? Hoho, now we are blind men When you see Grandma Xiong, don't make fun of anyone!"

Xiang Xiaotian opened his big palm-like hands and grabbed Kuo Gui, saying: "What sarcastic words are you talking about? Believe it or not, I'll beat you into a blind bear right now!" Zuo Gui's daughter-in-law screamed in fright.

Chen Mengsheng stepped forward and said, "Brother, we are here to ask questions, not to fight. What are you doing? Let me go!"

Xiang Xiaotian angrily pushed Kuo Gui away, but Kou Guifei was not angry and said with a smile: "When you first came, people in the town were ashamed to see you because of the black ringworm on your face, now we are all the same , what are you trying to ask?"

When Chen Mengsheng saw Kugui's gleeful appearance, he couldn't resist the urge to beat him up.After calming down, he asked, "How is the first blacksmith in Calabash Town to be a normal person? Does he have any enemies? What happened to him the night he was hanged?"

Kuo Gui thought for a while and said, "The people in the town are all of the same family and clan, where is the enemy? I have to call him "Brother" according to seniority. Why do you ask him?"

The daughter-in-law of Kugui who was on the side shouted: "Don't mention your brother who is a bloody molder who beats iron. No one in the town knows that he is the master of plucking wild geese. My mother gave him thirty catties of iron last year and asked him to beat it." Anchor, but he managed to save less than half of the thirty catties of iron in a blink of an eye. He is greedy when he sees acquaintances!"

Kuo Gui said displeased to his wife: "You go back to the house. Didn't Brother Kui take your mother's iron and save it to build that pair of iron cages later! Can you catch strange fish without that iron cage? Just you Women are narrow-minded, that's why the ancestors didn't let you enter the clan's ancestral hall." Kuo Gui's daughter-in-law shook her hands and gave Zuo Gui a vicious look, and went back to the house angrily.

Kuo Gui stepped aside by the door and said, "Come in and talk, most people in the town haven't gotten up yet." Chen Mengsheng and Xiang Xiaotian entered the yard and saw two big houses, one south and one north, and Kou Da was in the middle of the house. Beiwu was walking out of the house with his hips akimbo, holding a handful of purple sand in his hands. When he saw Chen Mengsheng and the others, they were shocked and anxious.

"###, why did you recruit them? That black man was not good at breaking the iron cage last night, what are they doing here?" Kouda looked nervously at the uninvited visitor who entered the yard.

Kugui smiled and said, "Brother, it's okay. They came to ask about Brother Kukui, brother, why did you get up so early?"

"I was woken up by your yelling. Didn't Zuo Kui die? They were all burned to ashes and sent to the ancestral hall. What else is there to ask? Go, go, go, stop annoying me here .You want to find Zuo Kui and go to the ancestral hall at the east end of the town to find it, ###What are you talking to them about?" Zuo Da seemed to be very reluctant to say a word to his brother and Chen Mengsheng, not at all Hesitantly issued an order to evict the guest.

Kuo Gui looked at his elder brother, hesitant to speak but stopped embarrassingly, he cupped his hands towards Chen Mengsheng and said, "My brother always likes to be quiet, I'm really sorry for the two of you."

Xiang Xiaotian furiously said: "What do you mean, boy? You have been playing us like monkeys for a long time, it is really unreasonable. See if I won't dismantle you today..." Chen Mengsheng took Xiang Xiaotian's arm and pulled him away Arrived behind oneself.

"Hehe, since Brother Kou said that, we are bothering you. Let's leave." Chen Mengsheng dragged Xiang Xiaotian, who was still cursing, out of the house of the brothers of the Kuro family, and Koda came over immediately and closed the door.Kugui was called into the house by Zuda, and he didn't know what they were going to talk about...

Xiang Xiaotian shook off Chen Mengsheng's hand and said, "Why are you dragging me? Didn't you see that Kotatsu's high-spirited look? I really can't swallow this breath if I don't clean him up. Treat us as if we were going to The thief who stole their house!"

"Brother, I dragged you out just because I saw Zuo Da's appearance."

"Huh? What do you mean by that? What did you see him?" Xiang Xiaotian asked in confusion.

Chen Mengsheng smiled and said: "Zuda didn't want us to stay in the house. I guess he was afraid that his brother would tell us something, but he didn't expect him to be so unreasonable, which made me suspicious. There must be something hidden in this town. Secrets that we can't know, let's go, let's go to the east of the town to see their ancestral hall. Sometimes the place of the dead can tell us something better..."

At the east end of the town of Hulu Town is a large area of ​​poplar trees, and in the dense forest there is an unremarkable big stone house made of bluestones.The stone house was built in an antique style, and it seems to have been around for a long time. In front of the stone house, there is a tall stone tablet carved from bluestone two feet away and half a person high.After many years of wind and rain erosion on the stele, the handwriting on it has become blurred. Chen Mengsheng brushed away the fallen leaves and dry grass in front of the stele, and said word by word: "The Great Swallow General... Pei brings the whole family 72 Avoiding the Qin Dynasty...self-marriage...residence and reproduction...all women and children and unmarried people are not allowed...to enter the shrine and set up a seat..."

Xiang Xiaotian looked at Chen Mengsheng and said, "What kind of bird character is written on this stone tablet? What did it say?"

Chen Mengsheng shook his head and replied: "I just understand the general idea. The inscription on the stele is probably when the Great Qin ruled the six kingdoms. A general surnamed Zou from the Yan Kingdom fled here with 72 of his own people to avoid the Qin army. If the people here are married, they must choose their own clansmen to live in. The stone house at the back should be their ancestral hall. Women and unmarried men are not allowed to enter the ancestral hall. Tablet."

"What the hell, with such a weird surname, why don't people marry others? It's their fault that so many people died, and sooner or later they will die." Xiang Xiaotian said with resentment.

Chen Mengsheng thought for a while and said: "I think the person who erected this stele wanted his clansmen to get married, so they wouldn't reveal anything. Let's go to their ancestral hall to have a look."

Xiang Xiaotian followed Chen Mengsheng into the ancestral hall and said displeasedly: "Grandma, you see that there are so many ashes jars and memorial tablets of the dead here, what's so interesting about it?"

Chen Mengsheng smiled and said: "Brother, the mystery here is great. It has been a thousand years since Qin unified the six kingdoms. I just want to find out whether there are ghosts who have died in vain to find out the secrets in Hulu Town, but I can't see a soul, which makes me feel like a ghost. I'm even more suspicious..."

"You'll just mess around. You, a judge, can't find anything without a soul. I think it's more reliable to go to the blacksmith's shop of Zakui. I get goosebumps all over here!" Xiaotian is timid, and there are thousands of urns of ashes and tablets of the dead placed on dozens of long altars in the big stone house, which makes people shudder...

There was only one blacksmith's shop in the town, and Chen Mengsheng and Xiang Xiaotian found it without much effort.Pushing open the door and entering the blacksmith's shop, the stove in the front room was already covered with thick dust, and the blacksmithing tools were randomly thrown beside the stove.The broken iron foam all over the floor made a rustling sound under his feet, Xiang Xiaotian picked up the sledgehammer from the ground, touched it in the pile of stove ashes and said with a frown: "Brother, that's not right." Huh? You can see that there are iron pokers and hammers here, but there is no Tao Ding to hold molten iron. How did this kid forge iron? Where would he burn iron without Tao Ding?" Xiang Xiaotian said to Chen Mengsheng I also feel strange, since the Tao Ding is not a precious item, who would want it, even if it is taken away, except for the blacksmith's usefulness, no one in the ordinary family would miss a Tao Ding at all.Chen Mengsheng looked around but did not find Tao Ding, so Chen Mengsheng and Xiang Xiaotian walked to the back room of the blacksmith's shop with suspicion. The back room was even simpler, with only three tile-roofed houses and a well.

Judging from the furniture, the tile-roofed house in the middle should be the residence of the blacksmith couple. Xiang Xiaotian pointed to the beams in the house.Chen Mengsheng looked up and saw that there were still three rope nooses tied to the beam. It must be where the blacksmith's family was hanged.Later, it was discovered that the body had been taken down, and the rope was still there.There are children's clothes in the rooms on both sides, probably the blacksmith's children's room. The three tile-roofed houses are silent, and the child's innocent laughter will never be heard again...

Xiang Xiaotian sighed and walked to the well, picked up the well rope and was about to wash the black ashes from his hands, when he saw a piece of clay in the bucket in the well. "Brother, come here quickly. I think I found Tao Ding, what is this?"

Chen Mengsheng took the palm-sized pottery shard from Xiang Xiaotian's hand, and there were dots of black iron foam on the inner wall of the pottery shard.Chen Mengsheng probed into the well and saw that the well was more than one foot deep and the four walls were built with blue stones.Imagine throwing the pottery tripod from the well, maybe the pottery tripod hit the wall and shattered, and a piece of broken pottery happened to fall into the bucket submerged in the well water.

"Brother, let me go down and see why I threw the Tao Ding into the well. Could it be that there is something ulterior on the Tao Ding?"

Chen Mengsheng stepped on the vertical ladder and jumped into the well. The well water was divided into two sides by the emerald bamboo armor on Chen Mengsheng's body.The fragments of the pottery tripod that had been smashed into pieces could be clearly seen at the bottom of the well, and Chen Mengsheng picked up the fragments one by one.Xiang Xiaotian was piecing together the fragments by the well, and after a while, the general appearance of Tao Ding was pieced together.Xiang Xiaotian yelled: "Brother, look here..."