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Chapter 643 The Last Survivor

Speaking of the past, Mu Hong was overcome with grief, his face filled with unconcealed sorrow. He tried to wipe his tears with his sleeve, but Zhu Yu quickly stopped him. Only then did he remember that he had tried to use dirty tricks on the people in front of him but failed, and now his clothes were covered with a lot of eye-irritating powder.

“You don’t need to worry too much,” he said, glancing somewhat embarrassedly at Zhu Yu and then at the runes behind him whose eyes were still red. “It’s not anything poisonous, just finely ground dried chili powder.”

Aside from being an eyesore, it won't harm your body... I really had nothing else to defend myself with, so I resorted to this last resort..."

Zhu Yu nodded to him, indicating that she understood his intention: "So you escaped from Mu Family Village? What made you have to run away and hide here?"

"If I hadn't managed to escape, so many people in our Mu Family Village would have died without knowing why..." Mu Hong sighed heavily. "We could have tolerated it if they had just confined us to the village and made us help them mix spices."

Later, the King of Lan sent someone to the estate and asked us to blend incense according to that person's requirements.

At first, my father did whatever that person told us to do for the safety of the whole village. But later he gradually felt that something was not right. Some of the things that person told us to put in the perfume were spices that we had never seen before.

My father was afraid that something was wrong, so he agreed on the surface, but in private he kept trying to find out what those strange spices that man brought were.

As it turned out, my father actually found it in some old books at home, which contained all sorts of poisonous and toxic ingredients from other places.

My father felt that the ingredients might not be suitable, so he refused to help them with these things anymore.

The man first tried to bribe my father, but when he saw that my father refused to compromise, he led his men into my house and arrested and imprisoned my elderly grandparents.

Not only that, but all the people in our village who are skilled at making spices have had their close relatives taken hostage. If anyone in our village does not comply, he threatens to torture or even kill our close relatives.

Therefore, the people of the village had no choice but to compromise and submit to their tyranny.

Some people tried to secretly find an opportunity to escape and report to Jin Kingdom.

At the time, we all felt that Prince Lan was incompetent and had listened to some slanderous words, allowing his subordinates to do whatever they wanted. He was beyond redemption.

However, the spices from Lan Di, especially those from our Mu Family Village, have always been used by the Lan King as tribute to the palace of Jin Kingdom. If something goes wrong, and the emperor blames us, wouldn't we all lose our heads?

Unfortunately, just when they finally found an opportunity, torrential rains fell for several days in a row. The rain was so heavy that the soldiers guarding the manor stayed inside their houses and refused to come out.

One of the able-bodied men in our village was carrying a letter and tried to escape, but unexpectedly there was a spy in the village who secretly informed him. The man was caught before he could even get out.

If he hadn't taken advantage of the chaos to tear the letter to shreds in the rain and throw it into the water, the writing on the letter would have been smudged and the contents would have been illegible.

Those people took that strongman away, and we don't know where they took him. We never saw him again after that; he just vanished completely." Zhu Yu and the others didn't show any surprise at this. After all, based on what the man had just said, they had a rough guess. Although it happened much earlier, the fact that they had their eyes on Mu Family Village, which specialized in producing tribute spices, and the source of the unknown and poisonous raw materials, matched many of their previous guesses.

"What does the person sent by the King of Lan to force you to do these things look like? Is he thin and small, unlike the locals of Lan Kingdom?" Lu Qing asked.

Upon hearing this, Mu Hong's expression changed slightly, and his gaze towards them became more cautious.

Zhu Yu glanced at Lu Qing and said to Mu Hong, "You don't need to panic. To be honest, you were worried about us just now, and we were just as worried about you."

Our trip to Lan Di is also for a long-standing case. We want to find the enemy who committed the crime and then fled, escaping justice.

That person ruined our whole family back then. If we hadn't wanted to find you and get to the bottom of things, why would we have let you drug us twice and risked coming back?

Mu Hong hesitated for a moment. He couldn't understand how these people thought they could learn anything from him. However, their words about their entire families being murdered reminded him of his own relatives, and his initial hesitation faded away.

After all, he had been hiding here for more than 20 years, during which time he had lived a life worse than death.

If it weren't for a sliver of resentment in their hearts and a desire for someone to know what the Mu family village had gone through, they would never have been able to persevere.

By chance, he came into contact with these people, and since he had already started talking, there was no need to be cautious anymore, so he might as well go all out.

“That’s right.” Mu Hong put away his brief guard and nodded repeatedly. “That person was thin and small, with sallow skin. His features didn’t look like those of people from our Lan region, nor did they look as imposing as those from Jin Kingdom… At first glance, he looked like a starving person who hadn’t had a full meal in a long time, but after a while, you would find that he really looked like that.”

"Do they look like the people of Brahma?" Zhu Yu asked.

Mu Hong shook his head in confusion: "I don't know what the people of Brahma look like. I've never seen them before."

Zhu Yu nodded and sighed.

This doesn't sound like a lie. After all, he was originally a young man who was learning a craft from his father on the village. He was tricked and forced to hide in this small wooden building, sleeping in a grave pit every day for more than 20 years. Even though he looks to be around 50 years old, it's normal that he hasn't seen or experienced many people and things.

“I have something I don’t understand,” Zhu Yu thought for a moment and asked Mu Hong, “You said that your grandparents and others were imprisoned by that person and his soldiers, and that they were used to blackmail you into making poisonous spices for them.”

"When you escaped, weren't you worried they would harm your family?"

Upon hearing this, Mu Hong revealed a hint of bitterness: "If there were no one else in my family, why would I have risked everything to escape?"

Before I could find a way to escape, that man had already killed the entire Mu family. I was the last survivor of my family.