Run into the world

Chapter 293 The Natives

Locals, yes, those who can go into the mountains to collect herbs must be locals who are familiar with the conditions of the mountains and forests.

Duan Muxiang didn't ask too much. They were just strangers who had common interests and could cooperate with others for the time being. They could be kind to others, but they would have to think about it if they had a deep friendship.

"There are many rooms in the building, you can just pick one, but you have to clean it yourself."

The old man nodded cheerfully and pointed to a room on the second floor. Duan Muxiang stood up and walked towards the kitchen, "It's a rare guest. I'm going to prepare some hard dishes. Well, do you want to drink?"

The old man seemed a little hesitant, "The younger ones in the family usually don't allow me to drink. They say that drinking makes it easier to get brains... What's wrong with your brains?"

Duan Muxiang raised her eyebrows and asked: "The junior in the family? Where is it? Why didn't I see it?"

The old man also followed and looked around, "Yeah, there are no juniors in the family, hahaha, then have some, don't want foreign wine, it's boring to drink."

Duan Muxiang casually opened the seal of a wine vat, and the aroma of wine suddenly wafted out from it, making the old man's eyes light up when he smelled it.

These wines were actually made by Zhao Yuanyuan, but Duanmuxiang was not good for this drink, so I put them aside and ignored them. It worked today.

The old man went to clean the room, while Duan Muxiang was busy in the kitchen. The light of the setting sun gradually poured into the living room, coating the entire small building with a layer of red light.

"Hey, what kind of dish is this? Large intestine?" The old man was a little confused when he saw the pieces of meat on the plate. He said that he had never eaten this kind of dish in the mountain city. "Are you from Nagada in the Northeast?" of?"

"What are you talking about? This is a snake feast! Have you never had a dragon-tiger fight?" Duan Muxiang rolled his eyes.

The old man scratched his cheek and said, "I have eaten Longhu Dou before, but I have never seen it treated like this. Have you peeled off the snake skin?"

Duan Muxiang nodded, "When raising voodoos, the voodoos bite each other, and the snake skin is often torn. In addition, the poison glands have to be removed, so it becomes like this. Come on, try my craft."

The old man picked up his chopsticks, took a bite, and stuffed it into his mouth. His sense of taste suddenly became smoother, "Oh, it's delicious, hahaha."

Duan Muxiang smiled and said, "I really don't have much else here, just a lot of snakes."

The old man chewed the snake meat in his mouth but smiled and said: "You have failed so many times in raising voodoos. It seems that your skills are not up to par, hahaha."

The corner of Duan Muxiang's mouth twitched slightly, "The snake that eats me is still mocking me? The old man is very bad!"

"Hahahaha, I know a little bit about raising Gu, do you want me to give you some advice?"

"No, I have confidence in my own strength. I was forced to do it by that Miao Jiang woman, so there will definitely be no problem with the method she gave me."

"Hey, the young man is very confident. Have you ever heard of a saying? There are only exhausted cows, not plowed fields!"

The old man took a sip of wine as if he was a stranger. Duan Muxiang didn't bother to talk to him, and just asked casually: "May I live long, old man?"

"Oh, seventy and one!"

Duan Muxiang frowned, "If you are over seventy years old and still come out to collect medicine and refine poison, then the younger generation in your family is not very filial."

The old man moved for a moment, with a bit of embarrassment on his face, "The juniors are all busy. It's not like I can't walk with my old bones, so why should I let them bother?"

"Busy? What are you busy with?"

"A while ago, the court...oh, it's called government recruitment now, and a bunch of young people in the village went out. It's been several months, and no letter has come back."

Duan Muxiang picked up the wine glass and drank it all, looked at the old man and said: "This is not a good time to be a soldier... A few days ago I could still hear the sound of artillery outside the mountains, and bombers flew over from time to time in the sky... …Too dangerous."

The old man looked at him and said happily: "You don't have to be so careful as you say. I actually advised them the same way, but those guys were deceived by the official people and refused to listen no matter what they said. They insisted on becoming cannon fodder, blah! What did he say to me, 'It's hard to live with your family and country in ruins, but even if you are weak, you don't want to be safe!'"

Hearing this, Duan Muxiang drank with her silently and listened to the old man continue: "Old man, I haven't read too many books. I usually do business, drink wine and eat meat, and occasionally go out to have a good time. They are here The words sound good to me, but I can’t say what’s good about them. If I can’t say it, there’s nothing I can do to persuade them! The children are older, and we old guys can’t break our legs with sticks.”

Duan Muxiang filled the wine for him, "I used to have a friend who always wanted to make peace with a bunch of scholars on his own. At that time, I told him that the common people were the largest, so why not unite more people? Haha , as a result, you can see now that the civilians are united, but they are facing artillery shells that far exceed human power."

The old man looked at him with interest, "By the way, do you know a lot about artillery shells?"

Duan Muxiang kept moving, picking up vegetables from the plate, and at the same time replied: "I have avoided bombs dropped from the sky when I was in the mountain city before. From the technological content of those bombs and bombers, we can roughly guess the enemy's technical strength. It is at least 50 years higher than here. This gap is somewhat obvious, and it can no longer be easily made up by quantity."

"Then you mean you can't win this battle?"

Duan Muxiang shook his head, "That's not necessarily the case. Weapons can't compare, but people control weapons after all. As long as they don't invent an intelligent system, the quality of people themselves will greatly weaken the power of weapons. As long as we find a way to deal with the control of weapons. What's more, I heard that the enemy is an island country with a limited population, which means a limited number of soldiers. The military quality must be uneven. As long as the war continues for a long time, the balance will naturally tilt in the later stage and there will be a chance of victory! But... in the end... The group of people who started to kill the enemy's elite must have suffered heavy losses. Whether they can win this war depends on whether they can withstand it."

The old man was silent for a moment and did not comment on this argument. He just asked blankly: "What is that intelligent system?"

Duan Muxiang is a little embarrassed. Before the real catastrophe, technology developed rapidly. Space elevators were built, and all intelligent systems were already quite complete.But if you ask him to explain an intelligent program to someone who has never seen a computer, you really don’t know where to start.

Duan Muxiang poured another glass of wine for the old man, casually brought up another topic and slipped the matter of the intelligent system over.

Just like that, three days passed by while chatting about nothing, and the poisonous flower finally matured. Duanmuxiang and the old man came to the tree before, and they saw that the python had eaten the poisonous flower. It is shedding its skin quietly.

The two looked at each other, one raised his head and the other raised his tail, and carried the big python back to the wooden building. The big python wanted to struggle, but it felt like it was clamped by two iron pincers, unable to move at all.

Duanmuxiang helped the old man open the mouth of the poisonous python, caught the venom in a bamboo tube, and then began to refine the poison.

The old man was curious and didn't leave, Duan Muxiang didn't care what he was looking at, just like that, another day passed, failure...success!
Out of dignity, Duan Muxiang held up a half-arm-long golden snake awl and showed off: "Look, it's awesome!"

The old man's eyes widened, "Hey! I'll go! What kind of luck did you have to get this Gu refining method of yours to produce results?" "Just tell me whether it's successful or not!"

"What a fart!" The old man pointed mercilessly at the remaining poisonous insect corpses and snake meat, "What you want to refine is something similar to the mother-in-law Gu. People's mother-in-law Gu usually has one son and one mother. Only. How about you, you have to refine several of them! It is extremely difficult for the Gu insect itself to survive, and mother-child Gu is even more difficult to refine. Ordinary voodoo refiners use tricks to find poisonous insects during the production period. How about you, cultivate them directly? Even though you have achieved results, it is actually no different from failure."

Duan Muxiang irritably bent the golden snake cone into a bracelet and wrapped it around his wrist. He did not expect that the old man just read it once and told him the effect of the poison he wanted to refine.

"Hmph, I'm just saying that the Miao Jiang woman must have lied to you!"

"..."

Duan Muxiang didn't want to speak, but just flicked his arm, and the golden snake cone flew out, piercing a tree trunk and then nailing it to the ground. A circle of blackness suddenly spread from the injured part of the tree trunk.

Seeing this, the old man commented, "The poison is strong enough, but such a direct concealed weapon cannot hit anyone. What's more, the golden color all over the body is too eye-catching. The enemy can't hide after seeing it?"

Duan Muxiang was too lazy to explain that the Golden Snake Cone was originally a failed product of the Golden Snake Sword. It is better to say that it is a hidden weapon than a means of auxiliary attack.

It's just that it requires a lot of energy to fully use it. Think about it when you hold a golden snake sword and face the enemy, but there are countless golden snake cones floating in the air around you. What will it be like?
Well, you can think of it as a floating cannon!

But this matter must not be told to the old man. Seeing that Duan Muxiang didn't speak, the old man doubted whether he had hit him too hard. He coughed lightly and said with a smile: "Actually, well, if you suddenly dump someone when you are fighting, It is also very lethal, after all, the toxicity is really good, hahaha."

Duanmuxiang rolled her eyes at him, "No need to comfort me, I didn't really want to succeed easily... You also got the snake venom, what do you plan to use it for? To increase the toxicity of the internal energy?"

The old man was stunned for a moment and asked strangely: "How do you know?"

Duanmuxiang put away the golden snake cone again, and replied casually: "Cultivation is not easy, and there are even fewer people who can reach the innate realm, let alone in this world where cannonballs are flying everywhere. As an innate strong man, you old Some are too fast!”

The old man was startled and scratched his cheek, "You can still sense my cultivation, but I didn't expect..."

Duan Muxiang chuckled and said: "You should rarely fight with masters of the same level, otherwise you won't be able to see what other innate masters are like."

The old man spread his hands and said matter-of-factly: "At our level of cultivation, how can we easily fight each other?"

"So, there is no self-awareness without comparison. Although your method of mixing poison with Qi is effective, it makes you impure. Over time, your cultivation becomes difficult to break through. Maybe your combat effectiveness is indeed stronger, but other That aspect was completely sacrificed.”

The old man didn't take it seriously, "Oh, isn't that good? People don't need to live too long. The key is to live a high-quality life. It's good to do what you want to do."

Duan Muxiang naturally didn't say anything when he saw this. He didn't want to persuade him, he just said it casually.

"I haven't been home for a few days. I guess those old guys are getting anxious. Thank you for the hospitality right now. We'll talk again when we have the opportunity." The old man put away the bamboo tube and waved goodbye.

Duan Muxiang yawned and sat on the recliner with no intention of getting up to say goodbye. "Remember to bring a roast chicken or something when you come back next time. I'm a little tired of eating snakes."

The old man waved his hand, his pace was slow but extremely fast, and he disappeared into the jungle in the blink of an eye.

Duan Muxiang looked back at the wooden building where there was only one person left, "I have to adapt to the lonely life again."

……

Time flies, and Duan Muxiang's life is quite fulfilling. She practices Zixia Kung Fu in the morning, then studies various martial arts, tries to refine Gu, and then studies the role of the mysterious bead and the seven-petal flower.

He basically had no clue about the mysterious beads, but he had made some progress in his research on the seven-petal flower.

The purest flowers bloom in the darkest and dirty soil. This kind of flower is like a cathode and a yang that bounces back from the bottom. It has extremely strong vitality and can make living things undergo radical changes, and even improve the life level of living things. .

So Duanmuxiang experimentally used a seven-petal flower to join the Gu refining process. Facts have proved that his method was correct. Two golden dragon Gus that could not be made in more than two months were successfully made in one refining process!

It's a pity that the two of them couldn't become the Golden Snake Sword. From the result, it still failed after all.

After that, Duanmuxiang stopped doing this. After all, the seven-petal flower was limited. It would be fine if he could make a golden snake sword. If it was just a golden snake cone, it would be a big loss.

In this way, another two months passed in an ordinary but not boring life.

On this day, the old man came again. This time it was not a chance encounter in the jungle, but a man who came here specifically to beat the autumn wind after collecting herbs.

Duan Muxiang despised this and would have kicked the old man out if he hadn't seen him bringing two live chickens.

However, this day seemed to be really lively. A new batch of supplies arranged by Zhao Yuanyuan was also delivered, and the leader was his anonymous disciple Zhao Fangxu.

"Where's your father? He's so generous just letting you and your companions go into the mountains alone."

Zhao Fangxu looked at the old man behind Duan Muxiang with a shy face. He hesitated to speak, which made Duan Muxiang smile and ask, "What happened? Have you cried? Why are the circles under your eyes red?"

"My dad...is injured."

Duan Muxiang frowned, "Tell me about it."

"The war on the front line was tense, and the soldiers needed medicine. My father contacted a batch of medicine from Hong Kong. Who knew that he escaped the search of the warship, but was intercepted by the enemy after landing ashore. Although my father escaped, he was also captured. Got the gun."

Duan Muxiang pondered for a moment and said decisively: "The enemy may have known about it for a long time, but wanted the batch of medicines, so he chose to do it on the shore. Also, the news has leaked, you should check for the traitor."

Zhao Fangxu carefully wrote down these words, but the old man next to him answered: "Do you need a bodyguard? I know some, but it will cost money."

(End of this chapter)