Mangdang Mountain, forty miles wide, is the watershed between Sui River and Si River.

All the streams in the south of the mountain flow into the Sui River, and the north of the mountain flow into the Si River.

The complex terrain of this place can also be seen from the administrative divisions of later generations - Dang County in the south of the mountain belongs to Henan Province, Pei County in the north of the mountain belongs to Su Province, while the narrow mountainous area in the middle belongs to Hui and Lu Provinces. It is simply a marginal area where the four provinces do not care about it, and since ancient times, thieves have been born.

However, such a vicious mountainous area is not without civilized historical sites—the tomb of King Xiao of Liang, the younger brother of Emperor Jing of Han, is on the mountain.

Later, in Chen Lin's famous work "Expression to Yuan Shao for Yuzhou", he condemned Cao Cao for setting up the "General of the Central Army of Faqiu and the Chief of the Jin Dynasty". The first example he mentioned was "the generals, officials and soldiers came to excavate in person" and robbed the tomb of King Xiao of Liang.

Li Su rode on a powerful war horse that Liu Bei personally selected for him, wearing black armor and holding a sword in his hand.

Several Wuhuan cavalry soldiers who were skilled in bowing and arrows walked in front of him, and Guan Yu walked with his bridle on his left. Dian Wei carried his two halberds and inserted a short sword as a throwing weapon, and explored the way forward on the steep side of the mountain road.

Dian Wei is still relatively poor nowadays and cannot afford to build too many consumable hand halberds, so he can only use a flying knife.

After reaching Danyang, Li Su decided to find another blacksmith to build a group. In the future, Dian Wei would throw away whatever he wanted in battle, and it would be fine to use the hand halberd as a boomerang.

Li Su also had a trace of fantasy, hoping that when he met his fellow merchants on the official road of the mountain, he would encounter some historical celebrities.

But this low-probability event never happened, and the thief naturally encountered it.

The group had just entered the mountain less than ten miles and reached a steep slope of the mountain road, so they had to lead their horses to walk first.

The thieves are obviously more experienced and understand the terrain better than them.

As soon as the group of people got off their horses, Dian Wei, who was exploring the road in the high forest, was the first to find a thief ambush. He quickly flew over several short swords and killed the three thieves immediately.

The bandits had to launch attacks in advance, jumping down from the forest, and more than a dozen hunting bows flew in a random manner.

Guan Yu quickly blocked Li Su's body, and swung the long soldiers like flying, sweeping at least 80% of the arrows. There were also personal soldiers holding shields, but two arrows still shot Guan Yu's shoulder guards and ribs respectively. Fortunately, the iron armor was solid and the ordinary soft bow could not be shot through.

Among the personal soldiers, the Wuhuan thunder cavalry immediately copied the bow and reflected, with superb archery skills, and shot and killed more than ten thieves in succession. Soon, this group of thieves, which were at least two or three times larger than Li Su's personal soldiers, was completely defeated.

Dian Wei was quick-witted and rushed forward as if he was walking on the ground. He grabbed two thieves who were still killed by the flying knife on their shoulders. He carried one of them back with his armpits and handed them to Li Su for questioning. One of them seemed to be the little leader of the bandit.

"Where are you from? You dare to intercept the official army?" Although Li Su was not interested in thieves, he still had to interrogate clearly for his own safety.

The little leader begged for mercy and said, "My husband, please spare me. We don't know that you are an official army. We just saw many horses from afar, so we were jealous. When we walked closer, we all had weapons and were already timid. But this black man killed several of us first, so we had to take a gamble."

"Haha, it's still us who said so?" Li Su couldn't help but feel funny and continued to question, "Stop talking nonsense, if you want to survive, tell me the origin of your leader."

"We are ordinary bandits, and have no origin... We have to talk about the origin. From Mangdang Mountain to Juyeze, most of the thieves in Pei County and Shanyang County are all remnants of the Huangteng Que Supervisor Liang Zhongning, but they are already the leader of our leader."

Li Su nodded when she heard this, and she knew it roughly.

Nowadays, the bandits at the junction of Yan and Yu are mainly the remnants of the Yellow Turban Army of the Dongjun, which was killed by Huangfu Song three years ago. At that time, Huangfu Song killed Qu coach Bu Ji and Zhang Bo in Cangting and beheaded 7,000 levels. Liang Zhongning, a small leader under Bu Ji, took the remnants as bandits, and even dared to call himself Qu coach.

But don’t underestimate these remnants. In history, after Zhang Ju and Zhang Chun’s rebellious troops went south to rob, they quickly took the opportunity to grow bigger, and some of them formed the later Qingzhou Yellow Turban Army.

Since you have seen it, then kill it and leave less seeds of infection source for the Qingzhou Yellow Turban.

Li Su walked behind the two prisoners, drew out his sword and quickly killed the two. However, the blade was narrow and only cut the blade about an inch deep behind the thieves' neck.

The thief fell to the ground with a miserable tone, and Li Su had to borrow Guan Yu's ring-headed knife and behead himself.

In the past few months with Liu Bei, he only got two opportunities to finish the fight. Although his martial arts are still very bad, at least he gradually calmed down when he was killed.

After finishing, he threw his knife and ordered Dian Wei: "These two heads are considered your military achievements. The chief of Yun told you that ten heads will be promoted to your garrison leader, and there are still five left."

When Dian Wei heard that he actually killed the bandits, he was immediately overjoyed: "Thank you, don't go!"

Dian Wei felt vaguely looking forward to the remnants of the Yellow Turban thieves to come a few more waves.

If he cut five more heads, he can lead a hundred soldiers!

...

Unfortunately, since then, until I crossed the main ridge of Mangdang Mountain, I never encountered any bandits who dared to attack Li Su again.

At noon, the group climbed over the commanding heights of the official road, and in the afternoon it was downhill, and the group relaxed a lot.

There is a small town on the top of the mountain. It turned out that it was built to guard the tomb of King Xiao of Liang. Because within forty miles there are good people living there, and business trips and travelers are resting here.

Li Su wanted to eat hot food, so she ordered her to take a break in the village and town and spend the hottest time of noon before rushing.

Guan Yu personally checked and verified the safety of the food he bought from the townsmen, and then handed it to Li Su.

It turned out to be a deer cut into small pieces, and some DISPLAY and stewed together, like a thick gnocchi soup, without any saltiness.

While the group was having dinner, there were several other business trips that were also very cautious. When the pedestrians arrived in the town, they saw that Li Su and his party seemed sophisticated, so they came up to get close.

A middle-aged man, who seemed to be the leader of the caravan, said, "You guy, look at your clothes, are you officers and soldiers with tolerance? Can you go with us later? Please accept some mountain goods with you later."

As he said that, the other party gave him half a piece of deer jelly and a few pheasants, obviously trying to get a bodyguard.

Li Su looked up and down and asked, "Where are you doing business and where are you going? Why do you have to go to Mangdang Mountain when doing business?"

The merchant smiled bitterly: "I am here to have a list of Li surnames. I am the manager of the Li family in Shanyang. I go to the East China Sea to get the goods necessary for some tribes. There are Juyeze in the north of Shanyang and Mangdang Mountain in the south. There are thieves everywhere. There are no way to go. Fortunately, there are too many thieves, and even those who collect taxes in the government cannot go to the village, so everyone will set up a dock to defend themselves."

Li Su thought to himself: It turned out that he was a person living nearby, so there was nothing he could do. For example, the mountainous areas do not produce salt, so you must take the risk to go to the East China Sea to buy salt.

He filtered the name of "Shanyang Li Family" in his mind and asked tentatively: "In this way, your clan is also a local rich family, how many warriors are there? Is there anyone named Li Dian? This morning in Dang County, I heard local merchants talk about this person."

Li Dan quickly replied: "It's this person, the nephew of our patriarch. However, Brother Dian is still young and likes to study, so how can he be famous for his bravery?"

Li Su didn't answer: "We were sent by the imperial court to recruit soldiers to Youzhou. Are there any aspiring people in your clan willing to join the army and serve the country?"

Li Dan: "The whole clan is here, I'm afraid he doesn't want to travel far away."

Li Su: "That's not forced."

Such powerful men who build docks and build villages are the same as Xu Chu. If you don’t occupy his hometown, he will not be willing to do it with you.

No matter what, it is also beneficial to have a group of businessmen walking along the mountain, not to mention that you can receive some small gifts in vain.

...

After resting, the group began to go down the mountain.

The road down the mountain was light and Dian Wei was even more brisk and rushing forward. He also walked in the forests on both sides of the mountain road, for fear of walking with the large army. The thieves would not dare to take action when they saw too many people.

In this way, under Dian Wei's fishing law enforcement, he cut three bandits' heads one after another, and happily returned to report his merit count.

Once, he even led a group of nearly 100 bandits. Seeing that there was only one of him, the other party killed him. Dian Wei killed several people, thinking that he would suffer a loss if he continued to fight alone. Moreover, he had enough heads needed by the garrison leader, so he went back to lure the enemy.

Guan Yu quickly set up a formation to let his personal soldiers prepare bows and arrows, shot over a dozen times, and then rushed forward to sweep the tail. The morale of the bandits collapsed and the birds and beasts scattered.

These scenes made the people in the Li Dian family caravan frightened: When did the officers and soldiers kill thieves so actively? If the Han Dynasty's army was like this, how did the Yellow Turban Remnants survive these three years? It should have been killed long ago.

In the end, more than 30 were killed. Li Su's side only had two Wuhuan archers and cavalrymen slightly injured, and none of them died. Instead, the Li family caravan killed one of the guards and several injured.

Li Shan begged hard: "Mr., county., and government. Hurry up and stop luring the enemy. We have been traveling around the country for more than ten years, but we have not seen the government army so bravely take the initiative to kill the thief. There are five pieces of coarse silk here, so we can't afford to die."

Only then did Li Su restrain Dian Wei and told him to officially promote him to the governor of the village when he arrived in Danyang, so that he would not attract any more monsters.

Then Li Su helped Li Dan up and told him not to kneel down: "What are some trivial matters? By the way, I haven't asked you where to buy goods after you leave Mangdang Mountain?"

Li Dan: "We go to the East China Sea to purchase goods, so we have to buy more salt and Zuo Bo paper. Anyway, after passing Pengcheng, the road is peaceful, so we go to the East China Sea by ourselves and don't make the difference for those people in Pengcheng Xiapi!"

Li Su: "That's just a good trip to you - we also went to the East China Sea. I heard that there are many wealthy merchants there. This time I recruited soldiers for the court, and I just needed to find wealthy merchants to raise funds. Since you often travel on this road, you should know which wealthy merchants are the most generous, right?"

When Li Su asked this question, he was afraid that Guan Yu and Dian Wei would doubt how he predicted Mi Zhu's existence. It would be better to use Li Dan's mouth to say it, so that he would be more likely to go with the flow.

Li Dan shivered when he heard this: Should this official army go to fight Qiufeng or rob? It’s not that he was a donation to force him to donate... Fortunately, he just gave them some wild game and a few pieces of silk, and let us go the little money for our Li family.

If you die, a fellow Taoist, I will not die.

Li Dan thought so and quickly said everything he knew: "The richest merchants in the East China Sea are of course the Mizizhong family in Qu County, but if you want to be generous, they are the local Lu family in Quyang County. Since the Yellow Turban Thiefs emerged, the young master of the Lu family has sold land every year to help the poor and make friends with wise men and heroes."

Li Su originally wanted to induce the other party to say Mi Zhu, but when he heard that there was a young master of the Lu family, he asked more: "What is the situation with the Lu family? Who is the head of the family name?"
Chapter completed!