Mountains and rivers are waiting for you to return

Chapter 299: Forty Dirty Stone Lands

"Have you not eaten meat for a long time?" Pei Nai asked.

Yu Min held the dried meat in his hand with care and answered her, "I have eaten it before. I caught rabbits and snakes myself. Occasionally, birds would fall down. I would pick up their carcasses and roast them over a fire when I got home. But the meat was very bland and not as fragrant as this one. It also depended on luck. Sometimes I couldn't catch any for a long time."

The bland taste is understandable because the vegetation here is sparse and it may be impossible to make seasonings.

"By the way, Minmin, you are trapped here and can't get out, is it because the canyon is too deep and there is nowhere to climb?" Pei Nai asked curiously.

One of them spoke Tianyao dialect and the other spoke Qilu dialect, but they could understand each other and just chatted like that.

Yu Min nodded, swallowed the food in his mouth, and then said, "There was an entrance, but it was blown up by the army. They built a station ladder that can move up and down in the dirty stone area, so that miners can come down to mine during the day."

Yu Min explained the reason very clearly, but Pei Nai still had doubts.

"Since you knew there was only one entrance and the poisonous miasma was so severe, why did you flee here?"

Yu Min replied, "There are soldiers guarding all the exits from the mountain. The environment inside the canyon is complicated, so the villagers think they can hide there. Besides, the poisonous miasma was not serious before. It was those people who blew up the dirty stone area that caused the poisonous gas to become more and more dense."

Pei Nai gradually understood what happened.

“Since there is a ladder, people will come down every day. Haven’t your villagers resisted?”

Yu Min showed a sad look, his eyes were moist, "Of course there were, the strong uncles all went, but the soldiers came down with weapons, and no one came back alive. After that day, we had no ability to resist."

Pei Nai sighed, wondering who was the mastermind behind this who could even use private soldiers.

However, this uninhabited area and Yun'azhai are directly under the jurisdiction of the Qilu court and are not personal fiefdoms.

She couldn't think of any suspects yet.

Pei Nai was afraid that Yu Min would feel upset, so he stopped asking questions and gave her a bag of dried fruits.

"What does this taste like? Is it sweet?" Yu Min took a bite, feeling happy and curious.

"It's dried peaches and apricots, it's sweet."

As Pei Nai spoke, he began to feel a sour feeling in his heart.

The greatest suffering Gu Yuli had ever endured after he was born was training in the military camp.

But Yu Min has been living in this canyon since he was two years old, surrounded by poisonous plants and miasma. He has hardly tasted any good food and is very skinny. It is unknown how long it will take for him to recover.

"Can I call you sister from now on?" Yu Min asked cautiously.

Pei Nai laughed out loud, thinking she was very cute, "I'm almost thirty years old, and my son is older than you, so don't call me sister, dear."

Although Mingzhi's physical age is only twenty-five, Pei Nai is talking about the age she has experienced.

"Ah? But you look less than 20 years old." Yu Min was very surprised.

Yu Min was not wrong about this.

It was only in the past two or three years that Pei Nai and his friends realized that they had not aged at all during these years.

Gu Jinheng checked everyone's bodies and speculated on the reasons for the changes based on the differences among the people who entered the meteorite site together.

Zhang Sheng, Lin Shengtao, Zhong Lin, Senior Qu and Grandma Axun are all in good health and are aging naturally.

The only ones whose bodies have not aged are those who entered the Land of Falling Skies.

And the thing most likely to affect their bodies is the light spots that merge into their bodies after they find the secret exit from the foggy wasteland and enter the stone chamber.

In other words, their bodies are not aging, they are just aging very slowly.

Pei Nai could only smile at Min without any explanation.

They rested until night, and when the miners left, Pei Nai took the Lingyue gun and followed Yu Min to the dirty stone area. It seemed that the moonlight could not illuminate this forgotten land.

They walked in the dark, in the evil fog, with only dark miasma in front of them, and they moved forward completely relying on Min's memory.

After walking for a long distance, Pei Nai smelled the stench of a corpse.

She grabbed Yu Min and moved closer.

As Yu Min spoke in a low voice, Pei Nai vaguely saw a mountain of corpses.

Below were countless decayed skeletons, and above were many new corpses. She stood on the pile of bones and looked closer, trying to see the dead people's clothes clearly.

It was determined that several of them matched the characteristics of the villagers who disappeared from her fiefdom.

Those who disappeared in the mountains here were killed and thrown here.

"People are often thrown down from above. They must be people who accidentally entered this mountain area and saw the canyon." Yu Min said quietly.

Pei Nai couldn't imagine that Yu Min had been living in such a place since she was two years old, and she was left alone in the end.

How strong does she have to be to survive?

Moreover, her character was not suppressed or distorted, and she still maintained her original innocence and kindness.

What a strong-willed girl this is?
Pei Nai sighed in his heart and felt even more distressed for her.

They continued walking towards the far end of the canyon, through endless darkness and thick fog.

After a long time, they turned a rock wall, light appeared in front of them, and the mist began to turn blue.

A huge deep pit has been dug in the dirty stone area.

The ore inside glowed blue in the darkness, illuminating the mist above.

Being in it is like falling into a sea of smoke.

Pei Nai was a little dazed. When Yu Min took her around the edge of the mine, Pei Nai picked up a piece of dirty stone on the ground.

Finally I could see the stone clearly.

At that moment, she felt as if she heard a loud bell ringing in her ears, and her scalp went numb with fright.

Three years ago, a kind of "yearly poison" appeared in many places in Qilu and Tianyao.

"Sui Du" was the general term used by the imperial court for this drug. The poison came from a peculiar blue stone, and folk users called it "He Sui".

When this poisonous stone is inhaled into the human body, it will cause hallucinations, make the user drunk and delirious every day, and make the user addicted, eventually causing the user to die from the poison entering the lungs.

At first, the "Sui Poison" only appeared in Qilu and Tianyao, and then the countries in the east and west also discovered the "Sui Poison" one after another.

During the three years, the imperial courts of various countries destroyed many dens that resold "Annual Poison", but they were never able to find the source.

Because there were particularly many cases in Qilu, they speculated that the source of the "year poison" was most likely in Qilu.

Da Xian gave the prosecutor who was investigating the case a final three months. If the source was not traced by the time the time limit was up, he would block the border between Qi and Lu to stop the spread first, and then conduct a thorough investigation from within by region.

This would be a move that would greatly damage the national strength of Qi and Lu, and would bring all trade and commerce to a standstill, but Da Xian was determined to completely resolve the scourge of the "poison of the year".

The "dirty stones" mentioned by Yu Min are the "harvest years" that bring disaster to the outside world.

Who could have thought that this uninhabited area was the root cause and led to the overnight destruction of the Heluo tribe?
Just as Pei Nai put the stone into the package and prepared to take it out as evidence, he heard a man's questioning voice from far above his head.

The man shouted in Qilu dialect: "Who is it?!"

(End of this chapter)