In the third year of Kaiping's reign, Zhenzhou's ruined houses were hit by military disasters.
In September of the third year of Kaiping in Houliang, there was Jicheng, thirty miles southeast of Zhenzhou.
Withered yellow weeds overflowed the broken wall, and fragments of pottery pots that had been trampled by horse hooves were embedded in the mud, mixed with dark red blood stains - these were the traces left by the Hedong Army's rangers who crossed the border three days ago. Zhao Chen woke up with a heartbreaking headache. When he opened his eyes, sawdust was falling from the beams, hitting his face, with a musty and dusty smell.
"Water... Water..."
His throat was so dry that it felt like it was about to burst. He struggled to sit up, but found a sharp pain in his left arm. When he lowered his head, he saw that the sleeves of his coarse cloth coat were soaked with blood, and the edges of the wound were black and red, as if he had been slashed with a blunt instrument. This is not his body - he remembers that he stayed up late last night in the university library revising the paper on "The Military System of the Five Dynasties." There was "History of the Five Dynasties" and densely marked notebooks spread out on the table. How could he suddenly be in such a place?
"Hunter, you are finally awake!"
A hoarse voice came, and an old man in animal skins walked into the door, holding a broken pottery bowl filled with turbid water. The old man's face was full of wrinkles, two fingers were missing from his left hand, and he had a rusty hunting knife on his waist. "Yesterday you fell at the east end of the village and were rubbed by the hoof of Liang Jun's horse. If Lao Qin and I hadn't passed by, you would have fed the wild dogs."
Lao Qin? Liang Junyouqi?
There was a "buzzing" sound in Zhao Chen's mind, and he glanced around the room - the adobe walls, the leaky windows, half a bag of moldy corn piled in the corner, and the notebook wrapped in a tarpaulin beside the kang! That's his baby
