Priceless: A widow with a baby asks the prince to marry again

Many thoughts flashed through Chu Shiyu's mind, and he had a rough idea of ​​the cause and effect behind it...

But there is still a doubt... Which man would be so eager to match his widow with another man?

Especially, he was originally... not a good destination... even in the beginning, he was a trouble to her.

Chu Shiyu didn't want to admit it, but he knew himself... Even with his current fate, he was not Liu Rusi's type... Just like how she treated Xue Fei and Cai Yun, she liked pure and simple people and hated those with complicated minds...

"Why did you save me?"

Chu Shiyu couldn't help but ask. The old Taoist probably didn't have much time left. If he didn't solve the doubts now, he might never know...

Seeing that the old Taoist still smiled foolishly and didn't answer, he knew that there was a taboo and he couldn't speak directly, so he changed the question: "If I die...what will happen?"

"Why bother asking me this? Think about it, what have you done after you survived..."

The old Taoist smiled faintly and said, "Now the people in the surrounding areas of Jinyan City are all grateful to Prince Duan!"

"I just suppressed some bandits..." Chu Shiyu said, his heart ached...

The bandits in Jinyan City are essentially private soldiers raised by the Eighth Prince. In fact, they can eat and drink enough without robbing houses. Perhaps they deliberately do some evil deeds as bandits in order to cover up their tracks.

But they really were committing all kinds of evil, such as burning, killing, looting and so on. After being indulged for too long, they had become extremely vicious and cruel, and were no different from real bandits.

Chu Shiyu secretly despised the Eighth Prince for never leading troops and not knowing how to follow good and follow evil. It was almost impossible to discipline a group of private soldiers raised from bandits into a disciplined army. Even if the bandits were kept, they would be of little use.

What if I die?

Will anyone fight against the bandits? Maybe no one will.

Even if he did, if the other assigned generals did not arrive in Jinyan so quickly, the Eighth Prince would probably not give up directly like this, and might move the bandits to another place to hide.

The bandits cannot become a weapon for the Eighth Prince to fight for the throne, but they are the nightmare of the people around Jinyan City!

Even though they were mainly causing trouble in the villages west of the city, didn't Liu Rusi send him two baskets of eggs to express her gratitude for his efforts in suppressing the bandits? In other words, these bandits could threaten Dongshan Village...

A chill ran through his heart. He still remembered the scene of the women who were raped by the bandits biting the bandits. Their strong hatred had touched him...

After that, he instructed his subordinates who stayed in Jinyan City to help these women make a living. However, there were still many women whose families were broken or who were disliked by their husbands' families. They refused the money to live a stable life and chose to end their lives.

But just like his judgment of his own coldness, it was just a slight touch, nothing more...

He had never associated these with her! Now, just thinking about the threat of bandits that had not yet occurred, he felt suffocated!

She was a cautious person, and she would wear a veil to cover her face when she left Dongshan Village. Dongshan Village was remote, and outsiders were rarely allowed in. Most of the villagers had a good relationship with her, and few of them went out to cause trouble...

But God is never fair and often brings sudden disasters to people!

With her looks, if she was noticed by the bandits... he didn't dare to think about it anymore!

'We have nothing to do with what we cannot interfere with'

With what she said, he barely put away his fear. In the predetermined trajectory of fate, he, Chu Shiyu, was still alive.

Chu Shiyu looked at the old Taoist in a trance, but this made sense. Why did the old Taoist... or why did Qin Lie save him...

From the beginning to the end, it was all for the purpose of protecting Liu Rusi and her son.

It would be difficult for them to deal with the bandits of more than 3,000 people, but as long as he - Prince Duan - survived, he would definitely suppress the bandits and take revenge.

The old Taoist said at the banquet that life and death are hard to change, and survival is hard to find. He is afraid that handing him over to Liu Rusi will be his only chance of survival in this doomsday.

In other words, in order to prevent Liu Rusi and her son from encountering the danger of mountain bandits, he had no choice but to let him meet Liu Rusi.

Then, perhaps because he saw the fate that was about to happen, in order to prevent him from causing Liu Rusi to get hurt, Qin Lie placed his feelings on him...

Then the old Taoist traveled thousands of miles to reach Xingzhou City, and now he has come to the palace to pay the price of his life...

Changing the key points of fate again and again...all to ensure that Liu Rusi and Qin Hao can be safe and worry-free.

As for why the old Taoist wanted to do this for Liu Rusi and her son... or in other words, why he was willing to sacrifice everything for Qin Lie's will, Chu Shiyu had some guesses...

Rui Feng stared at the Taoist priest who was drinking the ginseng soup slowly. He decided to keep this question hidden in his heart, fearing that there might be ears on the other side of the wall and that it would be a disaster for Liu Rusi and her son.

"Do you understand?"

The old Taoist put down the empty earthenware jar and said with a smile: "If you have nothing to do, go to sleep for a while. It's getting late. You will have to worry about me tomorrow."

Chu Shiyu slowly put away those emotions, but did not leave. Instead, he sat down on a chair beside him and said seriously: "After all, my surname is Chu, and I am a member of the Great Xia royal family. The fate of Great Xia is closely related to me."

Hearing this, the smile on his old face, which was always smiling, gradually faded, and the old man looked at the spirited young man in front of him in a trance but seriously.

"Have you ever seen people exchanging their own children for food?" the old man asked softly.

Chu Shiyu was stunned, then shook his head and said, "I've only seen it in books. Historical records show that during famines, such inhumane things sometimes happened."

“I’ve seen it.”

The old man had a bitter look on his face, muttering, "When I was ten years old, I ran away alone because I was playful, but was accidentally kidnapped by a kidnapper... Later, it was discovered that I was not a Han Chinese. The kidnapper thought that even if he let me go, it would still be a capital crime, so he simply went all out and took me to the dark market and sold me as a vegetable."

"Veteran?" Chu Shiyu asked in surprise.

The old man explained: "Vegetable people are people who are eaten as vegetables. At that time, they were also not allowed to be seen in public... But they were not rare. Almost every city had such secret places."

Chu Shiyu frowned. He never knew there was such a place.

Seeing his expression, the old man sighed in a trance, "It doesn't exist now. Three or four years after Chu Yuan's Lixia Dynasty, the Vegetable Market disappeared."

Chu Yuan was the founding emperor of Daxia, and Chu Shiyu also remembered him.

"Daxia law: if you slaughter a living person, regardless of gender, age or youth, your entire clan will be exterminated. If you buy and eat human flesh, your entire clan will be exterminated."

The old man sighed: "There were similar laws at that time, but..."

"However, this only applies to your tribe. People of my tribe are treated as cattle and sheep and are often not bound by the law. When we don't want to care about them, we won't interfere even if they have committed many crimes! When we want to kill people, we will kill them even if they are innocent. We have deliberately massacred more than hundreds of thousands of people just because some of the big families in our tribe have too many people!"

Chu Shiyu said in a deep voice: "That kidnapper dared to sell you as a vegetable and send you to be slaughtered, probably because of this. The crime is not certain, but it is a serious crime to offend people from your clan. Killing as many people as you want is just a matter of a word. Letting you go is not necessarily much better than killing you directly."

The old man was silent for a long time, and then he continued after a while: "Yes... lawless and absurd... You said before that eating children is a thing in times of famine, but there was no famine at that time... In fact, there were several years of good harvests at that time."