Chapter 52 Nothing Happened in the Car

Yanzhou, Chenliu Commandery, outside Puyang City.

A very small carriage was parked by the roadside, its wheels extremely peculiar, covered with several layers of animal hide.

The driver was Qu Yi, who turned his head and said to the carriage: "Young Master, we've arrived."

Before long, the carriage door opened, and Yuan Xi jumped down first.

His original appearance was easily recognizable, so with Wu Zhao's help, he darkened his eyebrows and glued some of Qu Yi's beard onto his chin, completely changing his appearance.

In contrast, Qu Yi's beard was trimmed quite short, making him look quite different from his appearance in Beixin City.

Wu Zhao followed, poking her head out, her face a little flushed, but fortunately hidden by the spots on her face, so it wasn't very noticeable.

The carriage space was extremely small. These days, they had been rushing on their journey, and the two of them were cramped inside, their bodies often bumping into each other, causing Wu Zhao's heart to race.

No one would have expected that Yuan Xi and the others would appear here.

Seven or eight days ago, Yuan Xi led a convoy of dozens of people, even including dozens of women, and left Beixin City grandly and openly, heading south slowly, as if on a pleasure trip.

Calculating the time, the convoy should still be hundreds of miles north of Ye City, and it will take several more days to reach Ye City.

In reality, Yuan Xi, Wu Zhao, Qu Yi, and a few personal guards secretly boarded a specially made small carriage when the convoy camped for the night on the first night, and traveled south day and night.

They traveled lightly all the way, changing horses several times, bypassing Wei Commandery, Ye City, the southernmost part of Jizhou, and arrived at Puyang City in Chenliu Commandery, Yanzhou, more than a hundred miles south of Ye City!

Yuan Xi reached out his hand, and Wu Zhao naturally placed her hand on Yuan Xi's arm and jumped out of the carriage.

Wu Zhao reacted and her face flushed slightly.

This whimsical idea of changing identities like a heavenly horse soaring through the sky made Wu Zhao secretly admire him. Yuan Xi wanted her to play the role of Madam Hidden Tiger. Wu Zhao was not angry, but rather secretly delighted.

But when Wu Zhao asked Yuan Xi for her alias, Yuan Xi said a bad joke.

"I'm called Hidden Tiger, so you can be called Hairy Rabbit."

Wu Zhao listened and subconsciously tightened her legs.

When Yuan Xi saw that he had said the wrong thing, he casually said, "Or should I call you White Tiger?"

As soon as the words came out, Yuan Xi felt that something was wrong and quickly turned his head away.

Wu Zhao squeezed her legs even tighter. Since her husband's death, she had been extremely sensitive to this kind of husband-killing statement.

Moreover, did Yuan Xi say this casually, or did he calculate it using that star-gazing technique?

If that's the case, then you don't need to be called Hidden Tiger, you might as well be called Lustful Tiger!

Qu Yi greeted the few attendants dressed as farmers following behind the carriage and began to remove the animal hides covering the wheels.

At that time, the wheels were all made of wood. If the speed was too fast, it would be very bumpy and easily damage the wheels.

In this world, there were no rubber or other materials to make tires, so Yuan Xi came up with a method to wrap the wheels in straw, then wrap them with cloth strips, and cover the outermost layer with animal hides, and then tighten and fix them with iron wire.

In this way, the bumps were greatly reduced, and the sound was slight, which can be said to be much more convenient than wooden wheels.

Qu Yi and the others propped up the carriage wheels and removed the iron wires, animal hides, straw, and other materials on them, and the wheels returned to their original state.

In this way, they would not attract attention when entering Puyang City.

Seeing that everyone was almost done, Yuan Xi said, "Except for Brother Qu, you go into the city separately to inquire about news first. Brother Qu and the two of us will enter the city together in the carriage."

The personal guards listened and went away to carry out their orders.

Yuan Xi and Wu Zhao got into the carriage, and Qu Yi drove the carriage swaggeringly towards the gate of Puyang City.

At the city gate, there were more than a dozen soldiers dressed as Cao soldiers guarding the gate. Seeing the carriage coming, they blocked it with the wooden spears in their hands and shouted, "Stop!"

A soldier walked over and was about to use the tip of his spear to lift the carriage curtain. Qu Yi's eyes flashed.

As a result, a faint voice came from the car, "If you damage my car curtain, I will definitely make you regret it."

The soldier was furious when he heard this: "Who is inside? Get out of the car!"

The car curtain was lifted, Yuan Xi poked his head out, threw a letter of introduction at the soldier's chest, and snorted coldly, "Look carefully."

The soldier caught the letter of introduction, and was about to get angry, when he glanced at the logo on the letter of introduction, and his face changed drastically.

He carefully looked at the letter of introduction several times, and a squad leader came over and shouted, "Who is making trouble here?"

The soldier quickly handed the letter of introduction to the squad leader. The squad leader took it and looked at it, and his face changed immediately. He put on a smiling face, respectfully handed the letter of introduction back with both hands, and said with a smile, "This little one is blind and offended you, sir. Please don't blame me."

"I don't know what you want to do in the city, sir?"

"Do you need this little one to help you lead the way?"

The soldier was so respectful for no other reason than that the logo on the letter of introduction was issued to the gentry by the Yuan family of Jizhou.

At that time, the gentry were superior people, and the Yuan family controlled the land of four states. Even Cao Cao's Yanzhou was the territory of the Yuan family, so how dare these soldiers speak.

Yuan Xi snorted coldly: "Do I need you to ask about my affairs?"

"Is it okay to enter the city?"

He acted like a frivolous and arrogant gentry to the fullest, because in the eyes of the gentry, these soldiers and ordinary people were no different.

The more he looked like a gentry, the less the soldiers dared to ask questions.

If he acted humble, the soldiers would become suspicious instead.

Sure enough, the squad leader quickly stepped aside, smiling and said, "Yes, yes, sir, please go slowly."

Everyone watched the carriage enter the city and disappear into the streets. One soldier snorted, "What a big airs."

Another soldier laughed and said, "Who told him to be a member of the gentry? We can't even say a few words to them in our whole lives. You should thank God that you didn't cause any trouble."

The carriage moved slowly on the street, and Wu Zhao curiously looked out through the gap in the curtains.

Since she was taken away by the Xiongnu in Luoyang, she had been running around hard until she was rescued to Beixin City, and then she came to this Puyang City.

At that time, Luoyang suffered a big fire, with broken walls and ruins everywhere, streets collapsed, and starving people everywhere.

She stayed in Beixin City for more than half a month and found that Beixin City was much better than Luoyang in terms of streets and other aspects. She only thought that Luoyang had suffered from war disasters.

As a result, when she entered this Puyang City, she found that the streets were also dilapidated and there were starving people lying on the ground everywhere. Only then did she realize that Beixin City was a special case?

Wu Zhao told Yuan Xi her doubts, and Yuan Xi listened, and after a moment of silence, he said: "I'm not sure, but I heard that Ye City is good."

"Let the people recuperate and reduce wars, and the people below will naturally live well."

"Yanzhou has been in constant war for the past few years, and the gentry control the land, how is it possible that people will not starve to death."

Wu Zhao remembered Yuan Xi throwing the grain-hoarding gentry off the city wall, and thought that only this person would dare to do it.

In Wu Zhao's view, everything Yuan Xi did was against the gentry, without any family style.

However, when she thought of the scene when their group left Beixin City, almost all the men, women, old and young in the city went outside the city to see them off, she couldn't help but sigh in her heart.

He despises the gentry and values the lower class. He is really a strange person.

The carriage drove a few streets and stopped behind a house. Qu Yi looked at the surrounding scenery and should have arrived at the agreed place.

He took out two strips of black and white cloth and tied them to the left and right carriage shafts respectively, then pretended to sit and doze, while squinting his eyes slightly and constantly looking around.

After a full half an hour, someone came over and made a few gestures to Qu Yi.

Qu Yi said a few words, and the man nodded, came up and led the carriage, leading the way in front.

Wu Zhao felt the carriage start to move, and her heart couldn't help but thump.

Yuan Xi had told her earlier that the purpose of this trip was to pretend to be a mystic hermit, but the key lies in Wu Zhao, who is familiar with the Yanzhou gentry.

The other party will definitely ask some questions to test them. If they don't respond properly and reveal their flaws, the efforts of this trip will be in vain.

The carriage circled in the city for a long time before finally turning into a small alley and entering a small courtyard.

As soon as he entered the courtyard, Qu Yi's pupils shrank slightly.

There was a man sitting with his back to them in the courtyard. Although he didn't move, the faint murderous aura he exuded made Qu Yi vigilant.

He is an expert who has experienced the battlefield!