love on the turquoise land

Chapter 29

"Once Xu Fu set sail, he never looked back.

I'll only mention the Headscarf Army. The tripod books recorded that in the land of Namba, there were four extremely secretive lairs of the Di Xiao. The Headscarf Army repeatedly ventured deep into the old forest and found the indigenous people living in the dense jungle.

From a modern perspective, these indigenous people were a minority ethnic group living in the old forest. Due to their long association with the mountains and remoteness from the outside world, their living environment, lifestyle, habits, and even their height, body size, and development of individual organs were different from those of outsiders. Their most distinctive feature was their ability to smell the scent of the Di Xiao—a strange odor, it's said, that neither the Headscarf Army nor anyone else could detect.

However, this is reasonable. People evolve with their environment, and this is a form of natural selection: those who have lived for generations in the vicinity of the Di Xiao's haunt can only survive if they can smell the scent of the Di Xiao, allowing them to prepare to flee or confront in advance; otherwise, they would have been wiped out long ago.

From the mouths of these indigenous people, the Headscarf Army confirmed that the Di Xiao was not a mythical legend but a real existence, and then they gradually identified the lairs.

Next, they did three things.

The first was to recruit the indigenous people. The noses of the indigenous people were invaluable to them. The recruited indigenous people were later called Dog People (gǒu jiārén), not as an insult, but because they really had noses like dogs.

***

Yan Tuo remembered the big guy who loved eating cucumber with dipping sauce. He must have been one of the Dog People.

No wonder Mrs. Hua acted normal when giving him directions but stalled inexplicably after reading the new message on her phone, using the clumsy excuse of moving a sauce jar. (chapter 13)

Now it made sense. The big guy must have sent a message to Mrs. Hua because he smelled the scent of the Di Xiao coming from the car.

***

"The second thing the Headscarf Army did was blockage, which is sealing off the four main lairs and securing them with locked gates.

Although the saying goes, "It's better to disperse than to block," not everything is about flood control. Since the Di Xiao were rare to begin with, sealing off the source was equivalent to preventing future troubles.

Of course, blockage came at a cost. I don't know if you've heard, but after Qin Shihuang unified the six states, fearing rebellion from the people in various regions, he "collected the soldiers of the world and gathered them in Xianyang," and cast twelve gold statues. After the fall of the Qin dynasty, the fate of the twelve gold statues remains unknown—there are various folk legends, some saying they were burned along with the Palace of Eternal Life by Xiang Yu, some saying they were buried with Qin Shihuang, and some saying they were destroyed by Dong Zhuo during the late Eastern Han Dynasty.

I don't know about the other gold statues, but as far as I know, at least one of them was used in the Namba Old Forest—transformed from one to four, they were cast into four large gates, known as the Golden Gates because they were made from gold statues.