Chapter 168 Riko

Fang Yangqin's speech was very orderly, and he gave a brief summary of the confession obtained so that Shen Hao could understand the context.

"One month after the first death, similar deaths began to occur in Xiushan Village. Usually, they would die suddenly on the day of the onset, less than five hours before and after, and the symptoms of the onset were similar to those of ordinary wind and cold. I feel weak and want to sleep, and I die as soon as I fall asleep. Black spots will appear on my body after half an hour of death."

Shen Hao flipped through the file in his hand while listening to Fang Yangqin's brief introduction. When he encountered doubts, he interrupted and asked: "When did the Wanhekou side feel that there might be a plague?"

"I felt the problem when the yamen servants who dealt with the first death incident died suddenly at home. At that time, the yamen advocated reporting it, but was suppressed by the chief officer, worried that the news of the plague would affect his promotion. The chief officer can be transferred to Pingshun City next year to take over as the chief officer."

"Bastard! Where is that man now?"

"In prison."

"Don't let him die, and don't let him relax. He won't know how much trouble he has caused until he scrapes off three layers of skin."

"Hehe, it's inevitable."

"continue."

Fang Yangqin continued: "After that, Xiushan Village completely lost control. Many people in the village were scared away. Some went to Lincun to hide from the disaster, and some simply ran to Wanhekou City. It is impossible to know where they went. In the end, the Wanhekou yamen could only bite the bullet and continue to conceal the report and threatened those who fled. If they dared to go out and talk nonsense, their population fields would be confiscated. Most of them are floods.

After that, there were dead people from village to village, too many to count. In the beginning, the yamen would organize people to bury it on the spot, but then everyone was afraid and didn't want to do it. The yamen dug a hiding pit on both sides of the official road, and asked the old and weak in the village who could not escape to help get the corpse out and throw it into the pit.

Later, about a dozen of the yamen servants died, and no one dared to enter the disaster area."

The doctor next to him blushed and was angry, because according to the common way to deal with the plague in this world is to block it, so that the scope of the plague will not expand. But if you want to block it, you must react immediately. If one or two people are missed, it will lose all meaning. However, what Wanhekou did was undoubtedly a complete waste of the critical period for the disposal of the plague, and the situation is now irreversible.

"Send Fengri City a message, saying that the situation here has long been out of control. It is not clear how many people have poured out of Wanhe Estuary, and where they have gone. It is recommended to investigate all the refugees who entered the city, and circle them. The ban is imminent. Send it urgently."

"Yes." Wang Yiming took the order and left in a hurry.

Shen Hao got up from his seat, looked at the sky, turned his head to the doctor and said, "The starting place should be Xiushan Village, let's go there now, how about?"

"It should be!"

So Shen Hao personally led the team, leaving Wang Yiming and Fang Yangqin behind, and galloped all the way towards Xiushan Village.

He got off the official road in the evening, followed the guidance of a local Xuanqing Wei Zongqi who led the way, and walked for half an hour on the mountain road before seeing the Xiushan Village in a mountain depression.

"There are not many people in the village. There are a total of 125 people in 31 households. One hundred and seventeen people were confirmed dead, and the whereabouts of the rest are unknown."

"Is there any statistics on the death toll?" Shen Hao asked with a frown. He hadn't seen the dead person from the file before, and he hadn't heard Fang Yangqin mention it.

"There is no way to count, but because Xiushan Village was the first place where the accident happened, the yamen also counted it at first, but then things got messed up."

Without rushing into the village, the doctor walked around the village and recorded all the surrounding environment and vegetation, so professional that Shen Hao couldn't understand it.

After entering the village, it was quiet inside, and the darkened sky looked even more gloomy.

After lighting the torches, Shen Hao and his party found the first house where the accident happened according to the description on the file. A small courtyard on the east side of the village, with a bamboo fence on the outside, and three-entry houses and thatched houses on the inside.

Shen Hao asked most of the people to wait outside, and those whose cultivation base was not in the Gathering God state were not allowed to enter.

The healer's monk happened to be at the first level of the God Concentration Realm, and he was not afraid of the plague, so he entered the room first, followed by Shen Hao.

There was a strange smell in the room, and the doctor and Shen Hao felt it immediately.

"The smell is very strange. It doesn't smell like tide or corpse. It's weird."

"What's the smell of decay?"

After such a long time, no one should have lived in the house. It's normal that it seems to be rotten, but why does it smell so strange? Even annoying.

"This is."

Following the strange smell, he opened a basket in the corner, and there were some rotten fruits in it, which looked like pears. That strange smell came from this thing.

Shen Hao thought to himself: Is this the smell of rotten pears? Is it so weird?

However, the doctor who came over was not as relaxed as Shen Hao. He carefully inserted a fruit with a stick, and then beat it. Because of the rot, the rotten flesh was easily peeled off, exposing the fruit inside. nuclear.

Shen Hao was still wondering what the doctor was going to do, but when he saw the core of the fruit, he realized that he almost missed an important clue, the fruit in the basket was not a pear at all.

Will the pear pit grow into a skull? It's still the kind of skull that seems to be laughing wantonly with a grin.

"What is this?"

"Ghost pear."

"Ghost pear?"

"Well, it's a poisonous plant that can cause mental trance, and it's also a poisonous medicinal material for alchemy. It looks almost exactly like a normal wild pear, and it tastes similar to a wild pear."

Shen Hao: "Is this the source of the plague?"

"No, ghost pears are only poisonous but they won't cause plague, otherwise they wouldn't be used for alchemy. What I'm curious about is how an ordinary family can have ghost pears in such a big basket. It stands to reason that ghost pears only grow in places with heavy corpse air, strong yin, little sunlight and humid environment. Such places are usually inaccessible places, and monks have to spend a lot of time searching to collect them. How can this ordinary family touch them? Where did you go?

And if I remember correctly, we don't have ghost pears here in Jingxi, only in Jingnan. "

The doctor was just wondering, but Shen Hao had already turned his doubts into doubts out of habit. Strange enough for a poisonous material to appear in an ordinary family's home and unknowingly afflict it with the plague. Will there be any connection between the two?

"Do you think that this family thought they found wild pears, and they were infected with the plague by something during the picking process?"