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Chapter 82

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(Thanks to Amnesia Love Min for her reward, thank you!)

Zhao Shun walked by the moat outside the city with a lightning gun. In the night sky, the city was brightly lit and the wine and food were fragrant. Outside the city, there were frogs and insects, which were pitch black and dim.

There were no lights on the road, so Zhao Shun walked on the road with deep dim moonlight. It had just rained yesterday and there were puddles on the ground. He accidentally stepped on the mud.

Finally, a dim light appeared in the distance, and a little yellow dog rushed out from afar, but did not yell. Instead, he shook his tail and ran to Zhao Shun's feet and sniffed it.

"Brother Zhao is back?" A figure emerged from the shack in front of him, but it was the neighbor Lao Liu. The old Liu family fled south from Shandong like him. Last winter, the Tartars invaded the pass and rushed into the Shandong territory. In the end, even the Jinan Prefecture was broken, and even several royal princes in Jinan City were killed by the Tartars.

Zhao Shun was originally a craftsman in Jinan City. He opened a blacksmith shop in the city and lived a good life. But when the Tartars arrived, he finally hurriedly fled with his family and headed south. After suffering all the hardships along the way, he finally came to Macheng, Huangzhou Prefecture. He was originally here to join a distant relative, but when he arrived, he found that the relative had moved to Shuzhong two years ago.

At this time, the marriage was not enough, and the money he had spent was almost the same. In the end, he could only lay his feet on the moat in the outer city of Macheng County. Like other refugees who had been wandering here, he built a shack.

There are many shacks on the moat in the south of the city, gathering hundreds of refugees, and it has become a refugee village. Usually, the men go to the city to take on work, do all kinds of hard work, and make some money. The women do some female work, or go to the countryside to do some random work for the landlords. The younger ones go to the streets and go to the villages to beg for food. In short, if they don’t die for a day, they have to eat and drink.

Zhao Shun's family of five has a wife and three children, and the three children are not old. Although Zhao Shun looks half old, he is actually only in his thirties this year, three children, two girls, one boy, two girls, nine and eight years old, and his son is only four years old.

After staying here, Zhao Shun was also responsible for the work at first. Later, he bought a few simple tools and built a simple blacksmith shop in the shack. He usually did some simple tasks, which was much better than carrying the work, but he could barely maintain the life of the family.

Originally, he thought of doing things in the blacksmith shop in the county, but he was not a local person, and the shop generally didn't want to accept him. If he wanted to accept him, he just wanted him to be a young man. He had no salary at all. He could not do such a wife and children.

Zhao Shun wanted to wait until now, he worked in the shack first, and saved some capital, and then he would open a shop himself again. But when the house was leaking, his son suddenly became ill and hired a doctor to see him. After a few doses of medicine, he didn't get better. The little money at home was used up.

If you don’t have money, you can’t catch medicine, and your son’s illness cannot be cured.

Zhao Shun was so anxious that he finally remembered the recent popularity of the Nine-Headed Bird that he had heard people had heard of, how powerful the two young men suppressed bandits, how fierce their firearms were, etc. Zhao Shun was also concerned. Speaking of which, he was no stranger to firearms. His father was a disciple of Zhao Shizhen, a famous firearm master in the court in his early years. He learned a lot of new ways to make new firearms, and later passed on to him.

The last time he fled, he brought out two muskets, one Lumi gun and one electric gun from his home, all of which he had built with his father. After arriving in Macheng, he had only these two muskets.

In order to treat his son, Zhao Shun took two guns to find the two young masters of Jiutou, hoping to sell the guns to them and exchange some money for their son to get medicine to treat his illness. He heard that the two young masters of Jiutou like firearms, and Chunjiang was also the nephew of Li Gong, the minister of the four ministers of the Macheng clan.

Unfortunately, he left in despair and returned in disappointment. He didn't even see anyone, so he left a Lumi gun, hoping to see them tomorrow.

Zhao Shun was in a bad mood and just nodded to Lao Liu.

Back in his shack, Zhao Shun found his wife sitting by his son's bed wiping her tears.

"Is it still hot?"

"Well, after stopping the medicine, it seems to be a little heavier. Dad, has the musket been sold?"

Zhao Shun shook his head, his wife looked disappointed, "Didn't you say those two guns are treasures? Why didn't anyone want them at all?"

"Baby, someone must recognize the goods." Zhao Shun replied, "Today they happened to meet them and they had no time. They had already agreed to see me tomorrow."

"But how can the child's disease be delayed until tomorrow?"

Zhao Shun squatted beside his son, with a gloomy face and didn't say anything. He was in a heavy mood and didn't know what to say. It took two cents of silver to grab a pair of medicine, which was only one pound of pork, but he couldn't afford half a cent of silver at all. He even borrowed all the refugee neighbors around him, and everyone helped to raise some cents of silver, which was very helpful.

He also knew that everyone had no money and no overnight food at home. The man went out to carry the work and worked for a day. He was half tired and only earned a few cents of money.

The wife began to cry in despair, crying heartbroken.

Zhao Shun felt like a needle in his heart when he heard this. He got up, picked up the electric gun from the side, and turned around and walked out of the house.

"Where are you going?"

"Go and find money!" Zhao Shun said without replying, his figure hiding in the darkness.

Zhao Shun, who was deep and shallow, returned to the city again. Fortunately, although there are chaos everywhere, Macheng has always been good. A few days ago, Linjiazhai was blocked by bandits, and Macheng was closed for a few days at night. However, the bandits were suppressed and the city gate was still not closed at night. When passing by the city gate, the soldiers guarding the city just glanced at him and saw that it was a person in the refugee nest by the moat, so he lost interest in coming up to ask and allowed him to enter the city.

Zhao Shun had no place to go, there were no relatives or friends here, and no one would kindly lend him money.

Finally, he gritted his teeth and entered the pawnshop at the intersection with a gun.

"Shopkeeper, pawnshop." Zhao Shun walked into the shop, and the high counter was standing in front, and an old shopkeeper wearing a melon-shaped hat sat behind him, pulling the abacus.

The shopkeeper raised his eyelids and looked at him, responding lightly, "What are you doing, bring it up."

Zhao Shun put the electric gun on the counter and untied the cloth strip, revealing the one big and six small inside. The one big is the main gun of the electric gun, the six small ones are the sub gun, and there are also several accessories such as the poke strip.

The shopkeeper glanced at him unexpectedly, then dragged his long tone and said, "A weird messy gun can be used as a five-cent silver!"

Zhao Shun's face suddenly turned red, "This is not a ragged musket, it is the most exquisite rear-mounted musket, called the lightning gun. It was invented by Zhao Shizhen, a master of firearms, and later submitted it to Emperor Wanli. It was praised by the emperor and was once equipped with the guards of the Beijing camp, which was the most exquisite firearm!"

The shopkeeper ignored him at all, just raised his eyelids and asked again, "Do you think it's not, do you think it's dead or live?"

"I am a good person, but my gun is very good, far exceeding the bird gun, and the cost of making a price is more than three times that of an average bird gun. Now the Ministry of Industry has to make a bird gun for at least five taels of materials and labor. If you want to buy it outside, the price is even more expensive. The Jiutou Bird bought a batch of bird guns last time, and each one was twenty taels of silver. My lightning gun is far more than the bird gun, and it costs more than ten taels of materials and labor. I am now working as ten taels of silver, and I will come to redeem it when I have money."

The shopkeeper just looked at him like a joke, "I am a pawn shop here, not a Jiutou Bird Township Group. If you want to sell bird guns, you should look for them. If you want to pawn, don't talk too much. I will give you one tael of silver now. If you die, I can give you five taels."

The shopkeeper is not ignorant of the goods. On the contrary, he is very familiar with weapons such as bird guns. There are often soldiers in the pawn shop who are poor and cannot eat, so they use their fat jackets, waist knives and muskets to pawn for money.

Although he had never seen this real electric gun, he had heard of the name of this thing. Seeing the gun being kept as new, he knew that this thing was worth a lot of money. But in the pawnshop, the price was different.

Zhao Shun was angry, but he had no choice. He had a son waiting to get medicine and treat the doctor at home, and he couldn't delay it. He only gave one liang to live, and five liang to die. Zhao Shun thought about it for a while, and finally gritted his teeth, "I'll die."

A smile appeared on the shopkeeper's face, and another good deal was done.

He picked up the pen and started writing as a ticket, and handed it to Zhao Shun with five taels of silver.

"Sign up your handprints and get the money."

Zhao Shun was anxious and quickly signed his name and pressed his handprint, and took the money.

"I'm optimistic, I'll be responsible for spending five taels of silver and leaving the counter!"

Zhao Xin took the silver, looked at it under the lamp for a few times, and didn't care much, so he hurried out of the shop. The shopkeeper watched the person leave, and whispered, "Idiot." Then he carefully held the musket in his hand and looked and played with it.

With five taels of silver on his body, Zhao Shun went straight to the medicine shop.

Fortunately, the pharmacy was open at night, so I took out the prescription and asked the client to fold five doses of medicine first, and asked the doctor to catch a little ginseng, a total of one tael of silver.

Zhao Shun handed over the silver ingot, and the man took it and handed it over to the accountant.

"Huh!" The accountant exclaimed unexpectedly, looked at Yin carefully, "Call Wang Tou."

"Old sir, what's wrong?" Zhao Shun felt something was wrong and asked hurriedly.

The accountant looked bad, and looked at him vigilantly, "You wait a little bit."

After a moment, the guy came back with him.

"Tao Wang, look at the money, it seems there is something wrong with it." The accountant said to the man.

The person who came was a silversmith specially hired in the pharmacy, who specialized in identifying silver and anti-counterfeiting silver. The drug store usually had a lot of silver exchange, but now there are fake silver everywhere. If you accidentally receive fake silver, you may even receive fake silver. Ninety percent of the fake silver is adulterated by copper and lead, and less than 100% of the real silver.

If you accidentally receive fake silver, you will lose all your capital. Therefore, in this large-scale pharmacy, a silversmith specially hired to prevent fake silver.

The silversmith looked carefully, then took out a few craftsmen and started to conduct detailed inspections.

"Pseudo-silver, the fake ones can't be fake anymore. There is a layer of silver outside, and it's basically full of lead inside. This ingot of five taels of silver is only worth five cents."

The accountant immediately became angry when he heard this.

This man bought one tael of silver for medicine and gave five taels of fake silver. If they didn't find out, they would have to pay back four taels of silver.

If he collects five cents of silver and gives one tael of silver and four taels of real silver, then his business is really profitable and he will lose a lot. If he doesn't notice it, the final loss will be counted on him.

"Come here, take this guy down and send him to the official position. He dared to use fake money to trick us into the head. You don't ask who our pharmacy is. Seeing your honest appearance, you would never have thought that he would still be such a treacherous villain." The accountant shouted angrily.

A group of pharmacy shop staff were already surrounded by pestle, guillotine, scissors, etc.

"This is impossible. My money was just exchanged for pawnshops. How could it be fake?" Zhao Shun shouted in panic.

The silversmith sneered, took the silver clipper, and cut the silver ingot a few times. The silver ingot turned into a few small pieces. It was clearly visible that there was a layer of silver outside, but there was black lead inside.

When the pharmacy accountant heard that the silver was taken from the pawn shop, his expression changed slightly.

"Is it the intersection in front?"

Zhao Shun nodded.

The accountant sighed, "You man, why don't you be more careful? Forget it, you didn't come to deceive us on purpose, so you won't tie you up and send him to the official position. Let's leave with this fake silver, and we can't sell you the medicine."

When the surrounding men and silversmiths heard the pawn shop at the intersection, they shook their heads. Which shop in Macheng County doesn’t know the bad things about the pawn shop now? Not only did they secretly hire a group of silversmiths to make fake silver, but they also specially used pawn shops to release the fake silver.

It’s better for those locals in the county towns, and they dare not do it too obviously. Sometimes when changing fakes, they just exchange them for 80% or 70% of the pseudo-silver with a higher content. If this man looks at outsiders or poor people like this, he will often be deceived. Just like this silver ingot, the silver ingot of five taels is actually less than 10%, and it is worth at most five cents.

Looking at the expression of the people in the medicine shop, Zhao Shun also understood in his heart that he had been cheated and was cheated by the pawn shop. Not only did he die as a 5 tael of silver, but he was still a fake silver. His snatch gun was actually only used as a 5 cent of silver.

"I'm going to fight with them!" Zhao Shun shouted angrily as he put away the fake silver.

"Brother, listen to my advice, I will take a lesson as a loss this time. You didn't notice it at that time. Now they will not admit it. Moreover, if you have a backer, you will not only be able to get back the money, but you will not do it well. The light ones will be beaten, and the heavy ones will be beaten back, and the bad ones will be put in prison. It's not worth it." The accountant kindly advised him, and he has seen too many broken things. The pawn shop belongs to Zhang butcher, and there are secretly the stakes of the county magistrate and a clerk in the county. How can you fight against them if you are a person without money or power?

Zhao Shun couldn't hear it at all. At this time, he was completely angry. The Tartars invaded his home and destroyed his house and his shop. He fled all the way to visit his relatives, but his relatives moved away. Now he became a refugee living in a shack. As a result, his son was sick and had no money to get medicine. He took out the treasures he passed on from his family and was cheated.

All of this made this Shandong man finally angry. His heart erupt like a volcano, and he was extremely furious.
Chapter completed!
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