Chapter 678 9.102

Chapter 678 102

"Who are you? Why are you here?"

Inside the mansion, Yusuf held a candle. Google search reading

As a newly promoted secret agent, his psychological quality is certainly not as good as the battle-hardened elite of the Tang Kingdom. Seeing a strange woman walking straight to the safe house, he tightly grasped the dagger hidden in his back.

However, when the maid lifted her hood and revealed a delicate face, Yusuf saw the golden flower emblem on her collar.

His heart stopped beating.

"Holy Lord! Are you the king's envoy Isamier?"

Isamier didn't say much. No military official serving in this city didn't recognize her face. As the head of the four maids around the king. Every time Isamier appeared, it represented the king's will.

"I know they are here."

"Lead the way."

Yusuf calmed himself down as quickly as possible. If Isamier came to encircle and suppress the secret agents of the Fa family, she would definitely not be alone.

Walking to the window sill and pulling aside a corner of the curtain, he saw a dark street.

The city was under martial law again, and the streets were empty.

**

Yusuf felt as if he had boarded a giant ship that had just set sail and was about to sink.

Roman citizens born in the Byzantine Empire were born superior, and most people had quite a lot of career choices as they grew up.

Among them, joining the army would never be a good option.

Even if he had 30 low-ranking non-commissioned officers, Yusuf's monthly salary was only 1 gold and 4 silver.

If he wanted to live in Constantinople, this money could only cover his daily food, clothing, housing and transportation.

As for buying real estate, buying horses, and going to Honeysuckle Street to maintain a neat French girl.

These were all completely impossible.

When he was young, he fantasized that one day he would become a great marshal like Caesar the Great, leading the army to expand the kingdom's territory. However, after he really joined the army, he found that there was no war to fight in this kingdom.

Wielding swords to expand territory is something that only barbarians would do.

Roman senators have long summed up a more effective way of ruling.

On the spiritual level, they have a huge church called "Holy Bishop". At least 8 out of 10 people in the entire Western Continent are believers of the Holy Bishop. The Pope controls the marriages and funerals of all believers and major life events.

On the material level, Roman merchants are all over human civilization.

They use caravans and horses to transport goods to the East and the West all the time. Other small caravans either come to Constantinople to cooperate with the Romans, endure high taxes and commercial terms.

Or simply merge into Byzantium and continue to create wealth for the empire as "Latin citizens".

To this day, except for the Arab Empire, which has huge differences in faith, no scattered small countries dare to attack Byzantium.

And in order to maintain the stability of the trade route, the Byzantine Kingdom has no reason to send troops out. Because all disputes in the kingdom can be resolved through commercial means.

This is more deterrent and more efficient.

After joining the army, Yusuf finally understood why the Roman army was mostly composed of the second-tier "Latin citizens" and the third-tier "colonial citizens".

For the lower-class citizens, only by completing their service in the army can they obtain the right to vote, and only the right to vote can demonstrate the value of citizenship.

In the eyes of ordinary people, it is meaningless for Yusuf, a "Roman citizen" who has the right to vote since birth, to join the army. This is a huge waste of material and time.

"Dreams" have never been a life goal worth showing off in this realistic country.

After joining the city defense force, he patrolled near the high wall every day, watching the sun rise in the east and the west during the day, and listening to the sound of torches burning and flames bursting at night. The heroic dreams he had in his childhood have long been forgotten in the depths of his memory.

What Yusuf, 32, envied most was the foreign merchants who drove the caravans into the city. They came in a dusty manner, and although they were physically and mentally exhausted before entering the city, everyone was excited.

After three or five days, when the caravans walked out of the same city gate, the size of the caravans would almost double. The merchants who had cleared the goods drove their horses with rosy faces. They had already bought a new batch of goods and could make a fortune on the return trip.

In two years, he would complete his service and be discharged from the army. Yusuf was facing another important life node.

At the age of 20, he had made a wrong choice.

He worked hard every day to earn a meager salary, and he didn't even find a stable female companion in these many years. He paid 10 long years for a wrong choice.

His status in the family has been infinitely marginalized, and even his biological parents may not be able to interact with him several times a year.

When faced with a choice again, he must choose the right place to settle down next.

After many observations, Yusuf finally chose to approach the newly promoted Tang Dynasty led by the Legalist mentor.

Ten years of guarding the city wall left Yusuf with a very deep impression of Tang merchants. Foreigners were extremely trembling when approaching the city defense army, and their eyes were full of flattery.

Only these Tang merchants did not have to kowtow to the city defense army.

Most of the time, before they approached the city wall, the nobles in Constantinople had already gone out to greet them. The nobles who used to look down on the city would now bow and scrape to the honorable Tang merchants.

The horsemen with banners would respectfully invite them into the city, just to get more goods.

Respected and superior. As a human being, Yusuf wanted to be such a person.

For this reason, recruiting Yusuf was a recruitment experience that surprised Gu Huai'an. In order to develop secret agents in cities controlled by foreign races, the legalists generally need to pay money and beauty, and sometimes even need some threats to force them to serve the Tang people.

He never thought that he had just entered Constantinople for only two or three days, and a city defense sergeant would come to surrender on his own initiative.

What's even more exaggerated is that he doesn't need a woman with money who can immediately make him feel good. He wants to live in the Tang Dynasty in the East in the future, ride a tall horse like the noble Tang merchants, and let his family relatives who look down on him look up to him.

Gu Huai'an certainly had no objection, and even generously paid him 2,000 dinar gold coins as activity funds.

Yusuf did not squander the money casually, but recruited two companions who also complained about the boring patrol life.

Then he bought a house with a two-story cellar near the "Nimen" area where he patrolled, as a safe house for the secret stakes of the Fa family.

His experience as a city defense soldier living in the barracks for 10 years made him familiar with every building near Nimen.

The house Yusuf bought was very exquisite.

This dark building called "Falcao Mansion" was built 300 years ago and covers an area of ​​about 220 square meters. The east side is close to the main sewer channel, and the west side is connected to the river.

This means that in addition to the main entrance, with a little renovation, the basement of the house can have two more secret passages leading to the city.

Secondly, the owner of the house 300 years ago, "Sir Falcao", was a French businessman who specialized in selling wine. Winemaking is not new in countries around the Mediterranean, but the French are good at adding baking spices, especially French vanilla, which is produced in the Provence region.

The red wine and cheese produced have a unique flavor.

The three-story basement attached to the house is claimed to be his cellar for storing red wine and cheese, but based on Yusuf's years of military service, he thinks that the truth is not so.

In Constantinople, where every inch of land is valuable, this house will be quickly sold once it is sold, and it will not exceed one year at most.

The merchants who live in the "Falcao House" as a residence complain that the walls of the house have been eaten by rats, and they can often hear rustling sounds coming from the walls of the house in the dead of night.

Real estate developers saw that they could not use this building as a residence, so they simply sold it as a warehouse at a reduced price.

However, this place was also criticized by merchants as a warehouse. There were many rats in the abandoned old house, but there were also many termites living in the three-story basement.

These were even more terrifying creatures.

The food of rats was similar to that of humans, but termites ate almost everything.

From wood furniture to cotton and linen fabrics, all commodities derived from animals and plants can become food for termites. The more serious problem was that these things could not be killed, and they kept emerging from deeper underground cracks.

In the end, the plan to use this house as a warehouse had to be shelved.

It could not be lived in, nor could it be used as a warehouse. It was too far from the market to become a bar or shop. In Constantinople, where every inch of land was valuable, real estate developers were unwilling to sell a house of decent size at a low price, so the Falcao House had been in a semi-abandoned state for many years.

Until Yusuf, who had enough gold and silver in his hands, appeared.

Just because the honest and honest businessman didn't know what was going on with the house didn't mean that Yusuf didn't understand the mystery.

According to his inference, this "Sir Falco" was most likely a fire priest.

His identity as a businessman was just a cover.

The so-called "wine cellar" didn't have a drop of red wine at all, but was a deeply hidden "fire priest site". The fundamental reason why the tenants could often hear rats running through the walls was that most of the walls of the entire house were hollow, and this design was very convenient for members to pass through and enter the secret passage.

As for the termites that kept pouring out from the ground, the most likely thing was that the fire-transmitting gang secretly dug a tunnel underground to the river on the east side.

The underground near the water source was the most suitable place for termites to survive.

This place was not suitable for any purpose, but it was a natural place with unique advantages for secret societies that wanted to secretly start war activities.

Yusuf fully experienced the difficulties of the poor during his life in the army. After a long conversation, with the commander of the city defense army sitting by his side, he finally bought the house for 1,700 silver coins.

He didn't expect that the house would be put to use in just two months.

Gu Huaian trusted him unconditionally.

When Wang Ergulei died and all the secret agents of the Fa family were exposed, the Tang people's gathering place "Tingfeng Pavilion" was no longer safe. The remaining secret agents of the Fa family took advantage of the chaos in the streets to enter Falcao's house through the entrances of various secret passages, using it as a temporary base.

When he heard that Loki's two brothers were hung on the cross and led Gu Huaian to the streets in front of the whole city, Gu Huaian saw this scene with his own eyes.

He immediately concluded that the lawless "God Killer" Loki would definitely make a comeback.