“Why did they run away?” An Yinong felt strange.
In the original plot, the two men insisted on taking away all their belongings before escaping, so the original owner embarked on a long journey to escape empty-handed. Now they actually left three months early?
“They can’t threaten him again just because I beat him up yesterday, right?”
After much deliberation, there was no other more reasonable explanation. Okay, he just scared people away with a casual threat?
“They just ran away. I still have to worry about food.” He couldn’t do anything about the empty rice vat. He only had half a bag of rice bran and three turtles left at home. If the turtles couldn’t be sold at a high price, it would be possible that he would only rely on one meal a day in the future. Stay up?
No matter what, he had to tell others about their escape first.
An Yinong thought for a while, destroyed the house some more, and then called the village chief with tears in his eyes, saying that his father had run away with the money, and there was nothing left in the house, just a roof.
All the good people in the village crowded over to take a look. Sure enough, there was nothing left, and it was cleaner than the one that had been robbed.
“They are going to starve Xiwazi to death. How can we have such a cruel father? The Chen family needs to give us an explanation.”
They yelled and cursed there, and even went to the village of the original owner’s father’s family to cause trouble, but no one said they wanted to help. They were starving to death, so how could they have the energy to help others?
“I saved some grassroots and went back to the town to find work. I can always survive.” An Yinong lowered his head.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief: Just don’t borrow food from them.
The village chief was silent for a while and said: “I will accompany you to the town, cancel his two household registrations, and say that the person died of illness. If they want to be refugees, then let them be refugees.”
Once the household registration was canceled, the person who signed the official stamp was dead. Even if these two people come back, An Yinong could disown them. The village chief was guarding against that uncle and nephew.
“Okay, I will listen to my uncle.” It was exactly what he wanted.
In this way, the turtle did not sell well that day, so they went to the town to close their accounts first. From now on, the two people surnamed Chen were “dead people”. Even if they came back, they cannot use their original identities.
“Gulu.” He hadn’t eaten a grain of rice that day, and his stomach grumbled loudly from hunger.
When the village chief heard it, he took out a piece of pancake from the small bag. After thinking about it, he broke half of it and gave it to him: “Eat.”
An Yinong took the cake, looked at the village chief, and took a bite. The dry multigrain cake was sandwiched with bran skin and was hard. Even if it was chewed and swallowed, it would make his throat feel like sand. But he chewed it with great care, chewing it one bite at a time.
After returning to the village, the village chief came again. He took out a bag containing three kilograms of broken rice mixed with a little rice bran: “My uncle’s house has no food. You should deal with it first.”
An Yinong held the bag and felt a thousand kilograms of weight pressing on his hands.
Food is life at this moment, and An Yinong looks like a poor household that has not yet come out. If something happens, the food will not be available. In the eyes of others, this was not the same as what was given to him?
“Uncle, when I have food, I will definitely give you the best.”
“Hey, okay, I will wait.” A smile appeared on the village chief’s dark face.
On the third day, the sky was still dark, and An Yinong was carrying three lifeless turtles to the town to sell. He added a ‘health blessing’ to each of the three turtles, and the turtles that originally shrank their heads seemed to be more energetic.
He conveniently added a health blessing to himself to avoid accidentally passing out on the road – the original owner’s physical condition was really bad. With an empty stomach, he walked for more than an hour, his shoulders aching from the straw ropes.
If the original owner’s body hadn’t been accustomed to this kind of intense walking, and An Yinong would add a ‘health blessing’ to support him from time to time, he would have fallen down directly from exhaustion.
The town was the same as yesterday. There were no people on the streets. Even if there were people, most of them had no smiles on their faces and looked lifeless. After more than a year of drought and food shortages, who could still laugh?
An Yinong asked people for the address of the best local restaurant.
In fact, there is only one restaurant in the town, and the business was not very good. He went to the back door and knocked. The door opened and a sleepy boy ran out.
The waiter looked at the bamboo basket behind him: “Selling something?”
An Yinong nodded and said there was a turtle.
After a while, the shopkeeper came out. He was a middle-aged man with a mustache and a shrewd face: “Let me take a look at the goods.”
The shopkeeper saw the three turtles, thought for a moment, and said in a caring tone: “Some people like this thing, some people don’t like it, so it’s not easy to sell. I think it’s not easy for you to carry it all the way. Forget it, eight hundred cents for the three.”
“Eating turtles is a great supplement. There has been a drought for more than a year, and the rivers have dried up. It is hard to find such old turtles, but they are still alive. Two taels, no less.” An Yinong directly gave him more than double the price.
In fact, he didn’t know how to haggle over prices before, as if he was born lacking this skill. Now that he thinks about it, he was still too rich back then. The two of them bargained, and finally the three turtles were sold for one tael of silver and three hundred wen.
With heavy amounts of silver and copper coins in his arms, An Yinong was wandering on the road. He found that there were more beggars in the town than he had seen yesterday. There were a bunch of beggars sitting under the wall. They all looked skinny and bones, wearing tattered clothes and unkempt clothes. His hair was dirty and he had no shoes on his feet.
“There is no food to eat, so I have to go out to beg for food. Master, please do me a favor. I have been hungry for three days.” A woman with her child was begging for food. Passers-by took one look and walked away. Although they were sympathetic, they didn’t have much to eat.
“Food is the hard currency.” An Yinong said cruelly, forcing himself to turn his eyes away: with his current economic strength, he is really unable to help others.
He had only taken two steps when an old beggar suddenly opened his eyes and looked at him: “Have you recently gone to a place you shouldn’t have gone and touched something you shouldn’t have touched? I see your hall is dark… “
An Yinong stopped when he heard the first half of the sentence, and then walked away when he heard the second half of the sentence, “The hall turns black”: a charlatan.
“Good words can’t persuade a damned person.” The old beggar slowly closed his eyes as he watched him go.
After walking three streets, An Yinong asked the townspeople for the most reasonable rice and grain shop. He used the money from selling turtles to buy grain. He still had some extra, so he bought new cotton and a bamboo tube of salt. The last eight copper coins bought three cakes.
The new grain had not yet arrived, and the old grain had to be exhausted. Food was very expensive right now. One tael of silver could buy forty pounds of old grain and twenty pounds of millet.
“Even broken rice is the same price as the best new rice in the past. It’s so expensive, it’s going to kill people.” The poor people were deterred. At this price, they could buy four times as much grain as in previous years. However, it was no good if they didn’t buy it. Food could help you survive.
“When the locust plague comes, the price of food will at least quadruple.” An Yinong wished he could move all the food away, but his bag was empty.
After buying grain and going home, he carried sixty kilograms of grain on his back and trembled every step he took. He gritted his teeth and walked forward.
An Yinong didn’t want others to see his food, so he chose a remote road. This path was originally a place with lush vegetation, but the land has been dry for two years. Now it was just a road, and one can’t see the direction when the wind blows.
Turning back by chance, An Yinong found that a person had appeared behind him at some point, wearing a black robe and a hat whose face could not be seen clearly.
The man was fifty meters behind him. If An Yinong walked faster, the man would also walk faster. If An Yinong walked slower, that person would also walk slower, always following him at a close distance. His back felt cold, and he thought it was someone snatching food, so he sped up.
Fortunately, as soon as he entered the village, he couldn’t see that person when I looked back: “If he is following me, then what is he doing? Apart from this little food, I don’t have any property on my body that others can covet.”
After putting the things in the room, An Yinong lay on the table and rested for a while. He also walked to the yard and took a look outside. It was still morning, the sky was a little red and as bright as fire, but there was no one around.
Forty kilograms of old grain half filled the empty rice jarl, and twenty kilograms of millet was locked in the cupboard. As soon as these life-saving things entered the house, An Yinong’s mentality changed – he had the confidence to survive.
At noon that day, it was rare for the Tian family to have porridge. He took two handfuls of old rice and cooked it into porridge, and sprinkled some salt on it. An Yinong felt it was a bit bland when he ate it, but there was nothing better.
“According to modern standards, staple foods account for 60% of a human’s daily diet, with the rest consisting of protein, fat, plant fiber, etc.”
“The staple food of a human being should be the body weight multiplied by five and divided by one thousand. The original owner was sixteen years old, but due to malnutrition, the weight was only ninety kilograms at most, maybe less than that. So the staple food needed for a day should be four to Five ounces.”
Half a catty a day was theoretical. In fact, because there was not enough “oil and water”, the food he needed a day was higher than the theoretical amount.
“Suppose, minus the meal brought by the gold-finger, I still need to eat half a catty of grain a day. Then sixty catties of grain is enough for about four months. I will stay here for three more months, so there will be only one month of food left. , minus the taxes to be paid…” An Yinong sighed, there was still not enough food.
“There is only half a tank of water left at home. I will go fetch water tomorrow.” After two years of drought, water sources in many places have been cut off. If you want to fetch water, you can only go to the Lotus Well three miles away.
The villagers of Lianhua Village occupied this well that was not exhausted, and acted very arrogantly. They had to pay some fees for fetching water. Survival was not easy.
In the afternoon he went to Hulutan again. This time he only found a few lonely river mussels, but he found a patch of land in the valley where kudzu grew. An Yinong dug out the fat kudzu root, which weighed more than thirty kilograms.
“It’s really a geomantic treasure.” An Yinong had a smile on his face, but when his eyes touched more and more grasshoppers in the valley, he paused and the smile disappeared.
The locust plague that is about to happen in the plot was also coming soon. There was not much description of the locust plague in the original plot. It only talked about the reduction of grain production through the servants’ mouths, how angry the master was, the tenants came to borrow grain, and so-and-so’s family starved to death.
Because the protagonist was the youngest son of a landlord, there was no crisis of food shortage in his family, so he could not feel the despair of the locust plague.
“If I could have warned them earlier, would it be possible to save some food and some people?” An Yinong thought about this problem. He was not a soft-hearted person, but he couldn’t help but watch the locust plague happen without staying out of it.
So, after bringing all the kudzu roots home, he went to the village chief’s house.
“You said you heard someone in town say there might be a locust plague?”
An Yinong nodded: “Those people say that there will be big locusts after a severe drought, and they are all buying food. I am young and inexperienced, and don’t know the seriousness of the matter, so I came here to ask my uncle for advice.”
The village chief’s face darkened, and after a while, he said, “I’ve also heard people say that there are a lot of grasshoppers this year. I can’t make the decision on this matter, so let’s talk about it to everyone tomorrow.”
WhiteMoon x BlackSun 