The side room was filled with the heavy scent of medicinal wine for bruises. Lao Sun washed his hands, placed two smoothly carved willow splints against Lin Siniang's left ribs, and wrapped them tightly with strips of linen round after round.
Lin Siniang instantly broke out in a cold sweat from the pain, but she stubbornly did not utter a single sound.
Meanwhile, under the eaves of the corridor, Xu Zhan leaned against a red-lacquered pillar. Recalling the scene at the West Market, his anger flared up once again.
"A bunch of ignorant fools! They watched helplessly as a woman was nearly beaten to death, and not a single one dared to utter a peep! And that pedantic scholar named Zhou, his mouth is full of benevolence and morality, but his bones are full of pus!"
Xu Zhan scoffed coldly, whipping his horsewhip against the pillar and leaving a white mark. "The hearts of the people in this Zhenbei City have long rotted through."
Xu Qinghuan stood on the steps, watching the banana leaves in the courtyard swaying wildly in the wind, and let out a long sigh.
"Second Brother, the deep-rooted maladies of the Great Qian Dynasty do not lie in the swords and spears at the border, but entirely in the hearts of the people." Xu Qinghuan gathered his crane-feather cloak around himself.
"We want to implement the military farming system in the Hetao region. Externally, the Helian cavalry is glaring at us like tigers; internally, we have these cold-blooded, numb local tyrants standing in our way. This battle is even harder to fight than drawing blood with real swords and spears."
Xu Zhan was about to reply when the door to the side room creaked open.
Lin Siniang leaned against the doorframe, inching her way over the threshold. She had changed into clean, coarse cotton clothes. Her face was deathly pale, and the old scars and new wounds intertwined on her forehead looked shocking.
Li Sheng hurried forward to support her, but she raised her hand and gently pushed him away.
"My Lord." Lin Siniang walked up to Xu Qinghuan and bent her knees to kneel.
Xu Qinghuan grabbed her arm, preventing her from fully kneeling.
"You are injured, there is no need for such formalities."
Lin Siniang steadied herself with Xu Qinghuan's help, staring straight at the young Imperial Envoy.
"My Lord's life-saving grace, this common woman could hardly repay even if my body were ground to dust! But I tore down that notice not to beg for food, and certainly not to swindle those ten taels of settlement silver."
"I feared that My Lord only brought me back to make a show of valuing talent for the outsiders to see. If that is the case, I will leave right now and absolutely will not cause My Lord any trouble."
Xu Zhan furrowed his brows as he listened from the side. This person had just crawled back from the gates of hell, yet she spoke so bluntly and with such thorns?
However, seeing her unyielding stubbornness, Xu Qinghuan was not only unbothered but even developed a bit of respect in his eyes.
"Li Sheng, bring out the sand table," Xu Qinghuan ordered.
Before long, a broad wooden sand table was steadily set up in the center of the main hall. Yellow sand and clay clearly outlined the terrain of the Yin Mountains, the Yellow River, and the surroundings of Zhenbei City.
Lin Siniang shuffled to the sand table. Her gaze fell on the broad curve of the Yellow River, and a fire ignited in the depths of her originally dead eyes.
"My Lord, you want to set up military farms here?" Her withered fingers pointed at that vast plain.
Xu Qinghuan nodded. "This land is flat and has the water conservancy of the Yellow River. It should have been the Jiangnan of the frontier. But our predecessors fought and failed repeatedly in their farming efforts. The city folks all say that there are mountains of salt buried underground, that it is a cursed dead land where nothing living can grow."
Lin Siniang sneered, her laughter revealing extreme contempt for those so-called predecessors.
"If they couldn't grow anything, it's because they were stupid!"
Lin Siniang swiped her finger heavily across the sand table. "The water of the Yellow River is a deadly poison, but also a life-saving remedy! The reason military farming has always failed in the past is that they only knew how to flood the fields, but did not understand the true principle of 'salt follows the water'!"
As soon as these words came out, both Xu Zhan and Li Sheng were stunned.
Xu Qinghuan quickly walked to the opposite side of the sand table, his gaze burning. "What do you mean by 'salt follows the water'?"
Lin Siniang took a deep breath and pointed at the terrain along the Yellow River, like an old general directing troops.
"The Hetao underground indeed hides salt. Once watered and baked by the sun, the moisture evaporates, forcing all the underground saline-alkali to the surface. It forms a stark white layer, and all crops are bound to die completely!"
Lin Siniang's speaking speed grew faster and faster, completely immersed in her own world of agronomy.
"Therefore, you absolutely cannot just irrigate without draining! You must dig deep trenches by the fields to drain the salt through open ditches. The bitter water that has watered the land and is wrapped in toxic salt must be completely drained away along the canals. You must never let it stagnate in the fields!"
Li Sheng scratched his head and couldn't help interrupting, "Madam Lin, this digging ditches to drain salt sounds easy, but the Hetao plain is so large. How deep and wide must the ditches be? How many laborers will it cost?"
Lin Siniang turned to look at Li Sheng, her tone firm. "You don't need to dig everywhere! Follow the terrain: keep the fields on the high ground and let the water flow through the low ground. The main ditches will connect to the tributaries of the Yellow River, and the branch ditches will surround the ridges of the fields. As long as the water becomes flowing water, the salt won't stay!"
"It will take some manpower, but once it is dug through, this land can feed the people of Great Qian for hundreds of years!"
Xu Qinghuan clapped his hands in great praise. "An achievement for the ages is naturally not built in a day. As long as the method is right, the hundred thousand sons of the Zhenbei Army are the best pioneer soldiers!"
"Just draining is not enough!" Lin Siniang drew an arc with her finger on the upper reaches of the Yellow River. "During the flood season of the Yellow River, the water is as muddy as dirt. This is the antidote bestowed by God! We must 'divert the turbid water to deposit the silt'!"
"Take advantage of the muddy water and divert it into the fields! Let the silt settle. This Yellow River mud is the most fertile. Once a thick layer covers the top, it can firmly suppress the saline-alkali underneath!"
Xu Zhan was dazed hearing this. Having spent half his life in the military, how could he understand the intricacies of farm work?
But hearing this woman speak so powerfully and resonantly, he actually felt that it was even more profound than the military formations in the books of war.
"There is also a killer move, called 'autumn watering and winter irrigation'." Lin Siniang's fingertip tapped on the field ridges of the sand table.
"After the autumn harvest, when the sun is not as harsh, divert a large amount of water to flood the fields again. The water will not evaporate but will all seep underground, ruthlessly washing the surface salt down."
"When winter comes and it freezes, the salt will be firmly sealed underground. When the ice melts the following spring, the fields will be full of living water, perfectly suppressing the alkali and protecting the seedlings!"
The main hall was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop.
Xu Qinghuan looked at Lin Siniang before him, dressed in rags and covered in scars, and stormy waves surged in his heart.
Those high-ranking officials of the Ministry of Works and the Ministry of Revenue of the Great Qian Dynasty sat high up in the royal court, flipping through ancient texts and making empty talk about water conservancy. They allocated millions of taels of silver to build canals, but the result was a complete mess.
Yet this commoner before him, who was beaten and scolded in the mud, had struggled in the fields just to survive, and had actually summarized this miraculous alkali-treating technique of "digging ditches to drain salt, diverting turbid water to deposit silt, and autumn watering and winter irrigation"!
This was true unity of knowledge and action!
Was the wisdom bursting forth from the bottom class not a hundred times more profound than those Four Books and Five Classics?
She was truly a great talent of practical statecraft!
"What a brilliant method of water conservancy and salt control!" Xu Qinghuan praised loudly. "Lin Siniang, your words are worth ten years of memorials from the Ministry of Works!"
Lin Siniang did not become complacent because of Xu Qinghuan's praise.
She carefully took out that chipped earthen pot from her bosom, lifted the coarse cloth, and revealed the five small millet seedlings inside.
"My Lord, just controlling the water is not enough; we must also improve the soil." Lin Siniang placed the earthen pot on the edge of the sand table. "In this saline-alkali land, we cannot just grow grain. We must implement 'crop rotation of grain and grass'."
"Crop rotation of grain and grass?" Xu Qinghuan leaned in to look at the seedlings.
"That is right. You plant broomcorn millet for one year, and the next year you must plant alfalfa," Lin Siniang explained. "Alfalfa roots grow deep and can revive the dead soil underground. Its rotting leaves make the best green manure. Once the alfalfa is fully grown, you plow it into the soil, roots and all, and the dead land will become fertile fields."
Xu Zhan knitted his thick brows and pointed at the sand table. "Plant grass? What our Northern Garrison Army lacks is military rations! Why plant grass? If we need fodder for the warhorses, we can just go cut it on the steppes!"
Lin Siniang refused to yield, pushing back against the general's imposing aura. "My Lord, you only know half of it! Not only does alfalfa fertilize the land, but it is also top-tier horse fodder! Warhorses that eat it lose weight slower and grow stronger!"
"Why is the Helian cavalry so fierce and brave? They rely on good pastures! If we grow our own premium grass and raise our warhorses to be plump and sturdy, why should we fear not being able to crush them on the battlefield?"
Xu Zhan was choked speechless by her words. It took him a long moment to squeeze out a sentence, "You... actually understand the military affairs of raising horses?"
Lin Siniang did not take the bait. Pointing at the soil in the earthen pot, she continued, "When sowing seeds, we must also deep plow to bury the salt. You turn the subsoil up and bury the salty topsoil down, then spread a layer of crushed wheat straw on top to cut off the path for the salt to rise. This way, the land can live!"
Xu Qinghuan looked at the five broomcorn millet seedlings growing stubbornly in the grayish-yellow alkaline soil. "How did you cultivate these seedlings?"
Lin Siniang's eyes instantly turned red. Her rough fingers hovered protectively over the curled green leaves, her movements as gentle as if she were caressing her own flesh and blood.
"After my husband died in battle, my mother-in-law cut off my rations! I had no choice but to go dig for food in that dead land south of the city."
Lin Siniang's voice grew hoarse, every word weeping blood. "The first year, I planted a hundred stalks of millet. They all died. The leaves were scorched yellow by the salt."
"The second year, I ran dozens of miles away to find wild grasses growing on the saline-alkali flats. I mixed their seeds with the millet and planted them. When they died, I planted again, and they died again. Out of hundreds of seedlings, only a dozen or so survived in the end."
"The third year, I used the seeds produced by those dozen plants and kept planting. I guarded the fields every day, using my tongue to taste the saltiness of the soil and my hands to dig for the moisture underground. In the end, only these five were left."
Lin Siniang suddenly raised her head, tears rolling down her cheeks and dripping onto the sand table.
"My Lord, these five seedlings are not afraid of salt or drought. As long as you give them a sip of water, they can take root in this dead land of the Hetao region and grow food!"
These words were steeped in blood and tears, each sentence carrying the weight of a thousand pounds.
Even in the dust, sparks can be hidden; even in dead lands, vitality can naturally be nurtured!
Xu Zhan turned his head away, unable to bear looking any longer. Even for an iron-willed man like him who had rolled through mountains of corpses and seas of blood, his eyes actually felt a bit sore.
Xu Qinghuan stood before the sand table, not uttering a word for a long time.
She looked at Lin Siniang, looking at this woman who had been forced into a dead end by the world, yet forcefully waded out a path of survival in the mud, and an indescribable respect surged in her chest.
This was the true backbone of the Great Qian Dynasty!
It was not those noble families and powerful clans, but these grassroots commoners who dug in the dirt for food and gave their all just to survive!
Xu Qinghuan took a half step back, folded her hands, and solemnly gave Lin Siniang a formal half-bow.
"Lin Siniang, on behalf of the soldiers of the Northern Garrison Army and the millions of common people in this northern frontier, I thank you."
Lin Siniang turned pale with fright and waved her hands repeatedly, ignoring the sharp pain it caused her wounds. "My Lord, you flatter this humble woman too much! I... I only know how to farm. I do not know anything else!"
"Knowing how to farm is enough." Xu Qinghuan straightened up, her tone resolute and decisive. "From this day forward, you are the Farming Commissioner for the Hetao military agricultural colonies. I will allocate men, money, and grain to you. The millions of acres of wasteland along the Great Bend of the Yellow River are entirely yours to manage!"
Lin Siniang froze in place, her face full of astonishment.
She could not believe her ears. An illiterate widow could actually become an official Farming Commissioner of the imperial court?
