Lin Siniang stepped over the threshold, beads of sweat rolling down her cheeks from her forehead.
Without bothering to wipe them away, she took two steps into the hall, holding up the yellowed roster with both hands and presenting it to the long desk.
Xu Qinghuan took the roster, spread it open, and her eyes were immediately met with terrifying remarks.
Wang Damao, right leg amputated above the knee, age fifty-two.
Liu Ergou, blind in both eyes due to cataracts, age forty-eight.
Madam Li, carrying a three-year-old child, both suffering from a cough.
The ink was scrawled crookedly, revealing the arrogance of the clerks in the Field Administration Office.
These were the strong laborers going to open up wasteland and farm?
It would be more appropriate to say they were packing up all the burdens and dying people in Zhenbei City and sweeping them out the door.
Xu Qinghuan read through three full pages, her fingers lingering on the edge of the paper for a long time.
Then she picked up the cinnabar pen from the desk, dipped the tip in red ink, and drew a heavy circle at the end of the roster, right where Clerk Wang's fingerprint was.
Xu Zhan, who was standing to the side, had been holding back a belly full of evil fire looking at those names.
He strode to the desk and slammed his hand on the corner of the table, shaking the water out of the teacup:
"Little Sister! These bastards from the Field Administration Office are going too far! Using five hundred cripples to fool the grand plan of farming in the Hetao region, this is clearly forcing you to a dead end to die!"
"It's true that Lord Lin understands agriculture, but can she turn over thousands of acres of hard soil alone?"
"I'll go to the General's Office right now to ask Commander Tie for troops. Even if we only draw half a hundred strong axemen, it's better than taking this bunch of abandoned pawns who can't even walk steadily to the Hetao to step on mines!"
"Stop."
Xu Qinghuan put down the cinnabar pen.
"Second Brother, have you ever thought about it."
"If you go to ask for elite troops today, this matter will become a secret memorial on the Emperor's desk tomorrow. Do you really think this is helping the Xu family?"
Xu Zhan was stopped by these words.
Xu Qinghuan tapped the table with her fingers, explaining the stakes to him word by word:
"If our Xu family uses the excuse of farming to gather the elite troops and strong generals of the Zhenbei Army in a big way, what do you think the person on the dragon throne in the capital will think?
"He will only conclude that the Xu family harbors evil intentions and wants to use the chaos in the northern border to build up their own military power."
"When that time comes, let alone growing grain in the Hetao region, the heads of the hundred or so people in the Xu family will roll."
"This soft knife handed over by the Field Administration Office is extremely sinister, but we must take it all, and we must take it with great fanfare, so that the eyes and ears of the whole world can see clearly that the people the Imperial Envoy's Office is taking to the Hetao are just a bunch of lingering refugees, definitely not some tiger and wolf army that can threaten the imperial power."
As soon as her voice fell, Li Sheng walked in quickly from outside the door, stopped three steps away, cupped his hands and reported:
"My Lord, Manager Huang from the West City Workshop has sent an urgent message. The batch of rusty iron tools given by the Field Administration Office has all entered the big furnace. Following the drawings drawn by Field Envoy Lin, the brittle iron is being reforged into a one-foot-wide salt-discharging shovel. Before tonight, three hundred practical agricultural tools will be ready."
Xu Qinghuan nodded, turned her head to look at Lin Siniang, who had been standing silently in the hall, and gave clear instructions to Li Sheng:
"Go to the backyard and harness three mule carts. Load them with half a month's worth of millet flour and coarse salt. Then go to the cellar and bring up two bags of dried mutton to hide under the sacks. Hand them all over to Lord Lin to take to the south of the city."
"Also, pick two strong guards carrying long swords from the Imperial Envoy's Office to follow. Those coming out of the refugee camp will do anything to fight for food. Bringing weapons will at least hold the fort and prevent any chaos."
After hearing this, Lin Siniang took a step forward and blocked Li Sheng's path, bluntly declining Xu Qinghuan's arrangement:
"I will collect the grain and dried meat from My Lord for them, but the sword-bearing officials absolutely cannot follow."
"Think about it, My Lord. Farming is exchanging lives for grain, not forcing it with a sword. Those five hundred people are dead pawns thrown away by the court. Their hearts are already full of defensiveness and resentment towards officials."
"If sword-bearing guards really go, they will only treat me as a living Yama sent to escort them to do hard labor, and they won't even say half a word of true feelings to me.
"I am just a miserable person digging for food in the fields. Driving the mule cart over myself will let them see that I am a grassroots person with no one to care for, just like them. Only when people who share the same fate gather together can we twist into a rope and turn over that saline-alkali land."
Xu Qinghuan sat in the armchair, looking steadily at Lin Siniang's thin but straight back.
Oh? Siniang is indeed a smart person.
It's just this name... sooner or later it has to be changed, but unfortunately Lin Siniang refused no matter what.
Those political schemes and calculations in the court eventually couldn't match the human feelings grown from this soil.
So Xu Qinghuan didn't say another word of nonsense, waving her hand to let Li Sheng prepare according to Lin Siniang's wishes.
...
The midday sun rose higher and higher, baking the few dead trees outside the ruined temple in the south of the city until they cracked, and even the sap on the bark was squeezed dry.
This place was originally a dead corner that even the city management runners were too lazy to set foot in, but now it was forcibly stuffed with hundreds of old, weak, sick, and disabled people forcibly conscripted by the Field Administration Office, blocking the half-collapsed temple gate and the abandoned courtyard completely.
Looking around, the ground was full of figures lying haphazardly.
Old soldier Sun Qi, whose leg was broken, leaned against a half-collapsed merit stele, an empty pant leg occasionally swaying in the hot wind.
The old soldier had long seen through this miserable scene of wailing everywhere, keeping his eyelids half-closed to conserve his energy, too lazy to even expend the effort to swat away the flies.
In a cool corner of the ruined temple, Old Zhao, the fire-head army cook who was blind in his left eye, was groping to pull miscellaneous grain pancakes out of a tattered bamboo basket.
The pancakes were baked with inferior bran mixed with a large amount of sand, hard enough to smash someone's head, and the edges were growing green mold, giving off a sour and smelly odor.
But it was exactly this kind of thing that even wild dogs wouldn't want to sniff that made the eyes of a dozen ragged refugee women around turn red, and they desperately crowded closer.
"Break off a bite for my Xiaobao! He has a high fever, and if he doesn't eat something, his life won't be saved!"
A young woman with a sallow face and emaciated body suddenly pounced forward, her thin hands tightly grabbing Old Zhao's arm that was distributing the pancakes, her long nails digging into Old Zhao's shriveled flesh.
"Roll aside! That dying sickling of yours eating it is also wasting the Lord's grain. This biggest pancake should rightly be eaten by my Zhuzi. He is a strong man who can work!"
Another big and coarse black-faced woman was not to be outdone, grabbing the young woman's hair and throwing her backwards fiercely.
The two immediately rolled into a ball on the ground covered in dust and urine stains, biting and cursing at each other, their sharp nails leaving bloody scratches on each other's faces.
The commotion caused a few scrawny children around to cry loudly at the top of their lungs, and the entire front of the ruined temple was in chaos, filled with curses and cries.
Just at this moment when no one cared about anyone else, three mule carts fully loaded with sacks turned in from the alley entrance.
The heavy wheels crushed over the hard, dry dirt, raising a cloud of dust, and finally stopped in the open space in front of the ruined temple.
Lin Siniang did not call for a cart driver. Gripping the sweat-stained reins herself, her frail figure leaped nimbly down from the cart's shafts, her feet landing firmly on the scorching yellow earth.
Lin Siniang did not shout or scold, nor did she put on the arrogant airs of an official. She simply stood in silence before these hundreds of old, weak, sick, and disabled people who had been abandoned by the Great Qian Empire.
To the onlookers, the woman's figure appeared even thinner and weaker than those of the veteran soldiers missing arms and legs. Her skeletal frame was starkly outlined beneath her coarse, short-cut clothes.
Yet at this moment, she stood ramrod straight, her gaze sweeping calmly across the numb and hostile faces.
The brawling women stopped tearing at each other, and the wailing children had their mouths covered by adults. The clamorous crowd gradually fell quiet.
Hundreds of pairs of hungry eyes stared fixedly at the bulging sacks of grain on the mule cart, then shifted with deep wariness to Lin Siniang's face, which bore an old scar.
Leaning against the base of the ruined temple wall, a fierce-looking, one-eyed man spat a wad of bloody saliva and roughly wiped his cracked lips with the back of his hand.
The one-eyed man narrowed his single remaining eye, looking up and down at the cyan cloth wrapped around Lin Siniang's head. Suddenly, from his raspy throat, he let out a cold, malicious sneer.
"I thought the Bureau of Agricultural Colonies had sent some six-armed living Yama to march us to our deaths. After all this time, it turns out to be a frail woman acting as this bloody Agricultural Commissioner!"
