Noon.
The large banner with the words Zhenbei drooped limply, without the slightest breeze.
The mess hall was set up at the base of the earthen wall on the west side of the drill ground. Right now, three iron pots were propped up on the stoves, with chopped wood and dried cow dung burning underneath.
The army cook stirred the thin, watery porridge in the pot with a copper spoon.
The bottom of the spoon scraped against the iron pot with a harsh screeching sound, occasionally churning up a few grains of sand that had settled at the bottom.
From the door of the mess hall to the weapon racks, hundreds of bare-chested soldiers were lined up in three crooked queues.
One of the veteran soldiers was named Lao Zhang.
He had queued for nearly an hour before it was finally his turn.
Satisfied, he got a full bowl of brown rice porridge, turned around, and found a shaded spot at the base of a low wall outside the mess hall to squat down.
Lao Zhang slurped a large mouthful of the boiling hot porridge, grimacing from the heat. He hurriedly wiped his mouth haphazardly with the back of his hand, and used his chopsticks to scrape the sand grains to the edge of the bowl and flick them away.
Around him squatted five or six familiar veteran soldiers, each holding a chipped coarse porcelain bowl and burying their heads in their porridge. No one spoke; there were only the gulping sounds of swallowing.
Lao Zhang glanced to the left and right, lowered his voice, and was the first to speak: Brothers, have you heard? There is a huge spectacle in the city today.
The Bearded Man squatting opposite him raised his eyelids and mumbled lazily, What spectacle?
Lao Zhang pointed his chopsticks toward the south of the city: The Imperial Envoy sent a woman to the Hetao region to open up wasteland for farming! And she is a widow whose husband died!
A widow? The Bearded Man almost spat out the porridge in his mouth. Are you kidding me?
Why would I kid you? Lao Zhang rested his bowl on his knees, gesturing with both hands. Not only is she a widow, but the manpower assigned to her by the Farming Bureau is entirely made up of the old, weak, sick, and disabled retired from Camp Bing, along with refugees.
Out of the six or seven hundred people, more than half have missing arms or legs. There are also blind army cooks and women holding babies.
After hearing this, the veteran soldiers looked at each other.
Skinny Monkey, who was squatting in the innermost corner of the wall, broke off a piece of dry flatbread hard enough to smash walnuts. He stuffed it into his mouth and chewed for a long time but could not swallow it, only managing to wash it down his throat after taking a big gulp of porridge.
Skinny Monkey wiped his mouth and let out a cold sneer.
A widow farming? What kind of spectacle is that? The real kicker is yet to come.
Skinny Monkey spat on the ground. Five hundred cripples plus a widow, going to open up wasteland right under the hooves of the Helian barbarians horses?
I am not trying to be pessimistic, but that alkaline land does not even grow a single blade of grass. If the Helian scouting cavalry passes through there, these people are not going there to grow grain; they are going to deliver meat to the barbarians!
As soon as these words came out, the veteran soldiers squatting by the wall fell silent, but the soldiers walking by after getting their food pricked up their ears.
A dark-faced soldier came over with his bowl, squatted right next to Lao Zhang, and interrupted vaguely while chewing on his flatbread:
I heard from the brothers in Camp Jia that the widow even tore down the recruitment poster at the West Market in front of all the commoners in the city!
The Imperial Envoy rewarded her with ten taels of settling-in silver on the spot. Ten taels! We could not save ten taels of silver even if we sold our lives for a year.
Ten taels of silver to buy a life, that is all. Skinny Monkey scoffed. Who is the Imperial Envoy? A noble from the capital, with cranes embroidered on their robes. If just a little crumb leaks out from between their fingers, the people below have to kowtow and give thanks.
She puts on a show with a few bowls of porridge and a few taels of silver. Later, she will submit a memorial to the imperial court, claiming a great merit of personally visiting the border, deeply investigating the peoples suffering, and planning military farming. Her red hat button will move up, getting a promotion and making a fortune.
But the ones who will die are those useless people going to Hetao. Skinny Monkey poked his chopsticks into the ground. Whether they can even survive this autumn is uncertain.
These words cut deep, and the expressions on the faces of the dozen or so soldiers squatting around changed.
Someone slapped his thigh and swore, saying that this was clearly the officials trampling on the people below.
A veteran soldier nearby spat forcefully on the ground, saying that the imperial court was probably doing this to save a bit of grain, deliberately sending these old, weak, sick, and disabled people to the wasteland to wait for death.
Then, a pockmarked soldier shouted.
If the Imperial Envoy is really capable, why does she not pay us our back pay first?
This drew a chorus of agreement.
The soldiers outside the mess hall, who had originally been eating their own meals, gathered toward this side.
The murmurs gradually grew louder and more chaotic, occasionally mixed with a few harsh roars of laughter.
Sitting among the crowd, Lao Zhangs mouth never stopped.
He also added embellishments to the news he had heard from a brother who had returned from the south of the city:
That widow was shriveled and emaciated. She had her ribs broken by her in-laws and was almost sold into a secret brothel. Could such a person carry a hoe? Could she dig up alkaline land?
More than half of those five hundred useless people could not even walk properly...
Just as Lao Zhang was getting excited and was about to add another sentence, a loud crash suddenly came from behind him.
Bang!
A coarse porcelain bowl, missing half its rim, was smashed heavily onto the bluestone slab by his feet, sending broken porcelain shards flying everywhere.
The unfinished brown rice porridge in the bowl splashed out, covering half of Lao Zhangs pant leg.
All the noise outside the mess hall was instantly cut off by this smash.
Hundreds of pairs of eyes turned in unison toward the direction of the sound.
In the shadows of the corner, a burly man slowly stood up. His left sleeve hung empty, tied in a knot at his waist.
The mans face was crisscrossed with several old knife scars. The sun shone over the low wall, falling on that livid face.
Wang Daniu.
A man carried out from the wounded soldiers camp, missing an arm.
Two months ago, he was still lying on a wooden bed waiting to die, his gums bleeding every day, his ribs clearly visible. The entire Zhenbei Army thought he would not make it past last month.
Lao Zhang subconsciously shrank back half a step. He opened his mouth to say something, but under the glare of Wang Danius eyes, he swallowed his words back down.
Skinny Monkey also stopped talking.
He recognized Wang Daniu. He was a veteran of Camp Bing, who had once chopped down several Helian cavalrymen in a single battle before losing his arm.
There was not a single veteran in the entire Zhenbei Army who did not respect this tough man.
Wang Daniu did not waste words. He strode into the middle of the crowd, grabbed Skinny Monkeys collar with his remaining right hand, and lifted him up.
Half-dragging and half-pulling, he hoisted the lean soldier up from the ground.
Skinny Monkeys feet were half an inch off the ground. The flatbread in his hand fell to the floor, and his face turned deathly pale from fright.
He grabbed Wang Danius wrist with both hands, trying to pry it open, but it did not budge an inch.
Brother Wang... Brother Wang, let us talk this out peacefully!
Wang Daniu swept his gaze around, then shoved Skinny Monkey forward, making him stumble.
He then ripped open the coarse cloth lapel at his chest, revealing the deep, bone-exposing knife wound that slashed diagonally from his left shoulder down to his ribs.
You bunch of heartless dogs!
Wang Danius furious voice exploded.
You pick up your bowls to eat meat, and put down your bowls to curse your mothers! Spouting complete filth! What the hell do you know!
That mutton soup, did it taste good? Those over seven hundred live sheep, who got them? It was the Imperial Envoy who had Centurion Xu risk his life to snatch them back from the Helians!
You bastards, a few days ago you were chewing on the meat the Imperial Envoy got for you, and today you are here gossiping behind her back!
Have you no shame!
The crowd's faces burned from the scolding, and many couldn't help but lower their heads.
Wang Daniu pointed at his severed arm, then at his knife wound, and pointed toward the south of the city as he continued to curse.
"Two months ago, there were over three hundred brothers lying in the wounded soldiers' camp! Their teeth were falling out one by one, the wounds on their bodies rotted, were stitched, and rotted again. The pus soaked right through their mattresses!"
"What did the military doctors use to treat us? They boiled grass roots in water and forced it down our throats! Did it work? It was completely useless!"
"Which of you has been to the wounded camp? Who has smelled that stench? Those brothers suffered more alive than dead, hoping every day that the heavens would just take them early!"
Wang Daniu gasped for breath.
"It was the Imperial Envoy who ordered his subordinates to boil that sheep kidney soup, a soup so foul-smelling that even the military dogs would avoid it."
"Bowl after bowl was brought to our bedsides, and he personally watched the brothers force it down."
"Do you know what that soup tasted like? It was so pungent it made your stomach churn; swallowing it made you want to vomit up your own bile!"
"But it was that very thing that dragged the brothers back from the King of Hell's grasp!"
"Our teeth stopped falling out, the bleeding stopped, our wounds began to close, and we could finally get out of bed and walk!"
Wang Daniu shoved aside Skinny Monkey, who was standing in his way, and faced the soldiers surrounding him three layers deep.
"You ask if the Imperial Envoy is just putting on a show? Then tell me, which posturing official would care about a bunch of dying cripples?"
"The brothers in the wounded camp with missing arms and legs had their names crossed off the imperial court's rosters long ago! If we died, we wouldn't even get a coffin; we'd just be rolled up in a straw mat and thrown into the mass graves south of the city to feed the wild dogs!"
"It was the Imperial Envoy who forcefully pulled them back from the gates of hell!"
"Without the Imperial Envoy's bowl of soup, I would have... I would have long become a pile of white bones in the mass graves!"
Wang Daniu's single arm trembled slightly.
"If anyone dares to gossip about the Imperial Envoy again, I can still snap their neck with this one hand."
The entire area was dead silent. The only sound was the low flapping of the flag corners being torn by the wind on the distant city tower.
Lao Zhang squatted in place, his eyes fixed on the broken porcelain shards by his feet. The remaining half mouthful of porridge in his bowl had gone completely cold, and he didn't know whether to hold it or put it down.
Everyone present knew perfectly well who had started the sarcastic remarks earlier.
Now, after being thoroughly scolded by Wang Daniu and thinking about the mutton they had just eaten,
each and every one of them felt thoroughly ashamed.
Skinny Monkey's face flushed red, but in the end, he couldn't utter a single word.
He looked at Wang Daniu's empty sleeve, then at the shocking knife scar.
Finally, he silently squatted down, picked up the piece of flatbread that had fallen to the ground, brushed off the dust, and carefully tucked it back into his robes.
Bearded Man let out a long, heavy sigh and silently drank the last mouthful of porridge in his bowl.
He stood up, patted the yellow dirt off his trouser legs, and walked up to Wang Daniu. Without saying any useless words, he simply gave Wang Daniu's intact right shoulder a firm pat, then turned and strode away.
The crowd began to slowly disperse, and no one mentioned another word of gossip about widows farming the land.
As a few soldiers left, they looked back at Wang Daniu with eyes full of respect.
An old soldier walked a few steps away before turning back.
He silently poured the thick porridge he had been reluctant to finish from his own bowl into the bottom of the broken bowl by Wang Daniu's feet.
