An hour later, Wen Fu and several villagers returned without success. Not only did they not find the horses and mules, they also failed to find the pigs and cows that the Jiangjia villagers had put into the forest.
Old Man Jiang sighed, but soon stopped worrying.
Just beg people to be around, and treat those things as external possessions. You can buy them later when you make money.
It was not until evening that all the people in the cave were freed.
People from Jiangjia Village returned to the village one after another.
When Uncle Jiang learned that his younger brother and his family also wanted to return to the village, he sighed and said goodbye to his younger brother with tears in his eyes.
But as soon as they entered the village, they found that the entire village had been burned down, and not a single house was intact.
The villagers walked beside the ruins and cried loudly, and some even criticized Jiang Sanlang's family.
"If you don't ask them, how could we encounter such a disaster?"
"No! They didn't come, our village was fine, but now it's fine, it's all over!"
Jiang Jiu couldn't listen anymore and said angrily: "That's enough! Didn't we go to the next village to have a look? Or go to a village further away! Is there any village like ours that has no casualties? Please don't let his brothers join forces.
He came to warn us at night, and we would have died in the house! How can we mourn there?"
"Hmph! A bunch of red-eyed wolves!" Uncle Jiang snorted coldly: "His nephew shouldn't have saved us!"
Jiang Dahu sighed, "Okay, okay, don't cry anymore. At least everyone is here, and everyone at home is here too. Let's quickly think of ways to build a house. Seeing that everything is freezing, what's the use of complaining about everything!"
"Build a house? What if the bandits come again?"
"No, if the bandits come, why don't you go live?"
Jiang Dahu stared: "Then the bandits won't come if we cry there?"
Uncle Jiang rolled his eyes: "It's up to us whether we build a house or not. The weather is getting colder and colder. Then we can dig holes and live with blind mice. This will save us the trouble of having to live in trouble when bandits come!"
Villagers:...
Let’s talk about Patriarch Chen and Old Man Jiang.
Wang Dashan brought a message after returning.
"All the bandits have gone to the county seat!"
Wang Dashan took a sip of the water handed over by Jiang Cheng and said: "He saw with his own eyes that there were many people holding animal tooth flags, there were mules, horses and carts, and there were thousands of people in the crowd."
Old Man Jiang frowned: "Going to the county seat? Do they want to attack the county seat?"
Patriarch Chen also looked solemn, "No wonder the villages were raided. Did they want to prepare food and fodder before attacking the city?"
"That's terrible. His brother Erlang and the others haven't come back yet. I wonder if they were captured by them." Old Man Jiang became more and more frightened as he thought about it.
Patriarch Chen: "Don't guess anything, let's go back to the village quickly. If Sanlang and the others don't see anyone when they come back, they will definitely go back to the village. Don't stay there for a long time."
"Okay, let's go back to the village first."
Everyone picked up their ceremonial bedding and the remaining food and got up, following Old Man Jiang and his family towards Chencun.
Jiangjiacun is twenty miles away from Chencun, but that's not the official distance. If you walk along the trail, it's more than twenty miles.
It was already dark now, so they dared to light two torches and move forward, one at a time and one at the other to provide light for everyone.
No one in the entire team made any noise, even Wen Tian didn't say anything, because Lin gave a bracelet to a villager and asked him to carry Wen Tian on his back while walking.
When they encountered villages along the way, they avoided them, even the torches were extinguished, and everyone just kept their heads down and paid the price.
Finally arrived at Chencun in the middle of the night.
Genji saw that the village was completely dark, and there was not even a sound of dogs barking.
Patriarch Chen went to Old Man Jiang to discuss, "You can't enter the village at that time. You have to let someone go to explore the situation first."
Old Man Jiang nodded, "Okay! Please go to the south slope first. It's far away from the village and has a lot of bamboo forest. If there are no bandits stationed, we can stay at his house first."
"Okay, let's do that." Patriarch Chen immediately nodded in agreement.
Autumn nights are cold and cold, so sleeping outdoors is not an option. Many people don't even have bedding. So if you stay in the cold all night, you won't get sick. It would be nice to have a place to shelter from the wind and rain.
So Wang Dashan and a villager ran into the darkness and first went to the south slope to check if there were any bandits.
They came back in less than half an hour, and Old Man Jiang said in an unspeakable way: "It is true that there are no bandits on Nanpo, but my house was burned down."
Old Man Jiang was stunned for a moment, his heart ached to the point of bleeding, "Are you all burned?"
Wang Dashan nodded, "Uncle Jiang's house is very good. Only the kitchen was burned down, but the main house was not damaged much."
Chun Niang breathed a sigh of relief when she heard this.
Old Man Jiang was silent for a moment and said, "Then let's go to the south slope quickly." It was already late at night, and it would be dawn in an hour or two.
"Okay, let's go quickly." Patriarch Chen took the lead and felt very unhappy.
Even the Jiang family's house in Nanpo was burned down, but what about our own house? Alas, was it really an unreasonable disaster?
The group soon arrived at Jiang's house in Nanpo.
Through the moonlight, the once neat large tile-roofed house was in dilapidated condition.
Jiang Sanlang's house is very good. Although the kitchen was burned down, only a corner of the three large tile-roofed houses was destroyed. It shouldn't be a big problem just to repair a few tiles.
Chun Niang was the first to run into the house and saw a mess outside the house. There were ashes and burn marks from the fire on the ground, and there were many discarded rags. The earthen kang outside the house was also in a mess, as if there were many people there.
Slept.
Various leftover bones and food scraps were thrown all over the floor, even on the kang.
What made Chun Niang most distressed was that all the furniture and other items in her home were missing.
Well, the floor tiles where the silver was buried in the corner of the room had not been touched. This made Chun Niang happy and worried, but she was not allowed to dig up and check at that time.
I found a broom in the yard to clean the earthen kang, spread the bedding I brought back on the kang, and let my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, second sister-in-law, and two nieces sleep on the kang first, while I, my little girl, and my two sons crowded beside me.
Everything had to wait for the bright moon. After traveling most of the night, they were almost exhausted and exhausted.
The other room was also full of women and children. Mrs. Wen, her daughter and nanny were crowded on the Yingbao Kang with many other women.
The men made bunks on the floor in the main room, barely surviving until dawn the next day.
It was already the third month of the month. When Yingbao got up, he saw two large iron pots set up in his yard, filled with two large pots of rice porridge.
Grandpa and Patriarch Chen were walking on the east side of the corridor to listen to Wang Dashan's report on the situation in the village.
"There are no bandits in the village, but many houses have been burned down."
"Has anyone come back from the village?" Patriarch Chen asked.
Wang Dashan: "Several families have returned and are cleaning their houses."
Patriarch Chen stroked his beard and asked again: "His house was also burned down?"
"That's not true, but several rooms in Third Grandpa's house were burned down."
Wang Dashan Niang stuck her head out of the window and asked: "Da Shan, where is our family?"
Wang Dashan: "It was also burned."
Dashan Niang frowned, but she was not too sad, because her family built a house on the south slope. Although it had a frame, the bricks, tiles and wood she bought were piled on the south slope.
Since the houses in the village were burned down, I simply would not go back home. At worst, I would live in a wall frame while Zhai Lufu went home and put the roof on it.
Li Dayong and Li Eryong's family had the same idea as her, because they also built a house on the south slope, and they also didn't have time to build a roof.
When the bandits first came out, the blind old man refused to burden his children and grandchildren and insisted on letting them send him to Nan Slope. Then he stayed alone outside the wall of Nan Slope, living on the dry food and water provided by his son Liudong.
Early in the morning of the bright moon, Li Dao and Li He went to look for their grandfather at the wall of their house. Unexpectedly, their blind grandfather was not killed by the bandits, and he even had no shortage of food.
Not only was there no shortage, but there was also a small bag of rice.
According to the blind grandfather, someone gave him a bag of grain and told him to live well.
