activa-t Chapter 10 Crisis
Chapter 10 Crisis
When the night wind blew back into the dry ditch, it carried a nauseating, astringent, and earthy smell.
It was a smell that had been forced out from the cracks in the ground, which had been parched for years and cracked for miles, mixed with years of mud and ash, months of sweat, and the sour and bitter smell of death that seeped from the pores of people who had starved to the point of exhaustion.
The people in the gully didn't sleep, nor did they dare to. In this desolate wilderness, closing one's eyes wasn't just for resting, but more likely to make room for oneself.
Li Qian sat by the ditch entrance, half his face shrouded in shadow, his back pressed against the cold, rough loess wall. His right hand never left the hilt of his knife; the cracks at the base of his thumb ached from the dryness, but he dared not relax his grip.
The saber, seized from the Green Standard Army soldiers, leaned slightly forward, its blade still damp with dried, purplish-black blood. A gust of wind carried the faint smell of rust like a snake slithering into the nostrils.
Li Qian stared at the darkness, and fragmented, otherworldly images suddenly flashed through his mind: neon lights that never went out in a 21st-century city, steaming oden in a convenience store after working overtime, and rent payment reminders that kept flashing on his phone screen.
Half a month ago, he was a corporate slave who had to bow down for a meager living; but when he opened his eyes, he was dragged into the huge, stinking meat grinder of the tenth year of the Xianfeng Emperor's reign by fate, a cruel and unforgiving fate.
He subconsciously touched the back of his neck. The stiff, oily braid, coiled like a cold, dead snake, was still there.
Countless times during the day, while traveling, he wanted to draw his sword and chop off this damned thing, but each time his hand touched the hilt, reason forced him to hold back. On this land of the Qing Dynasty, this queue was not hair; it was the reins around the necks of ordinary people, the "household registration" bestowed upon you by this corrupt dynasty. Without it, you couldn't even be a vagrant; you could only be a "hair bandit," a head that officials could exchange for a few taels of silver.
"Gurgle—"
A dull, drawn-out rumbling sound suddenly rang out from the deathly silence of the ravine.
Awang huddled in the corner, his hands tightly wrapped around his knees, his head buried deep in the ground as if he wanted to hide his mouth in the mud. But his stomach betrayed him, howling incessantly, the sound particularly piercing in the night, almost like a harbinger of his impending doom.
Sun Deshan's temples throbbed from the noise. He had just been publicly humiliated by Li Qian earlier that day for both his physical prowess and his adherence to rules, and now he was seething with anger. He suddenly opened his eyes, lowered his voice, and cursed, "Damn it, can't you hold your belly down? Do you think you can't find a place for the wild dogs in the wilderness, and you want to summon them all here?"
Awang shrank his neck, his voice weak as a sheet of paper, trembling: "I...I want to hold it down, but my intestines feel like they're boiling over, I can't do anything...My stomach is burning with fire right now, except for that piece of bread crumb from yesterday."
Sun Deshan opened his mouth, but ultimately didn't continue cursing. He felt as if a handful of scalding sand had been stuffed into his stomach, grinding against his internal organs with each breath.
The blood-stained dry biscuits and millet eaten during the day were burned up by stomach acid within fifteen minutes of entering the stomach. What remained was only a more intense, emptier, and more maddening internal heat. That kind of hunger wasn't simply about wanting to eat; it felt like every part of the body was gnawing at each other.
"In our village... before the heavy snow blocked the mountains last year, there wasn't a single piece of intact tree bark left."
Old Zhao leaned against the innermost side and suddenly spoke softly. His voice was very soft, but it carried a chilling sense of deathly stillness, as if he were telling a ghost story that had already ended.
"First came the elm tree, its bark was sweet and easy to eat; then came the willow tree, so bitter it made you cry but you still had to chew it; finally, even the grass roots from this cracked ground were dug up and eaten. My little grandson was so hungry, the three-year-old boy secretly grabbed some clay from the ground to eat. That stuff filled him up, but it wouldn't go down or come out. In three days, just three days, he swelled up like a drum and suffocated to death on the kang (heated brick bed). When he died, his eyes were bulging out, as if he wanted to see if God had any eyes."
No one responded. In the North at this time, this story was as commonplace as sunrise and sunset.
Awang wiped his eyes, his voice trembling with tears: "My mother gave the last half of the cake to my brother. My brother didn't make it. Before the seventh day after his death was over, my mother hung herself from the beam. She was afraid that if she lived any longer, she would eat the remaining half of the cake that my brother had... I... I crawled out from under the beam."
The air felt heavy, like it was filled with lead. Sun Deshan suddenly let out a cold laugh, a laugh filled with cruel clarity: "Hanging yourself is considered an act of charity. When I fled here, I passed through the eastern part of Baoding Prefecture, which was no place for a human to live. There was a house where the door wasn't closed properly, and I glanced at it. Floating in the pot... was a tiny hand with fingernails. That's what you call a sin, that's what you call cutting off one's lineage. But what did people say? They said it was called 'exchanging children to eat,' meaning they couldn't bring themselves to eat their own, so they exchanged children to eat. That was the rule in the tenth year of Xianfeng's reign."
"Stop talking..." Su Mo'er shrank into the shadows, her voice trembling uncontrollably, her hands tightly covering her ears.
As Li Qian listened to these words, he felt as if his chest was being repeatedly struck by a heavy hammer, his chest tight, suffocated, and he felt maddened.
Previously, when he read the seven characters "Xianfeng's great famine, people ate each other" in history books, they were just a few strokes of ink on yellowed pages. Now, he was sitting in the very center of those seven bloody characters, looking at this group of people who had been driven to the brink of death by the dynasty, and listening to their wailing that had lost all humanity.
"Fuck Emperor Xianfeng."
Li Qian suddenly cursed under his breath. His voice wasn't loud, but it was deafening in the dead silence of the ravine.
Old Zhao was terrified. His eyes widened in shock as he looked around frantically, even trying to cover Li Qian's mouth with his hand: "Young man! Are you crazy! That's the Emperor! That's the Emperor above us! Saying things like that will bring down a thunderbolt!"
"His Majesty?" Li Qian turned his head, the moonlight illuminating his ferocious face. His eyes were so sharp they seemed to tear the night apart. "He's a king now, but are you all alive? He's gone to Rehe on a 'hunt' in a sedan chair, the English warships are burning his gardens, and you're here eating dirt, eating children, hanging from the rafters. Has he even glanced at you? This kind of emperor deserves to go to the eighteenth level of hell!"
Old Zhao opened his mouth, but couldn't utter a single word. These outrageous words were beyond his comprehension, yet they inexplicably stirred a chilling ripple in the stagnant depths of his heart.
The ditch fell silent again, but the atmosphere had changed, filled with a hostile energy intertwined with "rebellion" and "despair."
Just then, a very faint, intermittent rustling sound came from the weeds outside the ditch.
It doesn't sound like the wind. The rustling of grass in the wind is a continuous, continuous sound, but this sound is scattered.
That was the sound of bare feet stepping on the cracked earth, deliberately kept low. Slow, greedy, with a ghoul-like patience.
Li Qian's eyes suddenly darkened, and his fingers gripping the knife tightened sharply.
"Soldiers?" Sun Deshan asked in a low voice, his hand already touching the broken military knife beside him.
"No. Soldiers aren't that light; they're used to charging on horseback. These are 'starving ghosts' who seek out night fires." Li Qian's voice was chilling to the bone.
Moreover, he was the kind of madman who no longer sought food, but only meat.
Sure enough, in less than three breaths, two withered, skeletal figures slowly emerged from the top of the ditch.
They were two men so emaciated they were unrecognizable. Their ribs were clearly visible beneath their thin skin, and their braids were as thin as withered rat tails. The leader's nose twitched incessantly, sniffing the air like a dog searching for prey.
The look in his eyes as he gazed at Su Mo'er and Awang held no pity for their shared humanity, only a burning, green hunger, as if he were looking at two fat sheep that had just escaped their pen.
"Brother... I smell fresh meat... that little one, the bones are soft and easy to chew, it can make a pot of pork cracklings."
"That woman will do; she can live for several days. If we eat sparingly, it'll be enough for the two of us to make it to Cangzhou..."
After seeing Li Qian and the other men, he turned to the Wang family's wife, who was holding a swaddled baby, and said, "Hey woman, do you want to eat meat?"