Chapter 25: What Kind of Society Is This

"The dog-fucked bastard, too cruel! Too cruel!" The Zhang Erlang whom Ma Yaozi yearned for day and night, Zhang Zhao, was at this moment utterly stunned. His eyes were wide as he kept exclaiming.

What astonished Zhang Zhao beyond measure was nothing else but the storehouse of that old wretch Ge Duo. The storehouse was located in the Thirty-Three Guanyin Temple behind the stone tower. After Qiong Reduo Jin knelt three times and kowtowed nine times, burned incense and prayed, and moved aside the statue of Guanyin Bodhisattva, an enormous cave entrance appeared.

"Young lord, we're rich now!" Old Zhang Zhong beside him was trembling all over with excitement, and Qi Xiahu looked as if he was about to cry.

Because when he, the master of this stronghold, could only have a pinch of salt every two days, Ge Duo's storehouse alone held fifty sacks of coarse salt from Ganzhou, each sack weighing at least thirty jin — that was fifteen hundred jin of salt! Used sparingly, it would feed the two hundred people of their mountain stronghold for two years.

Lady Cao Sanniang glanced at Zhang Zhao. She knew what he meant by muttering "too cruel."

The people under Ge Duo's control numbered no more than five hundred. Of these, some twenty-odd were men he had to win over; if one also counted the fifty or so veteran horse bandits who could not be ruthlessly squeezed, and subtracted Ge Duo's own wives, children, and thirty-odd kinsmen, then those left whom Ge Duo could exploit came to fewer than four hundred.

Just a rough look at the stores in this underground vault — how heaven-wrathful and man-resenting must his exploitation have been to amass so much cloth, coin, and grain!

"Old Zhong, have men carry everything out. Qiong Reduo Jin, summon everyone in the stronghold here, and bring your kinsmen too. Slaughter cattle and sheep — I have words to say to them."

"Moo! Moo!" A yak tied to a wooden stake bellowed with a face full of reluctance; clearly it too sensed something was amiss.

Across from the yak, Qi Xiahu had just finished washing his knives with boiling water, and now, before the eyes of all, he began washing himself in the cold wind, wearing nothing but a calf-nose loincloth.

Behind Qi Xiahu, his wife's younger brother was singing and dancing. Zhang Zhao listened carefully — good heavens, the man was actually chanting the Rebirth Mantra. So this fellow was performing last rites for the yak before him.

Just as Zhang Zhao was feeling somewhat baffled, Lady Cao Sanniang beside him had already closed her eyes and pressed her palms together, and old Zhang Zhong also pressed his palms together with an air of great piety.

"Though this long-haired ox cannot plow the fields, it is still an ox! A sin, a sin! Namo amitabha, tadyatha, gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha."

Sin my ass! You've clearly swallowed several mouthfuls of saliva already, haven't you? Zhang Zhao couldn't help wanting to mock. Fine — he looked left and right: as long as they were Han folk, every single person had pressed their palms together and was chanting the Rebirth Mantra.

This was killing an ox! In this era, an ox was more important than the life of an ordinary farming household. Although the yaks across from them could not be used to plow fields, they still granted the yaks the treatment of plow oxen.

Once the round of Rebirth Mantra chanting was finished, Qi Xiahu took a piece of black cloth and walked toward the several bound yaks.

Strange to say, whenever the black cloth covered a yak's eyes, the yak would kneel straight down, and then, without much struggle, a single knife thrust pierced it through the heart. As the gushing ox blood filled a wooden bucket, the blindfolded yak merely swayed gently.

Before long, all four yaks had been dispatched. The long-wooled sheep that had just been grazing leisurely on the hillside were also caught, seven or eight of them brought over. But they did not receive such good treatment. The Uyghur called Huang Yang'er took a short knife, his hands flying in a blur, and in a moment an entire sheepskin was peeled off.

While the cattle and sheep were being slaughtered, several women who had come along began pouring washed millet into large pots set over makeshift stoves. Lumps of butter and large chunks of tea brick were also dumped into another great pot, and the rich, fatty fragrance immediately spread far and wide.

This looked like they were going to hand out food! Could it be that the new Tarkan was going to reward them with meat? A large crowd of cowering herding slaves stared at the beef, mutton, and butter tea, drooling, wanting very much to come over but not daring to.

They had not even dared to take extra things when Ge Duo's stone tower had just been taken. They had ferociously slaughtered dozens of Ge Duo's kinsmen, yet they did not dare approach Zhang Zhao's side at all.

The adults could hold back, but the children could not. They did not dare come up directly to take food, but instead gathered around the great pot of simmering butter tea, greedily inhaling the aroma in great gulps, as if they could suck the butter tea into their bellies through the air.

Gradually, seeing that Zhang Zhao had given no order to drive the children away, the adults too began to edge over tentatively. No one knew who led, but people kept kneeling on the frozen ground, as if hoping that by kneeling they could beg Zhang Zhao to show great mercy.

More and more people came. Before long, no fewer than fifty people were kneeling in the open ground where cattle and sheep were being slaughtered and butter tea boiled — old and young, men kneeling in front, women kneeling behind. They seemed to know Zhang Zhao was the leader, and the smaller children pressed close to the fire, staring at him blankly.

Zhang Zhao opened his mouth, but he did not know what to say. The crowd before him made his heart deeply uneasy. It was not that he had never seen poor people — before his transmigration, he too had visited old revolutionary base areas, border regions, and impoverished areas to comfort left-behind children.

Zhang Zhao felt that those left-behind children — who ate potato rice for all three meals, could only have meat every few days, and had no drinks, no toys, no television, no parents by their side — already had it bad enough. But compared to the people before him now, they were at least several dozen times more fortunate!

Among the people before him, only the men kneeling in the first two rows had a complete set of clothing. Those behind were all wrapped in tattered things of unknown material that could not even be called clothes — no upper garments, no trousers to speak of, just a piece of rag sewn with animal hide thrown haphazardly over the body, like animals.

In such a bitter winter, what showed through the holes in their clothes was not even rotten hemp cloth or animal fur, but clumps of dried grass.

Zhang Zhao had heard his great-grandfather speak of this way of dressing when he was a child: when the poor had nothing to keep warm in winter, they could only store up dried grass and stuff it into their clothes, then tie the clothes tight with rope or kudzu vine to keep warm.

Everyone was pitch-black, looking as if they had never bathed. The great majority had no shoes, and pair after pair of feet, frozen blue-purple, presented themselves before Zhang Zhao's eyes. Whenever a gust of cold wind blew past, the crowd shivered like leaves in the wind.

Looking again at the children huddled by the fire, you could not tell their ages at all. All the children looked thin and tiny; their spindly arms made their heads seem especially large. Nor could you tell which were boys and which were girls, because they all looked the same.

On those faces, red from the cold, hung two runnels of snot that seemed as if they would never dry up. Their ears and hands were covered with chilblains, and in their eyes there was no innocence or liveliness left — only longing: longing for a full belly, longing for warm clothes.

Only when they strained to sniff, catching the scent of meat and butter wafting from the pot, could you see on their faces some expression that belonged to a human being.

What the hell kind of society is this? How could Ge Duo bring himself to exploit people like these?

After inhaling for half a day, Zhang Zhao had meant to say something, but he opened his mouth and did not know what to say. He could only wave his hand.

"Serve the food! First, let them eat their fill, damn it!"

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