Chapter 540: Locusts Blotting Out the Sky

An overwhelming tide of black-brown locusts seized every inch of ground within Liu Chengzong's field of vision.

They beat their wings in midair, crashing restlessly into every person they saw; even the toughest soldiers were battered into covering their heads and fleeing like rats, until people pulled hemp sacks over their faces to shield the bloody scratches left by the barbs on the locusts' legs.

Liu Chengzong immediately ordered men to report the locust plague's arrival to Hehuang and Gansu, but judging by the soldiers who had earlier fled from Chankou, neither men nor horses could necessarily outrun the spreading plague.

After that, it was all about catching locusts and exterminating locusts.

The soldiers and civilians under the Marshal's headquarters all had some understanding of locust plagues and their own methods for dealing with locusts, except that these methods basically treated the symptoms without addressing the root cause, because the locusts were not born on the land they controlled.

Drought never affects all land, because drought simply means no rain — places with rivers and water sources can hold out for a while — but the secondary problems drought brings are extremely severe, and locust plagues are one of them.

Where there is drought, there will be locust plagues, because locusts lay their eggs in riverbeds and saline-alkali soil; when the river water dries up and the land lies fallow, the locust plague arrives, and it is often far more terrifying than drought — drought reduces the harvest, but a locust plague blots out the sky and devours everything in sight.

Solving a locust plague is very simple: build water conservancy projects, cultivate the saline-alkali land, plow open and till all the saline-alkali soil and dry riverbeds, raise chickens and ducks by the river, and let them eat all the eggs.

But once a locust plague breaks out, human strength simply cannot resolve it completely.

"Cannot resolve" means that no matter what you do, it is a net loss.

People can kill locusts, exterminate locusts, catch locusts — locusts are just grasshoppers, and roasted grasshoppers are a protein-rich delicacy — but this is like raising pigs; in an age when there is not even enough for people to eat, no one would use human rations to raise pigs; they always feed livestock things people don't eat, or at the very least things people don't like to eat, because the food utilization rate is very low.

A locust plague is when they devour every bit of the rations people have toiled over for an entire year, breed madly, then run off to another place and repeat the process, leaving this land with nothing but a few sacks of grasshoppers.

Once a locust swarm takes shape, it reproduces rapidly; the locusts that human strength can catch and kill are nowhere near as numerous as the hatchlings they produce — never once in history has any locust plague been wiped out by people: their lifespan is very short, the first wave of locusts lives only three months from swarming to death, and the larvae they produce during that process will survive for five months.

That is why the saying goes: a grasshopper after autumn has only a few days left to hop.

They die, and the locust plague ends.

It is precisely for this reason that in ancient times so many Locust God temples were built, and that traditional thought regarded locust plagues as Heaven's warning to the ruler.

This line of thinking is not really flawed, because without neglected waterworks and large-scale fallow fields, a locust plague would not occur; and neglected waterworks and fallow fields, in the agricultural age, were matters of the highest importance — they were a manifestation of the ruler's lack of virtue.

When the locust swarm of the seventh year of Chongzhen descended upon the land of Lanzhou for the first time, everything was chaos and disorder.

The sky turned pitch-black in an instant as if a torrential downpour were about to fall; everyone knew this year's second crop was done for, men and women, young and old, all knew they would harvest little grain, and across the hills and fields people were everywhere, frantically chasing the locust swarm.

Shoulder bags, bed sheets, cloth curtains, clothes, and of course the most useful flour sacks — people swung everything they could lay their hands on into the oncoming locust swarm, and sack after tightly tied sack was thrown to the ground, thrashing furiously.

The Marshal's headquarters army was no different; Liu Chengzong had wanted to ride back into the city and order the storehouses opened to bring out equipment to catch locusts, but who could have known the warhorses would be battered so densely by locusts that they could not walk, and that dismounting to go on foot would mean crushing two or three with every step.

People could only use whatever they had to catch locusts; he ordered his bodyguards to tear down the marshal's tent, using the tent cloth and curtains to stitch together several huge sacks, while soldiers from every battalion, led by their company commanders, dug trenches and swung long poles to drive the locusts into the trenches, then buried them at once, and those that were not driven in were swatted dead with shovels.

But the incident was sudden, and their army, which had marched out to the field for drill exercises, had not the slightest preparation for this; moreover, compared to human strength, the number of locusts swarming through the sky was far too immense, so that the results were pitifully small.

Fortunately, the locust swarm came fast and left fast; in barely half a shichen, the dense black mass of insects flew off in succession, as if a brief and mad dream had passed — some people had only just fetched sacks from home when the thickly packed locusts had already vanished without a trace, leaving behind only a few locusts too gorged to fly, slowly crawling on the barren ground.

As the dense sound of beating wings beside his ears gradually faded and heaven and earth returned to stillness, Liu Chengzong gazed out at the devastation blanketing the Lanzhou outskirts; he had just breathed a sigh of relief when he heard someone out on the plain let out a wail, and then everywhere rose the farmers' desperate, overlapping cries of anguish.

Gone — the winter vegetables, the fragrant pears hanging heavy on the branches, the nearly ripe sorghum and corn, all bitten to shreds, all gone.

A field struck by a locust plague cannot be called clean, only a scene of utter devastation; the vegetable plots were stripped bare, the stalks and leaves in the crop fields were chewed to pulp, and farmland that had been growing vigorously was left with only stem after stem standing like rows of corpses in the field.

The groves of trees wherever Liu Chengzong looked had also entered winter ahead of time, gnawed completely bare.

His grain was gone.

But Liu Chengzong had no time at all to grieve over the grain the locusts had eaten; he needed an exact accounting of the losses and had to lead Lintao Prefecture in the coming fight against the locust plague.

He singled out a Feathered Forest Guard beside him, raised a hand to point west, and spoke in an urgent tone: "Go to Hehuang's Dongguan Town and bring Chengzong here. If Chengzong isn't there, find Song Shouzhen and Wu Panlong. Before tomorrow morning, I want them to draw forty clerks familiar with village affairs from twenty township wards and have them report to me in Lanzhou."

The Feathered Forest Guard Liu Chengzong selected was named Liu Yiren; ever since leaving the Children's Camp to serve at Liu Chengzong's side, his duties had always been very light, and he had never before received such an urgent order — he dared not delay, clasped his fist in salute, turned, mounted his warhorse, which had been frightened by the locust plague, and sped off westward.

From Lanzhou to Dongguan Town, not counting the Yellow River ferry crossing, was sixty li; for Liu Chengzong to see the people from Dongguan Town by tomorrow morning meant that no one should expect to sleep tonight.

Liu Yiren had just left when Liu Chengzong sent someone to summon Wang Wenxiu, who came with his hair disheveled.

Liu Chengzong was the Grand Marshal observing the drill review; Wang Wenxiu was the brigade commander who had organized the drill review.

When the sky suddenly filled with flying locusts, the gongs, drums, banners, and flags on which the army relied for command all became useless — the flags could not be seen, the gongs and drums could not be heard — and the organization was thrown into chaos at once; in the half shichen that had just passed, Wang Wenxiu's primary thought had not been to kill locusts, but to make the seven battalions participating in the drill maintain their formations and stay obediently near Fulongping.

But this was entirely Wang Wenxiu's wishful thinking; in reality, the moment the locusts arrived, the twenty thousand soldiers were thrown into utter confusion, as if scattered beans had turned into soldiers — from the trenches outside Lanzhou's west gate, through Xigu, all the way to the docks on the southern bank of the river mouth, the forty-li road was covered with troops everywhere.

Everyone acted entirely on their own; Wang Wenxiu exhausted all his strength, yet he could not hold a single battalion.

It cannot be said that he held absolutely none — at least Ding Guodong's Suzhou Battalion did not move — but that had nothing to do with Wang Wenxiu; Ding Guodong himself had never intended to move.

Do not be fooled by the fact that Ding Guodong was a ruthless man on the battlefield; outside the battlefield, he was exceedingly well-behaved, because in essence, Liu Chengzong's conquest of Gansu was a completely unprovoked calamity for the Gansu Ming army — they had not suffered natural disasters as severe as those in Shaanxi, so they inherently harbored no rebellious intent, and the Ming army's organization had not collapsed as badly as the Shaanxi Ming army's had.

The troops under the Marshal's headquarters, even those that had once been Ming soldiers, had in reality all gone through either acting on their own in rebellion or desertion, and had then been gathered back under Liu Chengzong's banner; each unit had a very strong sense of autonomy.

This characteristic held true even for the most elite and most loyal grand battalions; when an order came from Liu Chengzong, they could all execute it well, but when Liu Chengzong's order had not yet arrived... they would move on their own.

Ding Guodong was different; he was a very traditional commander, and his Suzhou soldiers were also very traditional Ming soldiers — relatively speaking, in terms of mindset, they were more regular than the Marshal's headquarters' most regular troops; without an order from above, they would not move if they could help it.

The three battalions under Wang Wenxiu's command — Luo Rucai, Li Wanqing, and Yang Chengzu — were different; the three of them had long since run off with their troops and vanished — they wanted to provide disaster relief and catch locusts.

The moment the sky full of locusts descended, people could not see into the distance at all, nor could they hear orders; they could not even see Fulongping, let alone Liu Chengzong and Wang Wenxiu standing on Fulongping.

Each of the three battalions had fewer than three thousand men, but none of the three colonels could pull their entire force away while locusts were crashing everywhere; Yang Chengzu took over a thousand men and ran eight li to guard the government granary outside Lanzhou's west gate, while Li Wanqing ran halfway west to guard the sorghum fields.

Luo Rucai was a long-distance running ace, dressed in gaudy finery, the most eye-catching figure in the Marshal's headquarters under the sky full of locusts — the soldiers could all spot him, and wherever he went, the soldiers followed... but Luo Rucai went to Xigu.

If one were to ask Liu Chengzong which crop around Lanzhou was the least important at this moment, he would certainly say sweet potatoes, because with autumn arriving and the weather turning cold, the sweet potatoes planted in the ground had already stopped growing, and the Marshal's headquarters had not planted many sweet potatoes to begin with.

Sweet potatoes fear the cold; the chilly, shaded mountain land was not suitable for planting them, and their growing season overlapped with wheat and corn; moreover, the growing, harvesting, and storage stages were all extremely labor-intensive — in Hehuang, only Dongguan Town had planted some on Liu Chengzong's orders, while in Lanzhou, a rotation of sweet potatoes had been planted in Xigu after the wheat harvest, with the vines eaten as a vegetable.

Luo Rucai had gone to defend the sweet potatoes.

But the damnedest thing was that he was not defending the sweet potatoes because he liked eating them — quite the opposite; because he had been garrisoned at Xigu, he had once eaten sweet potatoes as his staple, and they gave him acid reflux, heartburn, and gas; ever since then, whoever told him to eat sweet potatoes, he would get mad at them — yet conversely, whoever said the Marshal's headquarters would no longer plant sweet potatoes from now on, he would also get mad at them.

After eating too many sweet potatoes, Luo Rucai had sworn an oath: as long as there was a single bite of food, if he could eat white flour he would not eat yellow flour, and if he could eat yellow flour, he would not even glance at a sweet potato.

But the premise was right there: "as long as there was a single bite of food." In this age, as a peasant army leader who had crawled out of the northern Shaanxi drought, Luo Rucai knew very well that they would again encounter a situation where there was not a single bite to eat, and at that time he would have to eat the black flour made from sweet potatoes — so he had to defend the sweet potatoes.

No matter how good wheat and corn were, if they were not ripe, you could not eat them; sweet potatoes were different — except in winter, you could plant them anytime, dig them up anytime, and eat them anytime; they might be a little small, but the leaves, the roots, and the tubers — none of them would kill you if you ate them.

But, well, Luo Rucai had thought it through so nicely... he ran a full thirty li to Xigu, only to find that the corn and sorghum planted along the way had nearly all been devoured by the locusts, and only the sweet potato fields were perfectly fine, without the slightest problem.

The locusts, just like him, did not like eating them.

Wang Wenxiu, his hair disheveled, came running in a frantic rush to see Liu Chengzong upon being summoned, and the moment he saw Liu Chengzong, he was deeply ashamed, feeling that he had mishandled the drill review.

But he never expected that Liu Chengzong did not care about this matter in the slightest, and was even baffled by his ashamed expression: the locust plague had come, which signified that the Son of Heaven lacked virtue — I am not the Son of Heaven, the one who should be ashamed is Chongzhen inside the Forbidden City; what are you being ashamed for?

Wang Wenxiu, of all things, before Liu Chengzong could even speak, opened his mouth to accept punishment: "Grand Marshal, your subordinate has failed in leading the troops, the seven battalions..."

"It's just a locust plague, don't be so dejected."

Liu Chengzong raised a hand to cut him off, stuffing the unspoken words back down his throat. The army had scattered everywhere — even now they had only figured out where the seven battalions were, but every battalion was understrength. All told, several thousand men were still unaccounted for. That was perfectly normal.

A locust plague counted as force majeure. The army scattering in all directions was indeed a problem, but it was also excusable — after all, they were doing what needed to be done. If the locusts really broke into the Lanzhou government granary where the grain reserves were stored, what would their tens of thousands of troops eat?

"Listen to me. I will handle the locust plague — you stay out of it." Liu Chengzong gave the Yulin Cavalry the order to return to Lanzhou, then rode alongside Wang Wenxiu as he spoke. "First, back to the prince's residence. Summon the brigade commanders of every battalion. Wei Qian'er and Ding Guodong need not attend."

Wei Qian'er and several brigade commanders had just run over when they heard Liu Chengzong say this while looking straight at him. He was dumbfounded. "Commander, where do I not need to go?"

Liu Chengzong reined in his horse by the roadside and instructed, "You need not attend the war council. Gather your main camp. The bugs came from the east. This year, the rotation-planted grain across the whole of Shaanxi is gone. What will the ten thousand-plus government troops in Gongchang Prefecture and Qinzhou eat? You and Ding Guodong, first assemble your troops and rest in place. Prepare to move out tonight. Once you are ready, come to the prince's residence."

Hearing that there were orders, Wei Qian'er immediately clasped fists together with Ding Guodong and returned to the military camp.

With the locust plague striking, Liu Chengzong's face was dark and frightening. No one dared speak. Only after they entered Lanzhou city and Liu Chengzong directly ordered the Yulin Cavalry into the residence to hang the map did Wang Wenxiu ask, "Is the Commander planning to use the locust plague to start a war?"

"Start a war?" Liu Chengzong glared. "The bugs came from the east. I'm afraid the government troops will come to seize my grain!"

The reason Liu Chengzong's orders were so urgent was that he had calculated in his mind — by a conservative estimate, they had twenty days.

He had personally compiled the Marshal's Headquarters' Book of Famine Relief and Pestilence Control and understood locust plagues very well.

The locust plague's first strike was merely the war drum before the battle arrived. Wherever the locusts passed, they laid eggs in the soil, then flew elsewhere to forage. Here in Lanzhou, they would most likely fly back again.

And the eggs in the soil would become insects twenty days later. Then a new wave of locusts would take wing once more and again lay eggs in the earth — eggs that could survive the entire winter.

He could not eradicate the locust plague because the locusts' egg-laying grounds already covered the whole of Shaanxi. Next year, there would be another large-scale plague. But at the very least, he could use this winter to control the locusts and eggs in Hehuang and Lintao as much as possible, and establish a set of countermeasures against locust plagues.

But what was absolutely critical was that no one came to cause trouble during these twenty days.

Otherwise, a locust plague was never something that passed in a single wave.

Good evening!