novelraw Chapter 468: Exhausting the Fate of Great Xia
Chapter 468: Exhausting the Fate of Great Xia
Su Zhan and the others walked silently along the small path littered with garbage.
Their clean clothes, so out of place in the surroundings, made them stand out all the more.
They had originally intended to pass through this area quietly, but the desperation born of suffering has an incredibly sharp sense for any chance of survival.
Some gazes, hidden in the shadows of tents or curled up within tattered bedding, cautiously sized up these outsiders.
As they ventured deeper, those gazes gradually grew bolder.
A boy who looked about seven or eight years old timidly shuffled out from behind a drafty tent.
The clothes on his body were ragged, barely covering him, and he shivered in the cold wind.
He didn't dare get too close, but his large eyes were fixed intently on a small cloth pouch hanging from Liu Ziming's waist.
It contained a few pieces of exquisite pastries that hadn't been finished at the earlier banquet, which Liu Ziming had casually wrapped up.
The boy swallowed a mouthful of saliva that wasn't really there, a faint gurgling sound coming from his throat.The look of longing in his eyes was pure and direct.
"Hey, kid..."
Liu Ziming instinctively moved to cover the pouch, but his motion was somewhat stiff.
He wanted to shout, to tell the boy to go away, but the words stuck in his throat as he looked into those eyes. He couldn't get them out.
He had fought in the most brutal city defense battles, faced the most hideous monsters, yet now, the hungry gaze of a child made his heart tighten with panic.
Encouraged by the boy, more and more people began to emerge from their hiding places and gather around.
A young mother holding an infant, her face sallow and her lips cracked, the child in her arms crying weakly like a kitten.
She staggered forward a few steps, her voice trembling and tearful. "Sirs... kind sirs, have mercy, give us something to eat... the child... the child won't last much longer..."
She tried to kneel, but the movement was clumsy due to her weakness and the child in her arms.
A veteran who had lost a leg, propped up by a crude crutch, wearing a tattered military uniform long faded from its original color, looked at Wang Mingyuan with cloudy eyes.
The corner of his mouth twitched, as if he wanted to salute, but in the end, he just wearily lowered his hand and bowed his head.
"Sir, please spare some food..."
"We haven't received decent porridge for two days..."
"My daughter is sick, has a fever, I beg you, do you have any medicine..."
...
More and more people gathered around, men and women, old and young, most with sallow, emaciated faces and hollow eyes.
They didn't dare get too close, afraid of scaring away this rare hope. They just stood a few steps away, stretching out their hands, some pleading in low voices, others silently weeping.
The aura of despair was suffocating.
They formed an invisible human wall, blocking the path forward for Su Zhan and the others, and also blocking their hearts that wished to turn a blind eye.
Liu Ziming's face paled. He took half a step back, his hand tightly clutching the pouch containing the pastries.
It wasn't that he was stingy, but the pressure of being stared at by countless pairs of hungry, desperate eyes left him feeling utterly at a loss.
Xu Hao frowned deeply, subconsciously feeling his own pockets, which were empty. He felt a pang of regret for not having brought any food with him.
Feng Jue's gaze swept over the pleading faces, finally settling on Wang Mingyuan.
Su Zhan wore his mask, so no one could glimpse his expression.
He stood quietly among the crowd, his golden vertical pupils calmly scanning each face, every detail clearly registering in his perception.
Teacher Wang Mingyuan took a deep breath, stepped forward, passed Liu Ziming, Feng Jue, and Su Zhan, and stood before the group of disaster victims.
He directly took out his phone.
His authority was clearly not low, as he directly connected to a person in charge at the Capital's logistics support department.
"It's me, Wang Mingyuan... Immediately dispatch a batch of emergency food supplies to the Western District Resettlement Zone. Yes, right now.
Standard? Use the wartime satiation standard. Rice and flour that can be cooked immediately, preserved meat cans with long shelf life, compressed rations. Send as much as you can. Coverage... prepare enough for ten thousand people to start.
Yes, immediately, right away!
Authorization? Use my general-level authority. I'll pay."
After hanging up, he quickly contacted a military material reserve depot in the Capital and issued the same orders in the same tone.
After doing all this,
Wang Mingyuan put away his communicator and said solemnly,
"It's been arranged. Official supply convoys will arrive very soon. Tonight, everyone here will receive a meal sufficient to fill their stomachs."
"Did you hear that? This general says he'll give us food!"
"The officials are sending grain!"
"We're saved! We'll have food tonight!"
"Thank you, General! Thank you, our righteous lord!"
...
The crowd erupted. Many wept for joy, hugging each other, repeating the good news.
Wang Mingyuan looked at the excited crowd before him, his expression growing even more complex.
This one meal could only relieve their immediate hunger. The fundamental problems were far from solved.
But he had done it anyway. Perhaps just to comfort these desperate souls before him, or perhaps to soothe that stirring in his own heart that he could not ignore.
Liu Ziming watched this scene and silently untied the pouch of pastries, stuffing it into the hands of the frail boy nearest to him.
The boy was stunned for a moment, then hugged the pouch tightly, bowing repeatedly to Liu Ziming.
Su Zhan's heart was filled with a myriad of emotions.
The power of one individual is limited.
He could turn the tide of a battle single-handedly, slay hundreds of Calamity-level creatures, and be revered as a guardian deity.
But faced with these tens of thousands of struggling disaster victims, his power, sufficient to destroy heaven and earth, seemed so utterly pale.
The Flame of Destruction could incinerate monsters, but it couldn't produce a single grain of rice to stave off hunger.
The Law of Time could reverse life and death, but it couldn't heal the wounds of these countless families torn apart by war.
Power, at this moment, lost its most direct utility.
This was the Capital.
The center of power for Daxia, the core area where resources should theoretically be guaranteed first and foremost.
If even here there were disaster victims on such a scale, then what must the border cities directly ravaged by the Mist, those remote areas that had lost their administrative systems, be like?
Probably scenes of hell ten times, a hundred times more miserable than here.
The tragic state of the Capital was merely a microcosm of the nation's massive trauma.
Teacher Wang Mingyuan could arrange for one emergency shipment of food, perhaps alleviating tonight's hunger.
But what about after that?
What about tomorrow?
Winter had only just begun.
This war, they had won against the Mist, but in doing so, they had also exhausted Daxia's vitality.
The casualty rate of over thirty percent among the Awakened army, the similar proportion of Ocean Realm and Calamity-level experts who had fallen, represented a cliff-like drop in national strength, a vacuum in high-end combat power for decades to come.
The destroyed industries, the polluted farmland, the depleted reserves, the collapsed commercial system, the hundreds of millions of displaced people...
All of this together formed a body that had suffered a devastating loss of vitality.