novelraw Chapter 217
Chapter 217
Chapter 217: Rising Grain Prices
In the desolate wilderness, a group of people were resting on the spot.
Some were standing guard, some feeding horses, some sleeping… With hundreds of people, each had their own role. Under a certain tree, a few people were gathered around a fire, standing or sitting.
A gaunt and emaciated man was sitting leaning against the tree trunk, holding a bowl of steaming millet porridge in his hands. He looked weak and lethargic, the kind who needed to rest after saying just a few words.
This man was one of the few living people Wei Yu had found who had already regained consciousness. His name was Niu Dahe.
Wei Yu sat opposite Niu Dahe and asked, “Why did you faint out here in this desolate wilderness? We just arrived at Qian City Commandery, and we've already seen quite a few dead bodies on the road. Were they all starved to death?”
Although there was no judicial officer with Wei Yu, Fang Sheng and others, who were all from the Gray Guards, had some strange skills activated, including being able to deduce the cause of death from the way the corpse died. Some of them could do that.
It was Fang Sheng who told Wei Yu that those people had all starved to death.
Niu Dahe gave a bitter smile and nodded feebly, “Yes, sir, you're right. Everyone… they all starved to death.”
As he spoke, Niu Dahe lowered his eyelids and stared at the bowl of plain porridge in his hands. His dry eyes suddenly welled up with tears. Grain.
This was real porridge made from actual grain!
He had never thought that he could still open his eyes, or be able to eat a bowl of hot porridge in a day!
The porridge was given to Niu Dahe by an unknown young man right after he woke up.
The porridge was steaming hot, the ceramic bowl slightly burning his hands, and it was heavy. At a glance, it wasn’t the watery porridge with just a few grains of rice. It was real millet porridge.
Even in normal times, Niu Dahe would never have been able to eat such porridge.
Staring at the porridge in his hands, Niu Dahe couldn’t help but sob.
“Wuwu… Sir, you have been kind-hearted and saved my life. It is the blessing of Niu Dahe! But, but my poor child, and all the people in our village… they, they will never open their eyes again!”
A man who was hungry for a long time and just awakened had little strength; even such heartbreaking cries were just Niu Dahe’s anguished groans.
Yet the hatred and suffering in his words were sincere, making people empathize deeply.
Wei Yu couldn’t help but furrow his brows.
He didn’t speak but just quietly looked at Niu Dahe, listening to his painful lament.
At such a moment, rather than offering trivial comforting words, it was better to let the other person vent.
Only after venting could one summon the courage to keep living.
“My son, he was forcibly taken away by a group of bastards… I saw it with my own eyes…”
“Those people deserve a terrible death…”
“If only Daobao could have had a bowl of hot porridge before he died…”
Niu Dahe rambled on for a long time.
From intermittent choking sobs, to more vigorous curses, he eventually sat up, gritting his teeth and cursing fiercely.
He cursed many people—from the group who plundered his son, to the villains who snatched the few remaining pancakes they had on the road, and finally to the greedy merchants who wildly raised grain prices…
Even without asking, Wei Yu roughly understood the reason why there were so many dead bodies in the countryside of Qian City Commandery from Niu Dahe’s words and curses.
—The grain prices had surged.
Food is the paramount necessity of the people; no one can survive without eating.
In this era where the common people live in hardship, they could do without money—but they could not be without grain.
Disasters had damaged the crops, and as people lost their own grain and waited for the Imperial Court’s disaster relief, they still had money to buy grain.
But if grain that used to cost a few cash per jin was now raised by unscrupulous grain merchants to tens or even more than thirty cash per jin?
How many people were there in an ordinary farmer’s household?
Even a poor family of three, with one jin of grain boiled into the thinnest porridge and doing nothing all day, could only survive for two or three days before fainting from hunger.
The crazy rise in grain prices caused the people of Qian City Commandery to suffer extreme hunger.
They needed to eat, so they had to keep spending money. When the money ran out, the people were left to either die or escape elsewhere to seek survival.
Some succeeded, but some perished on the way.
Unluckily, Niu Dahe was among the group who perished on the road.
“Did the grain prices rise everywhere in Qian City Commandery?” Wei Yu suddenly asked.
After this long venting, Niu Dahe’s emotions were roughly stabilized. He nodded, then shook his head, and finally grudgingly replied, “I don't know if all places went up, but in our area, the neighboring two counties have raised prices… twenty-seven cash per jin, those damn grain merchants! They deserve to die!”
He started cursing again.
But Wei Yu didn’t focus on that; he was more concerned about the fact that grain merchants were raising prices.
The Imperial Court’s disaster relief teams had already come down, and Third Brother’s team was openly carrying out disaster relief in Xingshan Commandery. So why was it that in Qian City Commandery, grain prices were still rising, causing such a ridiculous situation of corpses everywhere due to starvation?
Was the Prefect of Qian City Commandery an idiot??
Creating such an absurd situation—was the Prefect not afraid that when the Imperial Court’s disaster relief teams came, they would see this scene and punish him??
Wei Yu truly couldn’t understand.
He blinked and sat on a rock, frowning.
The more Wei Yu thought deeply, the more he felt that the Prefect of Qian City Commandery must be an idiot. Even if the Prefect couldn’t control the rising grain prices, after seeing that a large number of people were starving to death because of food shortages, he should have found ways to distribute grain from warehouses or provide relief!
Could it be that he was afraid the provincial governor would blame him for acting on his own?
The provincial governor was not unreasonable!!!
Everything had to be considered based on the situation, right?
Wei Yu wanted to curse a lot, but he held back.
He didn’t know whether the Prefect really didn’t know about the rising grain prices or was pretending not to know. Either way, seeing so many corpses along the way was a clear reflection of the Prefect’s serious dereliction of duty.
In an era of low productivity, how hard was it to grow the population?
Those ruthless mountain bandits in the past, unless it was absolutely necessary, Wei Yu generally sent them away to do hard labor constructing infrastructure!
He didn’t want to kill those guys, yet the Prefect of Qian City Commandery stabbed him in the back?
Really great.
Suppressing his anger, Wei Yu asked Niu Dahe some more information about Qian City Commandery.
For example, where was the commandery seat? Were there any major aristocratic families? Was the Prefect a good person or not…
Niu Dahe could answer some questions, but for others, he was clueless.
After all, he was a farmer who rarely left his village, so it was understandable that he didn’t know certain things. Wei Yu sympathized.
Since Niu Dahe had just awakened, Wei Yu didn’t talk with him much. After asking some questions, he let him rest first and then took Fang Sheng and walked away.