Life began to settle down.

Perhaps it was the confidence of having provisions in hand, or perhaps it was the strange sound of Su's soft, gentle explanations and the boys' reading voices that sometimes drifted from a certain room in the Yun family's old house.

When Xiao Youran is in a good mood, she will pretend to recognize a few words. After all, she has to pretend in the process of reading and learning words, so that she won't be exposed later.

Both the present hardships and the distant future are so reassuring.

The dozen or so members of the Yun family who had moved back to their ancestral home from the capital became more united and warm-hearted than ever before.

However, a crisis soon began to emerge in the village.

This year's continuous heavy rains have resulted in a complete crop failure for the autumn harvest. Not only are taxes unpayable, but even stored grain is gone.

For the first month or two, the villagers could hold on, but gradually they couldn't hold on any longer.

Zhou became suspicious after she first noticed that the grain stored in the woodshed seemed to be stolen.

Sure enough, that very night, Lao Feng, who had been on watch beforehand, caught a thief.

But the thief was a boy from the village who cried and said that his family had no food and he was about to starve to death, which is why he came to steal things.

Zhou had no choice but to release the man.

Yu took Guo to town twice. Their embroidery work was very cheap, and they only made a little over a hundred coins in a month, while the price of rice had risen from ten coins per dou to thirty coins per dou.

In other words, after a month of hard work embroidering handkerchiefs, they could only buy three bushels of rice, not enough to feed their whole family for five days.

Suddenly the gap became larger.

Moreover, the grain purchased with the money from selling the tiger and the grain sent by the young master of the Wen family were almost used up. Fearing that the price of grain would rise again, Yu and Zhou discussed it and decided to use the remaining money to buy grain and rice, which they then stored at home.

Meat doesn't keep well, so we didn't buy much and relied on the Yu family to hunt wild game in the mountains to supplement our diet.

Even so, by the end of November, the family's food supplies were almost exhausted.

Meanwhile, the seven or eight families in Sanyang Village whose houses had been destroyed earlier, though they had survived, were already penniless and relied on the help of relatives and friends to live in. This made their situation even more difficult in the food-scarce winter.

The first to cause a scene at the Kuang family's door was Aunt Hua.

After she fell into the water and was rescued by the lame man, he turned around and brought twenty catties of rice and flour the next day to propose marriage. She scolded the lame man and drove him away, becoming the laughing stock of the village.

The more she thought about it, the angrier she became, feeling that the cause of this misfortune was the last time Tian Kuang's eldest daughter and second daughter fell into the water.

And as the weather grew colder, there was hardly anything left to eat in the fields, so she cried and made a scene in front of Tian Kuang's house, "Is Heaven going to kill my widow and her child? What kind of world is this! Tian Kuang, come out here! Give me back my food... pay me back for my medicine..."

A group of people quickly gathered in front of the old house.

Hearing the commotion, the Zhou family ran out and heard Aunt Hua outside cursing loudly, "Your family is a bunch of jinxes! Since you came, our whole village has suffered! Not only did the landslide almost kill everyone, but now our autumn harvest is ruined! It's like God is trying to starve our entire village! You're a bunch of jinxes! Why did you come to our Sanyang Village?! Give me back my grain, give me back my medical expenses!"

When the nosy old woman outside saw Zhou and her companions come out, she asked curiously, "Why did you say you wanted them to return your grain and your medical expenses?"

Aunt Hua slapped her thigh and cried, "They borrowed a bushel of grain from my family during their first few days here, and they still haven't paid it back! And if it weren't for their daughters falling into the water a few days ago, how could I have fallen into that river? I had to drink medicine for five whole days after I got back, and they have to pay me for the medical expenses!"

Upon hearing this, Guo exploded, "You're falsely claiming to have saved my daughter's life and trying to extort money from her! You're like a toad lusting after a swan! She accidentally fell into the water on her way back, what does that have to do with us? I've seen shameless people, but I've never seen anyone as shameless as you!"

At this moment, Zhou had someone fetch a peck of rice from the woodshed and threw it in front of Aunt Hua. "This is the peck of coarse rice we lent you at the beginning. Now we're returning a peck of fine rice to you, and we'll even give you three cents more as interest!"

Aunt Hua, clutching the rice tightly, said coldly, "You bunch of impoverished outsiders! Since you arrived, we've been suffering from water and food shortages, landslides, and floods! In my opinion, you're a bunch of jinxes. If it weren't for you, how could we have ended up in such a state? Why did you even come back?"

Guo launched a full-scale attack, "So what if we're demoted to commoners and sent back to our ancestral homes? We're returning to our ancestral homes by imperial decree! You dare call us jinxes? Does that mean the Emperor's judgment was wrong? You'd better watch out! That's a capital offense!"

Aunt Hua was stunned. She swallowed hard and said, "But... you've occupied the mountain that belongs to our village! This mountain has been the village's public property for so many years! Right now, we have nothing to eat or drink, but you can occupy the mountain and eat meat every day! Why should only you be allowed to go up the mountain to hunt?! The game on this mountain is also naturally raised! If you ask me, you should take out the grain you have and distribute it to everyone!"

Guo was even angrier upon hearing this. "What do you mean we've taken your public property? We were originally from the Yun family of Sanyang Village. We only distributed our ancestral land to everyone because we stopped living in the village more than ten years ago. Now we've come back simply to take back our land. It was you who refused, which is why you gave us all the hills! If you really want to argue, then let's calculate carefully who got our 146 mu of fertile land back then, and how much interest we've generated over the past ten years. Give it all back to me!"

Everyone was startled when he said that.

One hundred and forty-six acres of fertile land—almost every household received some. Over a decade of hard work, that's quite a sum of money.

Then some people started cursing at Aunt Hua, "That's enough! Hurry up and take the grain they gave you back and go home to sleep on the kang! What's the point of bringing up old grievances? It's not just your family that suffered a disaster; the whole village is short of food!"

Aunt Hua pointed at the Yu family, "Their family doesn't lack food at all; they even have meat to eat every day! I don't believe none of you have ever coveted the wild game from the mountains!"

Yu said coldly from the side, "This mountain isn't a place where just anyone can go up and hunt game. Before we came, how many people in the village made a living by hunting?"

Aunt Hua's eyes darted around, and she quickly retorted, "That mountain used to be steep and difficult to climb. But didn't it collapse? Now it's much easier to climb! Who knows, maybe a few hunters will emerge from our village someday!"

At this moment, Xiao Youran, carrying the kitten, also ran out with her short legs.