Lu Manyue shrank her neck and dared not speak.

Smack, another hit on the butt.

"Speak!" Wei Dingbang's words seemed to be squeezed out from between his teeth, revealing a fierceness.

Lu Manyue shuddered and whispered, "My mom said you were arrested. I can only think of this stupid idea. Let them vent their anger and then go with me to the police station to plead for mercy and to drop the case."

"So, what you mean is that in order to get me out earlier, you would rather be stabbed by someone else?" Wei Dingbang asked coldly.

"Yes, I thought so, but when I was really about to be chopped, I was still very scared." Lu Manyue answered honestly.

"Idiot!" Wei Dingbang snorted, carried Lu Manyue back home, put her on a stool, and looked at her face with a frown.

Lu Manyue knew she must look ugly without looking in the mirror, so she kept her head down like a child who had done something wrong.

"What's wrong with your face?" Wei Dingbang stretched out his hand and lifted Lu Manyue's face up, making her look up at him.

"It's just that the temperature in the workshop was too high, and I was accidentally scalded by the steam from the converter." Lu Manyue's eyes kept flickering, and her voice became smaller and smaller under Wei Dingbang's cold gaze, until it was almost inaudible at last.

"The registrar needs to go to the converter to register?" Wei Dingbang asked with narrowed eyes, and used a little force in the hand that was supporting Lu Manyue's chin.

Sooner or later, the news of your job change will be known.

Lu Manyue hesitated for a moment and finally told the truth.

Fearing that Wei Dingbang would get angry, she gritted her teeth and said, "Actually, I can do the job of loading materials. Changing jobs is very normal in our factory. The salary of a material loader is only two dollars and fifty cents less than that of a registrar."

Wei Dingbang heard the caution in her tone. He looked into her eyes steadily. Her eyes were clear and bright, and in her pupils was an enlarged image of his face, Wei Dingbang.

"You think, I'm just an old farmer in the countryside, I have no power and influence, if I'm caught I won't be able to get out by myself, you have to beg for mercy and get chopped to death before you can get out.

People are targeting you, taking away your job, and assigning you to do work that even men find hard and tiring, and you just accept it. Do you think I am incompetent, can’t support the family, and can’t compete with the Yang family, so it’s better to have less trouble than more?”

These are all facts, but the tone of Wei Dingbang's voice clearly sounded as if his self-esteem was hurt.

Lu Manyue was a little flustered.

Reality is stronger than people, but a man's self-esteem is also very strong.

"No, it's not like that. You, you are very capable in my heart. We just don't have a way for the time being. Later, when our family is better off, I, I can even give up this job." Lu Manyue looked at Wei Dingbang anxiously.

"It is a man's responsibility to support his family. If people knew that I, Wei Dingbang, can't even support and protect my own wife, I don't know how many people would laugh at me." Wei Dingbang said self-deprecatingly.

"Then, I will go back to the countryside with you, get up early every day to go to work in the city, and you will take care of the fields at home. I, I don't know how to grow crops." Lu Manyue said.

Wei Dingbang spread his hands and said, "Actually, I don't really know how to grow crops."

Lu Manyue's eyes widened, "Then, how did you do it before?"

"My mother is an old hand at farming. When she was alive, she arranged for me to plant seeds and apply fertilizers, and the harvest was just barely enough at that time. My mother passed away last spring, and the grain we planted this season is not enough to pay the public grain tax." Wei Dingbang was also helpless.

In fact, farming in the countryside and taking care of his blind mother was just one of his tasks.

If Lu Manyue had not come at the right time, he would have planned to leave Hongxing City after the autumn harvest at the end of this month.

The fields are all collectively owned. The fields in their village are not fertile. Most of the villagers are the elderly, the weak, women and children, and the production capacity is always the lowest in the entire commune.

"Hmph, you still have the nerve to say that. You're a grown man, born and raised in the countryside, and you just served in the army for a few years, but you even forgot how to farm?" Lu Dashan had been awake for a while, and when he heard his son-in-law frankly tell Manyue that he didn't know how to farm, he was furious.

"You are already over thirty, and you don't know how to farm or learn? Are you still counting on me, Man Yue, to support you forever? What if the Yang family becomes unruly one day and really expels me and Man Yue, then the three of us will just starve to death?

Before, he was bragging about supporting his father-in-law in his old age. He was just good at talking." Lu Dashan became more and more angry as he spoke. His eyes moved back and forth between the shoes placed in front of the bed, and his palms itched.

But beating the son-in-law in front of his daughter would inevitably hurt the man's reputation.

Forget it. Lu Dashan resisted the urge to spank Wei Dingbang with the sole of his shoe and forced himself to look away from the shoes.

Wei Dingbang also silently withdrew his foot that was about to kick off Lu Dashan's shoes, and sat down next to Lu Manyue as if nothing had happened.

"Then where did all those nice cigarettes, alcohol, flowers, candies, and that big bag of rice and noodles that you brought home come from?" When Lu Dashan saw Feitian on the cabinet, he suddenly realized something was wrong.

Wei Dingbang was silent.

Only then did Lu Manyue realize that there were a lot more things in the house, which looked very valuable.

She looked at Wei Dingbang worriedly, wanting to ask something but not knowing how to ask.

"A comrade-in-arms gave it to me." Wei Dingbang couldn't bear to see the cautious expressions of the father and daughter, so he made up an excuse.

Lu Dashan's eyes lit up. "By the way, you are a retired soldier, so you have subsidies, right? And comrades, won't those who have retired be arranged with jobs?"

His eyes wandered around Wei Dingbang's face, and he was discouraged again. "Only those who have excellent performance will be assigned jobs, and they can get a considerable subsidy after they retire. People like you... probably have no job and no money."

Wei Dingbang raised his eyelids and glanced at his cheap father-in-law with a somewhat obscure look in his eyes.

Sometimes when he closed his eyes, he would see his dead comrades.

Some of them were worried about their blind mothers before they died. They held his hands and cried, their blood and tears mixed together, and their eyes were full of longing.

"I really want to go home. There are only me and my blind mother at home. What will happen to her if I die?

But if I don’t join the army and fight, our country will lose its living space, and naturally my family will not be able to be saved either.”

Every inch of land is soaked in blood.

The war was so cruel that all the people in his company died except him.

He survived carrying the hopes of the entire company. His comrades died holding his hands with a smile on their faces. Before they died, they kept chanting "Long live the new Chinese flower." I really want to see it with my own eyes.

He also wished he could die with them, but he wanted to live on for them, to see victory for them, to see how the new country became prosperous and strong.

All his comrades were dead, and he crawled out from the sea of ​​blood and corpses. Naturally, he had to take care of the families of the dead.

There is indeed a subsidy for veterans. My blind mother said that she asks her brother who works in the city to collect it on her behalf every month.

Wei Dingbang could get food and drink for himself, so he didn't pay any attention to the money.

However, when the blind old mother was buried, according to local customs, her old clothes had to be burned together with her.

When he cleaned up the blind mother's room, he burned the bed as well.

There was not a penny in the room.

What's even more strange is that although they brought a letter to the blind mother's brother Qin Shu, none of them came to the funeral.