"Hurry up, Xiao Li, let's bury these people and go back right away."
"Yes, the sooner we finish, the sooner we can go back, so we don't have to stay in this mass grave for too long."
It is now the year 995 in the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches calendar, which means Ye Li is fifteen years old.
Together with several villagers, he collected the bodies of disaster victims who had recently died violently around the village and sent them to the mass grave on the back mountain.
These people came from both the border regions and the interior, and they all looked emaciated.
Their village is doing alright, but they don't have much surplus food left, so they can't possibly help these people.
Aside from providing aid, they wouldn't stop him from going up the mountain to hunt, down to the water to catch fish, or to find weeds in the mountains.
"Leave them a way out that seems like they can hold on for a while, so they won't resort to desperate measures."
That way, even if they're truly starving, they won't have the energy to cause trouble in our village.
This was the village chief's suggestion. After all, the killing had begun and corpses were left behind. The old man was worried that the villagers might also change towards that chaotic world where people ate each other.
They'll avoid killing if they can, but if you really run into them, they won't be polite.
There are many strong men in the village who patrol day and night. Anyone who dares to cause trouble should think twice about their strength.
If they really starve to death, the villagers will collect their bodies and bury them to prevent a plague from breaking out.
The mass grave is only a few months old, but it already has more graves than the cemetery in their village.
As for why Ye Li joined the team?
To others, the dead disaster victims were nothing more than corpses, but Ye Li could sense a different aura emanating from them.
Out of curiosity, he tried to touch the corpses.
(Entry title: Launched as expected)
The wishes of those disaster victims before they died were their strongest obsessions and prayers.
Their calls, for the first time, were used to collect the bodies of these people; those voices, accompanied by some special power, entered his body.
"I'm so hungry, give me food, I want to be full..."
"Why is this damned world not going to be peaceful?"
"My child, he was just born, and my husband has already become someone else's meat."
Those voices almost all pointed to one wish: to restore this chaotic world to its former state, so that ordinary people like them could live a better life.
The existence of these voices made Ye Li start to think about a question.
"Can reading really save this country, can it really bring peace and prosperity to the people, and bring tranquility to the world?"
If it were before, he might have been more certain of his own thoughts.
They could pass the imperial examinations, become local officials, or even enter the imperial court to assist the emperor in initiating reforms.
But now...
"Xiao Li, tell me, there are actually people from the Jiangnan water towns here. Shouldn't they be richer than us?"
"Why? Yes, they'd rather be eaten by a tiger on the road than stay in their hometown."
The prosperous land of Dagan is far better than their border region, and similarly, the emperor's three expeditions have taken them a step further than theirs.
Not only were officials forced to levy taxes at each level, but local gentry and powerful families would also voluntarily offer donations to suppress bandits.
"The money received was returned in full by the gentry, and half of the money from the common people was first used to pay tribute to the important figures above, with the remainder split three-seven."
The woman he just buried, according to her recollection, had her last piece of land taken away by the Sun family, a well-known philanthropist in the area, the day before she left her hometown.
Even so, their fleeing groups faced harsh mountains and rivers, and even tigers that ate people, yet they were unwilling to return.
"A harsh government is more ferocious than a tiger"—this saying had never been so vividly illustrated in Ye Li's mind.
"Studying literature won't save this massive project."
He understood that the reason this chaotic world had emerged was because this massive campaign seemed to have rotted to the core.
So, what can Ye Li, a man who aspires to be a gentleman and a chivalrous person, do for this world and for the common people?
"Something terrible has happened..."
Their team had just finished collecting the body when they saw a young man running over, panting.
Xiao Zhang, from the same village, is the blacksmith's son.
His actions made everyone present feel uneasy.
"How do you explain this? What happened to Xiao Zhang? Tell me slowly. Did some fool come to the village to steal something?"
"No, no, it's terrible, everyone! We have to go back quickly! There's a group of bandits in the village!"
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