After Peach Blossom Village was kicked out of the team, they changed their name to County Alliance.
After leaving the county, the group was robbed by bandits. Some of them were killed and some were captured.
These people were caught between luck and misfortune. After being caught, half of them were sold to who-knows-where, while the other half were kept as food. The women suffered the worst; not only were they tortured to death, but they were also divided up and eaten after their deaths.
According to these old women, their group only had a little over two thousand members before they were robbed by this band of mountain bandits. The group, which previously had more than three thousand members, is estimated to have only a little over one thousand members now.
There were about 500 people at the back of the group, not all of them from the Luoshan County Alliance. They were released when they left, and when they saw that the two groups had grabbed the supplies, they wanted to follow them.
The Black Wolf Gang refused them, but they still wanted to follow. Some of them even stayed with their group. The Black Wolf Gang members killed one of them to scare them away.
Then, they tried to cling to the Anping Village Alliance, but as soon as they approached, the captain of the three guard teams slashed the man at the front with his knife.
Seeing that they were not to be trifled with, those people didn't join the group, but followed at a distance.
The reason why Anping Village Alliance is so poor is because they were robbed. They are afraid of being robbed, so even now they dare not exchange water for other things.
If others find out they have water, they'll be robbed even more badly than last time.
Besides, the water was only enough to keep them from dying of thirst; if they wanted to use water to cook food, they had to save the water they drank.
They don't even have enough water for themselves, let alone the water they can exchange for others.
The older women in the group immediately began to lecture their daughters-in-law, forbidding them from taking the water out. They warned that if the relatives found out about their behavior, it would ruin their group.
As evening approached, the patrol team found a cave, and they decided to spend the night there.
Not long after I put my things down, I heard from the patrol team that the Black Wolf Gang was also resting nearby.
What's even more absurd is that people from the county alliance were also nearby.
Those county alliance members who had just escaped from the den of thieves quickly returned to their ranks, and the county alliance members even accepted the five hundred men into their ranks.
Currently, the person with the most say in the county alliance is Village Chief Tang.
Knowing that the people from the Anping Village Alliance were here, they came over to say hello.
As soon as Village Chief Tang met the three village chiefs, he began to complain about how many people had died in their team. Originally, the team had more than 3,000 members, but only 1,300 remained. Even with the new members who had just joined, the team only had 1,800 members left.
The three village chiefs also inquired in detail and found that the county alliance had actually killed more people than they had imagined. The 1,300 people were actually many who joined later; otherwise, there wouldn't have been so many.
Not long after, the patrol brought more bad news.
The Peach Blossom Village Alliance was also nearby. Most of their villagers had died, but they had gathered a number of refugees and formed a force of over a thousand people, still called the Peach Blossom Village Alliance.
There is another team nearby with a relatively large number of members, called the Los Angeles County Alliance, which has about 1,200 members.
The two girls who had a conflict with Daya before, their families were in that line.
Hearing that there were so many people nearby made everyone a little uneasy, but when they thought about how they had just wiped out the bandits' den, they figured it would be good to have so many people to hold them off if the bandits came looking for revenge. So they weren't so anxious anymore.
The three village chiefs tallied up the supplies and then distributed them to everyone.
The grain was not distributed; it was kept to feed everyone in a communal pot.
The broadswords were not distributed; they were all assigned to the guards and patrols for common use.
As for the other items, some were kept for public use, and the rest were distributed.
The allocation will be prioritized based on the magnitude of the contribution made this time, followed by the priority guard patrol team.
After the supplies were distributed, the people in the team were finally freed from their savage lifestyle and put on clothes.
It's not that a lot of cloth was stolen this time, but that people who have no clothes to wear usually have one or two relatives who are members of the guard or patrol team. If they can borrow some, they'll have clothes to wear.
The Chen family deserved the most credit this time, receiving a bolt of cloth, a bamboo basket of charcoal, two wooden buckets, a cart, and a sickle.
There were some other things that the Chen family already had, but they didn't need them, so they were all replaced with charcoal.
The team has a tent that used to belong to the Chen family, which was also taken back by the Zhou family, but according to the rules, it can only be exchanged with the team in exchange for other items.
Without hesitation, Zhou took a quilt insert and replaced the tent.
The cave is only so big and can't hold many people. Families like theirs have to spend the night outside the cave, so tents are really necessary.
Unfortunately, she only managed to retrieve one tent. The Black Wolf Gang took one, and the rest of the tents were lost to the bandits.
Zhou set up the tent and told the children to stay inside. Even with a fire lit, the cold wind still made it bitterly cold.
There were two tents, and in each one, two blankets were stuffed inside—one for padding and one for covering.
Once inside the tent, Chen Kai felt incredibly comfortable. The only downside was that he hadn't showered and was still very dirty.
With the warm bamboo tube of sand covering her hands, and now that she had a hand warmer, Xiao San still sighed.
Their group only had two tents, and only the children could enjoy this privilege, while his family was still enduring the cold wind.
The women of the Chen family continued sewing cotton-padded clothes around the fire, and the six embroiderers they had previously hired were also called over.
The men helped build a makeshift shed for everyone to sleep in at night.
Chen Laowu and his companions cut down some tree branches and used them to form a rectangle around their resting area. They then borrowed twenty bamboo mats from the villagers of Lotus Village, tied the mats to the wooden sticks stuck in the ground, and enclosed the resting area, leaving only one entrance and exit.
Finally, they even hung a straw mat over the exit, so the roof couldn't be covered anymore and it was completely exposed to the elements.
In terms of wind and rain protection, bamboo mats are better than straw mats. The bamboo mats woven by the villagers of Hehua Village are specifically for wind and rain protection, so they are woven very densely. The only drawback is that they are heavy and bulky, making them inconvenient to carry.
However, the villagers of Lotus Village don't mind the bulkiness of bamboo mats; they are used to dealing with bamboo products.
The villagers also knew that the bamboo mats woven by the people of Hehua Village were good, and many people borrowed things from the people of Baijia Village.
Those who couldn't afford to borrow bamboo mats had their own ways of keeping warm. They would cut some thatch, build a simple triangular shed, and light a fire in front of it. It was much better than being exposed to the cold wind in the open.
The eldest son's wife and the others sorted out the scraps of cloth, intending to use them to make hand warmer sleeves.
In the past, when they had extra cloth to keep warm during the winter, they would make hand warmers, but they would stuff them with things like cattail fluff and willow catkins, because they couldn't afford cotton.
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