Chapter 279 The Third Valley (5)
The father brought breakfast from Yanzhen Pavilion for him and his mother: two spirit beast eggs, two spirit fruits, and meat porridge. After heating the milk jug and sending it over with the breakfast in the kitchen, Lu Yanyan suddenly noticed that his brothers and sisters seemed to have slowed down their work.
Speaking of which, Lu Yanyan remembered that there was no designated person to do the yard work, because there was no guarantee that the designated child would still be alive the next day. The daily work had to be assigned to each child under the supervision of the eldest child, and now it was his turn to take charge.
Lu Yanyan moved a stool and sat in the backyard like the boss in his memory. His eyes swept across the houses, carefully recalling the daily routine of the Yi family.
The Yi family's house is divided into a front yard and a back yard. The front yard is the house of the father, mother and eldest child. The main hall where they eat is also in the front yard. The other children live in the back yard.
There are eight rooms in the backyard. On the right are the sorting room, kitchen, warehouse and toilet. On the left are the one-year-old room, the two-year-old room, the firewood room and the cattle and sheep shed. There is a row of roofs on the wall facing the gate, with hay piled underneath.
Children under the age of two live in the one-year and two-year rooms. After the age of three, they move out and sleep directly in the yard. Children who are strong enough to grab the hay will sleep in the haystack, or grab some hay and spread it on the ground to sleep on.
Children over the age of three must start working and wake up before dawn. At this time, the father, mother, and eldest child are still asleep, so the children need to quietly draw enough water from the well and start preparing for the three of them to get up.
The first thing to do is scrub the walls and floor. It's said that the adults at Yanzhen Pavilion extensively use a certain magical medicine on the fields outside the valley wall at night, and the medicine tends to condense on the walls and floor with the mist. Accumulation of this magical medicine can easily cause human disease, so it needs to be washed away before the mother and father get up and come into contact.
After washing, some people started to heat the wood stove to prepare hot water, while others took out the grass leaves cut yesterday from the warehouse to feed the cattle and sheep and milk them.
By the time they finished their work, it was almost dawn, and the three of them rose. The children brought them hot water to help them wash up, and then the father went to Yanzhen Pavilion to fetch breakfast to share with the mother. Unless they wanted meat, Yanzhen Pavilion provided all their meals for the day. At this time, they needed to change the hay in the mother's room, the first-year and second-year rooms to prevent the spread of disease, and clean the toilets for the mother, father, and eldest child.
After completing these tasks, under the supervision of their eldest child, the children retrieved the ingredients for the day's meal from the storeroom—mostly the stems, leaves, and roots of strange herbs, with a small amount of rice grains—and pounded and mixed them together. Once the mixture was completely pounded, half was removed and added to water to boil until a thick, soupy rice paste formed. Once the paste cooled, it was bucketed and carried to the first and second year rooms, where it was poured into a trough for the infants to eat.
The other portion is mixed with a small amount of water and fresh grass, spread out and fried into thin pancakes in a large pot in the kitchen. The pancakes are then scooped out, cut into squares the size of a six-year-old child's palm, and put back into the can. One square is a child's lunch.
Next, prepare lunch for the eldest brother. Cook half a can of rice and stir-fry a plate of root vegetables. If there is meat, the eldest brother will cut some for himself.
Before lunch, the teacher would single out a few children he felt had been the most idle that morning and punish them by not allowing them to eat. After the teacher finished eating, he would mix the leftover rice with the vegetable broth and add water from the water tank, making a bowl of soup for each child. The children would then eat a small piece of pancake with the soup and immediately return to their afternoon work.
Afternoon chores included chopping wood, gathering fresh grass from the valley wall, drying hay, and hanging laundry. Father and the eldest child would often have some fun during this time, so sometimes the children would mop the fields three or five times a day. In the evening, after the eldest child finished his meal, the remaining vegetable soup would become the children's dinner.
At night, the children continued their work. They cleaned the plumbing in the first and second year rooms, checked on the babies, picked out those who had starved or frozen to death, washed the day's dishes, and stoked the charcoal fires in the rooms of the mother, father, and eldest child. The children supervised each other and were not allowed to sleep until the three of them fell asleep, so as not to be unable to respond to their needs. They didn't fall asleep until around midnight.
It seems like this is a typical day in the life, but in fact, there are many more reporting incidents besides these things.
Because the physical energy consumed in a day's work is not proportional to the amount of food, in order to obtain more food and survive, children will choose two ways to obtain food: either report someone or kill someone.
Reporting someone, regardless of the severity of the offense, would be rewarded by the Father with a large bowl of rice and a large piece of meat. Those killed by the Father or the Boss would eventually become the greasy oil in the soup, which, if consumed, would replenish one's strength for several days.
While it's possible to get away with killing someone, it's crucial to avoid being seen and reported. The patriarchal group strictly forbids children from killing anyone other than the father and the eldest child. Anyone who kills someone other than them is reported for their own death. Therefore, most people keep an eye on each other's mistakes, waiting to be reported.
In addition to receiving food rewards for reporting, there are also different options, such as getting a new piece of clothing that fits your body to keep out the cold, or getting a medicine that only the mother can use to treat the disease.
If you don't report it, these things will never fall into the hands of children. The only consequences of keeping yourself clean and not reporting it are starvation, freezing to death, death from disease, being beaten to death for fun, or being killed and eaten for no reason.
If you want to survive here until you are ten years old and board the spirit ship, you must learn to sacrifice enough lives under your feet.
Monitoring each other and paying attention to everything around them meant a decrease in work efficiency. To conserve their energy, many children learned how to appear diligent while slacking off. To keep the entire compound running and prevent their father from doubting their abilities, the eldest child's responsibility was to beat and scold the children to increase efficiency, sometimes even killing those who were reported to demonstrate their power.
Lu Yanyan stared at the movement in the yard. Everyone was sitting on the ground, pounding the ingredients with stone pestles. Some of the pounded rice and vegetable paste had been sent to the kitchen to be boiled. The smell wafted out, not very fragrant but still appetizing.
Several children came out of the kitchen carrying buckets full of rice paste and long spoons in their hands. They first glanced at Lu Yanyan, then immediately quickened their pace and went into the first grade room.
Lu Yanyan, who seemed to be sitting upright astride the supervisor, was actually feeling very troubled.
If it was to stop his younger brothers and sisters from doing harm to each other, Lu Yanyan would have some motivation, but if he was asked to beat and scold them for some trivial matters, he himself would not be able to get over it.
If you think about it, the things in the yard aren't really that big of a deal. We've been doing this for so long that we've already gotten to know them by heart. Even if we're a little less efficient, it doesn't really matter. Might as well just sit here and forget about it.
Lu Yanyan thought so and made up his mind. He sat on the stool, looking stern but actually wandering around. He endured the morning, afternoon, and evening like this.
At night, when Lu Yanyan went back to his room to sleep, his third sister and Hua Fu, who were in charge of checking the baby, suddenly called him in a low voice.
"Brother, there seems to be some problems with the first and second graders." (End of this chapter)
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