Village Chief Li hurriedly led his men back to the village. Just as he finished speaking with Jiang Dacheng about the situation, a commotion arose at the village entrance.
When Granny Wang heard that the people from Dingshui Village had returned, she ran so fast that she lost her shoes. When she got to the village entrance, she kept shouting, "Jinhua, Wang Jinhua! Have you come back? It's your mother!"
"Mother!" A sallow-faced, thin, and robust woman suddenly jumped out from the crowd at the entrance of Xiahe Village. "Mother! I thought I would never see you again..."
The mother and daughter hugged each other and cried, but unfortunately, the scene was so noisy that no one paid much attention to them.
Village Chief Li and the village chief of Xiahe Village stood facing each other with their respective villagers.
"Old Wu, what's going on here? Didn't you go to escape famine?" Village Chief Li spoke first.
After all, they've come all the way to their village, so there must be something going on.
With tears welling up in his eyes, Village Chief Wu reached out to grab Village Chief Li's hand. "Old Li, you were absolutely right not to flee the famine! Look at our village, there were more than 500 people when we left, and now there are less than 300 left!"
He hadn't mentioned it until Village Chief Li noticed that there seemed to be a lot of people from Xiahe Village, but it didn't match the population of their village. He had initially thought that not so many people had come when he glanced at them.
"What happened?" Village Chief Li asked quickly, already having a guess in his mind.
Elder Wu, tears streaming down his face, rubbed his eyes and cried, “We’ve run into bandits! Those heartless bastards stole all our grain, they killed people, and they even tried to kidnap the women and children from our village. We fought them off to the death to save those few of us…”
As he recounted the story, the people of Dingshui Village felt a wave of fear wash over them. Luckily, they hadn't fled to escape the famine; otherwise, they might have been the ones robbed and killed.
Jiang Qinyu felt a sense of irony upon seeing this scene. In her previous life, it was this group of people who pushed the people of Dingshui Village to take the hits. In this life, without the people of Dingshui Village traveling with them, they indeed suffered heavy losses.
So what are they doing back now?
"Then you..." Village Chief Li had the same question.
Village Chief Wu wiped his eyes and said, "We were desperate and barely managed to escape back here. We heard you didn't leave, so we wanted to borrow some food from you..."
The moment the words "borrow grain" were uttered, the people of Dingshui Village immediately changed their expressions.
The people of Xiahe Village are really cunning! They actually want to borrow grain from us?
But will this loan ever be repaid?
"Old Wu," Village Chief Li's face turned cold, "you know better than I what kind of harvest this is. Do we look like people with grain? Forget about lending you grain, we don't even know if we can survive this winter!"
He absolutely cannot agree to lend grain; once he does, they will never be able to keep their grain supplies.
"No, Lao Li, you should at least lend us a little something for the sake of our years of friendship! Otherwise, how are we supposed to live?" Village Chief Wu naturally began to use moral blackmail.
Village Chief Li scoffed at this, "Don't say that. I don't have that much ability to care for the lives of so many of you. You'd better think of another way!"
After saying that, Village Chief Li said to Chen Shao and Liu Yazi, "Tell the men on night watch not to doze off tonight, and to keep a close watch on the village!"
"Yes!" Chen Shao answered loudly.
Upon seeing this, Village Chief Wu and the people of Xiahe Village immediately began to wail and shout.
"Do you have no humanity left? How could you just stand by and watch someone die?"
"My child has been hungry for three days! What's wrong with giving him some food?"
"We borrowed it, we're not going to not pay it back, who are you trying to hide from?"
"That's right, that's right..."
The people of Dinghe Village were almost laughing in anger at these scoundrels' remarks. Aunt Qin, standing next to Granny Wang, pointed at the people of Xiahe Village and said, "These are the people you told us to seek refuge with? Bah! You expect people like them to protect us? We should be grateful they don't try to rob us!"
Hearing this from behind, Jiang Qinyu secretly gave Aunt Qin a thumbs up. What she said was absolutely right!
In their previous lives, weren't the people of Dingshui Village pushed to be shields from knives and robbed by the people of Xiahe Village?
"What nonsense are you talking about? Didn't we not go to escape famine? Besides, didn't the village chief refuse to lend us grain?" Granny Wang looked embarrassed and somewhat guilty as she held Wang Jinhua's hand.
She dared not announce that the village had grain now, otherwise who knows what might happen.
However, she was determined not to let her daughter leave again. As long as her daughter stayed with her at her parents' house, she could at least have something to eat.
"Oh dear, now you know how to say that? Who was it that insisted on dragging people to flee the famine back then? If it weren't for your eldest son, you'd be just like the people in Xiahe Village now, wouldn't you?" Aunt Qin didn't hold back and ruthlessly exposed Granny Wang's shamelessness.
"Auntie is right. We were too foolish. We didn't expect the dangers on the way to escape the famine. Didn't we come back in time?" Wang Jinhua said with a smile, while tugging at Wang Pozi to tell her to stop talking.
Wang Jinhua wasn't stupid. During her time fleeing famine, she had come to understand many things. Her husband's family didn't take her seriously at all. When they encountered bandits, her husband died, and her brother-in-law and sister-in-law both wanted to push her to take the blows!
Fortunately, she was quick-witted and managed to escape with her life. On the contrary, her husband's younger sister was kidnapped by bandits, and her brother-in-law had his leg cut off and died on the way due to excessive blood loss.
Meanwhile, the rest of her husband's family either fled or disappeared, and her parents-in-law were killed by bandits, causing her husband's family to fall apart.
On the other hand, Village Chief Li firmly rejected Village Chief Wu's request to borrow grain, insisting that Dinghe Village also had no grain and that they should hurry back to their own villages and figure out how to survive.
“Your Xiahe Village also has mountains. Our village believes that ‘as long as the mountains are not barren, we can survive.’ If you work hard, go into the mountains to find food and water, and you will survive.” Village Chief Li pointed out a way to Village Chief Wu.
The mountains over Xiahe Village and Yunshan are the same mountain range. Since they can find food and water in the mountains, there's no reason why the people of Xiahe Village can't.
Village Chief Wu was furious. He glared at Village Chief Li and said, "Does that mean you're absolutely unwilling to lend us grain?"
“We have no food, how can we borrow it? We can’t just starve ourselves and give you our food, can we? If you were in our shoes, could you do that?” Village Chief Li retorted without any politeness.
Village Chief Wu really wanted to say, "You won't die from missing a few meals," but he didn't want to offend them too much. After his expression changed several times, he said stiffly, "We apologize for disturbing you. We'll go back now!"
The other villagers from Xiahe Village wanted to say something more, but Village Chief Wu silenced them, and the group walked back in a grand procession.
Wang Jinhua was kept by Granny Wang, and several other families in Xiahe Village also kept their daughters and grandchildren there. Village Chief Li didn't say anything.
But after the crowd dispersed, Village Chief Li called Grandpa Jiang and several members of the supervisory team to come and find Jiang Qinyu.
"Niece, do you think there's anything else going on with this? Should we make some preparations?"
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