An hour later, Wen Fu and several villagers returned empty-handed. Not only did they fail to find the horses and mules, they even failed to find the pigs and cows that the Jiangjia villagers had released into the woods.
Old man Jiang sighed, but soon stopped worrying about it.
As long as we are alive, those things are just external possessions. We can buy them later when we make money.
It was not until the evening that all the people in the cave were rescued.
The people of Jiangjia Village returned to the village one after another.
When Uncle Jiang learned that his younger brother and his family were also going back to the village, he sighed and said goodbye to his younger brother in tears.
But once we entered the village, we found that the entire village had been burned down, and not a single house was intact.
The villagers sat beside the ruins and cried loudly, and some even started to criticize Jiang Sanlang's family.
"If it weren't for them, how could we have encountered such a disaster?"
"That's right! Our village was fine before they came. But now it's all ruined!"
Jiang Jiu couldn't stand it any longer and said angrily, "That's enough! Didn't you go to the next village to check? Or go to a village farther away to check! Is there any village like ours where no one was injured or killed? If my brother hadn't come to warn you overnight, you would have died in your house! Are you still crying here?"
"Humph! A bunch of ungrateful wolves!" Uncle Jiang snorted coldly: "My nephew shouldn't have saved you!"
Jiang Dahu sighed, "Alright, alright, stop crying. At least we are still alive and have everything we own. Let's find a way to build a house. It's going to freeze over soon. What's the point of you complaining about the weather?"
"Build a house? What if the bandits come again?"
"Yes, if the bandits come, wouldn't it be a waste of time?"
Jiang Dahu glared and said, "So if you keep crying here, the bandits won't come?"
Uncle Jiang rolled his eyes and said, "It's up to you whether to build a house or not. The weather is getting colder and colder. When the time comes, you can just dig a hole and live with the rats. This will save the bandits from wasting their time!"
Villagers: …
Now let’s talk about Patriarch Chen and Old Man Jiang and his entourage.
Wang Dashan returned with a piece of news.
"All the bandits are heading towards the county town!"
Wang Dashan drank the water Jiang Cheng handed him and said, "I saw it with my own eyes. Many people were holding animal tooth flags, and there were mule and horse carts. There were thousands of people in the crowd."
Old man Jiang frowned: "Go to the county town? Are they planning to attack the county town?"
Chief Chen also looked solemn, "No wonder the villages are sweeping the city. It turns out they want to prepare food and grass before attacking the city."
"This is terrible. My Dalang and Erlang haven't come back yet. I wonder if they were captured by them." Old Man Jiang became more and more scared the more he thought about it.
Chief Chen: "Don't guess anything, let's go back to the village. If Sanlang and the others come back and don't see anyone, they will definitely go back to the village. We can't stay here for long."
"Okay, let's go back to the village first."
Everyone picked up their luggage, bedding and the remaining food, and followed Old Man Jiang and his family to Chen Village.
Jiangjia Village is twenty miles away from Chen Village, but that is the distance along the official road. If you take the small road, it will be more than twenty miles.
It was already dark at this moment, and they only dared to light two torches and move forward, one at the end to provide light for everyone.
No one in the entire team made a noise, not even Wen Tian, because Lin gave a bracelet to a villager and asked him to carry Wen Tian on his back.
They avoided any villages they encountered along the way and even extinguished the torches, and everyone just hurried on their way, taking one step forward and one step back.
We finally arrived at Chencun at midnight.
From a distance the village seemed pitch black, without even the sound of a dog barking.
Patriarch Chen found Old Man Jiang to discuss, "We can't enter the village now. We have to send someone to investigate the situation first."
Old man Jiang nodded, "Okay! Why don't we go to the south slope first? It's far from the village and there's a bamboo forest. If there are no bandits stationed there, you can stay at my house first."
"Okay, let's do it." Patriarch Chen immediately nodded in agreement.
The autumn nights are cold and it is not advisable to sleep outdoors. Many people don’t even have bedding. If they freeze all night, they will get sick. It would be great to have a place to shelter from the wind and rain.
So Wang Dashan and a villager ran into the darkness and went to the south slope to check if there were any bandits.
They came back in less than half an hour and said to Old Man Jiang in a complicated manner: "There are indeed no bandits in Nanpo, but your house has been burned down."
Old man Jiang was stunned, and his heart ached so much that blood was dripping from his mouth. "They are all burned?"
Wang Dashan nodded, "Uncle Jiang's house is fine, only the kitchen was burned, but the main house was not damaged much."
Chunniang breathed a sigh of relief when she heard this.
Old Man Jiang was silent for a moment and said, "Then let's hurry to the south slope." It was already late at night, and it would be dawn in an hour or two.
"Okay, let's get going." Patriarch Chen took the lead and walked forward, feeling quite uncomfortable.
Even the Jiang family's house on the south slope was burned down, what about my own house? Alas, it was really an unexpected disaster.
The group soon arrived at Jiang's house in Nanpo.
Through the moonlight, the once neat and tidy large tiled house was now in ruins.
Jiang Sanlang's house was fine. Although the kitchen was burned, only a corner of the three large tiled houses was destroyed. As long as they repaired a few tiles, there shouldn't be any big problems.
Chunniang was the first to run into the house. She saw that the house was in a mess. There were ashes and burn marks on the ground, as well as discarded rags. The earthen kang in the room was also in a mess, as if many people had slept on it.
All kinds of leftover bones and food scraps were scattered all over the floor and even on the kang.
What saddened Chunniang the most was that all the furniture and other things in the house were gone.
However, the floor tiles where the silver was buried in the corner of the room had not been moved, which made Chunniang happy and worried, but she couldn't dig it up to check at this time.
She found a broom in the yard and swept the earthen kang clean, then spread the bedding she had brought back on the kang. She let her mother-in-law, sister-in-law, second sister-in-law and two nieces go to sleep on the kang first, and she, her little daughter and two sons squeezed in next to them.
Let's talk about everything tomorrow. After traveling for most of the night, they were almost exhausted.
The other room was also full of women and children. Mrs. Wen, her daughter, and the wet nurse were crowded on the cherry-bearing kang with many other women.
The men slept on the floor in the main room and barely managed to hold out until dawn the next day.
It was already noon. When Yingbao got up, she saw two large iron pots in her yard, filled with rice porridge.
Grandpa and Patriarch Chen sat under the eaves listening to Wang Dashan's report on the situation in the village.
“There are no bandits in the village, but many houses have been burned down.”
"Has anyone returned from the village?" asked Patriarch Chen.
Wang Dashan: "A few households have returned and are tidying up their houses."
Patriarch Chen stroked his beard and asked again: "My house was also burned down?"
"That's not the case, but several rooms in Third Grandfather's house were burned down."
Wang Dashan's mother stuck her head out of the window and asked, "Dashan, where is our family?"
Wang Dashan: “It’s also burned.”
Dashan's mother frowned, but she was not very sad, because her family had built a house on the south slope. Although it was only a frame, the bricks, tiles and wood they bought were all piled up on the south slope.
Since the houses in the village were burned down, she simply decided not to go back. At worst, she could just live in the wall frame and wait for her husband to come home and cover the roof.
Li Dayong and Li Eryong's family had the same idea as her, because they also built a house on the south slope and had not had time to cover the roof.
When the news of the bandits first broke out, the blind old father did not want to burden his children and grandchildren, so he insisted that they send him to Nanpo. Then he stayed alone in the wall frame of Nanpo, living on the dry food and water left by his son.
Early this morning, Li Dao and Li He went to the wall of their house to look for their grandfather. Unexpectedly, their blind grandfather was not killed by the bandits and even the food was not missing.
Not only was there no shortage of rice, there was even a small bag of rice added.
According to the blind grandfather, someone gave him a bag of food and told him to live well.