Another memory never told him that the rebel thieves of this era would trade heads with the officers and soldiers who suppressed thieves.
The news was brought back to Xingpingli, making Mr. Liu furious.
"During the disaster year, there was a drought! Every household in Xingpingli gave three days of rations to the officers and soldiers, and this is the result? Not to mention that there was no war, even the formation was not correct, and the thieves were let go. The heads of the villagers who were killed in Miaozhuang returned to the city to claim their merits!"
Liu Chengzong didn't say a word at home.
Until his father took the lead in contacting the village chief to convene the clan and proposed to help collect the bodies of the people who died in the old temple village, he was still digesting the impact of this incident on him.
As he set off northward to leave Xingpingli, Liu Chengzong suddenly vaguely thought of a word in another memory that he had never understood - weakness.
Now he can't say that he understood the word, but this touch made him think more, or it made him rise from this word to a summary of some fragments in another memory, combined with his own environment.
For example, Zhang Qianhu led 300 guardsmen to make a deal with the thieves, exchanging the heads of Laomiaozhuang villagers for the thieves to withdraw on their own.
This incident was beyond his expectation, but it was not as difficult to understand and angry for him as for his father.
He could understand that a general, with his subordinates who could not afford enough to eat, would make compromises to get what they needed when facing an enemy that they might not be able to defeat.
Even though it was irresponsible, dishonorable, and extremely shameless, he could understand it.
He was just surprised that he could actually relate to a word that appeared two or three hundred years later.
Where do you feel the same way?
From his father Liu Xiangyu, the pillar of the family, from his teacher Yang Dingrui, and even himself, he saw the weakness of literati.
The three of them have very few things in common. They all study and are relatively literate people of this era.
Literati is a pseudo-class, with a very low lower limit and an extremely high upper limit. It is an appendage attached to other identities.
If you point at someone on the street to introduce yourself and say, "This is a scholar," it's mostly a curse, just to say that this person has no ability except that he doesn't do serious things.
My father was a scholar, and his more prominent identity was as a civil servant or an official. After being dismissed, his most important identity was that of a clan leader.
Yang Dingrui is a scholar, but he is a Jinshi and an official. Even if he resigns, he still has a reputation as a gentry.
He was also a scholar, and had passed the imperial examination. If he had not passed the imperial examination, he might have gained a meritorious title, but when he became a soldier, he became a martial artist.
They have different identities, different experiences, and different statuses, but Liu Chengzong believes that they all have weaknesses.
Because even if they were furious, even if they were itching with hatred, they had no intention of retaliating against Zhang Qianhu for defrauding him of food.
The more people there are in the existing system, the weaker the revolution.
What great things can they do? Nothing big can be done. Even if you think there are all kinds of problems with the environment around you, the last thing you want is to improve it.
No matter how painful the scolding was, no matter how much he thought, it could not stop Cao Yao from sitting on the threshold without saying a word, while sharpening his knife on the bluestone steps of his house with a sneer.
Under the current system of the Ming Empire, he was a man who had nothing but a war horse, armor on his body, and a sword in his hand.
As one of the first five cavalrymen to explore the road to Laomiao Village, Cao Yao told Liu Chengzong on the road that the knife was sharpened for possible accidents in Laomiao Village.
"But if we meet that stupid Qianhu again, he will eat 1,500 meals from us. It won't be a loss if I give him another three qian of lead."
Three qian is the weight of a lead shot from a gun.
In Laomiaozhuang, the wooden fence that blocked Liu Chengzong from entering the village half a month ago was destroyed and burned to carbonization. Headless corpses and dried blood and bones left by slaughtered livestock can be seen everywhere.
Liu Chengzong, who was leading his horse for a stroll, pulled out a broken spear from the ground and held it in his hand. The three-foot-long spear shaft was pierced by the split burr, and the three-inch blade of the fine steel spearhead was unscathed.
This kind of spearhead with no spine was often seen in peasant uprising armies in history. People nowadays would not spend a lot of money to shoot such a spearhead, which made Liu Chengzong suspect that this spearhead might be an antique left over from past wars.
And he was very sorry for this good stick... Apparently this war spear belonged to a certain dealer in Laomiao Village. After the owner carefully polished it, he failed to stab the enemy in the first confrontation with the thieves. Instead, he was held thickly in the back. The guillotine or ax came up on the body, breaking the spear shaft and killing him.
It may be that his death was not pleasant, because his eyes searched nearby, but other than the blood stains that had already seeped into the soil and mixed with the soil, he did not find a corpse that matched his guess.
The thief must have left in a hurry, or he must have grabbed so many things that he was unwilling to take away even the weapons that could be used with a little repair.
Liu Chengzong is different. He has the genes of a garbage man in his bones. He does not have such luxury. He raises his hand and hangs the broken spear beside Hongqi.
His hanging gear didn't have names like victory hook and killing ring. There were only a few homemade hanging gears on the left and right sides of the war horse saddle, with hooks sandwiched in the rings, and leather goods that could hold knives and axes.
Normal cavalrymen have some equipment, but not as many as he does.
When he came back from outside the Great Wall last year, the wasteland burning operation was a great success. He shot and killed the Cavalry spies but had no place to hang his trophies. He failed to bring back many things. Liu Chengzong, who often went to cave dwellings, felt desperate. He only felt that he was fighting with the Cavalry. I was so lonely.
I made these things in a fit of anger, thinking that this year I would go out and give the old Liu family a hard-top house with a shop on Qingliang Mountain in Yan'an Fucheng, but I never thought of asking the general to send him away.
Turning around the wooden fence and the collapsed loess wall, he walked into the crushed courtyard wall. Maggots were crawling on the stone well in the courtyard. The bare tree stumps were littered with bark and sawdust. A girl was lying in the bark and sawdust.
All the blood was gone, and the body was as white as blood.
As soon as he found a dirty blanket in the collapsed house, he heard howling cries from the village. He didn't even have time to fish the girl's family out of the well, so he had to scribble a blanket over her to cover her body. He hurriedly ran out of the yard following the cry.
Lu Bin stumbled and knelt down in front of a big black pillar and cried endlessly. He said that this was the old earth temple in the village.
Liu Chengzong couldn't see any sign of the Earth Temple from the black pillar hanging the old man. The broken bricks and tiles all around made it impossible for him to see where the previous courtyard wall was. But if this was his village, he would Bi Lu Bin cried more sadly.
This was neither a village nor a home. They searched the entire village, and there were corpses everywhere. Not only those who resisted were killed, but those who did not resist or were unable to resist also died, regardless of men, women, and children.
The only difference is that most of the women's corpses still have their heads.
Compared with the repression of Liu Chengzong and Lu Bin, Cao Yao is much better.
The old thief threw a white cat out of the yard and cursed as he walked: "That unscrupulous grandma left half a tank of wine in the yard. The cat got drunk without water and walked around on all four legs with its tail stretched out. I still I thought it was a big goose!”
