From Chief to Ball

Around this center, a population transfer operation quietly started.

Some fishing boats along the coast heard a rumor shortly after the flooding started.It is said that those people on the other side of the sea believe in Buddhism, and their hearts are extremely kind, so they can't see so many people dying.Therefore, if there are people who escaped due to floods, if these small boats can send them to Danshui, they will give some gifts per head.

The gift of thanks is of course silver. Although the price is not high, it can't stop the crowd.In addition, the navy also said hello and sent some bribes; Chen Jian sent several warships to cruise along the Ryukyu area, and it is impossible for the Japanese pirates to come here for the time being; The Japanese pirates have also restrained a lot.There is no problem along the way.

Some fishermen are spontaneous, while others are large-scale, and they have started the business of human traffickers.Anyway, there were plenty of victims, so they said that if they went there, they would survive, which deceived many people.

In order to earn this money, some ships have been refitted, and the people in them are no less than the slave ships of the black slave trade. A group of people will die in the slightest storm, and after the flood, the disease is rampant. In just one month, the straits It has also become a road of bones.

But the other side of the strait is very generous. As soon as the ship arrives, the heads are counted immediately to calculate the money according to the number of living people, and there is never a shortage.Sometimes when silver is not enough, sulfur, glass, cotton cloth and other things will be used to offset the account.

The local officials are not strict with this kind of thing. If there are so many fewer household registrations in normal times, it is hard to say, but this time the catastrophe, the few household registrations only need to write how much the number of household registrations was reduced due to the drowning in the flood.And after all, he was seeking to survive, so it was considered a good deed, and it was better than civil uprisings in the areas under his jurisdiction, White Lotus Sect uprising, looting and smashing of big households, and the like.

Since Chen Jian started building Wangbei City after the Quanzhou earthquake, Taiwan finally ushered in the first large-scale immigrant wave. A large number of victims and refugees from the coast were transported to Wangbei City by this method similar to the slave trade, and counted like goods. Then arrange them into different small communities for epidemic observation like goods.

Every day, a large number of dead people are burned on the shore, and the flames are so strong that the smell is unbearable.

But in the same way, some people who were mortal survived every day. They have become numb to the pain of losing their loved ones. They just think about a bowl of porridge every day and try their best to keep themselves alive.

Most of these people came from the coastal areas, but a different form was adopted in the hardest-hit areas in the upper reaches of the river, which is slightly inland.

Taking advantage of the chaos after the flood and taking advantage of bribes in Fuzhou, several boats quietly came to the upper reaches of the river every day.

The boat is loaded with some fried rice or fried sweet potato powder, which are all foods that can survive.

There are still some people on board.

There are local Hokkien speakers selected from Wangbei City; there are also a group of people who have grown up in the Republic a few years ago after experiencing canal engineering and miners' organization and have practiced organizational skills.

Several years ago, there were two petitions on the canal and the mine. These people were trained with theoretical and practical experience. It would not be a problem to organize the transfer of hundreds of people. Without the accumulation of experience in previous incidents, it would be really difficult to find a suitable Do it manually.

Some rumors and activities were quietly spread and carried out in the upper mountainous area in the north where the victims were concentrated.

Chapter 92 Flood, survival

The disaster area is not the worst in Shaxian County, Yanping Prefecture, but the people sent by Chen Jian went the furthest.When Chen Jian heard the name again, the first thing Chen Jian thought of was the famous snacks here, but at this time, this place was associated with words such as death, plague, and home destruction.

This is not the place where the disaster is the worst, but it is a place that is more severely affected and has relatively convenient transportation.

Jianning further north suffered the worst disaster, but it is already a mountainous area, and it is impossible to go deep.If nothing changes, it is still one of the poorest places, so much so that it was once the seat of the Fujian-Jiangxi Soviet area government.

From Jianning to Yanping Mansion, these places with the worst disasters were also the most unstable places in Fujian in the Ming Dynasty, none of them.From the orthodox uprising a hundred years ago to the White Lotus Sect a few years ago, the people here have killed one crop after another, slaughtered it over and over again, and grown it again and again, continuing to survive in this disaster-prone place with.

The torrential rain, which had not seen the sun for more than ten consecutive days, finally stopped, and after more than half a month, the water gradually subsided. Those who survived the torrential rain and flood returned home with the boats carrying all the belongings they had looted. To the homes that have been razed to the ground.

Many people lie on the tree for a month and eat all the leaves on the tree.Sometimes these people wish they were a worm, like a silkworm or a disgusting caterpillar, at least these things can survive by eating leaves.

The village could no longer see its original appearance, and a few children were squatting there with their stomachs swollen from eating soil and leaves, defecating.It seemed that these children were lucky, at least they did not die in the flood or in the raging plague, but in fact they did not die temporarily, and they were not far from death.

The children squatted there in pain, their stomachs were swollen, but they couldn't pull them out.The two of them went together, using small wooden sticks to pick or pry from each other's body, trying to get those dry things out.If you get it out, you can live, if you can't get it out, you will be suffocated to death.

The grown-ups looked at all this blankly, sometimes their feet would loosen suddenly, sinking into something soft, followed by a stench and the sound of flies flying.

There is no need to bow your head, and you know that you have stepped on the chest or stomach of a dead person.Maybe it's your own relatives, maybe not, but it doesn't matter anymore.

The living are not far from death, who can take care of these dead people?Those who were washed away by the flood had half of their bones exposed by the bites of fish, shrimp and crab roe; those who were not washed away by the water were also full of maggots wriggling on the corpses covered with green mold, white flowers.A few very hungry people picked maggots from the dead bodies, and those with long tails were discarded, leaving only the white ones without tails.

I am still alive today, and I can still pick and choose, but no one thinks about what to do in the future.It's not that I don't want to think about it, but I dare not think about it.

The rice planted has already been harvested, the sweet potatoes for famine relief have not yet been spread here, most of everything in the house has been washed away and only one life has been recovered, the taxes to be paid must continue to be paid, and the usury borrowed still has to be repaid.

The most annoying thing is that you have to eat, otherwise you will starve to death.

In order to eat, the owner farmers with a few acres of Susukida sold their last possessions at the cheapest price.If this is the case, we still need to pick and choose, and those who can buy land in a disaster year will also be called good people.

A random disaster can turn an owner farmer into a tenant farmer.The self-cultivator farmed with kindness, kindness and hard work to become a landlord. It is precisely because of the scarcity that it has become an inspirational chicken soup story.

And those who have no land or very little land can only choose to live one day after this disaster. If they can survive until the next planting, they may still be able to find some jobs, so that they can Another year to live.

Hundreds of hundreds of hungry and disaster victims just want to live, and only to live.If people from the White Lotus Sect stand up at this time and say that this is the last day of the struggle between light and darkness, as long as they promise to let these people have a bite of food, these people will not care when the light comes, they will only fight for this bite of food. Doing all the possible beheadings of their ancestors.

It's just that a group of White Lotus Sects were killed a few years ago, the grassroots organization was basically destroyed, and most of the backbone were killed. After this catastrophe, there was no riot.

What's more, it is said that there is another option to live for a few more years without such decapitation: there are rumors around Sha County that in some places people choose to give porridge, and if they are young and strong, They will be hired to do work for three to five years, and they will be allocated some land after three to five years.

Things that sound good are sometimes full of deception.It's just that after so many years, no one has ever given them a promise about allocating some land. This kind of promise sounds a little intoxicating.

There were more than 2000 people crowded outside a small relief station near Shaxian County. Some people held sticks to maintain order, and rescued those who might survive in batches and turns.

Each person has two bowls of porridge or a handful of fried rice every day, just to ensure that these people do not starve to death.

A few miles away from this relief station, there is a depression full of people waiting to die.

Mobilizing the masses is just a means and a tool, and the purpose may not be what to do. The cult uprising also used this tool.And the purpose of using this tool here is to isolate those who are infected with the disease.

After these victims arrived here and ate the first bowl of hot porridge in a couple of months, someone stood up and told them: the disease is contagious, and everyone who catches the disease will die. I hope everyone will report the infection to each other. The sick drive them out of here.

The person who gave the order knew the consequences of doing so, and knew that in this case, those people would die, and knew that this would expose the ugliest side of human nature.

But there is no way, it cannot be saved.There are no medicines, not enough doctors, and no means of prevention or disinfection, or even affordable.

In just two days, there was a lot of crying in the relief station.

The sick children were reported or thrown directly into the depression several miles away, giving the mother a choice to either survive or leave; the sick old people were driven away, and each gave a White phosphorous matchheads, tell them that when they are too hungry or sick, they should swallow the matchheads and die immediately to avoid so many crimes; in order to protect their sick wife's husband, he was beaten to death by a group of people, Throw it into the limestone field far away and burn it clean.

The light and strong who came first and were not sick were quickly organized. Relying on the strength of eating two more bowls of porridge, they became the most faithful to carry out these orders with a bamboo pole.

There are such people guarding the three entrances, and no one is allowed to enter without permission. When necessary, the dead are carried or the living are thrown out, so that an extra bowl of porridge can be exchanged.

These people who were disaster victims not long ago, but now hold bamboo poles to maintain order, are like the dividing line between cloud shadow and sunlight in cloudy weather.One step forward is light, one step back is darkness.

Scenes of tragedies in the world continued to be staged like this.

In just ten days, two of the party comrades sent by Chen Jian to this relief station had a nervous breakdown and fled back to Fuzhou. The person in charge of the relief station swallowed a gun and committed suicide after seeing the maggot-filled corpses .

The new person in charge was sent here, after seeing the situation here, and seeing the depression with his own eyes, he called these people who had never experienced such a scene together for a meeting that night, because if they did not Holding a meeting to strengthen the thoughts of these people may leave indelible trauma to these people.

It's not that these people haven't seen death, it's that they haven't seen such a death.People who have mental breakdowns and swallowed guns have gone to sea, seen shipwrecks, organized miners’ movements, and been on battlefields, but when they really saw those rotten, moldy, and half-dead people piled up together, they still couldn’t bear it. .

When the new person in charge arrived, the morale of the relief station was low, and many people complained. In the internal meeting that night, there were a lot of dissatisfaction and complaints, and some felt that doing so was inhumane and cruel.This is not the emotion of one or two people. No matter how strong a person is, they will sometimes be unable to bear such a situation.

The new person in charge is a miner. He has seen many accidents in the mines in Nan’an, and he was also shared by his colleagues about being trapped in the mine and eating the corpses of dead workers. His mentality is far more tenacious than ordinary people. many.

Hearing all kinds of questions, he asked back: "I have your questions too, but the key to the problem is to solve the problem, not to discuss whether these decisions are cruel. Can you come up with a better solution? No If not, we can only make decisions for these people and live for more people. Now, I ask, who can do it? Speak up!"

A group of people kept silent. It wasn't that they hadn't thought about it, but they knew that there was really no way.

After a long time, a person stood up and said, "But Chen Jian said, we don't want to be God, Buddha or Allah, and come here with a salvation mentality. Ordinarily, if we are not gods, we cannot decide whether these people live or die. I I just feel that if we do this, are we treating ourselves as gods? Whoever we let live will live, and whoever we let die will die?"