bookrandom Chapter 440: Food Consumption Fast
Chapter 440: Food Consumption Fast
At this point, the fate of Zhu Lei and Liu Quan was already sealed.
Yang Zhijin ignored the two dying people and walked towards Li Mengyue and Xie Ruiyuan.
He actually wanted to ask Xie Ruiyuan when the second daughter of the prime minister's mansion became his future princess.
But he had more important things to do at the moment, and he had already discovered it on the way to Xinghua Village.
The seven villages, namely, Xinghua Village, Lianhua Village, Taohua Village, Shitou Village, Guihua Village, Meihua Village and Zhoujia Village, are all working hard to dig rivers and build reservoirs.
Of course, he was not idle while on the way. He caught up with the son of Village Chief Wang and asked him everything.
Therefore, he also knew who proposed to build the reservoir, and that the river that connects the entire Qingshan Town was all proposed by Li Mengyue.
When he heard that it was related to Li Mengyue again, he was surprised, but also felt it was natural.
It was indeed something Li Mengyue could do. It seemed that Li Mengyue had always been bringing him surprises since he met her.
Especially when the locust plague came and everyone fell into panic and despair, it was Li Mengyue who stood up and led everyone to turn the tide.
Not only were the locusts eliminated in Wuning County, but also Lanlong County, Wujiang County, Huangyao County, Shuimo County, Gugang County, and Mengchuan County benefited from it, reducing to a certain extent the losses caused by the locust plague to the people.
The most important thing is that when the duck army was sweeping the locusts, Li Mengyue offered to buy the locusts from the people at a high price, and treated all the people in the county equally, at the price of five cents per pound.
To be honest, not to mention that the common people would go crazy when they heard the price, even he who was not short of money was tempted. Five cents a pound does not mean five cents a pound. The locusts are so overwhelming that you can just catch a handful of them. It doesn't take much effort. Every household can get a few hundred pounds and easily make a few taels of silver.
You have to know that a few taels of silver is the total income of an ordinary farmer in a year, and many families cannot earn less than five taels of silver a year. Even if there is no locust plague, it is unlikely that they will have enough to eat.
But after the large-scale locust plague arrived, everyone thought it was all over. In order to survive, they might have to leave their homes and flee to other places.
Who would have thought that there would always be a way out? When everyone was in trouble, they felt that there was no way to survive under the gnawing of locusts.
But the army of ducks led by Li Mengyue found a way to survive for the people in the seven counties of Qingshan Prefecture.
There was an army of ducks in front eating locusts non-stop, and people behind were catching locusts and selling them for money. In a short while, there were countless swarms of locusts, which became a delicacy on people's tables and a way to make money.
So whenever Li Mengyue arrived in a county town, the local people would go crazy. They no longer worried that the locusts would eat up all the crops, but instead tried every means to catch more locusts. After all, they could get five cents for one pound of locusts per table, and if the whole family worked together to catch them in a day, they would no longer have to worry about being forced to flee because of a locust plague.
During the period of eliminating locusts, he followed the whole process and understood very well what Li Mengyue brought to the people.
Therefore, when he heard from the son of Village Chief Wang that the seven villages in Qingshan Town had begun to build reservoirs and dig rivers under the leadership of Li Mengyue.
He knew that the refugees in front of the factory were saved. Although he also ordered people to provide porridge every day, this was only a stopgap measure. It was fine in the short term and no problems could be seen. However, over time, contradictions began to emerge.
For example, before he came to Xinghua Village, he was dealing with conflicts among refugees.
After all, no matter where you are, when there are a lot of people, everyone is idle, doing nothing every day, just waiting to get two meals of porridge every day, so friction is inevitable.
For example, he stipulated that porridge could only be distributed twice a day, and each person could only get one bowl each time. Although there was a shortage of food, he did not treat the refugees harshly and did not have the porridge cooked to be sticky and thick.
But it does not mean that everyone has the same appetite. Some young and middle-aged people have a larger appetite and a bowl of porridge is not enough to fill them up, while some children have a smaller appetite and cannot finish a bowl of porridge.
It’s okay if you can’t finish the food, as your family can eat it, but overall, most people still don’t feel full.
People are not full every day and so many people gather together. Some people with bad intentions will come up with some crooked ideas and snatch the porridge from others.
But people’s greed is endless. Once you give something once, you will get it a second time, and a third time. Once someone can’t stand the resistance, they will be beaten with fists.
Ever since the refugees came to Wuning County, during the time when he was distributing porridge, people had been fighting for food every day. At first, they were just small fights, but now they are getting more and more intense, with more and more people getting involved.
Even if he asked the yamen runners to take turns on duty in the refugee area, the number of yamen runners in the county was limited, and they could not mobilize many people to take care of everyone.
Today, a gangster beat up an old man. Although the old man's injuries were not fatal, he suffered a lot.
In response to these situations, he issued a death order that whoever caused trouble would be taken directly to the county jail.
But he knew that this would not fundamentally solve the problem, because some restless refugees did not dare to cause trouble openly, and he had no idea what would happen in private.
But even though he knew about these situations and tried his best to deal with them, he had little success.
What's more, there is a more important problem, that is, more and more refugees are pouring into the county town, and as a result, more and more food is consumed in the daily porridge distribution.
But the food in the county government is limited, and at the current consumption rate, it can only last for half a month at most.
That is to say, in half a month, the grain in the county government's granary will be consumed. If we still haven't gotten any grain by then, there will definitely be a big chaos.
Once the refugees riot and the county's military is unable to resist, the refugees will completely abandon morals and will do anything as long as they can stay alive and get food.
Even if he wanted to stop it, he was powerless. What the refugees wanted was simple: just food.
But this seemingly simplest thing is the most difficult thing for Wuning County and even the entire Qingshan Prefecture, unless enough food can be raised at once to leave the government with enough time to resettle the victims.
Only in this way can we avoid riots from becoming unmanageable.
Another point is that he received news from Beijing, and when he first heard the news, he was a little bit unbelievable.
He could never have imagined that the Emperor would issue such an edict, stating that as long as Prince Chen resettled the disaster victims, a ceremony to enthronize the Crown Prince would be held upon his return to the capital.
In his impression, the emperor loved his son, the Third Prince, very much, so how could he let the Third Prince fall into danger?
He didn't believe that the emperor didn't know the danger this imperial edict would bring to the third prince.