In Yan'an Mansion, near the dry Xichuan water, a middle-aged man stood with his hands in his hands. Although his clothes were stained with wind and dust, his complexion was ruddy and his body was lean, which was incompatible with the bleak and desolate situation around him.

"Master Ma......" The man squatted down, grabbed a handful of loess on the bank of the river, and stared carefully. The two attendants on the left and right who carried bows and sticks did not know why, and whispered, "The soil is dirty, don't stain the clothes of adults." ”

The man ignored them, pondered for a moment, then threw up and sighed: "You don't know, although I am an official in the court, I was also born here. My grandfather and father dealt with this thing all their lives, and they provided me with the imperial examination, and I was lucky enough to receive the grace of God, so I gave up farming and entered the office. If I dislike it, won't I become a generation of people who have forgotten their ancestors? ”

The two attendants looked at each other, relatively silent. They were assigned by the government to protect this adult named Ma Maocai. But this lord is different from the side official, he does not sit in the Ming Hall, but has been walking around the towns and towns in Fuzhong for several days. The two of them were puzzled, and they didn't dare to talk much, because according to the officials in the house, although this Lord Ma was not a big official, this time he came out with the personal decree of the current saint, and he was a person who could reach the heavens, and he couldn't afford to offend and neglect it.

Knowing the stakes, the two of them were diligent and diligent along the way, and they did not slack off at all.

Their caution was not wrong, because this Ma Maocai was indeed one of the few "soldiers and pedestrians" that the emperor specially sent to inspect the place.

Zhu Youxiao, the emperor of the Tomorrow Emperor of the Enlightenment of last year, died last year, and his half-brother Zhu Youzhen was ordered to take the throne, and at the end of that year, he defeated the eunuch party that was in chaos for a while, successfully stabilized the internal situation, and changed the name of the year to "Chongzhen" at the beginning of this year.

At the beginning of the establishment of the new emperor, he cut off the eunuch, and the good business was vigorous, and the interior gradually calmed down, so he naturally turned his attention to the outside. At that time, there were two hidden dangers outside the Ming Court. First, the Houjin who is looking at the tiger outside the customs; Second, natural disasters and man-made chaos in Shaanxi are poisonous. Among the two, it is divided into internal and external, Houjin is external, and Shaanxi is internal.

If you want to go outside, you must first settle down inside, and the principle of governing the country. At the beginning of Chongzhen's administration, the disaster situation in Shaanxi was listed as the primary target of attention, and some people, including Ma Maocai, were sent as envoys to the local area to inspect the disaster situation.

Ma Maocai went out to study in his early years, and has not returned to his hometown for many years since he entered the Shishi in the fifth year of the Apocalypse. He is a native of Ansai, Yan'an Prefecture, and in his memory, although the Xichuan water in Ansai County is not large, it also flows all year round, not knee-deep, and he did not play in the river when he was young. But now, if he hadn't looked at the almost cracked Xichuan River bed with his own eyes, he wouldn't have believed that the river that raised him would become what it is today.

Natural disasters in Shaanxi, since the apocalypse years have begun, to this year's drought for abuse, grass and trees withered, from the clear stream from the skin Shi along the road, as far as the eye can see, all are thousands of miles of red land, ten rivers and nine dry. However, the drought is not over, locust plagues and plagues are coming one after another, and the people are sick without food, starving and dying, and the tragedy is full of poison.

Ma Maocai made a special trip back to his hometown this time to take a look, because he had his own relationship, his family and a few close relatives were still getting by, but more people had to dig grass roots, pick white stones for food, and even sell their wives for a little rations. What made him even more shocking was that he heard that some places even "cannibalism".

This is no longer the world, but a hell!

Ma Maocai ended his investigation of the disaster in Shaanxi in May, and recorded in detail what he had seen and heard in "Preparing for Chen's Great Hunger" and playing Emperor Chongzhen.

Among them, there are not only tragic descriptions such as "the people compete to pick the fluffy grass in the mountains and eat, and its grain bran skin is bitter and astringent, and the food can only be extended to immortality", "the most pitiful one, such as a dung field in the west of Ansai City, will abandon two or three babies in it every morning, there are those who weep, there are those who shout, there are those who call their parents, and there are those who eat their dung" and so on, but also "the people are not willing to eat stones and start to gather together with the dead to steal, and the people who have a little accumulation in one or two are robbed, and there is nothing left to rob." There is no prohibition of treatment. Occasionally, those who have won are also fearless, and say: Die of hunger and death from thieves, rather than sit and starve to death, if you die for thieves, you have to be full of ghosts. Words.

Artificial theft.

Perhaps at all levels of the court at this time, they were just hungry people. They couldn't imagine that in a year, three years, or even ten or twenty years, these hungry people would merge with deserters, miners, and even White Lotus cultists from all over the country, so that the spark of rebellion against the imperial court would eventually become a prairie fire!

And that day will soon come.

In the eighth year of Chongzhen, eight years after Ma Maocai wrote "Bei Chen's Great Hunger", the rebellion in Shaanxi, Jin, Henan, Sichuan, Chu, Huai and other places intensified, and there were thieves everywhere.