Caojiaji is a well-known big market town, with 3,000 households. Set day every five rows of ten, in the peaceful season, the people within a hundred miles around are here to catch the market, at that time, the merchants from near and far are endless, the people of the mountain township rush to meet, the whole Cao family set people one after another, sweat like rain and become clouds, call to buy and sell endlessly, a good faction of prosperity and wealth.

The Cao family set the Cao family, which was a local family, in the Yuan Dynasty, it relied on selling his comrades to help the Yuan people conquer the Quartet and was a very popular minister, but with the progress of history, the Ming Dynasty overthrew the Mongol rule, and the Cao family began to gather hedgehogs to not develop.

But at that time, Taizu also hated his deeds, but after all, he had helped the rebels, and he was also the largest clan power in this place, so he let them live, and also got the promise that Taizu was not allowed to be an official but could do business (at the end of the Yuan Dynasty and the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the landlords who were dependent on the Yuan Dynasty had more such a promise. ）

But the Cao family was unwilling to be so lonely, and always wanted to restore the glory of their ancestors during the period, but the Ming emperors of the past dynasties were heavily guarded, and they had no choice but to tolerate it.

However, with the declining of the Ming Dynasty, the heart of prevention has become more and more relaxed, and gradually these generations of big families are ready to move. The story of the previous dynasty and the glory of the previous dynasty began to resurge, with the ** of the Ming Dynasty officials can not be attached, those who rely on the accumulation of hundreds of years of so-called eunuchs have begun to collude with officials, although according to the regulations can not be officials, but it does not mean that they cannot be officials, such as the Cao family, within a radius of 100 miles, forcibly seized 100,000 pieces of land, and almost all the tax collectors under Luochuan County are not out of this house.

There are children's rumors among the people; "Eat Cao's family dinner early and go back to Caojiatian late". It means that the food you eat in the Cao family's restaurant in the morning, the feces and urine you have pulled for a day, or fattened the Cao family's field, which shows the amount of Cao's field.

The Cao family has more transactions all over Shanxi, Shaanxi, and the south of Zhili, constantly accumulating money, buying local officials in Hejing, and even more in love with those money-hungry eunuch bigwigs Wei Zhongxian, who is even more unscrupulous in his life.

Now although the eunuch party has fallen, Qingliu's group of Qingliu nerds are better fooled, and after a lot of pen polishing, it has become a plaything in the hands of the Cao family.

In the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the Cao family could still take into account their background in the Yuan Dynasty at that time and follow the rules, but with the greed of the officials in the late Ming Dynasty, they had already thrown their scruples out of the Nine Heavens Cloud. The Fangyuan tax clerks of Luochuan's ancestral house are almost all owned by the Cao family, and the government is happy to be ready-made, so Luochuan Fu County and the surrounding areas have become the world of the Cao family, and every intersection and every bridge is the point where the Cao family collects taxes, and the people go out almost step by step and one tax, one mile and one donation, so that the people do not interact with the village relatives because they cannot pay the tax on the bridge on the road.

This is secondly, the Cao family is fertile for thousands of miles, and someone needs to farm, but the Cao family is very oppressive, at the beginning of the land rent is five or five, and then June Fourth until the current ninety-one, not only that, but the people in this place to the Cao family, but they are endless hard labor, and all kinds of gift money can not be finished, that is, a cat of the Cao family has to give a congratulatory gift to the old man, otherwise, it will be the end of the family's ruin. It can be imagined how extremely squeezed, and if you don't follow it slightly, the Cao family's water prison is a place where there is death and no life.

In order to prevent the peasants in their sphere of influence from evading their labor, they implemented the law of long-term workers sitting together within their sphere of influence. It has been stipulated that if there are qualified strong men between the ages of 18 and 25 in each household, one out of three and two out of five; Later, it was changed to 18 to 30 years old; Later, it was changed to 18 to 40 years old; In the end, because of the exhaustion of youth, it was changed to 12 to 50 years old.

First, it was drawn according to the strong ding, and later changed to the drawing according to the ding, that is, the father is qualified, and the family has a young son, that is, it is a double ding, which is the so-called "big with small, small with big" peculiar method. The old ones can catch the big carts in the village, the small ones can be used as small servants in the back hall, and the slightly disabled ones can be caught as horsemen and gangsters.

The peasants were unable to live because of the long hours of forced labor, and some fled with their families and villages regardless of the consequences.

There were several brothers of the Ma family, who abandoned their houses, furniture, and land and fled to Shanxi. There were more than 100 original residents in Wangjiatuanzhuang, and only three families were left when the army broke in.

In order to prevent escape, the Cao family began to carry out the joint sitting system on their own ground, during the Ming Dynasty, the village level is mainly to appoint the local squire to manage, the implementation of the armor protection system, the armor is falling into the hands of the Cao family, so the Cao family stipulates that if one person escapes, the whole family replaces, the whole family escapes and then ten households sit together, and ten households escape and the whole village shares, so there is a family that cannot want to escape, but its neighbors or beg or denounce, none of them are spared. The 10,000-strong skeletons in the mountain behind the Cao family are everyone's fate.

And those who denounce the escape will be rewarded with a hundred pounds of wheat, so no one dares to abandon the land and flee rather than starve to death. All the peasants are fixed to their land, and they cannot be moved.

During the period of conscription, the small landlords were exploited, and they also had to contribute to the Cao family's work, some hired a lot, some bribed to circumvent it, some mutilated themselves, or fled with their families.

A peasant made himself dumb in order to avoid servitude. Li Qianzhong took a large amount of croton, diarrhea and dehydration died, and Wang Hongbao cut off his right leg by himself. A peasant chopped off a finger of his right hand and escaped forced labor for a while, and the Cao family tortured him to death for the crime of evading official forced labor.

In addition, it is not uncommon to puncture the eyeball with a needle, to smash the front teeth with stones, to erode the lower part with poison to forge syphilis, and to use other methods to avoid forced labor.

But the Cao family's methods are even more vicious. Under the conscription order, Ding Baojia, a villager from the village, mobilized together to arrest people everywhere, and the road was sparsely populated for a while, as if facing a great enemy. The brother escapes and the brother replaces, the father dies and the son inherits, a household is responsible for running, and a family without soldiers is fully protected by the public, which really affects the nine clans and extends the township.

Even if they do long-term work, they are also exploited, and one of the means is to force these long-term workers to a dead end, first of all, the salary, the salary is not given to copper coins in kind, but the equivalent of writing money written by the Cao family. It's that your salary is a white slip written by the Cao family, but after that, this white slip can be exchanged for what you need in any shop of the Cao family, but in fact, this is simply a blank piece of paper, where can it really be circulated? Even this is the case with a deferral of payments.

The Cao family also used the method of delaying the payroll date to deduct it. He often used the pretext that the autumn harvest had not yet arrived, and delayed the payment for 10 to 15 days a month, so that he could pay a maximum of 10 months a year, sometimes as little as seven or eight months, and the rest of the months would not be paid at the end of the year.

At that time, there was a limerick poem that said, "A family of several people, two meals are difficult to protect, three relatives do not recognize, four friends have few friends, five are like burning, six are hungry, seven are stealing and blazing, eight are in vain, nine are dead, and ten are really difficult"; "I received a ticket with seven folds and eight deductions, wore a hat with angry hair, wore down-to-earth shoes, lined with unprecedented socks, wore pants that were mended and sewn, lived in a crooked house, built a quilt with air circulation, lived a life of lack of rice and noodles, was afraid of the Cao family's guest posts, and the four seasons were sad faces."

This is the tenant long-term workers under their own jurisdiction at that time, and for other ways and means are also all kinds of ways, the Cao family itself has a considerable business network in the hundreds of years of operation, whether it is official sales or free business, it has a big decision power in hand, and the types of business are from grain, department stores to fur, wolfberry, arginine, medicinal materials, wood, hair cabbage, salt and other local specialties. In its own sphere of influence, there are hundreds of shops, which are purchased at "official prices" and private trading is prohibited.

For example, Shaanxi is rich in wool. The purchase price was extremely low, and the people could not exchange a few catties of wool for a foot of cloth. Every three sheepskins can be exchanged for two live sheep, and the common people hold the sheep and cry, which is unbearable.

In order to prevent smuggling in their own jurisdiction, the Cao family organized a township warrior team to arrest all passing merchants and local people, confiscate all the materials, furs, department stores and other important materials found, and put people to death or imprisoned. Even some daily necessities can not be arbitrarily transported from other counties to the local, one year a fellow villager, drove a donkey to carry two buckets of yellow rice, was found out by the inspection post, sent to the Cao family general manager, the Cao family a fifth-rate general pipeline: "people handed over to the township brave team as a gang, grain handed over to the backyard confiscated, donkey handed over to confiscate the public", all dealt with.

The Cao family's own family is like this, and the Cao family is even more pretending to be a fox, even if the government gets it, it is for the sake of the Cao family's face and a closed eye.

As a result, there are countless forests, and now the Cao family is not prosperous in the past, and the surrounding hundreds of miles are like ghosts, and the people can't escape only the part that is squeezed, where can they still survive?

When Wu Tao rushed to the outskirts of Caojiaji with the firearms battalion detachment, the villagers around the surrounding area made all the people in the army think that they had met hungry ghosts, all of them were unkempt and unkempt, and they were praised by saying that they did not cover their bodies, or more precisely, a sack or a little rotten straw bag was draped on their bodies and they were very rich people. Each opened his big godless eyes, looking at this mighty division, and when he heard that it was the army of the king of the Black Tiger Village, it was a cry of regret and shook the sky, and he heard it for ten miles.

When Wu Tao walked through a village, he took the herald to a low thatched hut that was about to collapse, thinking that it was uninhabited, and when he wanted to make it easier, he saw a pile of wheat straw shivering under an earthen wall in the thatched hut. Wu Tao walked out of the hut, silently took down a bag of grain from the car of the baggage camp that followed, personally carried it to the house of the family, looked at the left near, took off his coat again, cut a few copies with a knife, and sent them to the women. "Stand at the door and don't let any of our soldiers in."

The sergeant bowed in a low voice; "Deputy military division, I understand." Then he stood in front of the door like a javelin, until the next morning, when the army was over, and Wu Tao had not gone far, and the house became alive, and a wisp of green smoke began to rise, and that was the first meal that the family had begun to cook, probably in this winter.

There were such scenes along the way, without Wu Tao's orders, the firearms battalion and baggage team of Heihu Village began to distribute the food they brought and the clothes they carried along the way, and slowly the whole team began to wear short clothes, and some of them had lost their shoes.

At noon, everyone did not eat, that was because they had no intention of eating, they were reluctant to eat at night, and by the next morning there was no food to eat, but all the soldiers were red eyes and gritted their teeth, starving, enduring the cold, and did not even rest when it was time to rest, and struggled to push the supplies and baggage forward, eager to go to the Cao family set as soon as possible to eliminate harm for the people.

Behind the firearms battalion were more and more villagers with withered faces, following closely, all of them clutching sticks and stones in their hands, silently following closely, and the number of people gathered more and more, reaching more than 30,000 people in one day and one night.

Wu Tao was not worried about their order at all, they just followed the team silently with red eyes, their goal was the same as Wu Tao, that is, the Cao Family Center, the Cao family compound like a vicious tiger, the Cao family clan.