According to the handprint on the account book, Shijiazhai should have worked a total of 152 young people. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info but Huang Jia counted the number of people, there were only 67 in total, not even half.

Helpless, Huang Jiadi had no choice but to take out the names on the account book, and called out the young men from door to door with the village chief Shi Laoda, Zhang Police Division, and nearly fifty captive soldiers who assisted from the state city.

Seeing everyone's reluctance, the village chief quietly told Huang Jiadi that the people in Shijiazhai were more superstitious and knew that the town was leading everyone to produce and exterminate locusts today, so they were resistant.

It turned out that last night, a few particularly superstitious people privately lobbied everywhere that locusts were sacred objects and could not be hunted and killed, otherwise there would definitely be greater disasters from the sky. Whoever goes to hunt and kill locusts will be riddled with obstacles, and will not be liberated from life to death.

As a result, more than half of the villagers, who knew that they were going to kill locust larvae this morning, were reluctant to come out to work.

Huang Jiadi smiled bitterly, and said loudly: "Folks, locusts are just a pest, how can they be a fetish?" If it is a divine object, it must have spirituality, how can it poison everyone's crops so much and make the villagers starve to death? ”

As he spoke, he looked at Shi Fugui's three fathers and sons standing in the crowd of workers, and said: "Let's look at Shi Fugui's family, everyone knows that he has always been kind and kind to others, why did locusts sweep his family's seedlings and let his mother-in-law starve to death, is this something that the gods will do?" What's more, the removal of locusts is an order issued by a wise and martial saint king! You must know that the Holy King directly conveys the will of the Emperor of Heaven, and is the messenger of Heaven on earth, and the will of the Holy King is the will of Heaven! Don't say that a little locust is just a pest, even if it is a sacred object, it is also evil, you must obey the holy will, obediently confess your sins and obey the punishment! ”

Shi Fugui saw that the mayor of the town mentioned himself, thinking of the seedlings that were spoiled by locusts, thinking of his starving Shi Huang clan, and even more thinking of the two big bags of life-saving grain sent by the Holy King, got up and stood up, and said loudly: "Not bad! Old man, I don't care if this locust is a god or not, it killed my mother-in-law and forced my family to die, and the old man is not finished with it. The Holy King sent life-saving food to my Lao Shi family, and he was as kind to the old man as a mountain, not to mention letting the old man kill the locusts, even if he let the old man kill people, the old man would not hesitate! ”

"Yes, my old Shi family is not an ungrateful white-eyed wolf! If you have just received the food and pressed your handprints, how can you forget it in one night? Shi Youbu followed.

"Seems to be the case! I don't know if the locusts are fetishes, and I don't know if there will be disasters when they kill the locusts, but I know that if I am an ungrateful villain, I will definitely be punished by God. In the crowd, a young man turned his head to the person next to him and said.

"Yes, I came early just now, and I heard Teacher Wang and Police Officer Zhang in the town chatting and saying that if you don't eradicate these locust larvae, which are the locust things, they will grow again next year or even in the second half of this year, and continue to flood and cause a locust plague!" The man replied.

"It turns out that I thought wrong, I want to follow the old men in the town to exterminate the locusts!"

"Count me in! Actually, I also hate these seedlings that eat my family's hard work. ”

…….

After Shi Fugui and the people's statements and discussions, coupled with the villagers' psychology of conformity, they did not expect that in the blink of an eye, everyone expressed their willingness to participate in the locust extermination team.

At this time, the town's police division Zhang brought more than 30 captive soldiers from outside the village, wearing new-style military uniforms, all mighty, and marching into the village with neat steps.

The people in the entire Shijiazhai saw it in their hearts, and even the sound of talking and talking was much quieter.

Police Master Zhang said to everyone with a majestic face: "The plan to exterminate the locusts was arranged by the Holy King himself. If there is a disobedience or even troublemaker, neither I nor the soldiers of the captive army will let him go! Whoever hinders the destruction of locusts will be the enemy of the Holy Kingdom, and will suffer a heavy blow! ”

This is a naked threat!

However, not to mention, this kind of direct pressure is more real than the ethereal fetish, and it is really effective for these villagers.

Those particularly superstitious people didn't dare to say anything, and even, in the face of the more than 30 soldiers of the captive army armed with spears, they changed their minds and claimed to eradicate the locusts together.

As a result, not only did all the 152 young men with handprints arrive, but there were even dozens of more people who volunteered to help eradicate locusts.

Next, the town's police division Zhang and teacher Wang divided the 152 young men into more than ten groups, each group had three leaders of the captive army, each carrying a broom, shovel, hoe, each group contracted an area of the entire Shijiazhai, pulled the net to clean up the place where the locusts had fallen and the place where they had eaten, shoveled up the surface soil and brought the turf into a pile, and then took firewood and branches to add it, ignited it, and piled it into a fireman.

In this way, the whole Shijiazhai, within a radius of several miles, whether it is a dry paddy field or a dry mountain, every thirty or forty meters, there is a pile of smoking fire fertilizer, which is equivalent to hanging all the grass surface land of the entire Shijiazhai to one side, which is used to pile up the fire fertilizer into the fire soil.

This burnt soil, rich in potassium salts, is one of the best types of fertilizer. In this way, not only the eggs and locusts are killed, but also the fertilizer is piled up, killing two birds with one stone. This idea was also thought up by several old brothers in Guangxi, and Feng Yunshan thought it was good, so he ordered it to be promoted in various parts of Guangxi when the locusts were exterminated.

Huang Jiadi, the mayor of the town, and Li Chang, the head of the Ministry of Agriculture, set up a scale in the ancestral hall of Shijiazhai. Where there are locust carcasses collected by the people, they are weighed at one penny per catty, and the price of locusts is raised, depending on the size, by 5 to 10 wen per catty. All expenses were paid by the Holy King, no matter how small, and all were paid at the time of the locust.

For a time, the entire Shijiazhai was boiling.

In addition to the young men who went out to work, other men, women, old people, and children were all dispatched. Searching everywhere for places where locusts have been infested, and even a few catties of locusts that someone had secretly killed during the locust plague were taken out and exchanged for a few copper coins.

Originally, it was thought that the locusts flew away, and they just needed to get rid of the eggs they laid. Unexpectedly, as soon as the policy of exchanging insects for money came out, I found that in the fields of Shijiazhai, there were really a lot of locusts left behind that had not flown away.

Shi Youliang's mother-in-law carried a two-year-old child on her back and took three slightly older children, and even found a large number of locusts left in the grass cracks, and hurriedly slapped the locusts to death with her eldest son, collected them, and worked hard for an afternoon.

In this way, after a few days of busy work, the entire Shijiazhai was turned upside down. Finally, one side was carefully confirmed, and the remaining locusts and eggs were completely eradicated. Chief Li of the Ministry of Agriculture and more than 30 soldiers of the captive army withdrew and went to him to continue the extermination of locusts.

The mayor of the town, Huang Jiadi, continued to lead 152 young men to dig ditches, bury bamboo pipes for bridges, and build a proposed irrigation canal from the upper reaches of the Zuojiang River, more than ten miles away. This is also because of the severe drought in Zuozhou this year, there is no irrigation water source, and it is difficult to restore and replant seedlings.

After more than half a month of busy work, the river water was finally brought to the fields of Shijiazhai.

The town also organized Shijiazhai to resume production and replant a season of rice. On the one hand, a batch of rice is provided by the town, and Teacher Wang and the village chief Shi Laoda are directly responsible for leading people to promote the rice into seedlings; On the one hand, let Shi Fugui start, lead this group of young and strong families, from beginning to end, the paddy fields of the villagers in the whole village are irrigated, excavated, composted with fire, and transplanted into the paddy fields when the seedlings grow.

………

In the same way, Liuzhou, Yulin and other places in the north and east of Zuozhou, as well as the major locust plague areas in Guangxi, have also carried out locust eradication campaigns under the supervision of the royal government.

The whole government of Liuzhou not only set up a large scale to openly purchase locusts, but also locusts can be easy to rice, and one bucket of locusts is easy to two buckets of rice. In addition, the prefect led the county magistrates to take the lead in eating locust meat. Or barbecue, or head and wings to steam, or remove the meat and boil the soup, all kinds of tricks, it is delicious.

Some children and teenagers were the first to try it, but they fell in love with the delicious taste of grasshoppers and couldn't control it. In less than a month, the locust swarms that had fallen more than 100 times in Liuzhou only escaped, and the rest of the locust swarms were wiped out.

The locust corpses that were piled up and burned were handed over to the government for money, and I am afraid that there would be tens of thousands of catties.

Yulin Mansion, that is, the original land of Yulin Prefecture, was garrisoned in Yulin by more than 2,000 people, a group of 100 people, pulling the insect net provided by the Nanyang Company to deal with locusts, hanging around the rice fields, standing in the wind, locusts flew by, and fell into the net one after another.

The captives regularly took down the nets, killed the locusts one by one, and then re-hung them.

In Guangxi's Taiping Mansion, Zhen'an Prefecture, and Lianzhou Prefecture in Guangdong, near the border, there were also local garrisons stationed to fight for prisoners, together with the local government, to organize the common people to ignite a raging poisonous smoke at half-mile distances along the hundreds of kilometers of border with Vietnam, turning the entire border into smoke and driving countless swarms of flying locusts from the south that wanted to fly into Guangxi back to the south.

In short, the local governments, with the help of the local garrisons, mobilized the people in their territories to show their magical powers, and cleared the locust plague outbreak in a dragnet from village to village.

Two months later, the locust plague in Guangxi was completely calmed down, and except for a small number of locust swarms left in the remote mountains and old forests, the rest were concentrated and wiped out.

Moreover, through this locust plague, the prestige of various prefectures and counties, especially local towns and villages, has greatly increased because of the distribution of relief grain and rice and the mobilization of the people to eradicate the locust plague.

Originally, although the captives drove away the Qing soldiers, the people under Guangxi still only identified with the Manchu government that had ruled for 200 years.

But now, after two months of coordination with local township officials, the simple people have realized that the government of this Holy King organization is genuinely thinking about them, and they have also identified with these local parents. So, unconsciously, the mentality of the people changed, and they began to really regard these local officials as official mansions, and regarded the holy king's palace that they often hung in their mouths as the real imperial court, and the holy king that everyone worshiped and praised was naturally regarded as the lord of the world, replacing the male lord of the Manchu Qing Dynasty.

Feng Yunshan probably didn't expect that a locust plague would reduce the grain production of the Holy Country and cause serious losses, but he didn't expect that there was also a good side, and he and the Holy King's Mansion he established slowly won the recognition of the people of Guangxi. (To be continued.) )