Lin'an, Huangjia Village.

Huangzhou was hungry for a long time, trembling and poked the motionless old lady lying on the bed with his hand, and asked, "Mom, I'm so hungry that I can't sleep." ”

The place touched by his fingertips was as hard as a stone, Huang Zhou was stunned, and slowly straightened his mother's body.

My mother had been dead for a long time, and there were large corpse spots on the back of her neck, and her eyes were sunken and lackluster.

Huang Zhou tentatively moved the corpse with his hands, and felt light and weightless.

Even if he was chronically malnourished, he could barely move.

Huang Zhou didn't cry, he just numbly rolled his mother's body into a ball with a straw mat, and then picked up a shovel and began to dig into the ground in the center of the hall.

"Dad, my mother is here to accompany you, and I will bury you all in the ancestral house, so that you don't have to worry about being picked up and eaten by wild dogs or villagers."

After all, Huang An was only a young man under the age of fourteen, and he had been hungry for a long time, and the last time he ate was a dead mouse that he had dug out of the corner of the wall last night.

He ate half of it and handed his mother half what was left.

The mother only ate the skin, and asked him to eat the rest of the meat, bones, and blood of the rats, so that he could support the relief of the government.

Huangzhou felt that there would be no relief to be sent, and the old men in Lin'an City also suffered, and this unprecedented flood inundated most of the fertile fields in the nearby prefecture and county, and the people who fled the famine had already been discharged to Hedong Road.

His father was unlucky, and when he was harvesting grain, he got caught in the rain and became ill.

I didn't even survive a few days, and I soon returned to the west in the case of lack of food and clothing and high fever.

However, Huang Zhou now thinks that his father's luck is not bad, and he does not have to suffer from hunger every day.

It's a terrible feeling to be hungry.

People who are so hungry feel that their stomach pouches are about to dissolve, sizzling.

A green light came out in front of my eyes.

I want to nibble on two bites when I see the leaves.

However, the leaves had long since been eaten by the nearby villagers, and the edible tender bark had to be searched around the village for a long time to find some of it.

He hadn't eaten tender tree bark in a long time, and he missed it.

The plump and juicy bark is chewed in the mouth, bursting out full of sap, and the rough fibers are just enough to fill the throat, so you don't have to worry about scratching your throat when it is soft and rotten.

Swallow it in one bite to relieve hunger pangs for the whole day!

But now, even Guanyin soil is not so easy to find.

Huangzhou walked through the village, but could not find anything to devour.

So he could only watch his mother get hungrier and thinner day by day.

And he couldn't do anything about it, because even he himself was dying of hunger.

Now that his mother is dead, he breathes a sigh of relief.

Huang Zhou had been worried that he would starve to death with his mother, and that there would be no one to collect their bodies.

In this way, it is impossible to tell if some villagers with unclean hands and feet sneaked in at night and dragged their bodies home.

Every night when Huang Zhou sleeps, he can see someone standing silently by the window observing the movement in the house, and as soon as he sees those people, he deliberately moves his body.

Those people will silently retract their heads and go to the next one.

These villagers are good people, and although they are hungry, they will not kill people.

They are like scavenging eagles, circling around you quietly, waiting for you to die a natural death before enjoying a big meal.

Huangzhou has always dared not die, just to boil the old lady to death first so that she can collect her body, so as not to be ruined by others after her death.

The shovel carved out a hole less than a meter deep, and Huangzhou was so tired that he was panting.

He rested for a while, then scooped a gourd of water from the tank and drank it down.

The abdominal pain was finally relieved a little.

So he threw a shovel and put his mother's body in the hole, just to cover his father's body, which was already maggots, and then he put a shovel on top of it.

The last layer should be filled with old soil and compacted with boards, so that no one can see the clues.

After doing all this, Huang Zhou lay on his back on the ground, feeling that the last trace of strength was exhausted.

Two hours later, Huang Zhou woke up from his fainting, he felt as if he had been turned upside down, and the jolting sensation made him nauseous and dizzy, and he wanted to vomit very much.

"Vomit ............"

A large stream of yellow-green juice spurted from his mouth, contaminating the hem of the man's clothes below.

The villagers who were walking slowly in Huangzhou were startled and put him on the ground in a panic.

Huang Zhou raised his eyes weakly and glanced at it, recognizing this man.

It turned out to be called the second uncle, and the ancestors of the two families were a little bit of relatives, after all, they were both surnamed Huang.

When I was a child, the two families often moved around, and Huang Zhou and the girl in his family were childhood sweethearts and often played together.

Later, Huangzhou went to study at the Hongfa Temple outside Lin'an City, and gradually stopped contacting.

"Second uncle......" Huang Zhou reluctantly shouted.

Huang Erbo covered his face with his hands and ran into the house in a panic, and soon heard a woman's sharp cry: "What are you afraid of...... He's dying, if you don't eat it, others will eat it, go and watch him, don't let people take the lead! ”

Huang Zhou slowly straightened up, picked up a thigh bone from the ground as a crutch, and limped home.

The country roads are lined with starvation, and the skinny appearance of everyone is very frightening.

Huang Zhou was not too afraid, he knew that his current appearance was not much better.

If that kind of fat and fat rich family came to this village, he would be afraid, the villagers had not seen meat for more than a month, and the green eyes of a group of people would definitely scare him to death.

Thinking of this, Huang Zhou couldn't help but grin.

The hungry people on the roadside wailed all over the field, and Huangzhou's laughter sounded particularly permeating at the moment.

He didn't take a few steps, turned his head, but saw the second uncle standing cowering and staring at him directly.

Huang Zhou smiled at him again, and then continued to walk forward.

The roads after the flood tide receded were very difficult to walk, and there had been several recent outbreaks of plague that had killed many people.

His father died of fever, and now the village is full of dead bodies, and the road is very difficult to walk.

Huang Zhou was not too afraid, he lasted for more than ten days without fever, and the plague could not harm him.

It's just that he can often see hungry and red-eyed villagers lying on the ground eating the mud mixed with rotten food, which makes him feel a little sick to his stomach.

Huang Zhou sighed, knowing that these people were all starving to death, otherwise they would never be like this.

Many of the corpses lying on both sides of the road were as big as a bulge, and they all died of eating too much indigestible soil and bursting their stomachs.

These people are also coming soon.

Huangzhou would rather starve to death than eat these things.

He walked to the door of his house with a leg bone, and when he saw that the second uncle was still following, he greeted weakly: "Second uncle, don't ...... Don't worry, I'm almost ......"

Huang Erbo's dark and thin face was red, he covered his face with his hands, and big tears fell to the ground.

But he didn't care about wiping it, but he still looked straight at Huangzhou.

Huang Zhou shuddered and stepped into the back room.

(End of chapter)