Central Weiguo, Wutong Town.

The snow stopped last night, and when the sun rose, the mountains were covered in snow.

Rare good weather.

Near noon, a convoy of about 50 people walked into the town. Although the population of the town is only about 500 people, the guards are strict, and outsiders must have a guide to enter. If you owe it or find out that it is forged, I'm sorry and arrest it.

Fortunately, the team members were all innocent and passed the test quickly. Under the banner of transporting military supplies, the team traveled unhindered, escorting shoes, more than 2,000 pairs of cotton shoes. These were all made by several nearby shoe shops, and they should be sent to the military town as soon as possible, and from there they should be transferred to the front line.

Just after the end of the New Year, the entire eastern part of the country is still freezing cold. In such weather, if a soldier does not have a pair of warm and well-fitting shoes, he will not even fight, and chilblains and muscle necrosis can torture the dead.

But there were also seven or eight individual visitors in this team. It is too unreliable to go out alone in this world, and passengers will find a serious convoy to follow for safety. However, all the people took out were stamped road guides, and when the town guard checked the last two passengers, his expression suddenly became very polite, and he ignored his previous affection.

Everyone was curious, and they all stretched their necks to look, but saw that what these two people took out was not a road guide, but a token with gold in the black. In just a moment, the guard's face changed.

The gap in identity has been judged.

Again, the crowd scrutinized. These two are tall and short, one big and one small, they look like brothers, the older one is in his early twenties, and the younger one is only thirteen or fourteen years old.

The past two days and one night have been in the wilderness, and everyone has tensed their nerves, and finally entered the city, and they all felt tired. Qu Yunhe pointed to the small shop in front of him: "Go eat a bowl of hot food? ”

Today is the fifteenth day of the first lunar month.

This year was spent in a hurry. Yan Saburo has never been a temperament that misses relatives or hurts every festival - for him, there is no one to think about and no one to hurt - so he is neither sad nor sad.

He shook the frost on his felt hat: "Are you almost at the agreed place?"

"It's coming. "The closer you get to the old palace of Yasukuni, the more familiar Quyunhe is with the path. He has been asleep for a hundred years, and the country here has changed, but the terrain of the mountains and rivers has basically not changed, "He Xiaoyuan made an appointment with us to meet in the small town at the foot of Fenglai Mountain, which is at most thirty miles away from here. We came early, and the appointed day is tomorrow. ”

"Hmm. Yan Saburo picked up the bookcase and strode towards the main street.

He originally thought it was strange that since there was a high-level imitation of the military preparation order, why did He Xiaoyuan still tell them: "Don't go forward when you arrive at Fenglai Mountain, meet me first, and I'll take you there." ”

Along the way, he basically understood.

The town is so small that they can walk to the street with their legs raised. There used to be shops on both sides of the street, but now six or seven of the ten houses are closed, and there are notes on the door panels that read "Yoshiya Transfer" crookedly.

Most of the rest that are still open sell grain or cooked food.

This alone shows that the town is economically depressed, not to mention that the townspeople come and go in a hurry, and they do not have the comfort of the residents of a small town.

The small shop they walked to, there were a few people squatting outside the door, all of them with yellow faces and thin muscles, shrunken heads and heads like quails.

If there are customers coming in and out of the store, the thick curtain that blocks the wind will be lifted, and the heat will come out. These people were given a moment of warmth.

Yan Saburo looked at them twice before lifting the curtain and walking into the store. These people seem to have his own shadow.

It's already time for dinner, but there are only two tables of customers in the store. Qu Yunhe sat down, raised his hand and said, "Two bowls of yuanzi and six potstickers." ”

The shopkeeper was a man with an urn voice, and when he came out, he said, "Pay the bill first." ”

It seems that there are quite a few people who eat overlord meals. Yan Saburo paid the money, but it turned out that these worthless meals cost thirty yuan!

If this is in Chunming City, it will only take ten copper plates at most.

Prices are skyrocketing.

But Yan Saburo still didn't change his face. Along the way, they have become strangers.

The stuff was quickly served.

Yuanzi is a glutinous rice ball. Weiguo also has the tradition of eating glutinous rice balls on the Shangyuan Festival, which is the same as that of Juyaoguo.

As he gets older and has sufficient nutrition, Yan Saburo doesn't like sweets much in the past two years. But Chitose said that festivals should have a sense of ceremony, so they had to find a place to eat Motoko.

The yuan skin of this nameless shop is not soft and glutinous enough, the sesame filling is not finely ground, and you can occasionally gnaw on lard residue in your mouth. But it is at least steaming, and when eaten in the cold early spring, it irons the stomach and gives people an illusion:

It seems that the world is not so bad.

In the current Weiguo township, ordinary people are reluctant to go to the restaurant, even if they only eat a bowl of hot noodle soup.

Yan Saburo went from Youguo to Weiguo.

In the land that was attacked and occupied, he saw the lingering wounds of war, and saw the survivors struggling to survive.

But he didn't expect that as the party that took the initiative to attack, the people's livelihood of the country was withering, and it was not much better than that of the country.

He walked from the southeast front to the central part of the country, and the big cities were better, and lifeless towns like Wutong Town abounded.

The Kingdom of David fought for many years, and during the reign of the first king, the kingdom defeated two of them, and it was supposed to be a period of recuperation and recuperation. Unexpectedly, the first king suddenly collapsed, and the new king who succeeded him wanted to uphold his father's will and make a career, so he once again set off a war against the country.

The war is the most expensive and material-consuming, and the defense of the country was originally rich, and after eight years of fighting, it was poor. What's more, military spending is very difficult to supply, in order to raise military salaries, the country adjusts taxes, and the names of levies are even more varied and numerous. Roughly calculated, eight years ago, the 30 taxes have been raised year by year, and now the people have to pay almost 30% of their income!

To the weight of the tax is to the natural disaster. The year before last, there was a severe drought in the country, but last summer there was a flood, and the crop output was reduced. In this case, the taxes of the defense of the country have not been reduced, after all, the war on the front line is in full swing, and the rear must not cut off the supply, otherwise it will really be called a failure. War is a special and temporary state of emergency, in which the state stops normal life and production and does everything to serve the war.

It was Yan Saburo who came all the way from Suo Luo City, and there were often abandoned barren fields on the roadside, and the weeds grew taller than people.

Farmers generally plough the fields immediately after the autumn harvest and press the stumps and weeds from the ground into the soil as soon as possible to promote soil fertility and ensure that they can be sown in time after the snow melts in the following spring.

However, the barren land in front of me has not been taken care of for a long time, and I don't know if it was affected by last year's floods, or if the owner of the field simply fled and refused to stay here.