Chapter 111: People who starve to death are no different than livestock (please vote!!)

In Yuyin Village, shrouded in rain, there are several towering towers.

And on the top of the tallest tower, a scar-faced rain ninja came here.

Looking at the silent iron door in front of him, the scar-faced Yu Ren still had anger on his face, and he stretched out his hand and knocked heavily on the iron door.

Boom! Boom!

"Yilong?"

After a while, he heard an old voice from inside the door, asking and answering: "Come in."

The scar-faced man called "Yilong" was stunned for a moment, and he actually pushed open the iron door with a gentle push.

Click.

Yilong looked up after pushing the door open and saw the figure in front of the window.

The turbulent rainwater trickled down the window, leaving winding and branching traces.

There was a slight ticking sound, and the dead leaves were blown by the strong wind and fell on the window. They were as wet as paper and stuck to the glass, and the leaf veins were slightly convex like human blood vessels.

"Ha~"

The old man standing in front of the window looked away, breathed a breath of white air into his hands to keep warm, and murmured in a low voice: "Sure enough, in this weather, you should eat hot pot to warm yourself up."

After that, he walked to the living room without any decorative furniture and sat next to the square kotatsu.

Then he waved to the scar-faced Yu Nin in front of the door and said jokingly: "Why are you standing there stupidly? Close the door quickly, my old bones can't withstand the cold."

Hearing this, Yilong suddenly came back to his senses and felt the slight chill. He couldn't help but tighten his clothes, closed the door and walked in.

Click.

After closing the door, the dampness and coldness outside seemed to be blocked out.

Yoshitaka walked to the kotatsu with a stinky face, and suddenly felt a gentle warmth, and the anger in his heart calmed down a lot inexplicably.

"This kind of thing is not common in the Land of Rain."

The old man lowered his head and fiddled with the kotatsu, his eyes lowered and he smiled kindly: "His Majesty the Daimyo got two sets, and specially left one set for me."

There was a small oven on the kotatsu table, with a sukiyaki pot on it, and the soup stock was boiling.

Yilong stood there without speaking, just staring without saying a word.

Watching the old man throw the cross-shaped mushrooms and square pieces of meat into the pot, and the pink and fresh vegetables are also thrown into the soup, where the rising and falling colors are very fresh.

But Yilong felt that the green was extremely dazzling, making the fire in his heart burn again.

"Lord Musashi!"

He clenched his fists subconsciously and asked in a deep voice: "Do you know that the disaster relief grains we bought with money were replaced by bran and brown rice for livestock by those damn businessmen and nobles? "

Bran is the husk removed from the rice, such as chaff, wheat husks and other useless discards.

Brown rice is a rice grain with the husk removed but still retaining the cortex and embryo. But the rice they want to buy is a product from which all the husk and husk of the rice have been removed!

"...So it's because of this." The old man who was called "Musashi" put down the cup in his hand and said softly, "If this is the case, then I know."

"Know? Do you know they are passing off inferior goods?"

Hearing this, looking at the leader of Yuyin Village in front of him, the old man he once admired very much, Yilong's anger suddenly rose, and he asked: "Then why are you sitting back and doing nothing? Those bastards should be hanged and beaten to death. !”

"That guy Hanzo is still trying to win people's hearts, and even spends his own money to buy relief food for the refugees. Now people outside are praising his wisdom! You, don't you care at all..."

Faced with the questioning from his right-hand man, Musashi took a sip of tea and asked calmly: "Then do you know how much bran and brown rice can be replaced by one pound of polished rice?"

Facing the inexplicable rhetorical question, Yilong was stunned for a moment subconsciously, frowned and said, "Of course I know that for the price of one pound of polished rice, you can buy three pounds of bran and brown rice."

At this point, he raised his eyebrows again and said in an angry tone: "But even if it's bran and brown rice, they're still greedy for a third of it! Moreover, those things are for livestock, not for humans at all. Of! You..."

"Hey, don't be so angry." Before Yoshitaka could finish speaking, Musashi suddenly patted the table, interrupted what he was saying, and said with a smile, "Come on, let's eat something together to warm ourselves up."

Yilong choked after being interrupted, his brows almost knitted together.

But looking at the old man's clear eyes, he suppressed his anger and sat down.

"Yoshitaka." Musashi took out a few pieces of meat from the hot pot and handed them to Yoshitaka's bowl while whispering, "Have you ever seen someone who bloated to death from eating dirt?"

Yilong, who was holding a bowl in his hand and wanted to greet him, froze in midair after hearing these words, and blurted out: "What?"

Eat dirt and bloat to death?

"Look, you haven't seen it. You haven't even seen the tree bark being chewed away. You think the civilians are miserable enough now."

Musashi said to himself: "I am an old man who has survived from the end of the Warring States Period to the present by luck. When I was young, I fought with samurai from all over the world with a sword. From the age of thirteen to sixty, I fought more than a hundred times without losing. "

"But because of this, I realized that the victims who were about to starve to death were actually no longer human beings."

As soon as these words came out, Yilong suddenly stood up with his eyes widened, looking at the old man in disbelief.

It is obvious that Yuyin Village has been able to reach this point because of the leadership of this old man!

That's why he chose to stay with Lord Musashi when other companions favored Hanzo.

But he never expected that such words would come out of Master Musashi's mouth.

"Shocked?"

Musashi just smiled and shook his head, sighing: "Because, you have never seen what people who are about to starve to death look like, and you have never seen the miserable reality after the outbreak of war. After all, you are just a ninja who does not do anything productive."

"What dignity, what decency, what animals eat, what people eat, those things are things that can only be considered after eating!"

"When people are hungry to a certain extent, they will not consider what to eat, let alone whether it tastes good, or even whether they can eat it."

"As long as they can survive, let alone bran and coarse rice, they can eat grass roots, tree bark, and soil!"

Wu Zang looked up at Yilong with a deep gaze, "They will even exchange their children, and then..."

Here, he suddenly paused, looked at Yilong's pale face, shook his head and smiled bitterly, "One pound of refined rice, exchanged for three pounds of bran and brown rice, is equivalent to the money that could save one person, now it can save three people."

"Although they have no nutrition and are not easy to digest, they can fill the stomach and allow more people to live a few more days."

"You say, did I make a mistake in this deal?"

For a moment, Yilong fell into a long silence, his mind had become a mess.

He could only unconsciously open his mouth and stammered in a weak rebuttal: "This... the relief money is not enough, why don't we ask the daimyo for more..."

"Moreover, most of the relief money, which was not much, went into the pockets of those merchants..."

Hearing this, as if he remembered something, a trace of sadness flashed in Musashi's eyes, and he smiled sarcastically: "More money? Where does the money come from? The granary has long been an empty shell! Where does the grain come from? Do we continue to collect taxes?!"

"As for those profit-seeking people, If we don't feed them, how can they sell us food? At least, they only took one-third, and the remaining two-thirds can still save one more person! "

"If there were no bastard merchants in your mouth, and no bran and coarse rice for livestock in your mouth, what you saw outside the city would not be skinny refugees, but a pile of gnawed bones!"

The only thing that Musashi regretted most at this moment was that he didn't come up with a way to grow food earlier, and didn't try to get rid of his dependence on big countries earlier.

Hearing the old man's increasingly deep voice, Yoshitaka staggered back a few steps with a pale face, his mind was blank, shaking his head and muttering: "How, how could this happen, it turned out to be like this..."

"Then, the reason why you have never resisted Sand Village is also because..."

Musashi slowly lowered his head, picked up a piece of meat from the pot, and whispered: "Do you think I want to watch coldly? Do you think I want to be a turtle?"

"I am Musashi, the former sword saint Musashi. Which of those old guys in the Iron Country was not defeated by me? Even though I am old, I can still swing a sword."

"But Yes, resistance? Revenge? Four words, two words, how serious will the consequences be? "

"Hanzo is still young, he can be arrogant and ambitious, but I can't. I am now the leader of the Hidden Rain Village, carrying the lives of thousands of people on my shoulders. I can't gamble, and I can't win the gamble."

"Once the scale of the war continues to expand, it will no longer be just a passage like now. The Rain Country will become a victim of the big countries and will become their joint target. "

"'Revenge' is a luxury we can't afford now!"

The Rain Country now has no way out except to survive.

It can only survive until the end of the war, and then find a way to slowly work it out.

But even if you want to survive, the premise is that the big countries ignore it, otherwise once you are targeted, you won't even be able to survive...

Bang!!

Just when the two were distracted, the iron gate was suddenly pushed open.

"No, it's bad, Lord Musashi!"

A Rain Village ninja rushed in and shouted in horror: "Sunagakure! Sunagakure is looting again..."

At this point, he hurriedly shook his head and said in fear: "No, this time it's a massacre! Two villages, hundreds of people, all slaughtered by them!!"

"Hanzo, Lord Hanzo received the news, and took people to intercept the Sunagakure troops as soon as possible!"

Musashi listened to all the news very calmly, looked at the vegetables and meat rising and falling in the boiling hot pot, and whispered: "This day has finally come."

Destiny will always catch up with our slowing pace until we achieve the future it has chosen for us.