Gouwa, dressed in silk and wearing a melon cap, squatted beneath the tree at the village entrance, cradling a bowl as he slurped down Braised Noodles.
The minced-meat gravy had chilies in it, and it left him sweating all over.
Beside him, Zhao Wu took a bite from a White Flour steamed bun, bumped him with his shoulder, and asked, "Hey, did Senior Brother Li say where all that grain was being sent? Is he selling it or what? Did he say whether it'd be sent back?"
As Oxheart Village's bookkeeper, watching the numbers on the accounts vanish one by one naturally left him puzzled.
"He didn't say. He's an immortal now, flying high and far every day," Gouwa said with a trace of dissatisfaction.
Watching his household's grain get hauled away every day without seeing a single coin come back was more agonizing than killing him. He had never seen anyone squander a household like this.
"But what if there's a famine? What will our village do without grain?" By Zhao Wu's reckoning, in just a few days, the granary beneath the ancestral hall would be so empty that rats could race through it.
"Hey, I asked Senior Brother Li that too. Guess what he said?" With one last slurp, Gouwa licked the final bit of gravy from the bottom of his bowl.
"What did he say?" Yang Xiaohai came over with his bowl and joined in.
"He said, how could there be so many famines? Didn't Big Guy send over so much gold, silver, and treasure? Couldn't we buy grain with that?"
"And if worse came to worst, everyone in our village could take a bowl and beg all the way to the capital. Wouldn't the Emperor of Great Liang still feed us? Could he possibly refuse?"
"Did