The Truth of the Grand Sacrifice

Zhang Haoming took quite a while to crawl up from the ground.

He hurried after the others to watch the excitement and see what exactly had happened. After all, farmers were the dullest, yet also the keenest.

They felt nothing about the calamities that would arrive in the future. Their eyes were like those of mice, fixed only on inches before them. Even if war was about to break out, they could not smell the gunpowder and merely felt it was still far away.

Yet correspondingly, they were extraordinarily sensitive to what would happen the very next minute—sensitive to the point of having a sixth sense. If a merchant shorted them in weighing goods, if someone tried to take advantage of them or cheat them, they had an exceptionally sharp awareness of it.

Mouse-eyed and short-sighted—they could not see the distance, but when it came to that tiny patch of "inch-light" before them, they knew it inside out.

Thus, after the farmers exchanged all manner of information, everyone swiftly pieced together a rough blueprint of what had happened from the fragments they each knew.

The piecing-together process was rather interesting. Your family had seen a bit of light, mine had seen what color that light was, and his family had seen where it landed.

With each person adding a word or two, they somehow forced the truth together until it was eight or nine parts out of ten accurate.

The truth was simple. A sword immortal had arrived just now, and sword-light had descended, slaughtering the landlord's entire household, leaving behind a line of large characters: "All debt notes are to be burned without exception. All contracts of sale are hereby voided."

So-called contracts of sale were, in truth, contracts selling oneself into bondage. Farmers had long grown accustomed to