Half a year passed in the blink of an eye. It was now May, and the weather had begun to warm. The harvest season was upon them.
(Here's a bit of general knowledge: In ancient times, the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River and the Shandong region did not enter their harvest season until early summer, not autumn. Wheat was grown in the north and rice in the south, and the wheat they planted was winter wheat. It was usually planted around the ninth month of the lunar calendar and began to be harvested around the fifth month of the following year. Only beyond the Great Wall—in what was essentially the Northeast—was spring wheat planted, which was sown in spring and harvested in autumn. Readers from Hebei or Shandong should know a bit about this. After winter wheat was harvested, people would plant millet, broomcorn millet, beans, sorghum, and other food crops, which were the crops harvested in autumn.)
(PS: The claim that the north entered the slack farming season after the autumn harvest is complete nonsense. After wheat was introduced into China during the Shang dynasty, it gradually became the highest-yielding crop and was planted on a large scale. Thus, autumn was actually the busiest farming season. The slack season only began after the first snow.)
(PS2: The claim that autumn was the season for launching wars in ancient times because it was the slack farming season is also nonsense. One reason was indeed that grain and fodder were plentiful after the autumn harvest, but the main reason was that the autumn air was crisp and people were less likely to fall ill. In ancient warfare, the highest mortality rate was never on the battlefield, but from tetanus after the battle and various diseases caused by large-scale