Half a month later, Great Spirit Field Realm.
Beside field roads that stretched to the heavens and covered the earth, endlessly winding on, yet mostly lay barren.
A weary old horse pulled a dilapidated carriage, carrying a carriageful of people as it labored onward.
The driver's gaze was as alert as a mountain falcon's, constantly sweeping the surroundings.
Inside the carriage sat seven or eight cultivators.
Every one of them wore tattered clothes, hunger written across their faces. Their fingers were rough, their fingertips stained with mud that could never be washed clean.
The only thing of value on them was a battered Storage Bag.
Inside the Storage Bags were some spirit grain and spirit flour, along with a count-on-one-hand number of Spirit Stones.
Their faces were equally exhausted and weathered. All along the way, they had been on tenterhooks, speaking only of the famine years and the chaos of war.
Some families had poor harvests and could no longer feed their children, so they drove them from home to seek their own way of surviving.
Some young, strong cultivators had joined riot camps and learned to burn, kill, and plunder. Before long, they had been killed themselves.
The fields to the north had rotted away for no reason. After planting for a whole year, not a single grain had been harvested. Before long, the Spirit Farmers would likely rise in revolt as well, unable to fill their bellies.
In some places, many people had died again. No one knew why, and not even their corpses could be found...
In the end, with no other recourse, they could only mutter prayers for the Earth God's blessing, prayers for the great deity Ksitigarbha's protection.
They felt that they themselves had not been devout enough, that they had not offered enough incense,