Zhang Jiao

As time flowed on, after Zhang Ling ascended, his Daoist Tradition left behind in the mortal world a spark of quietude and self-cultivation.

And amid the fields of Julu in Ji Province, another seed was being watered with blood and tears in barren soil, sprouting slowly and painfully.

The Zhang family had been tenant farmers for generations, with only a few mu of poor fields, dependent on Heaven's timing, and even more dependent on the "grace" of the landlord master.

For as long as Zhang Jiao could remember, what he saw was his father's hunched back, his mother's sighs deep in the night, and the eyes of his younger siblings protruding starkly from long hunger.

More than half the harvest went to rent.

When disaster years came, the steward from the landlord master's house could still bring over an IOU with a beaming smile.

Using old grain from years past as high-interest loans, he bound the entire family, old and young, tightly to the ridges of the fields.

Year after year, the debt piled up like a mountain, with no end in sight.

He had seen Old Wang from the neighboring village have his leg broken by the Zhang family's vicious servants because he could not repay his debt, then be thrown beside a ditch to wait for death.

In the end, wild dogs tore apart what was left of his body.

He had seen the newly widowed Li family daughter-in-law dragged into the woodshed by Lord Zhang's young master, and the next day she threw herself into a well.

When the corpse was fished out, the village headman only said she had "slipped and fallen," and instead cursed the Li family for bringing bad luck.

When the yamen runners came, what they brought was not disaster-relief grain, but the