At dawn the next day, Lu Fan assembled the army and set out for Yichun. The army had already run out of grain, so there was no need to worry about cooking meals along the way.
The soldiers' stomachs had originally shrunk from hunger, but to stabilize morale the previous night, Lu Fan had cooked up and distributed every bit of grain in the camp. Their stomachs had been stretched larger, and after a night's sleep, they were even hungrier.
The army needed an explanation for running out of food, or an incident like last night's would break out again. Lu Fan shifted the blame onto Zhou An and the others, claiming they had been turned by Lan Tian and had deliberately thrown the grain into the river to ruin it. When their crime was exposed, they resisted and were executed, but the recovered grain had only been enough for last night's single meal.
If the officers and soldiers wanted food, they could only hurry to rendezvous with Zhu Huan. The other side ought to have some provisions left, and more importantly, they needed to retake Yichun—the city was rumored to be abundantly stocked with grain.
One lie required countless others to patch it over. Having reached this point, Lu Fan had no good solution; he could only treat the head when it ached and the foot when it hurt.
Perhaps driven by their craving for food, Lu Fan led tens of thousands of men to arrive ahead of schedule. Yet Zhu Huan, having traveled light, had little grain left himself. The cooks used the last scraps of food to set up cauldrons and boil wild-vegetable gruel to fill their bellies.
Zhu Huan had sent men to gather the wild vegetables. The rice in the pots was sparse enough to