The sea wind surged mightily, and the waters rolled on without end.
From Jin'an Commandery—what is now the Fuzhou, Quanzhou, and Xiamen region—to Yizhou, it was merely a matter of crossing a strait.
In bad weather, they might need a fairly large ship to make the crossing. In good weather, even small fishing boats could traverse it. In extreme cases, someone strong enough and skilled enough in the water could even swim across barehanded...
Even so, as Shen Le drifted at the bow, all he saw were faces knotted with worry. They said that trees died when moved while people thrived when moved, but that depended on how they were moved.
They had only just settled in a place, spent their savings on farmland, and painstakingly built homes for the family. Season after season of harvests had barely filled the holes in their finances, and the entire family had begun rising again.
Then, at such a time, they suddenly suffered another major raid. The family's strength was devastated, forcing them to flee to Yizhou. It was like plucking a bird's feathers or shaking the roots of a young tree—
Every migration dealt a tremendous blow to a family's foundations.
Not to mention that when they had moved from Kuaiji Commandery to Jin'an Commandery, the family had relocated three or four thousand clansmen, along with more than ten thousand tenant farmers and servants.
Yet after the raids in Jin'an Commandery, only two thousand clansmen and three thousand tenant farmers remained to move to Yizhou—
The rest of the tenant farmers had either suffered grievous casualties, scattered in large numbers, or the Shen Family had lost the power to control them and could no longer force them to relocate.
They were farming land for landlords either way. What difference did it make