"Observations?"
Gela Jiang leaned his surfboard against the rocky shore, crouched down to start a fire, and set the cleaned fish over it to roast.
Bai Zhu sat beside him, watching the fish skin slowly turn crisp as he wondered whether they had been overly cautious these past few days.
"Honestly, after traveling all this way, I only had one impression." Gela Jiang poked at the firewood. "Poor."
"You made such a huge circuit just to come up with the word 'poor'?"
"I visited several normal villages. The crops in the fields grew well enough, but every household still went hungry. No pesticides, no proper farming tools, harvests depended entirely on the weather, and on top of that, all that bullshit about farming close to nature meant there wasn't much land under cultivation to begin with. Being able to eat your fill was practically a luxury."
Bai Zhu picked up a piece of crispy roasted fish skin and bit down with a crunch.
"So preaching here doesn't even require slogans? Just hand out food?"
"Exactly. Put food in their hands, and people will naturally be willing to listen."
Gela Jiang turned the fish over, then split open its belly to let the flames lick into the meat.
"There were also a few villages less than a hundred li apart. One had been stripped bare by locusts, while another enjoyed perfect weather and had granaries nearly overflowing. The rainfall and terrain in that region weren't different enough to explain it."
The fish skin in Bai Zhu's hand stopped just before his mouth.
"A man-made disaster?"
"I caught a few locusts." Gela Jiang raised a finger. "I think they were artificially bred. There was residual Nen in their bodies. Someone was probably controlling those locusts deliberately."
The fire crackled as a piece