Day after day passed.
Qingjiang County still showed not the slightest sign of rain.
Every day, the blazing sun hung overhead, scorching the earth as the fields cracked in great swaths.
To stay alive, many ordinary commoners in the surrounding villages could only sell their fields and land, hoping to exchange them for enough food to weather this drought.
As for Qingjiang County Seat...
The price of a cup of clean water had risen from one copper coin to ten, and it showed signs of climbing further.
With countless fruits and vegetables planted in the fields and wooded hills withering away, the prices of produce sold in the county seat had also increased tenfold.
The same was true of everything else.
Dongxi Village.
The Xu Household was a hive of activity.
They built waterwheels and joined hollowed-out bamboo sections into long pipelines, continuously transporting river water over great distances to irrigate their rice paddies and fields.
As for the wooded hills, they were too far away and the terrain too complicated, so people could only carry water there.
Light-filtering black gauze blotted out the sky and sun there, covering vast stretches of orchards.
Thus, they did not need watering every day; once every ten days or fortnight was enough.
The Xu Household would not be too short of manpower.
Black gauze canopies had also been raised over the Xu Household's many medicine fields to keep the excessive heat from scorching the medicinal plants to death.
Besides absorbing heat, the black gauze also collected droplets when temperatures fell at night, which dripped onto the medicine fields and eased some of the pressure on their water supply.
People also tended them constantly.
After several days of this...
The medicinal plants, whose growth had begun to wilt, recovered.
As for the rice, with