After leaving Hengyang City, Pan Long followed the main road east.
In every town he passed, he made a point of finding the granary and slipping inside to see for himself.
What he found worried him more with each visit. Out of every ten granaries, seven or eight were less than full, and some were completely empty. Those stocked to the rafters and ready for use could be counted on one hand.
That was bad news. Yang Province was famed throughout the realm as a land of fish and rice, and it was one of the Nine Provinces' breadbaskets. The banks of the Heaven-Reaching River were among its more prosperous regions. If grain reserves were this poor here, other places scarcely bore thinking about.
Pan Long shook his head again and again, growing ever more worried about the famine that might come.
And the heavens were doing no one any favors.
Throughout his journey, the weather had shown no sign of warming. It had even snowed lightly twice more.
April was nearly upon them. In past years, spring would have been drawing to a close by now. As the saying went, "By April, the mortal world's blossoms have faded." Fruits such as peaches and plums would have begun to form, and winter wheat would have reached the stage where its grains filled and ripened.
But this extraordinary cold snap had left the wheat in the fields sickly. The rice was in even worse shape: dead seedlings were visible almost everywhere in the icy mud. As Pan Long traveled, he often saw farmers sighing in their fields, and some even broke down sobbing.
There was nothing he could do.
Faced with a natural disaster on this scale, even his teacher Bi Lingkong would likely have been helpless.
All he could do