"Ah-choo."
Yu Ziye sneezed violently again in his carriage, spraying mucus more than two feet before hurriedly wiping his nose with a handkerchief.
"An assignment like this is sheer torture."
As he muttered, Yu Ziye could not help wondering how Chancellor Chu, a man of such advanced years, could bear it.
As the saying went, winter was hard on the elderly. It was not merely because ordinary households had once faced shortages of grain in winter, but because old people could not withstand the cold. The Treatise on Strange Epidemics stated that as people aged, their bodies weakened, their five organs grew weary, and their yang fire dwindled. Why did none of that seem to apply to Chancellor Chu?
A little distance outside Yu Ziye's carriage, Chu Hang did not join the other local officials in looking down on Yu Ziye. Instead, he raised his head toward the sky.
Over the years, Chu Hang had become rather sensitive to certain currents in the air, and here, that sensitivity was especially pronounced.
As the saying went, auspicious snow heralded a bountiful year. Yet this winter, in the many parts of Hexi Circuit Chu Hang had already visited, rain and snow had been pitifully scarce.
There wasn't enough moisture!
That day, after making arrangements for the work in Changyuan County, Chu Hang returned to the offices of the Si Prefectural Yamen to rest for a while and draft a memorial to the throne.
Si Prefecture was one of the places in Hexi Circuit with abundant water, yet even here, what he found on this visit gave little cause for optimism. It was easy to imagine how grave the situation elsewhere must have been.
Providing drinking water for people was still manageable, but irrigation posed an enormous problem.
Early the next morning, Chu