After traveling more than a thousand li, Liu Cheng set out once again, beginning another thousand-li journey.
He did not enter Yecheng, but even without entering it, he witnessed plenty of "filth and disorder" firsthand... Hebei, especially the supposedly fertile lands in its southwest, had a distinctly different air of desolation from the Shaan-Luo corridor.
The most immediate sign was what people left behind after death.
In Shaan-Luo, one certainly encountered such things along the road, but they were generally white bones, picked clean by wild beasts. Even the few corpses clearly left behind by the migrating column from Xuchang had received simple burials where they lay or been disposed of in designated river valleys.
Thus, that region was a textbook case of white bones exposed in the wild, with not a cockcrow heard for a thousand li.
Around Yecheng, these things still largely took the form of white bones. Yet whether because winter's cold arrived earlier here, or because the previous fighting and famine had seen the wild beasts disposed of too, a considerable portion of the corpses actually retained some tissue besides their bare bones.
These corpses therefore carried a heavy stench, and one could still detect large numbers of ants and other insects on them.
That was not all. Especially around Yecheng, almost every dozen or so li, a pronounced, overpowering fetid stench would suddenly reach their noses, accompanied by barking dogs, while Murong Ping merely led the delegation on a detour as though it were perfectly ordinary.
A moment's thought made it clear: these were either battlefields that had never been properly cleared, or mass graves from massacres or hasty burials after battle.
Two hundred of those accompanying them were bona fide members of the Jiankang delegation of consolation, selected directly by Huan Wen. At their