Wang Zhuo met Great Dragonhead Zhang, who was soon to become Chief Zhang, in a ditch. At the time, surrounded by refreshing ice true qi, the latter was using his cultivation-whether at Condensing the Core or Core Formation, Wang Zhuo could not tell-to help a woman with a child whose husband had joined the army dig a pit.
A pit for drawing water for her vegetable garden.
Because her husband had enlisted, the family had simply rented out all their allotted farmland to her brothers and several cousins on her husband's side. But there was still a vegetable garden whose produce could be taken regularly to the nearby Zhouqiao Great Market for extra income. She truly could not bear to give it up, so she had kept tending it.
By now, however, May's rainy season had passed in perfunctory fashion, with conspicuously little rain. The ditch used to irrigate the garden was nearly dry, making it difficult to draw water. There was still deep water in the main Zhouqiao channel, but a round trip was rather arduous... This was where a man's usefulness came into play. What had the owners of the other vegetable gardens done? That was right: dug pits.
All they had to do was keep digging down in the half-dried ditch beside their gardens. This place was not far from the substantial tributary of the He River that flowed through Zhouqiao, and the groundwater connected. Dig down, and water would collect on its own, which they could then carry out to irrigate.
Carrying water this way was still exhausting, but it was barely enough to sustain a small vegetable garden.
For this woman, though, carrying water was no problem; digging a pit was difficult. Especially in the height of summer, climbing into a filthy hole full of