Capítulo 1024: Chapter 1024: The General Returns, but His Family Is Gone
Ti flies like a fleeting horse, and the affairs of the world are as epheral as clouds.
The General, returning victoriously to his holand, finds only desolation.
Returning to his old ho, the house is damaged and has been uninhabited for a long ti.
He searched for a long ti in the house, wiping away the thick dust on the wooden table, and saw the words his daughter had carved into it.
When his daughter was three, she began her education. He taught her to recognize words, but after only a year, he went to serve in the army. The words she knew were few, and the carvings were crooked, missing strokes, but as her father, he still understood them.
Hunger, leave, city, live.
With just a few words, he roughly guessed what had happened.
He went to the farmland and found all the fields severely cracked.
Famine struck; to survive, the family had to leave, becoming refugees, hoping to make a living in the city.
He mounted his steed and galloped towards the next city.
The soldiers following him had sadness in their eyes.
They had already gone to several cities, but there was no sign of the General’s family; perhaps they had long since…
In every city they entered, they inquired and learned that in the year of the famine, many refugees tried to enter the city. So cities opened their gates, but once inside, they couldn’t find food, so the refugees gathered to rob, which led to the city gates being closed, denying all refugees entry.
Those refugees who traveled slowly were hard by those before them and couldn’t even enter the city, essentially dying outside the city gates.
That year, countless people died, and the mass burial mounds outside the city stank unbearably, piled with corpses.
“General, don’t…” search.
The soldiers tried to persuade him, but when they t the General’s bloodshot eyes, they couldn’t utter a word and had to swallow their words.
The General ca to the mass burial mound, actually feeling sowhat hopeless, hoping to find his family’s corpses here, at least to gather their bodies.
He found nothing.
Couldn’t find the living.
Couldn’t find the dead.
Yet his heart rekindled hope, for if no bodies were found, it ant maybe… maybe they were still alive.
But how could a gentle woman of that year survive such harsh conditions alone with a six-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son?
“We should go back…” a soldier reminded.
This search had a ti limit, and it was ti to return to guard the frontier.
The General laughed bitterly: “I defended the country but couldn’t protect my family!”
At the next table, two people were talking about those days, saying the refugees locked out of the city gates were not human, driven by hunger to the point of killing each other and even eating…
The General abruptly stood up, slamming the table with force.
The already shabby table shattered into pieces.
The people at that table were startled and tried to flee but were ordered by the General to be captured.
“Speak, what else do you know!”
“We… we only heard.”
“Speak!”
The two shivered, finally disclosing all they knew.
It turned out the two were guards of the city, so they saw everything outside the city gates clearly.
From their mouths, the General learned that soone had left the city to take away girls under ten, claiming to buy them to be maids.
“Why was this person allowed to bring people into the city? Who was it, what was their status?”
“That… we don’t know.”
“What about the survivors?”
“All dead.”
“Dead?” The General staggered, almost falling, but was supported by soldiers beside him.
“Those people disappeared, and the courtyards left behind emitted a foul sll. Upon investigation, it was found inside were all the bodies of the girls.”
User Comments
0 comments from readers