Na Rimu now needed a lot of food every day. A giant military pot full of rice wasn’t enough for her to eat. Fortunately, Yun Ye’s convoy never stopped people from eating. As long as you could eat, no one cared how much you ate—they just didn’t allow waste.
A clean little girl was always so likable. The cook would often see off with a sweet “elder brother” call as she carried away the giant pot, then shake his head and cook another pot of rice. The convoy wasn’t lacking that one pot of rice either.
She always seemed to be hungry. Every time she came to Yun Ye’s place, she timed it for meals. Not only did she eat food in an unseemly manner, but she also secretly stuffed baked flatbreads into her clothing. This aroused Yun Ye’s curiosity—how could a little girl eat so much?
Coming to her tent, Yun Ye understood. Na Rimu was breaking apart the flatbreads from her clothing and distributing them to over a dozen Turkic children in the tent. When they saw Yun Ye enter, they were like startled sheep, all immediately hiding behind Na Rimu.
Li Jing was reducing the prisoners’ rations. Under the circumstances of roads blocked by heavy snow, this was understandable. If they hadn’t found a patch of pine forest yesterday, probably no one would have hot food to eat. You should know that the day before yesterday when cooking, Yun Ye ordered two sleds dismantled and the wood used for burning fire so everyone could have hot food.
No need to imagine the miserable conditions of the prisoner camp. From the tragic circumstances of the rescued Han slave laborers, Yun Ye could imagine how Li Jing would treat Turkic prisoners.
Yun Ye pulled the panic-stricken Na Rimu out of the tent and brought her to where the Han slave laborers were. Sun Simiao was treating the injuries of those Han slave laborers.
This was a living hell. They were as thin as skeletons draped in human skin. Those women were even more tragic—their festering private parts exposed under the daylight. They seemed to have lost all sense of shame, letting those auxiliary soldiers apply ointment to their wounds. The air was filled with a rotting stench.
Sun Simiao glanced coldly at Na Rimu, then turned his head to continue applying needles at the throat area of someone desperately trying to eat but unable to swallow no matter what.
Na Rimu watched, trembling all over, extremely terrified. She understood why these people had become what they were now. She feared Yun Ye would return his anger upon those children.
Calling over an auxiliary soldier who understood Turkic, Yun Ye said: “Translate every word I say to her.” The auxiliary soldier nodded in agreement.
“Na Rimu, each scar on these people before you requires the destruction of the Turks to repay. The Turkic people’s savage nature has destined there will be a massacre, and it cannot be changed. Na Rimu, you are fortunate, but I hope this fortune remains only with you. Don’t take in other Turkic people anymore. They are destined to accept punishment, otherwise it’s unfair to these people.” After Yun Ye finished speaking, he left. He had been to this place twice. He didn’t have Sun Simiao’s steel-wire-like resilient nerves. Every time he looked, he had the impulse to kill all the Turkic people.
Returning to the tent, Na Rimu also came back with her head lowered. She prostrated herself at Yun Ye’s feet, mouth muttering who knows what.
Yun Ye bent down, stroking Na Rimu’s long hair, only able to emit a sigh. The enmity ran too deep. There was no possibility of reconciliation. The Turkic people always thought that as long as they admitted fault, the Central Plains dynasty would forgive their mistakes. Not this time, because the Central Plains Emperor was Li’er. He also had barbarian blood and knew too much about barbarian nature. He knew clearly that barbarians who hadn’t experienced a baptism of blood wouldn’t submit. On the grassland, only the strong were respected.
Yun Ye had never converted his mindset. He always viewed barbarians from a later era’s perspective. Those cruel scenes were too far from him. Now witnessing them with his own eyes, he put away his excess compassion. In fact, the grassland didn’t need compassion either.
In the end, Yun Ye still didn’t drive those children back to the prisoner camp. He tacitly approved Na Rimu’s actions—neither encouraging nor opposing. This soft-heartedness was only directed at children. He really couldn’t harden his heart. This was a lingering effect from his later life.
Li Jing apparently didn’t plan to wait any longer. He selected ten thousand robust soldiers, all cavalry. He wanted to brave the snow to go to Xie Li’s camp. Zhang Gongjin stayed behind. Once Li Jing succeeded, he would lead the main camp slowly advancing toward Yinshan.
Yun Ye handed over all the biscuits from the convoy to Li Jing, and also provided these ten thousand soldiers with roughly sewn sheepskin gloves. Those humiliated Han women, Yun Ye took all of them in. When sewing gloves, even the weakest women struggled to crawl up and worked day and night by the fire.
He Shao献出了牛肉干,把它们分成一个个的小块,再用麻布袋子装起来,香肠也被他献了出来,得到了李靖的高度赞赏。Yun Ye used a large pot to stir-fry flour, wanting to make it into roasted flour. He had never made this thing, only heard of it. Never mind—as long as it was cooked it would work. Anyway, soldiers ate pig feed. Their military rations were impossible to look at—a sticky, gooey pot that when ladled into bowls looked like snot, yet had the fine name “soup cakes.”
Since even soup cakes could be wolfed down, there was no reason such roasted flour wouldn’t suit their taste. First he added a lot of beef tallow. After it melted, he poured in the flour, using an engineering shovel to repeatedly stir-fry, finally adding finely ground salt until the flour was fried to a yellow color before stopping.
Li Jing brewed a bowl with boiling water and was very satisfied with the taste. Immediately the entire army began making it. Twenty days of rations for ten thousand people—Yun Ye didn’t dare be careless at all. He spot-checked the biscuits, spot-checked the dried meat, didn’t even spare the sausages. A large pile of discarded sausages made He Shao wish he were dead, just because a few horse hairs were discovered, several hundred catties of sausages were thrown into the snow, called defective products.
Li Jing couldn’t bear it. The food he ate occasionally had things like hair in it. In difficult times, mice floating in the rice pot wasn’t unheard of. He steamed a large pot of sausages Yun Ye had thrown away, ate them with relish, and loudly proclaimed them delicious.
This was clearly undermining him. He Shao’s chin was raised almost to the sky, still holding a defective sausage and eating it with oil flowing from his mouth, making those soldiers drool. Food hygiene and epidemic prevention regulations had no market here. Yun Ye could only watch helplessly as those absurd bastards each held a sausage roasting it over fire to eat.
They would have their time to regret. When poisonous rice and gutter oil filled their dining tables, Yun Ye really wanted to see their expressions of wanting to cry but having no tears. Now materials were too scarce, even impoverished. Yun Ye really didn’t understand why Li’er set the price of rice at three wen per dou. Was grain really so abundant it couldn’t be sold?
Why were there still so many beggars? So many people going hungry? The Zhenguan Prosperity was just an illusion, an illusion that enriched powerful families and embittered the common people.
Yun Ye had those women make some knee pads, and specially used wolf skin to make a pair for Li Jing. His rheumatism in later years kept him bedridden for a full ten years.
The grassland after the snow stopped could be described as water freezing instantly. Too cold. The tents provided no protection at all. When the north wind blew, the cold penetrated to the bone marrow. People began freezing to death. Going to sleep at night, by the next day they had become icicles. Even like this they were still held by others for warmth, saying huddling together was warmer.
Yun Ye looked at his own hands swollen like bread, helpless. Na Rimu’s hands were also swollen from frostbite. She seemed not to see it, still hurrying about the military camp like a groundhog, searching everywhere for food to feed those dozen mouths.
Li Jing hoped for cold weather. The colder it was, the greater his chance of success. Yun Ye had never experienced such severe cold. From morning to evening he seemed to be constantly shivering. The fire piles grew ever larger. People sat only two feet from the fire. Chests were roasted almost to the point of oozing oil, yet backs still had cold wind piercing to the bone. This was truly fire roasting the chest warmly while wind blew coldly on the back.
He Shao was already unconscious with fever. Cheng Chumo specially moved over to care for him. In Yun Ye’s view, that wasn’t caring—it was purely seeking a warm stove. Watching Cheng Chumo sleep while hugging old He, Yun Ye wanted to strangle Cheng Chumo.
If he couldn’t think of a way to keep warm, old He would die on the grassland. Looking at old He’s cracked lips, Yun Ye used a spoon to feed him water bit by bit. He opened his mouth like a baby, wanting to drink more, but his constantly trembling body made it impossible for Yun Ye to pour it in. The water spilled outside was far more than he drank.
Even the strongest person had limits. In ancient times lacking heating methods, at this full thirty degrees below zero temperature, many people would die. History only recorded Li Jing’s success but didn’t record how many casualties there were. Those people seemed to be only the necessary price of victory. Gou Zi put his hands in his crotch for warmth because that was the warmest place on his whole body. In the past, this would be laughed at to death, but now no one mocked him. His face was a mess, frozen to a blue-purple color, snot frozen into ice hanging on his lips. They were responsible for chopping firewood. These past days no matter how they chopped, they couldn’t keep up with the burning.
Yun Ye didn’t know how Eskimos spent the harsh winter. The winter there must be much colder than now, right? Building a small snow house—would it really work? No choice—Yun Ye could only try. Anyway snow wasn’t lacking either.
He called Cheng Chumo and the two of them took shovels, slowly building an ice house.
“Ye Zi, will this ice house really be warm?” Cheng Chumo was so frozen he couldn’t even speak a complete sentence.
“I heard Master mention it before. I haven’t seen it either. Now we have to wait here for the Commander-in-Chief to return, at least staying for over ten days. I don’t want to freeze to death, so let’s try. I just hope Master wasn’t fooling me.” Yun Ye’s lips were also covered in ice chips. His mouth had long lost feeling.
“The old master wouldn’t lie to us brothers. Let’s work faster—it’s a bit warmer.” Regarding the legendary old master, Cheng Chumo clearly had more confidence than Yun Ye.
An hour later, when Yun Ye felt he was about to freeze to death, the snow house was finally built. The door faced away from the wind. Whether it was psychological or truly effective, the two felt long-absent warmth.
They poured water over the snow house again. In an instant it froze into ice. Actually Yun Ye’s snow house was very simple—just piling snow outside the tent, then pouring water on it to block the cold wind. The brazier was lit. Before long, the entire house warmed up. The flames were no longer the orange-yellow color outside, but displayed a warm pale blue.
Yun Ye carried old He into the house and covered him with thick furs. He finally stopped shivering and fell asleep snoring.