Chapter 4: Everyone is in turmoil
"Brother, what should we do?" Several brothers asked Lin Erbao in a low voice.
Lin Erbao looked at Qin Yao deeply, "Are we really going to take him away?!"
Qin Yao nodded: "Take it away, I won't stop you."
Lin Erbao and the others: "."
Lin Erbao still felt a little scared when he thought about how Qin Yao had just lifted him up. He also didn't want to be known as a bully of women and children, so he just made up his mind.
All right, you two can just play double duty here. I want to see who is crying!
"Take him away!"
Lin Erbao gave an order and several brothers immediately pulled up Liu Ji, who was tied up like a dumpling on the ground, and carried him away.
After walking a few steps, he looked back to see Qin Yao's expression.
It turned out that Qin Yao was not moved at all.
This was the first time in Lin Erbao's life that he encountered such a thing. It is said that a night of love brings a hundred nights of affection, so how come this couple has no love left at all?
There were still four Liu children, but none of them came to stop him. How despised was Liu Lao San?
After watching Lin Erbao and his group carrying the struggling Liu Ji away, Liu Dalang looked at his stepmother in front of him and whispered,
"You just want to scare my father, you don't really want Lin Erbao and the others to kill him, right?"
Qin Yao: "No, I'm serious."
Four children: "."
Seeing Qin Yao dispersing the villagers who were watching the show, he picked up a hoe and two bags of unknown things and walked into the house.
The four Liu siblings looked at each other, and then the three brothers shouted "Dad!" and chased in the direction where Lin Erbao and others disappeared like crazy.
Unfortunately, he was too weak. After running only two steps, his legs became weak and he felt dizzy. He stopped under an old tree at the entrance of the village.
After a while, they all floated back dejectedly, looking at Qin Yao's busy back, stammering and not daring to say a word.
Following them came Old Man Liu and his two sons, who were panting and had just hurried back from the fields.
The world has just been settled and the troubled times have just passed.
The current population of Sheng State is sparse, so the farmers have been allocated a lot of land. Per person, each adult male has 50 mu, and each adult female has 20 mu.
Of course, taxes also increased.
The villagers of Liujia Village plant millet in spring and wheat in autumn. They are busy in the fields all year round, but the output is not much. With such hard work, they can barely support the whole family.
As the weather was getting colder, Old Man Liu dared not sit idle. He took his three sons to work in the fields before dawn.
The women in the family were not idle either. Old Man Liu's stepwife, Zhang, took her eldest and second daughters-in-law to clean up the house and went to the vegetable garden.
The mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law planned to harvest another crop of vegetables before winter came so that they could store them for the winter.
When Liu Ji was in turmoil, there was only an eight-year-old child looking after the house in the Liu family's old house.
When the villagers who came to report the news saw it, they hurriedly told the boy to call his uncles back, saying that his third uncle was about to be beaten to death by debt collectors.
The kid had heard his grandparents talk about his uncle's deeds and hated him very much. But when he knew that he was going to be beaten to death, he no longer cared about his hatred and hurriedly locked the door and went to the fields to look for the adults at home.
The mountain road was long, and by the time the baby brought the message and Old Man Liu and his three sons rushed over, the people at Liu Ji's door had already been dispersed by Qin Yao.
Instead of seeing Liu Ji, he only saw Dalang and his four siblings standing in the yard trembling in fear. Old man Liu felt a palpitation in his heart - he had a bad premonition.
"Da Lang, where is your father?"
Seeing that his father had been opening his mouth for a long time without any answer, Liu Ji's eldest brother Liu Bo could not wait any longer and asked first.
Dalang looked at his grandfather and uncles in front of him, then looked at Qin Yao in the room, and for a moment he didn't know how to start.
Could it be that my stepmother asked the debt collectors to carry my father away and kill him to pay off the debt?
Seeing that the four brothers and sisters were silent and just looking at the house, Old Man Liu waved his hand and the others walked towards the door.
The thatched hut where Liu Ji lived didn't even have earthen walls, so they just used river mud to paste the walls together.
There are two small houses like this. The kitchen is completely open-air and has a stove made of stones, a pot on the stove, and an empty vat next to the stove. There is not even a fenced yard, and everything is visible.
After walking a few steps, Old Man Liu and his two sons arrived in front of Qin Yao.
Old Man Liu had met the new wife that the third son had brought home once.
Three days ago, the shameless Liu Ji stayed in the yard of the old house, saying that he was going to the county town to pick up his wife. He "borrowed" ten cents and used the money to rent an ox cart from the rich man Wang next door, and rushed to the county to pick her up.
Liu Ji did not forget that he had his father as an elder in the family. He brought his new wife to the old house and kowtowed to old man Liu.
Yao Niang had fled here, she was penniless, wearing old clothes given to her by others, and she was very skinny.
At that time, Zhang, the stepmother-in-law, just shook her head. This little body was in great trouble. She didn't know if she could recover after following Liu Ji, such an unreliable man.
But the face looks very good, no wonder Liu Ji insisted on renting an ox cart to bring this pretty lady back.
"Dad, eldest brother, second brother, and younger uncle." Qin Yao called them one by one.
The Liu brothers nodded to her three times, which was quite polite.
Old Man Liu finally let out the breath he had been holding and asked with a straight face, "Where's that bastard, Old Third?"
Qin Yao first put the hoe in her hand behind the door. This was the most valuable item in the house.
Then he replied calmly: "I went to pay off my debts."
Liu Ji's second brother Liu Zhong asked: "How can he pay his debts if he spends every penny he has on buying half a plate of peanuts?"
Qin Yao raised her eyes, looked at the four men in front of her, and said calmly: "If you don't have money, pay with your life."
The four of them were horrified. What did this mean?
Qin Yao had no intention of explaining. She just continued, "If you want to redeem him, you can use the money to redeem him. I don't have a penny anyway."
The situation in this house was clear at a glance. Old Man Liu and the other three were unable to refute her words and were choked.
"Dad, let's go home and eat first. We need to take a rest at noon because we still have to go to the fields in the afternoon. Do we really need everyone to pay money to redeem that bastard? We don't have any money at home. Dad, wake up!"
Liu Fei, the fourth son of the Liu family, who was standing at the back, tried to persuade them in a bad mood.
He just turned fourteen this year and is the youngest in the family, the second born to Old Man Liu and Madam Zhang. His older brothers are much older than him and are always more yielding to him, so he has the biggest temper.
He didn't believe that Qin Yao, the new bride, was really willing to ignore her husband's life or death. So, if the other decent wives were not anxious, why should they be anxious? The family had already helped enough! The
Liu family's sons were named according to the ranking of Bo, Zhong, Shu and Ji. Liu Ji was the third, so he should have been named Liu Shu. However, after giving birth to three sons in a row, Old Man Liu didn't want any more sons, so he gave him the character Ji, indicating that he would stop here.
Who would have thought that after Liu Ji's biological mother died, Old Man Liu married Zhang, and they actually had another son.
Old man Liu was worried when he saw the boys in the family, but there was nothing he could do. He had already given birth to the boy, so how could he drown him?
Among his four sons, the eldest and second oldest were filial and hardworking. Even the youngest, the fourth, although he liked to fight for small profits on weekdays, he followed his father and brothers to work in the fields since he was eight years old.
The only thing is that the third child is a rebellious son. He has been disobedient since he was young. If you tell him to go east, he will go west. If you tell him to stand still, he will climb a tree!
(End of this chapter)