Around them, sobs of women were occasionally heard.
Everyone’s faces were expressions of pain, grimy and dirty, they had already exerted all their strength.
Yet, it was to no avail!
"Dongfeng, everything’s gone. What do we do next?" another man beside the burly man asked.
The burly man, with a face that carried years of hardship yet looked bold and generous, had thick, powerful eyebrows.
He frowned, and his body, which had been stiff, moved.
He walked into the barren paddy field, pushing a tractor to start plowing.
With a pull of the rope.
The tractor started, and the burly man held onto the handle, pushing it forward.
Others nearby looked at him puzzled, not knowing what Dongfeng was now up to. Only one man, who exuded the air of a scholar, seemed to understand and hooked a smile at the corner of his mouth.
But most were clueless about what Dongfeng intended to do, so they asked:
"Dongfeng, the rice has been eaten by locusts. What are you doing?"
"Dongfeng, what are you doing this for?"
Many wore puzzled looks and called out to Dongfeng.
Dongfeng didn’t look back; only after he made a round and came back did he stop and twist a button to turn off the tractor.
He told everyone in front: "It’s May now; if we hurry, we can still plant early rice. Everyone, quickly work on raising seedlings and plowing."
Upon hearing this, the previously despairing and gloomy hearts of the people seemed to be illuminated by a beam of light.
This beam of light, like a gentle stream, moistened their parched hearts.
Exactly! The locusts have come, the locust plague has erupted, but they still have hope.
Last year, because they were backed by Poyang Lake, they could still grow crops in the scorched hot weather.
Only occasionally would zombies surface from the water, catching them off guard.
They had taken significant risks, many had died, but they finally built a somewhat robust and sturdy protective system.
Although they still had some food reserves, it was barely enough for them, and there used to be a few survivor groups nearby, but in the end, they did not make it through.
They used to shelter some survivors, but later on, due to food shortages, they stopped taking in more people.
Although they had some food reserves, it was enough only for a few months; if the early rice failed to grow and was not harvested, the hundreds of them would starve.
Hearing the firm words of the burly man, everyone regained confidence.
But there were some pessimists who asked:
"What if the locusts return? Wouldn’t our effort be wasted!?"
Dongfeng took a gulp of water, sweat dripping onto his broad chest, and said faintly:
"Then we plant again. Should we just wait here to die if we don’t?"
Then, another person asked, "Dongfeng, Ma Jun and his group might come to trouble us again, considering this locust plague has surely impacted them as well."
Dongfeng thought for a moment and said to the man: "Then we fight them. Don’t be afraid of them, the more we fear them, the more arrogant they become.
Our days have improved a lot compared to before, we were bullied by the prison near the southern provincial capital city, forced to yield under the mantis gang.
Since the last torrential rain, when I took Xiaolong there, I found that everyone in that prison had died!"
People around began to discuss fervently.
They had been curious why they hadn’t seen those bad people from the prison for so long, turns out they were all killed.
"Who killed them? That was too fierce?!"
"Good riddance! These oppressors, relying on their guns, bullied us, robbed our food. Good that they are dead!"
"Hahaha, they finally got what they deserved. Good riddance!"
Dongfeng recalled the scene he saw around the prison when he took people there to check, and he felt a bit fearful.
Mountains of zombie corpses, all dead.
And inside the prison, those inmates were also dead.
The whole prison was like a ghost town, with blood and corpses everywhere.
Recalling the scene, Dongfeng couldn’t help but wonder:
Who were those hateful killers? Too violent, too brutal!