Volume 1 Chushan Bandits Chapter 37: The Xu Clan Gathers at Jade Emperor Ridge
Not knowing whether any accidents would happen, Liu Qiong'er, Ge and Xiaohuan did not act separately. Instead, they followed Xu Wuliang to hide on the west bank of Baijian River before nightfall, waiting for Xu Huai and Su Di to sneak out of the military camp.
Afterwards, everyone set off for Lutai Village where the Xu family lived.
However, Lutai Village is located on the east side of Baijian River, and it is impossible to take a boat from the ferry at this time, so the road is difficult to travel.
The terrain near Huaiyuan Town is flat, compared to the rolling hills and valleys on both sides.
There was no ready-made road leading south along the west bank of the Baijian River from the military camp. The hills, valleys and gullies were crisscrossed and it was dark and there was no way to go. Even though we had prepared three horses, we could only lead them carefully and walk south among the calf-high reeds along the riverbed where the water had risen.
Fortunately, Xu Huai, Xu Wuliang and others were familiar with the terrain along the Baijian River. They stumbled all the way to Huangshi Beach, and then waded through the shallow water that was only thigh-deep to the east bank of the Baijian River.
Even a strong man like Xu Wuliang was exhausted at this time.
Fortunately, Su Di, Ge and Xiao Huan were all able to endure hardships and had good physical strength. Only Liu Qiong'er was frail and delicate, and the road was dangerous at night, and they were afraid that she would fall off the horse, so Xu Huai carried her on his back from beginning to end.
After crossing the Baijian River and walking about a mile east, you will reach the dirt road leading to Yuhuangling. At this time, it is only five or six miles away from the Lutai villages where the Xu family lives on the northern slope of Yuhuangling.
However, Xu Huai and his companions were not in a hurry to rush back to Lutai Village overnight.
Not only would they easily arouse suspicion if they suddenly rushed back to the village in the middle of the night in a disheveled state, but when the officials arrived at Yuhuang Ridge for confrontation, what words would they use to win the trust of their fellow villagers?
The more time came, the more they could not lose their composure. Xu Huai and his men changed into dry clothes and took a rest in the woods beside the dirt road.
After eating dry food in the early morning, Xu Huai, Su Di, Liu Qiong'er and Xu Wuliang's family of three rode three horses and headed for Lutai Village at the foot of the northern slope of Yuhuangling Mountain.
Huaiyuan Town is more than 20 miles away from Yuhuangling. They enter the village when the sun rises above the treetops, and then they can claim that they set out from Huaiyuan Town at daybreak.
Yuhuangling is one of the many ridges in the Nanling Mountains of Tongbai Mountain. It extends from southeast to northwest, stretching for eleven or twelve miles. Its west and south slopes are steep, while its east and north slopes are gentle.
In addition to the forest on the top of the north slope, the hillside is also covered with lush grass, with a few sturdy trees dotted here and there. It is a rare and excellent grassland in Tongbai Mountain.
At this time, hundreds of cattle and horses had been released and were grazing on the thriving weeds on the north slope . This was the basis for the Xu family to operate the mule and horse market in Huaiyuan, Biyang and other places.
At the edge of the grassland, there is a shallow stream flowing out from the southeast valley and merging into the Baijian River to the northwest; this is Qingliu Creek, a tributary of the Baijian River.
In the early years, Lutai Village was a group of villages where the Xu clan lived along the Qingliu River . Later, in order to prevent bandits and thieves, the clan members built earthen walls to enclose the villages and formed several earthen villages, collectively known as Lutai Village.
The dirt road leading out of Huaiyuan Town extends to the bank of Qingliu Creek, where there is a wooden bridge spanning the creek.
Lutai Village's main village is also the northern village of all the Lutai villages. It is just opposite the wooden bridge and is the largest in scale.
Xu Huai and his companions rode their horses up a gentle slope. On the other side of the Qingliu River was a rammed earth wall about two miles long, which enclosed two or three hundred courtyards of various sizes and was located at the foot of the northern slope of Yuhuangling.
The land along Qingliu Creek is relatively flat and close to water sources, so most of it has been reclaimed into fields. It is also one of the few cultivated areas near Yuhuangling. At this time, many tribesmen and farmhands working hard in the fields.
The Xu family is the most powerful with the head of the family, Xu Wufu, having many businesses in Huaiyuan Town and Biyang City. As a result, many clansmen and farmhands were sent out to manage these businesses.
In the past two days, seeing Xu Wuqi, Xu Wukun and others follow the head of the family Xu Wufu and his eldest son Xu Heng back to Yuhuangling, the clan members on the Yuhuangling side were naturally confused.
In the morning, they saw Su Di, Xu Huai, Xu Wuliang's family who usually didn't come back to the village, and the beautiful Liu Qiong'er rushing to the village. The tribesmen working in the fields also greeted them curiously, and even more curiously joked with Xu Huai: "Xu Huai hasn't been back to the village for a while, how come he got such a beautiful wife? It's true that fools have good fortune!"
Xu Wuliang prepared three horses overnight. Xu Wuliang and his wife Ge rode on one horse, Su Di and Xiaohuan rode on another horse, and Liu Qiong'er could only snuggle in Xu Huai's arms as they headed towards Lutai Village.
Xu Huai didn't mind riding on the same horse with Xu Wuliang, but the horse couldn't bear their weight.
Xu Huai stretched out his hand to grab Liu Qiong'er's waist, pushed her out of the saddle, and explained to the tribesmen in a stammering voice: "Miss Liu is not my wife; I don't want to find a wife, it's not fun at all!"
Liu Qiong'er sat on the bony horse's back with her buttocks, feeling uneasy, and pinched Xu Huai with her hands behind her back, saying in a low voice: "If you want to act stupid, can't you be gentle to me? What's not funny about me?"
"Oniang, Oniang, why are you back today?"
Su Di's father, Su Laochang, was a poor man. He had settled in Lutai Village over the years and rented land to farm. He was considered a farmhand of Xu Wufu's family, the eldest branch of the Xu family.
At that moment, he was taking Su Di and her twelve-year-old brother Su Shun to carry manure water to the fields. When he saw Su Di and Xu Huai rushing back to the farm early in the morning, he walked over barefoot and asked.
The Xu family were war refugees who fled from Yuzhou to Tongbai Mountain during the war in the previous dynasty. There were only two or three hundred of them at the beginning. At that time, the war in Tongbai Mountain had just ended and a plague had broken out. There were less than seven or eight households left near Yuhuangling and Qingliuxi, so the Xu family settled down here.
One hundred and fifty years have passed since then. The Xu family has grown to more than two thousand members, and together with families with smaller surnames, a total of three thousand people live in the four villages of Lutai. However, even though there are large tracts of grassland for grazing cattle and horses, it far exceeds the carrying capacity of the land.
Before Xu Huai's father's generation, more and more tribesmen were forced to leave Yuhuangling to make a living, but most of them still cultivated the barren sloping fields and lived a very hard life.
It was mid-spring and the weather was not very warm, but in order to save a pair of straw sandals, Su Di's father, Su Lao, always went to the fields barefoot, and his feet were full of chapped and cracked.
"Wu Jiang has been assigned recently and is not in the military camp, so I went back to the camp to stay for a few days," Su Di said to her father, and then she reached out and grabbed her brother Su Jun's ear and asked, "Why don't you go to the school now?"
The Xu family owns a lot of family property, all of which are under the management of the head of the family, Xu Wufu, and several elders. In addition to the expenses of providing relief to the orphans, the sick and the disabled in the family, autumn training to prevent bandits, repairing ancestral halls, village walls, and holding village community sacrifices, the North Village also set up a family school and a martial arts hall to accept children from the family and those from other families who are dependent on them.
This is also the main reason why the Xu family has strong cohesion in Tongbai Mountain, and the clan has played a role to some extent.
However, a boy is already half a strong laborer by the age of twelve or thirteen, and poor families do not expect their children to have any future by studying or practicing martial arts. After spending three or four years in school, they will almost always be sent to the fields to work in the fields, or find ways to learn a skill to make a living.
After Su Di married Xu Wujiang, she was still able to help her parents' family, but she hoped that her younger brother could study for a few more years, so that even if he could get a job in the inspection office or the county in the future, he could say goodbye to the fate of working in the fields and toiling all his life.
"What's the use of studying? I want to learn martial arts!" Su Xun said stubbornly.
In order to prevent the rebellion of the feudal lords, the independent country of the time used civil power to control military power.
Deng Gui was a genuine military scholar, but after wandering around for nearly twenty years, he was still only a ninth-rank inspector. Without special merits or vacancies, he could not be promoted, not to mention that in the officialdom, the status of a civil scholar was far higher than that of a military scholar.
Important military posts such as the commander-in-chief and the chief inspector who led the imperial guards were mostly held by scholars and civil officials. Even the possibility of eunuchs serving as commanders was much higher than that of military officials.
This led to many people who passed the military examination not joining the army in the end, but instead pursuing promotion as civil servants.
The military commander of a prefecture or county has always been a civil official of scholar origin, and the position is never easily granted to a military official.
This shows how big the gap is between learning martial arts and studying literature in today's world.
No matter how many bandits Xu Wujiang and other military leaders caught and killed in Tongbai Mountain, they would never be able to become high-ranking officials in this lifetime. The positions held by Jin Longquan and Xu Huai's father in the Jingsheng Army were the limit of what the martial arts students in Tongbai Mountain could see.
If conditions permit, Su Di would certainly hope that his brothers would study literature rather than martial arts.
However, now is not the time to dwell on this.
"When Wu Jiang accepted the assignment to leave the military camp, he said that his father was celebrating his 60th birthday today, and he wanted me to hurry back to prepare for the celebration - we just rushed back to the camp from Huaiyuan early in the morning. Dad, you and Su Xun should pack up quickly and go find Xu Sihu, Xin'an and their families, and ask them to go to the South Camp to help. Xu Huai and I will go to the South Camp to get busy first." Su Di said to her father.
"It's Old Man Xu's 60th birthday today? I haven't heard anyone mention it. Why did you rush back today? It's almost noon now, how can you have enough time to prepare?" Old Su asked in surprise.
The inspection team doesn't dare to travel at night, but they will most likely arrive before noon.
No matter what, even if it was a lie, they had to gather all the people and their families in the South Village first, so as to prevent the inspection team from having the opportunity to capture them directly.
If any of his family members fell into the hands of the Inspection Commission, it would be difficult to force Xu Wufu to go to the Inspection Commission in a tough manner to ask for the release of his family members.
"We have brought back everything we need to prepare from Huaiyuan," Xu Wuliang patted the large bamboo baskets covered with cloth hanging on both sides of the saddle and said, "Wujiang can't come back, so he specially invited Miss Liu, who just redeemed herself from Yuehonglou, to come and celebrate his father's birthday! Father Su, go and call someone quickly. My third uncle is very particular about the time. If anyone is a little slow, he will scold them for a long time..."
"Old man Xu has a bad temper!" Speaking of Xu Wujiang's father, Su Laochang was also dissatisfied and complained.
Su Di urged her father and brothers to accompany Xu Wuliang to call for help and make sure that Xu Xin'an and the families of the other soldiers were gathered in Nanzhai before the troops from the Inspection Office arrived; she, Xu Huai, Liu Qiong'er, Xu Wuliang's wife Ge and daughter Xiaohuan, took Xu Wujiang's letter and rushed to Xu Wujiang's home in Nanzhai to make sure that the cover of Xu Wujiang's father's sixtieth birthday would not be exposed.
What they can rely on now is mainly the support of the Xu clan. Regardless of whether this birthday banquet will be interrupted by the patrol officers, it must be held in a way that makes people believe it...
