Chapter 13 The unexpected blow of puberty in the first quarter

In the spring of the fourth year from Yuan to Zhengzheng (AD 1344), Zhu Chongba was not yet sixteen years old. Now, he is only a third-year junior high school student, who is ignorant of the curiosity, sweetness, melancholy, puppy love and leaving home of adolescence. In the process of leaving.At the age of sixteen, he had suffered a violent blow of fate prematurely. As the saying goes, "the year of the sheep and horse is good for farming", but in 1343, the year of the sheep, there was no rain in the summer, and the grain production was reduced by half.In the next year, there will be no rain for several months.The ground cracked like a child's mouth, pouring a ladle of water on it, "Zi Zi" smoked.The crops are yellow and thin, and they refuse to leave the land.The so-called misfortunes never come singly. When people tried their best to save this crop, a huge locust plague hit, and the remaining green on the earth was also wiped out.

I didn't dare to put too much rice in the first place, so I put a bowl less at each meal.From the moment the vegetation turned green, people went out to scoop out wild vegetables, peel off bark, and eat them mixed in porridge.After eating two bowls of porridge with wild vegetables, he pissed all over again.People are dizzy with hunger.In the spring more than 600 years ago, if you walked into Fengyang, Anhui, you would see many people walking staggeringly, and even the young people sitting at the foot of the wall were so thin that their skin was wrinkled.The children's joints are protruding, their complexions are yellow and thin, and their eyes are getting bigger and bigger. They only have bulging stomachs. In fact, they are filled with sweet potato leaves and wild vegetable soup.

God is obviously trying to make things difficult for people.Just when people's bodies were extremely weak, the plague came again.Symptoms are sudden high fever, vomiting and diarrhea, and the person collapses quickly, and usually dies within three to five days.At the beginning, people didn't pay attention to it. When several new graves were added to the edge of each village, panic enveloped the whole Fengyang.People understand that this is another "receipt" from heaven.Many families packed up their parcels, locked their courtyard doors, and began to flee. Zhu Wusi has been fleeing all his life, now he is sixty-four years old, his beard and hair are white, his body is bent, and he really can't escape.The old man who has not had enough food for more than a month is extremely weak.Viruses accustomed to bullying the weak were the first to target him.The old man had a high fever all over his body, his throat was red and swollen, and he lay on the bed moaning in despair.Asking a doctor is too extravagant for this family. All they can do is burn two sticks of incense in front of Guanshiyin Bodhisattva, and then listen to the old man's groans and wait for him to die.

On the sixth day of April, May Fourth finally ended a lifetime of suffering and let go.However, for the Zhu family, this was just the beginning of the disaster.Just three days before his death on May 4th, Yuanzhang's elder brother Chongsi also collapsed, survived for six days amidst the cries of his sister-in-law, and passed away on the ninth day of April.The third on the death list is the eldest son of the eldest brother.Finally, on the 22nd, the fifty-nine-year-old mother Chen finally put an end to this list. In the blink of an eye, four of the nine members of the prosperous Zhu family died.Before the famine, the second sister-in-law and third sister-in-law had all died of illness, and the only son of the second brother also died young.Now, only Yuanzhang and his second brother Chongliu are left in the Zhu family, as well as his sister-in-law Wang Shi and her two young children.

Compared with uncle Zhu Wuyi's family, Zhu Yuanzhang's family is not the worst.Of the fourteen members of Zhu Wuyi's family, thirteen died in the catastrophe, and only Chong Wu's daughter-in-law, Tian Shi, escaped. From the moment he was born into this world, what Zhu Yuanzhang felt the most was the cruelty of this world.In this cold world, only the family brought a little warmth to Zhu Yuanzhang.Now, even this little bit of warmth and family affection is gone, and the only precious thing in his life has been deprived by fate.