Chapter 72 The Storm Is Coming

Er Gouzi got three corpses of locust monsters this time, one one foot long and two two feet long.

If they are used separately, six geese can be evolved into spirit beasts.

However, he was partial when distributing them.

He was more partial to the goose that had experienced life and death with him and had been in prison with him.

He gave the two-foot-long corpse of the insect king to this goose.

After eating the insect corpse, the goose began to lose feathers again and its body size increased dramatically.

Two more feathers like steel were added to the tip of the wings.

The two new feathers are harder and sharper.

Now this goose is the largest and strongest, and has become the leader of this group of geese.

After feeding this goose, the remaining two insect kings were divided into four parts, and four more geese were evolved into spirit beasts.

Now he has a total of 42 geese, seven of which are already spirit beasts, and their strength is about the same as that of Qi training monks.

After raising so many geese, they can't always be idle.

Today, Er Gouzi rode on the Goose King, followed by more than 20 geese, and flew down Shekou Mountain together.

Qiuyue had already brought hundreds of people, holding bamboo brooms and other tools, waiting here for a long time.

Although I have seen it many times, every time I see the spectacular scene of Er Gouzi leading a group of geese to fly out, I still feel very shocked.

Qiuyue was chopped by Captain Wang last time, and was seriously injured and lay in bed for half a month.

Er Gouzi also went to the county town to buy a bunch of healing medicines to treat the dozen injured people.

The money spent on buying healing medicines is much more than the money spent on buying them.

"Boss, everything is ready!"

"Okay, follow me, let's go!"

Er Gouzi led the geese and did not fly too far, but stopped on a relatively flat barren mountain.

After arriving at the barren mountain, Er Gouzi took out a large clay jar from the gourd.

The jar was planted with the white demon fruit tree.

He put the demon-transforming fruit tree into the gourd, and it can grow normally like outside.

However, it needs to be watered once a day to maintain a 10-fold growth rate, which is more troublesome.

He came to this barren mountain today to attract some locusts.

Autumn is coming soon, and no matter how crazy the locust plague is, it will end when the weather gets cold.

But now there is no food to buy, and there are so many people under his command. To survive the whole winter, a large amount of food must be stored.

Er Gouzi can only set his sights on locusts.

The demon-transforming tree was placed on the top of the mountain. About an hour later, a small swarm of insects was attracted by the demon-transforming fruit tree and came to the door.

Before the men took action, the swarm of insects had been eliminated by the geese.

Qiuyue and the others only needed to sweep up the locusts on the ground, and they simply harvested a few buckets of food.

Not long after, a group of even bigger locusts came to the door...

In this way, Er Gouzi and the goose worked for more than two months and finally saved more than 100 stones of locusts.

With some food saved before, it should be enough for half a year.

At the same time, he also captured two more locust kings.

He shared them with the goose and now has 11 spirit beast-level geese.

Now that the weather is getting colder, the locust plague that has ravaged several counties has finally stopped.

But the situation has not improved, but worse, because except for a few landlords, everyone has no food.

On this day, he just came back from outside, and Huang Laocai came to him.

Huang Laocai was holding a string of pork fat in his hand, and he smiled and gave the pork to Er Gouzi as soon as he met.

This look reminded Er Gouzi of the first time he went to Huang Laocai's house to rent land.

He also bought a string of fat meat for Huang Laocai at that time.

"Master Zhang, I want to ask you for a favor."

"What is it?"

As for Huang Laocai, Er Gouzi was willing to help him if he could.

"It's like this. It's been too chaotic recently. I want to move my whole family to the foot of Shekou Mountain to live for a while."

"Master Zhang, don't worry. I'll move back immediately after the drought ends."

Although Huang Laocai has no land now, he has accumulated wealth for many years, so naturally there is still some surplus wealth hidden in his family.

There are too many bandits now. Maybe one day they will rush into the village and rob his house.

After robbing the money, maybe they will rape him, kill some people, and set fire.

Here in Shekou Mountain, at least there is the scholar here, so it's safer.

"No problem, you can move here."

For this small request, Er Gouzi agreed without any hesitation.

The next day, Huang Laocai built a shed at the foot of Shekou Mountain and moved here with his family.

Seeing Huang Laocai's move, Ah Hu followed suit and asked to move to the foot of Shekou Mountain.

Although his family had no money, they could squeeze out two taels of oil from a dry bamboo pole. No matter how poor they were, they could still make some money and food by scraping the land.

Moreover, he also harvested some corn and sesame this year.

Er Gouzi agreed to this.

Other tenants in the village followed suit and came to ask Er Gouzi for help.

As a result, more than 20 thatched houses were built at the foot of Shekou Mountain.

Now it is getting more and more chaotic, and Er Gouzi wants to make some weapons for his men to defend themselves.

I went to Sanchazi Town two days ago and wanted to buy some iron ingots from the blacksmith shop.

I found that the blacksmith shop had been closed for a long time, and it was empty inside, without a piece of iron.

Nowadays, apart from the refugees, there are few normal people.

The door of the old scholar who served as the township chief in the town was open, and the house had long been occupied by refugees and turned upside down.

The rest of the wealthy families in the town either moved to the county town to avoid disaster, or they were finished.

These refugees were hungry, and no matter who you were, they broke through the door, robbed money, food, and women.

The refugees were addicted to robbing, and they gathered together to become bandits. Wherever they went, they killed and robbed, and destroyed families. They were more harmful than locusts.

At present, there are such bandits everywhere in Anchang County, with large and small scales, strong and weak.

Among the stronger bandit leaders, there are even cultivators.

There are also two such mountain bandits around Sanchazi Town.

One of the bandits is called Chuang Potian, which has gathered thousands of people. It is said that the leader is a cultivator.

There is another mysterious group, without a name, whose leader is unknown, and each of them has a black cloth wrapped around his head, so everyone calls them the Black Scarf Bandits.

The situation is so chaotic now, and Er Gouzi feels insecure.

He can hide in the mountains and not come down, with food and drink, and no one can do anything to him.

But the people he bought back are all women and children, the youngest are only a few years old, and there are no more than 100 men.

But he has more than 100 young girls and more than 100 young wives.

After those mountain bandits robbed money and food, they were full and warm and lustful, and his Shekou Mountain became the fattest piece of meat in the troubled times.

Er Gouzi wanted to buy more iron ingots and let Huang Fugui make them into weapons and distribute them to everyone for self-defense.

Unexpectedly, he went to several places and only bought more than 200 kilograms of iron in total.

Salt and iron have always been important resources.

Now there are bandits and mountain bandits everywhere, and coupled with the strict control of the government, iron has become more scarce and difficult to buy.

After giving the iron to Huang Fugui, he could only forge some knives and a bunch of spears.

At least most people had weapons in their hands.

All these weapons were distributed, and those who were not enough were replaced with wooden sticks and bamboo poles.

Er Gouzi had been buying people before, and he bought more than a thousand people in total.

There were five or six hundred people over the age of eight, all of whom were considered to be combat-capable people. Now all these five or six hundred people were equipped with weapons.

Based on the previous experience of sweeping locusts, he reorganized these people in the way of the army.

Among them, the male adults over the age of 14 barely gathered 100 people, and each of them was given an iron spear, and some were also given knives, which was considered the most elite hundred-man team.

Those wives and young girls gathered three teams of 100 people, and only half of them got iron weapons, and the rest used wooden sticks and bamboo poles.

Although they were all women, they all came from poor families and could work in the fields like men since childhood.

In terms of strength, they were not much worse than men.

The remaining 100-odd people, men and women, were all over 8 years old and had not yet grown up.

They could only use relatively light long bamboo poles as weapons.

Each team of 100 people had a captain and a squad leader for easy management.

Then, Er Gouzi taught them some simple basic movements such as stabbing, chopping, smashing, sweeping, etc., and asked them to practice every day.

Born in troubled times, these people practiced very seriously and hard.