Chapter 1238: Chapter 1237: Watching Road Construction_1 Chapter 1238: Chapter 1237: Watching Road Construction_1 Road construction was an extrely arduous task; first, it was necessary to fill all the pits and uneven spots on the road. After leveling, a mixture of li with stone materials would be spread over the path, stabilizing the soil to a depth of at least twenty to thirty centiters.
Then, green bricks would be laid on top, one by one, just like building a house.
At that ti, without machinery, every task required manpower. The stable soil, made from li and stone materials, had to be transported by pushcart. In the absence of enough livestock, people had to step in and haul the pushcarts themselves.
A cartload of soil could weigh several hundred pounds, so when pulling the pushcart, a person would use a rope, one end tied to the cart and the other end slung over their shoulder, proceeding forward with the force exerted through their shoulders as if they were beasts of burden.
In this way, hauling cartload after cartload, by the end of the day, one’s shoulders would be bruised from the rope, purple and green, with the slightest movent causing excruciating pain.
But who told you to commit a cri? Now that you’ve beco a convict, no matter how heavy the work, you would have to do it. If you were terribly exhausted on the first day, as long as you could still move on the second, you had to get up and work. Otherwise, the jailer’s whip would definitely be more ruthless than the rope.
As a young man, Sun Junyan belonged to the strong labor force, and the task of pulling the pushcart was his to do.
But he couldn’t manage it.
He spent ten years studying, but he neither succeeded in his studies nor maintained his physical fitness — even the task of hod-carrying with a basket was more than he could handle, let alone pulling a pushcart.
So the Sun Family switched roles with Sun Junyan: Sun Junyan took on the lighter tasks typically done by won while the Sun Family did the cart hauling.
The tiny fra of the Sun Family contained boundless energy; she took on the heavy labor that even n found overwhelming, and she carried on for several months.
Qiao Xiaomai, jealous of such maternal devotion, felt discontent in her heart; thus, early one morning, she and Tong Sanlang drove a horse cart to town.
She wanted to watch the Sun Family repairing the road.
The current section being constructed stretched from Bailu Town to Prefecture City. It had not been long since they started, only a few miles completed, and Qiao Xiaomai and Tong Sanlang quickly reached the construction site.
By then, so families had already finished harvesting their wheat and ca to do odd jobs. The working conditions for these laborers were very good; their pushcarts were pulled by animals, and they used shovels to load soil onto the carts, and upon reaching the destination, they rely had to unload, and that was it.
The work was easy, the food included stewed wild vegetables with dark cornbread and millet porridge, seasoned with oil, which was better than what the convicts were given.
Moreover, they received wages every evening, with no worry of delayed paynts.
For convicts, it was different; their als contained no other seasoning than salt, and without animals, they had no choice but to pull the carts themselves — truly living up to the bitterness the term “hard labor” implies.
When Qiao Xiaomai and Tong Sanlang arrived, the work had been underway for so ti. The convicts and common people were distinctly separated, one group working on the left side of the road and the other on the right, each keeping to their own place.
Qiao Xiaomai stood on the horse cart, looking towards the convicts’ side, trying to spot the Sun Family.
Tong Sanlang also stared intently at the coming and going convicts, wanting to catch sight of Cen Hong.
Back when Yang Wang was arrested, Cen Hong was too, and all of Cen Hong’s martial arts abilities were disabled — without doing so, ordinary shackles would not have held him.
The couple craned their necks for a while but did not spot the people they were looking for.
“Huh?” Just as Qiao Xiaomai was about to jump down from the horse cart to ask a jailer, her gaze fell upon a slightly familiar figure. “Isn’t that Zhao Lan, the one who wanted to ‘turn raw rice into cooked rice’ with you?”
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