"Open the door! Is anyone inside? Hurry up and open the door!" The sound of pounding on the door echoed in the corridor. Two young soldiers with Mauser rifles were ordered to go from house to house, clearing out the leaflets of surrender thrown by the Tang Army.
Indeed, this was the third ti the Tang Army had dropped leaflets of surrender recently. Although their destructiveness was very low, their impact was imnse.
Nowadays, Ruoslaina people are in a panic, the entire city is shrouded in a worrying atmosphere of gloominess. Chaos seems imminent, a strange aroma pervades the air, needing just a spark to ignite and evolve into a terrifying explosion.
"We are only responsible for collecting enemy-scattered leaflets! Please open the door and cooperate." Before the door was closed, the soldier’s weary voice continued.
The man just went to open the door, handing over several leaflets from the Tang Army he picked up. These leaflets weren’t well printed, nor did they have any new tricks.
They only said the Tang Army had started heading south, and the Elf Troops were instantly routed. If you don’t want to die in vain, surrender quickly. The Tang Army promises not to kill the innocent.
But these lukewarm words couldn’t stir up much trouble in the Elf Main City, which hadn’t faced a real war for centuries: compared to the fear of death, the elves seed to fear being ruled by humans more.
After closing the door, the shouting in the corridor beca much quieter. The man walked back to the dining table, pulled out a wooden chair, and sat down.
The woman was looking after her two still underage children, serving food while complaining, "When will these days co to an end..."
The children might still be carefree, enjoying their delicacies with their heads down, unaware that the food at ho was nearly exhausted, or how dangerous the outside world really was.
The man looked at the other leaflets on the table, feeling uneasy in his heart. Yesterday, he was supposed to go out to earn money, but ended up encountering soldiers recruiting by force, picked up these leaflets on his way back escaping.
In fact, these leaflets weren’t completely useless. There were rumors that as long as you had this thing, you could save your life when the Tang Army entered the city. So said the Tang Army, after occupying so cities, would use this to exchange for relief food.
Anyway, preserving a few certainly wouldn’t hurt. Now, soldiers collecting these leaflets aren’t very strict, as long as you hand over a few, they would easily leave.
But with the change in the war situation, the complexity would arise: soon enough, soldiers conscripting by force might start knocking on doors. Then he would have nowhere to hide, offending those soldiers with guns wouldn’t be a good thing.
Thinking of this, the man sighed and said, "Alas, don’t ntion it. The food at ho is about to run out, yet this war, who knows when it will end."
Honestly, in recent years, the life of the Elf Race has not entirely stagnated. At least in Ruoslaina, many streets now have electric lights, and many households have small gadgets like radios.
But compared to the Great Tang Empire, such progress seems quite insignificant, and the exploitation by traditional nobility also makes it difficult for the Elf people’s path to prosperity.
The woman filled a bowl for the man, a mushy soup made from beans. This stuff looked unappetizing, people of the Great Tang Empire haven’t seen similar things on the dining table for a long ti.
There’s no choice, food can directly reflect the degree of economic developnt of a region: the more developed a region once was, the more advanced culinary culture it has.
Relatively, mushy substances are considered more backward in content, often appearing in tis of food scarcity. When food is abundant, people prefer more quality food that looks ’dry.’
The woman handed the bean mush, with little seasoning and quite ordinary taste, to the man, embarrassingly explaining, "I went to the market to buy flour today, guess what? The price doubled again! It increased, but the key is it’s sold out."
Their family in Ruoslaina was relatively well-off, the woman’s father was a carpenter, and she herself was a teacher.
Before the war broke out, the man eating bean soup was a workshop manager in a factory. After the war broke out, his factory was taken over by the military, and he, a small manager, was replaced by a military appointee.
This matter is quite helpless. Their factory, because of its production relevance to the military, was among the first batch of requisitioned and controlled companies, he thus vaguely returned ho.
Later, as more and more enterprises were requisitioned, the military couldn’t send any capable officers to take over. Instead, many forr managent personnel within factories were retained.
It ans he was rather unlucky, actually not needing to go ho, yet ending up becoming a jobless idle person at ho: now with the frontline tensions, he, losing the factory’s support, was very prone to being recruited to the frontline.
So, more than work and inco, he now mostly needed to be wary of those recruiting departnt minions wandering the streets.
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