Distant Mountain Battle Song

Chapter 233 There is no absolute kindness

All animals in the world are the same.

In a plentiful, stable, and peaceful environment, reproduction can occur very quickly.

The women in Yun Family Manor are a good example. When many women were slaves or living a life of hardship and displacement due to hunger, childbirth was a very difficult thing.

Since following Yun Ce to the north of the Great Wall, life has gradually stabilized, and food has gradually become plentiful. One after another, the women in the village have become pregnant.

Although there is a severe shortage of men in the manor, the scale of pregnancies among the women suggests that the moral standards of the people in the Yun family manor need improvement.

Feng An believes that the policies issued by the host family to care for pregnant women and reward childbirth are the culprits behind the current situation where many children's fathers are unknown individuals.

Yun Ce believed that those who exploit policy loopholes were not cunning people, but a group of clever people. Policies are made to be exploited. If someone can exploit a loophole, it means that the government's policies are flawed, not that the people exploiting the loopholes are flawed.

On Earth, a child takes ten months to gestate before being born. In the Han Dynasty, however, the days and nights are long, so the child is born after only seven months.

Nowadays, the specialty of Yun Family Manor is pregnant women. Pregnant women of different stages of pregnancy, with their bellies at different levels, can be seen everywhere in Yun Family Manor every morning, as long as the sun is out and it is not raining.

These women, who already lacked a sense of belonging, got pregnant so they could work less, eat better food, and enjoy themselves for several months without having to work. If they had enough breast milk, they could even work as wet nurses in the orphanage for another two months.

This period of time is enough for a smart person to get pregnant again.

I thought this situation was just a passing fad, and that it would gradually fade away once things got better at the resort.

Instead, even more women became pregnant, which made the entire Yun Family Manor very strange.

This made Cao Kun, who often visited the Yun family, look at Yun Ce with a very strange gaze.

"You don't actually think these children are all mine, do you?" Yun Ce said helplessly.

"I just want to know, why do you allow so many laborers to get pregnant?" Cao Kun didn't doubt it; he was just very puzzled.

"Giving birth is a woman's natural instinct; how can it be controlled?"

"Of course, men and women can be separated. With the help of strict laws and punishments, laborers will always be laborers and will not be excluded from laborers just because they are pregnant."

Also, there are too many women in your territory. If you let them continue like this, there will be more and more children in your territory, which will consume all the produce of your farm.

You also come from a noble family, surely you know the principle that manual labor is manual labor?

Yun Ce shook his head and said, "Our ancestors only said that having many children brings many blessings."

Cao Kun laughed loudly: "This means you can have more children, not that the laborers in the family can have more children. You should know that the laborers cannot have too deep a relationship. Once they have a deep relationship, they will easily band together. Once people band together, they can easily embezzle your interests behind your back."

Now, in Izumo Prefecture, there is a woman who was born a slave, named Red Girl, who led a group of slaves to occupy Izumo Prefecture.

Although Chuyun Prefecture was a deserted prefecture, not long ago, she actually led a group of slaves to slaughter Peng Dayong, the governor of Ning Prefecture, leaving him routed. Not only did she cause the near-total loss of three thousand elite soldiers at Longmen Post Station, completely severing Chuyun Prefecture's connection with the outside world.

Upon hearing this, Yun Ce laughed and said, "Is this why you didn't go to Chuyun Prefecture to search for the dragon?"

Cao Kun pondered for a moment and said, "Ningzhou is in chaos, and my Qiuhe Prefecture is too far away to help."

Yun Ce said, "Yes, it's too far away."

Cao Kun said softly, "My ambition lies in the Shehuo (a traditional folk performance) in Ningzhou."

Yun Ce shook his head and said, "I will not travel far for a long time. As you can see, my family is full of pregnant women and we have no strength to resist external enemies."

With me here, those women might still be able to give birth safely.

Cao Kun sighed and said, "Brother Yun, this is the kind of sentimentality a woman would show. It is not something a true man like us would do."

Yun Ce continued to shake his head and said, "No rush. The Yun family is not in such a hurry to expand. I am already very satisfied with the current situation. You should also know that a large family cannot become a towering tree without laying a foundation for decades or even hundreds of years."

Cao Kun said, "You may want a peaceful life, but others may not necessarily give you one."

Yun Ce laughed loudly: "Kill them if they come. If they are still not at peace, then kill them again. Slaughter them a hundred times, and the world will naturally be at peace."

Cao Kun was unimpressed by Yun Ce's murderous words, but he could tell that Yun Ce was unwilling to serve the Cao family any longer and was very determined to do so.

He stopped talking to Yun Ce about Ningzhou Shehuo and continued to talk about the large number of pregnant women in the Yun family in a joking manner.

Yun Ce did not take the implied threat in Cao Kun's words to heart. At present, the Yun family is just a broken pot, and there is no need for the Cao family, a precious gem, to deliberately come near it.

After reiterating that Yun Ce must attend his wedding, Cao Kun flew away on a Xintianyou (a type of ancient Chinese wind instrument). This time, he did not stay to eat the noodles with minced meat sauce that Yun Ce had so strongly recommended.

Relationships between people are always full of twists and turns. Yun Ce believes that, given the current rapid advance of the Cao family, they are likely to become the first major force to be besieged by everyone.

When Dong Zhuo entered Chang'an, he was incredibly arrogant. When he died, the oil lamp lit on his navel illuminated the shattered sky of the Han Dynasty.

If the Cao family doesn't know how to conceal their true strength, given their control of three provinces, they will eventually be feared by all the surrounding governors. The Yun family must maintain a certain degree of independence. If they have nothing better to do than follow Cao Kun around aimlessly and get involved in Cao family's private affairs, then even if they are not actually allied with Cao family, they will be perceived as being in cahoots.

Instead of running around with Cao Kun, it would be better to stay home and watch the crops grow strong, watch your wife's belly grow bigger and bigger, and watch the pregnant women in the village give birth to many new male offspring.

Yun Ce didn't listen to a single word of Cao Kun's methods of managing a household.

What is labor? It is actually a variation of the three tools we learned about in political class: tools that can talk, tools that moo, and tools that cannot talk.

In Cao Kun's words, the pregnant women in his household were like talking tools.

The Han Dynasty was a place with a clear hierarchy.

Slaves and vagrants were never treated well.

Perhaps for a very long time, no one has treated those unfortunate slaves and refugee women as human beings. They have very little affection for the children they give birth to, and simply regard the children as tools for them to make a better life.

As soon as a child is born, they are sent to an orphanage. When they get a little older, they are sent to a juvenile detention center. After the child leaves the juvenile detention center, they are assigned to various places. If the child is found to have martial arts talent, the treatment will be even better.

This is why the women of Yun Family Manor were willing to have children.

Learned and knowledgeable people would despise Yun Ce's decrees, feeling that he was treating these women like livestock.

Women who had been slaves or refugees for many years did not see it that way. Compared to the endless hard labor and the constant hunger and cold, the reward of six months of relaxation during pregnancy and the life of eating well and doing nothing all day long were especially important to them.

Such measures were hard for the Han people to understand. Even the kind-hearted Feng An and Liang Kun thought it was inappropriate to do so, as it was too good to them and would only breed a group of lazy people.

Yun Ce didn't care about this; he insisted that there were no lazy people on his farm.

A day in the Great Han Dynasty is too long. You can't define someone who works in the fields or in the village for more than sixteen hours a day as lazy, especially since they work all year round.

The reason these women are rushing to have children is simply because they were too exhausted in the past and never truly enjoyed their lives.

This is why we see pregnant women everywhere.

The dog had already tested it and found that the physical condition of the people here was not much different from that of the people in the ancestral land. In fact, when it came to resisting certain extreme climates and environments, they were not as strong as the people in the ancestral land.

The management system that Yun Ce implemented at Yun Family Manor was actually the management system of a state-owned farm.

This management method isn't exactly advanced, but it's very effective at managing a group of unlucky people.

The collective provided them with a great sense of security, and the relatively fair distribution also reduced their resentment.

Although Eji's belly was flat, she joined the ranks of pregnant women sunbathing early on. Whenever she appeared, countless pregnant women would gather around her.

It's said that it's unlucky for pregnant women to meet each other, but clearly, Eji didn't care. Unlike Zhang Min, she never thought that the children in these women's wombs would harm her child.

On the contrary, the children in these women's wombs will be a help to their future children.

With the arrival of children, the dinner table at Yun Ce's house finally became peaceful. Zhang Min and E Ji's relationship, which had been cold not long ago, quickly warmed up and they became best friends who could talk about anything.

It's Yun Ce; nobody's paying attention to him anymore.

The chestnut horse didn't want to pay any attention to Yun Ce. It was very busy, really busy, being chased by a chestnut-colored Thunder Smoke Beast all day long. It seemed that it was already a bit overwhelmed.

A horse's estrus cycle is very short. After three days, the chestnut horse returned to its original single state. If it wants to rekindle its old flame with that thunder beast, it may have to wait until next year.

When Yun Ce went to check on the female beast, he found her lying obediently on the ground, her big, wet eyes no longer following the chestnut horse, but leisurely looking at the white clouds on the horizon.

Yun Ce took out two beans and stuffed them into the mother beast's mouth. The mother beast chewed the beans calmly, seemingly having forgotten about Shen Tingyu's existence.

"What if this horse runs back?" Gouzi asked abruptly.

"So what if we run back?" Yun Ce said nonchalantly.

"Wouldn't you be at a loss then?"

"So what if we lose money? The child was born to someone else and belongs to them."

"Of all the ferocious beasts, you always seem to treat the Thunder Smoke Beast differently. Don't forget, there are many other savage beasts on the wasteland that you've chained up. Why don't you treat them as kindly as you do?"

When Yun Ce saw the chestnut horse's long face appear on the low wall, he stood up, stroked it, and laughed, "Because of my preference."

It's unclear whether the chestnut horse understood Yun Ce's words, but it also neighed and laughed twice.

　and also.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)