The Fierce Teacher of Zhenguan: Starting with Teaching the Crown Prince to Make a Comeback

Chapter 135 I hereby swear that I will overcome this hardship together with the people of Shandong!
A small but highly capable team left Chang'an and headed towards Shandong.

Li Chengqian's departure from the capital was not a big fuss; in fact, it was rather quiet.

Following the research method taught by Li Yichen during his last time accompanying the Crown Prince—"When you go out, observe the wind; when you stay, observe the situation. Do not rely on your status; you must get close to the dust."

He did not notify the prefectures and counties along the way in advance. Often, it was only when the procession arrived at the city walls that the local officials were in a panic to welcome the arrival of the crown prince.

Li Chengqian never stayed in the city. Instead, he would choose a place outside the city to camp, stay briefly, ask a few questions about local customs and grain prices, inspect the Ever-Normal Granary, and then set off again.

The entourage was streamlined, consisting of essential officials from the Eastern Palace, some Ministry of Works officials skilled in construction and warehousing, the elite Crown Prince's Guard, and a mixed contingent of elite cavalrymen personally appointed by the Emperor.

Li Yichen blended into the ranks of the officials of the Eastern Palace, dressed in a blue robe and a small hat, and was completely inconspicuous.

Throughout the journey, he had almost no direct communication with the Crown Prince, and they rarely even made eye contact.

Everyone stayed true to their duties, and the schedule was packed.

The further east you travel, the thinner the fertile air that originally belonged to the Guanzhong Plain becomes, replaced by a subtle sense of anxiety and unease.

At first, the fields on both sides of the official road still showed some green of the late crops, but gradually the green became sparse and mottled, as if it had been devoured by an invisible giant mouth.

As they entered the edge of Henan Province and were about to step into Shandong territory, the scene before them completely changed.

No longer just a few scattered refugees, groups of disaster victims began to appear on the official roads.

Like a swarm of ants being driven away, they carried the old and the young, staggering along, moving slowly and desperately in the opposite direction from Li Chengqian's group—to the west.

The dust kicked up by the carriages and horses, mixed with the stench of their sweat and an indescribable sense of decay, permeated the sweltering air.

Li Chengqian ordered the troops to slow down and make way for the main road.

He sat in a specially made carriage with slightly better shock absorption, his fingers gripping the edge of the window tightly, his knuckles turning white from the force.

Through the lifted carriage curtain, his gaze was fixed intently on the disaster victims.

This was the first time in his life that he had seen the concrete image represented by the word "disaster victims" so clearly and on such a large scale.

The words "displaced" and "starving" from the books now transformed into the ashen, numb faces before my eyes.

Most of the men were shirtless, their ribs protruding, their skin tanned dark and shiny by the sun, their eyes vacant, as if all their vitality had been drained away during this long escape.

The women were dressed in tattered clothes, barely covering their bodies, and held their dying children in their arms. The children's heads drooped limply, too weak to even cry.

The elderly people leaned on tree branches, their steps unsteady, as if they would collapse to the ground at any moment and never get up again.

He saw a mother sitting in the dust by the roadside, holding a baby, motionless, like a statue.

A slightly older child next to her tugged at her sleeve in vain, letting out a weak whimper like a kitten.

The mother's eyes were utterly lifeless, not even despairing, as if everything had been burned away.

He saw a group of about a dozen disaster victims surrounding a disabled wheelbarrow, on which lay an elderly man barely breathing.

They tried to carry the cart in turns, but each of them staggered and had to stop to catch their breath after only a short distance, their faces filled with the pain of being caught in a dilemma.

A faint, unpleasant odor drifted through the air, like the smell of something rotting, mixed with the sour stench of disease.

Li Chengqian felt a churning in his stomach.

He tried to suppress his discomfort, but his chest felt like it was blocked by a huge rock, making it almost impossible to breathe.

He knows he should pay attention to people's livelihood, understands the principle that "the people are the foundation of the state," and even recently discussed "what is the people."

But when this stark reality, built from countless hardships, crashed into his eyes without any concealment, the shock and pain that came from the depths of his soul was far beyond what any words or dreams could compare to.

This was not idle talk in a side hall of the Eastern Palace, nor was it cold, hard numbers on a memorial. These were his people, the very foundation of the Tang Dynasty, collapsing and vanishing before his very eyes in an extremely tragic manner.

"Stop...stop."

Li Chengqian's voice was somewhat hoarse, with a slight, almost imperceptible tremor.

The carriage slowly stopped.

He struggled to get out of the carriage with the help of a palace attendant.

He felt a familiar throbbing pain in his right ankle, but he was completely unaware of it at the moment.

Several officials from the Crown Prince's Palace and the Ministry of Works who were accompanying him immediately surrounded him, their faces showing solemnity and reluctance.

"Your Highness, this place is not safe to stay for long. The gathering of refugees could lead to unrest. Perhaps..."

An official from the Crown Prince's Office offered a low remonstrance, his eyes scanning the surrounding gazes—a mixture of bewilderment, awe, and a hint of greed—with wariness.

Li Chengqian ignored him and looked past his subordinates, his gaze landing on an old man not far away who was scooping water from a murky puddle by the roadside with a broken earthenware pot.

The puddle was covered in green foam, and there was animal droppings nearby.

"Send someone to ask them where they came from and what their situation is."

Li Chengqian commanded in a low voice.

A quick-witted palace guard took the order and soon returned with a middle-aged man with a withered face and sunken eyes.

When the man saw Li Chengqian's entourage, he trembled with fear and knelt on the ground, kowtowing repeatedly.

"No...don't be afraid,"

Li Chengqian tried his best to keep his tone calm.

"I was sent by the imperial court to provide disaster relief. Are you from Caozhou or Puzhou? What is the situation like in your hometown?"

The man raised his head, two streams of hot tears rolling down his cloudy eyes, his voice hoarse like a broken gong.

"Your Honor... Your Honor! I... I escaped from Juancheng in Puzhou... I can't live anymore! Locusts... Locusts are coming! It's dark already! They're so dense, like dark clouds, falling down, crackling and snapping... In no time, the crops in the fields, not even the stalks, are gone... completely gone!"

As he spoke, he became emotional, gesturing with his hands and trembling violently.

Another official from the Ministry of Works, responsible for warehousing, frowned and asked, "The government hasn't organized any suppression? What about the public granaries? Haven't they opened them to distribute grain?"

"Fight? How do we fight?" The man's face showed an expression that was even more painful than crying.

"At first, we fought them, and the county magistrate even gave an order: deliver a certain number of locusts in exchange for some millet... but the more we fought them, the more they multiplied, covering the sky and the earth!"

"Later...later there was no rice to exchange. The granary? That little bit of grain was gone before we even had a chance to smell it...The constables in the yamen all said there was no grain left, and told us to find our own way..."

He continued, panting heavily, "We ate everything—tree bark, grass roots, everything edible. Then...then I heard that some people ate those locusts, and...they vomited and had diarrhea, and within two days...they were gone!"

"They say it's the Locust God's wrath, so we dare not touch it anymore! There's really no way to survive, we can only flee... flee west, I heard there's grain in Guanzhong, there might be a way to survive..."

The officials fell silent.

The situation was worse than they had anticipated.

It wasn't just the locust plague itself that was destructive, but also the collapse of order and the loss of hope caused by inadequate disaster relief. As Li Chengqian listened, his heart sank deeper and deeper.

He recalled Li Yichen's discussion about the culling tools, about lime, and even about that shocking "eating locusts" theory.

Faced with such a reality, those seemingly ingenious strategies appear so pale and powerless, yet so...urgent.

"Have many people died along the way?" Li Chengqian's voice was hoarse.

The man nodded blankly and pointed to the way he had come.

"At first they buried them... but then they ran out of strength... so they were found by the roadside, in ditches... In some villages, almost everyone was wiped out..."

A chill rose from Li Chengqian's tailbone and instantly spread throughout his body.

While Li Chengqian was questioning his subordinates and deeply moved, Li Yichen did not remain among the officials.

Under the pretext of observing the ravaged vegetation along the roadside, he quietly moved closer to the group of disaster victims.

He didn't attract attention like the crown prince; he simply walked and observed in silence, etching one cruel detail after another into his mind.

The historical records, which only briefly mention "giant locusts" and "cannibalism," now unfold in their entirety, in suffocating detail.

He saw a child curled up on his mother's back, his head drooping limply, his eyes half-open but without any spirit, only a swarm of flies stubbornly buzzing around the corner of his festering eye.

The mother seemed to have gotten used to it, and was too weak to even try to shoo it away.

He saw a corpse that had been almost completely devoured by wild dogs. The remaining fragments of clothing were enough to make it appear as if the body belonged to an ordinary farmer. The corpse lay exposed in the weeds, unattended.

The faint, rotten smell in the air originated from this.

He saw several disaster victims sitting around a small bonfire, with a broken earthenware pot on top of it, boiling something black and unrecognizable, like peeled tree roots mixed with some clay.

Their eyes were fixed on the churning, murky liquid, filled with a wild, animalistic desire.

Li Yichen's stomach suddenly spasmed.

As a modern soul, he had seen poverty, but he had never faced such a utter and primal existential predicament so directly.

Modern disaster relief has a well-established system, rapid logistics, and professional medical care, but here, there is only the most naked struggle for life and death, and the veneer of civilization is completely stripped away.

His mind was racing, not only assessing the disaster but also anticipating potential crises.

The word "epidemic prevention" sounded like an alarm bell in his mind.

Such a large-scale population gathering and migration, lack of clean drinking water and food, extremely poor sanitation, and corpses left exposed and not disposed of in a timely manner—this was simply a breeding ground for plague.

Cholera, typhoid, dysentery... any outbreak of infectious disease can be more deadly than a locust plague itself.

He noticed that many disaster victims were drinking water from obviously unclean sources by the roadside.

He saw children urinating and defecating anywhere, and flies buzzing among the crowd.

He smelled the increasingly strong stench of decay, which came not only from animals but also very likely from unburied corpses.

"We must establish quarantine zones as soon as possible... even the simplest ones."

Li Yichen silently recited it in his heart.

"Designate clean water sources, boil them centrally, and then distribute them. The corpses must be buried immediately and deeply, covered with lime. Patients with diarrhea and fever need to be isolated… Also, those who have been poisoned by eating locusts are probably not just dealing with toxins; unclean handling methods could also lead to bacterial infections…"

He observed the expressions of the disaster victims. Besides numbness and despair, some people's faces began to flush abnormally, or their eyes became unfocused, which made the alarm bells in his heart grow even sharper.

The first signs of an epidemic may have already appeared.

He could not tell Li Chengqian these thoughts directly at this moment.

He could only keep these details and judgments firmly in mind, waiting for the right opportunity to integrate them into the disaster relief strategy in a way that aligns with the understanding of this era.

At this moment, an official from the Eastern Palace hurriedly returned from scouting ahead, his face even more grim, and whispered a report to Li Chengqian and several key officials.

"Your Highness, we've discovered an abandoned village ten miles ahead...and the situation inside is even worse."

Looking at the endless stream of refugees before him, at the faces filled with despair, and listening to his subordinates' reports on the horrific scene at the front, Li Chengqian recalled Li Yichen's descriptions of "frozen bones" and "the sale of wives and children"...

So this is the true hardship of the "people"!

This is the weight that Li Chengqian, as the crown prince of the Tang Dynasty, must face and bear!
"Pass on the order!" Li Chengqian's voice no longer trembled, but instead carried a cold, resolute power, breaking the surrounding tragic atmosphere.

"Full speed ahead! Reach the nearest town where we can set up camp before nightfall!"

His gaze swept over the group of officials, finally settling on the Ministry of Works official and several officials from the Eastern Palace, his tone urgent and stern.

"Upon arrival, immediately begin searching for a suitable location and setting up a soup kitchen. The soup should be thick enough to hold chopsticks upright!"

He paused, almost gritting his teeth, and added the last sentence.

"Tell the magistrate of this county, and all other local officials you can contact, that from this moment on, disaster relief is as urgent as putting out a fire. Anyone who neglects their duties, no matter who they are, will be executed without mercy, no matter who they are!"

The order was given with an unprecedented air of killing intent.

The officials solemnly agreed and quickly sprang into action.

Li Chengqian's gaze swept over the desperate and numb faces before him, finally settling on a few elderly, weak, women, and children huddled by the roadside, too weak even to stand up.

The suffocating heat in his chest now transformed into a cold, resolute decision.

He abruptly turned to the Crown Prince's Chamberlain beside him, his voice not loud, but carrying an unquestionable authority, and clearly issued the order.

"Immediately! Right here, on the open space beside the official road, set up a temporary soup kitchen! No need for formalities, just set up the stove, take some of the rice and rations brought with us, and start a fire to cook soup right away!"

The Grand Tutor was taken aback upon hearing this, and subconsciously said, "Your Highness, this place is desolate and crowded with refugees, I'm afraid..."

"Get it done immediately!" Li Chengqian interrupted him, his eyes sharp as knives.

"I've seen it with my own eyes; some people won't make it to the county town! We'll save as many as we can!"

He then turned to another official in charge of delivering the proclamation and said, "Take a few men and tell these disaster victims in the simplest terms possible: the imperial relief army has arrived, and the Crown Prince has been ordered to oversee disaster relief efforts in Shandong! Soup porridge will be set up here to temporarily alleviate their immediate crisis!"

The official received the order and was about to turn around when Li Chengqian raised his voice, almost shouting it out, to ensure that many of the disaster victims around could vaguely hear it.

"Tell them that my main relief point is in the county town ahead! There are larger soup kitchens there, with more food and doctors!"

"Those who can walk, help each other and return to the county town!"

"The imperial court will not abandon any of its citizens!"

"I, Li Chengqian, hereby swear that I will stand with the people of Shandong through this hardship!"

　One more chapter will be updated tonight at 10 PM!!!
　　
　
(End of this chapter)