Chapter 1295 - Gentle Hometown
Several transport ships of Great Wave Shipping lay at anchor in Foshou Bay. The vessels arrived according to a fixed schedule, with an interval of roughly ten days between each run. Refugee formations were organized to roughly match this cycle.
The number of ships arriving from Jeju varied, but at least three thousand people could be transported away with each convoy. In practice, the number of refugees stranded here rarely fell below this figure. In addition to the continuous stream of formations dispatched from the Cloud Ascending Temple side, countless desperate refugees arrived on their own. Word had spread through the region like wildfire: ships were coming to collect refugees at Foshou Bay. Though no one knew where they would be taken, or what fate awaited them, the specter of imminent death drove them onto this road regardless. They sought only to survive. After all, if ships were coming to collect them, surely they weren't going to be killed at sea and fed to the fish?
When Wang Ruixiang arrived at Foshou Bay, thousands of refugees were typically sleeping in the open outside the refugee camp. These people had neither shelter nor food, subsisting solely on the meager portion of relief gruel distributed daily by the Foshou Bay garrison. Every night that passed saw hundreds die. Yet new refugees arrived every day to replenish the numbers, so the crowds gathered outside the camp remained substantial.
Wang Ruixiang dismounted, withdrew a handkerchief, and wiped the clear snot running from his nose. He watched as refugees, under direction from the camp garrison, collected the morning's corpses. Bodies frozen stiff during the night—encrusted with icicles—were stacked like timber on rough sledges, dragged to the shore, loaded onto small boats, and rowed out to be dumped into the sea.
Those performing this grim labor were all half-dead refugees themselves, sleeping in the open outside the camp—for no other reason than that working for the transit station earned an extra portion of relief gruel.
To survive in this timeline, one's heart had to be hard. Wang Ruixiang listened to the crunch of his boots on the ice and snow as he walked through the crowd of refugees, his face grim. Those gathered outside the camp had automatically parted to open a wide path—anyone still lying across the way was either already dead or would be shortly.
The gate of the refugee camp stood open. Huang Xiong, the officer in charge of the Foshou Bay Transit Station, waited at attention before the entrance. He wore the winter uniform issued only to the Northbound Detachment, with a white sheepskin vest worn haphazardly over his gray woolen overcoat.
"R-Reporting: Foshou Bay Dispatch Detachment Leader, Infantry Lieutenant Huang Xiong, reporting! The detachment should number fifty-five; present arrivals number thirty. Awaiting your instructions!"
His voice was hurried, as though he had not expected Wang Ruixiang to arrive in person.
"At ease." Wang Ruixiang let his gaze linger on the officer's face, noting his unmistakable unease. It seemed the tip-off from the Committee of Ten had been accurate.
"Dismiss the troops. Take me to your headquarters."
"Yes, yes..."
Huang Xiong's headquarters occupied the beacon tower. The Foshou Bay beacon tower was merely a signal post—its tower body built of rammed earth, not brick-clad, suffering from years of neglect. Much of it had collapsed. Surrounding the tower was a wall four meters high and over a hundred meters in circumference, with a dry moat beyond.
Inside the wall, a row of housing for the beacon guards had been built along the left side. A well stood beside the quarters—though the water source had long since turned brackish and undrinkable. Drinking water had to be hauled from a nearby stream. In winter, melting ice and snow provided modest convenience.
On the right side of the compound stood the original stables, storehouses, and various military supply buildings for the beacon guards. Years of disrepair had left these structures in poor condition—broken windows, rotted doors, leaking roofs—yet they were still vastly superior to the shacks outside. After minor repairs, these buildings had been converted into barracks and command posts for the dispatch detachment.
Wang Ruixiang walked in. The interior had been swept clean, with no trace of remaining ice or snow. Garbage was sorted; firewood stacked neatly.
Huang Xiong's dormitory-cum-command post occupied the best room among them. The structure had two chambers, front and back. The outer room had originally served as kitchen-cum-main hall; the back was a bedroom with a heated kang connected through the shared walls. After Huang Xiong moved in, he had converted the outer room into a command post, keeping the inner room as his private quarters.
The moment Wang Ruixiang stepped inside, he detected the scent of rouge and powder. Observing Huang Xiong's apprehensive demeanor, he knew the whistleblowing materials had not lied. But he was in no hurry to confront the matter. He examined the documents, maps, and stationery on the table with deliberate attention, then surveyed the rifle hanging on the wall. He noted that the door curtain separating the rooms was new, and that the room had been cleaned with suspicious thoroughness.
"Captain Huang." Wang Ruixiang seated himself. "You seem to be living quite well here."
Huang Xiong was already on edge. Wang Ruixiang's words made him flinch, and he hurriedly stood at attention. "Reporting to the Chief—compared to other detachments, conditions here are indeed relatively superior..."
"Bullshit!" Wang Ruixiang cut him off. "There's the smell of a woman in this room!" He pointed at the door curtain. "While everyone else is crawling through ice and lying in snow, working desperately to save more refugees—you've set yourself up a golden house with a beauty hidden inside!"
Huang Xiong felt as if ice water had been poured down his spine. He was indeed keeping a woman.
Ever since the transit station had been established at Foshou Bay, refugees had streamed in not only from the organized formations sent from Yizhou, but from everywhere else as well. In the interest of allowing more to survive, Daoist Priest Zhang and Wang Ruixiang had permitted the dispatch detachment to use a fixed daily allotment of relief rations to assist these refugees, giving them at least some chance of survival. However, these refugees were "off the books." How many arrived, how many died, how many were lost—there was no accounting. The civil affairs department only recorded the number of "extra refugees" who ultimately boarded ships.
To survive, refugees would do anything. For women who had lost everything, selling their bodies became the only means of staying alive. So women used their bodies to seduce the soldiers of the dispatch detachment.
These women were haggard and disheveled, but for soldiers who had served long deployments without female company—men who would find even an old sow attractive—this hardly mattered. Among them were quite a few daughters and wives of formerly respectable or even wealthy households who had ordinarily lived in comfort. Though ravaged by natural and man-made disasters, some still retained a measure of charm.
Stationed at this remote outpost with no supervision, the soldiers had grown lax in their discipline. Some bold ones had started acting on their desires. At first, it was merely trading a bowl of gruel for one night with a woman. Gradually, soldiers developed attachments to certain women. They also needed someone to sew, mend, wash, and scrub. So they quietly began living together as temporary couples.
Huang Xiong had been drawn in soon enough. However, as an officer, he disdained indiscriminate mingling with common refugee women. He had taken his time selecting a sixteen-year-old girl of both beauty and cultivation, from a scholarly family—counting her as his "wife."
With the officer leading the way, what had been furtive became open and normal. By now, most soldiers in the detachment had acquired "temporary wives." Some brazen ones kept women at their side as live-in companions while continuing to dally with others—a single bowl of gruel would buy as many women as one wanted.
"Utterly degenerate military discipline!" Wang Ruixiang rebuked him harshly. "Do you still call yourselves soldiers of the Senate? Women, women—can you not live without that hole?"
Huang Xiong's face flushed crimson. He knew that the Senate's attitude toward soldiers differed sharply from the Great Ming's. The Imperial Army enjoyed excellent treatment and high status. They received preferential respect wherever they went. No one was permitted to insult soldiers; even adultery with a soldier's wife was a crime.
But in Lingao, men vastly outnumbered women, and soldiers had almost no opportunity for contact with the civilian population. Forget ordinary soldiers—even someone like Huang Xiong, who had served for years and risen to officer rank, could not find a wife. Soldiering had never been a profession that attracted women.
Now, watching shipload after shipload of women being transported away right before their eyes, with women suddenly available so easily, long-suppressed desires had burst forth.
Wang Ruixiang continued his tirade: "...Do you have even a shred of human conscience left! Refugees outside are starving to death, and you're using relief rations to indulge your lust!"
Huang Xiong dared not answer. Senator Wang's fury was entirely predictable. The Senate regarded military discipline as sacred. Among all transgressions, the most forbidden was soldiers taking women while on active duty—visiting prostitutes during leave was permitted, so long as they patronized licensed establishments. But once on duty status, even the word "woman" was not to be mentioned.
Thinking of the death penalty clause for raping women in "Discipline in Battle," a chill ran down the back of Huang Xiong's neck. He knew something of this Chief Wang: rumor among the naturalized citizens held that he liked to use an axe and had separated countless heads from bodies during the early campaigns against the local chieftains.
If the Chief uttered a single sentence—"Drag him out and shoot him"—he would immediately join the corpses being loaded onto small boats and dumped into the sea.
Yet at this moment, he had no idea how to explain himself. The Chief had clearly come prepared. Argument was pointless; begging for mercy on his knees was not the Imperial Army way. He could only stand in silence.
Wang Ruixiang watched him turn crimson and remain speechless. He paced a few steps, then lifted the door curtain of the inner room. A stove burned warmly within, keeping the room comfortably heated. Everything had been tidied meticulously. Several changes of clothing were neatly folded at the head of the kang. On the kang itself lay a standard uniform shirt in the process of being mended.
Wang Ruixiang gave a cold snort. "Where is the person?"
"Reporting—reporting to the Chief—all of them... all hidden in the refugee camp... inside..."
"You knew I was coming?"
"Yes—yes." Huang Xiong suddenly shuddered. Wasn't this deliberately deceiving the Chief? He hastened to add: "No—no, no..."
Wang Ruixiang waved his hand and walked out again.
Huang Xiong trembled and went pale. "I have been obsessed these past days. I failed to restrain my men and in fact led them personally in violating discipline. I beg the Chief for severe punishment. Even if I am to be dragged out and shot this instant, I have nothing to say."