Shi Yin surveyed him briefly. Judging by palms the size of bear paws alone, one could tell he was a trained fighter.
His gaze could hardly be called friendly; he likely knew the three men lying dead on the ground.
Meeting his eyes, she said unhurriedly, “By next year, Goguryeo will completely occupy Baekje, and the entire eastern sea trade route will be totally scrapped. In times of chaos like this, do you really think the imperial court will specifically send a large ship just to deliver grain to us?”
“What!”
The words struck like a thunderclap, causing everyone’s faces to pale as they instantly grasped the gravity of the situation.
“Cease sailing! Then what are we supposed to do?”
“They’re going to starve us to death trapped on this island!”
The middle-aged man’s brow furrowed tightly, and after a moment, he countered in a deep voice:
“Nearly half of the salt in the three provinces of Qing, Yan, and Ji is shipped out from Heishan Island. If no one comes to collect the salt, leaving the common people with no salt to use, how could the imperial court sit by and ignore it?”
Hearing this, the crowd nodded in agreement one after another: *Indeed, cutting off the ships is equivalent to cutting off the salt supply of the northern lands. The imperial court will definitely not leave it unattended.*
Upon hearing their response, Shi Yin instantly let out a sneer:
“How long has it been since new people arrived on Heishan Island? Have you not heard what state the outside world is in?
After the drought in Qing Province, a plague of locusts followed right on its heels, leaving the fields with zero harvest. In the worst-hit areas, nine out of ten households are completely abandoned.
The common people have eaten all the turf off the mountains; who still has the mind to care about salt?
Besides, the world is in utter chaos today, with the imperial court collapsing. The practice of illegally boiling salt along the coast is running rampant, and the court simply lacks the power to manage it.
With the coarse salt you guys dry, is it really worth the court risking the open sea to come for?”
As her final word landed, a deathly silence fell over the surroundings.
Indeed, under chaotic times, bootleg salt had long overflowed everywhere. What Shi Yin said was precisely what he had been worrying about all along.
A wave of desolation struck the burly man’s heart: Heishan Island was ultimately going to become an abandoned island.
Shi Yin’s expression remained indifferent: “I’ve laid down my words; whether you believe it or not is up to you. But please trouble the friends of these three to take their corpses further away. Having just arrived, I have too many things to attend to. Whatever business there is, we can talk tomorrow—I won’t be entertaining anyone today.”
With that, she pushed the handcart over to the front of the house, working with Chengzhou to move the grain, supplies, and belongings into the room. Leading the lamb, she turned and stepped inside.
The wooden door shut, blocking out the gazes and discussions outside the door.
At this time, outside the door, that burly man with the unwelcoming expression stood amidst the crowd, his face heavy and solemn.
“Big brother, what should we do now?”
A tall, thin man leaned in closer.
His voice was not lowered, and the surrounding people recognized them too, shaking their heads as they discussed: “Didn’t Sun Da snatch this house of his from old man Fang in the first place? It’s just karma.”
“Exactly. Back then, they even threw old man Fang’s son into the sea.”
Everyone shook their heads; all of them were wicked people, no better than one another.
As the crowd dispersed, the burly man finally spoke: “Carry them away. That woman was right about one thing: they lost their lives because they were stupid. There’s no need to risk our lives for a few fools.”
The tall, thin man seemed somewhat unwilling to let it go: “Big brother, if we could get our hands on the crossbows in that woman’s possession, wouldn’t Heishan Island belong to us to call the shots from now on?”
The burly man frowned: “A crossbow is a fine thing, but I care more about what that woman said. If the official ships really stop coming, what good would ten crossbows do us? Won’t we still be trapped to death on this island in the end?”
Thinking of this, the tall, thin man also furrowed his brows in deep worry.
“I just feel that woman isn’t simple; she likely has a trick up her sleeve.” After speaking, the burly man looked up: “We’ll swallow this loss for now. Tomorrow, I’ll go meet her and see what she has to say.”
He then waved his hand, carrying away the corpses of Sun Da and the other two with the tall, thin man to dispose of them.
On the other side, Shi Yin did not slack off after entering the house, quietly watching the movements outside the yard through a crack in the door.
Seeing the two outside moving the corpses away, she knew in her heart that the leader of that group had ultimately taken her words to heart.
She let out a quiet sigh of relief.
This time, she had indeed taken a huge risk.
After all, she had two children by her side, leaving her constrained at every turn.
In the event that the other party insisted on revenge, backed by superior numbers, and launched a surprise attack while she was away from home, she really wouldn’t have been able to keep everything secure.
Fortune favors the bold; she had won.
“Chengzhou, put it away. It’s fine now,” Shi Yin said while carefully placing the fire bomb in her hand back into her luggage. Only then did Chengzhou behind her stow away the fire striker as well.
In truth, as long as all the exiled people behind them landed on the island, the news of the official ships’ impending cessation would spread across the entire Heishan Island sooner or later.
She had actually owed a debt of thanks to the “help” of those three men for letting her settle down so early.
Seizing this head start had given her an extra bargaining chip to save her own life.
Shi Yin found a corner, and after carefully placing her luggage down, she thoroughly inspected this small room.
The foundation of the small room was built from strips carved from the granite common on the island, stacked about three feet high.
Above the stone foundation were layers of rammed yellow mud walls. The entire house was only about ten feet tall, low and dark.
The roof utilized whole logs to construct the roof beams, thatched with straw and weighed down with gray tiles.
The room was square and simple, appearing to be around thirty square meters at a glance.
There was a wooden door and a wooden window.
layout of the window frame was crude, fixed with wicker woven into a window pane and supported at an angle underneath by a wooden branch, barely letting in a bit of light.
A small window of the same kind was also opened high up on the back wall, extremely long and narrow—so narrow that even Rong’er might not be able to squeeze through.
The inside of the room was empty, devoid of furniture.
An earthen stove was built beside the door. There was no iron pot on the stove, leaving only a soot-blackened clay jar standing upright inside the stove cavity.
Beside the stove lay three coarse earthenware jars: two small ones containing some green vegetables that had been pickled, making it impossible to tell the variety.
The largest jar stored fresh water.
In the innermost part of the room lay that pile of weeds.
Shi Yin grabbed a handful of the weeds, pulled out a few long stalks, twisted the stems together, and casually bound them into a crude broom.
By the time she finished weaving the broom, the crowd outside the door had mostly scattered, and the corpses of the three men were nowhere to be seen either.
Only then did she open the door to find a wooden stick of suitable thickness, inserting it into the iron shovel head, repeatedly pounding it firm against the ground to let the wooden handle wedge tightly into place.
After moving the grain and children back onto the handcart in the yard, Shi Yin shouldered the shovel and began scooping away that pile of weeds.
Sure enough, as soon as the grass pile moved, four or five rats suddenly scurried out, running every which way and causing a wave of revulsion to wash over Shi Yin.
The room was open and bare, so these rats quickly found the door and ran out, hiding among the pile of loose rocks in the yard.
Once the last of the weeds were shoveled clean, Shi Yin shoveled another inch off the ground of the entire room, only then feeling that the inside of the room was a bit cleaner.
Afterward, she simply detached both the front and back wicker window panes, allowing air to circulate from all four sides to disperse the long-accumulated moldy stench.
Now that the rat problem was cleared, the children could come down to help. Shi Yin had mainly been afraid earlier that the children might get bitten by those rats.
She had no medicinal herbs on hand right now; any minor injury or illness could prove fatal, so she could not afford to be careless.
Rong’er helped splash the jar of water left behind earlier onto the ground to prevent the dust Shi Yin swept up from flying around.
Chengzhou, on the other hand, helped his mother thoroughly dig out every last bit of the old ash from inside the stove cavity.