From space to the world, it takes trillions of years

Ji River is a small tributary of Chengshui River, also known as Jishui River and Jijiang River.

The river is fast and dangerous, so it was formerly called Ji Shui, but people thought the name was unlucky, so it was changed to Ji River.

The Ji River makes several big turns forty miles away from the foot of Fengqi Mountain, and Baimu Town is located between these mountains and waters.

Chen Yu rode his horse out and walked south along the ditch in front of the door.

This ditch is diverted from the upper reaches of the Ji River to provide drinking water and irrigation for farmland for the people in Baimu Town, and finally flows into the lower reaches of the Ji River.

The townspeople simply called it Baimugou.

The rice fields along the banks of the ditch were filling with grain. The severe drought in other counties had not affected this place.

The Shan family is the oldest family in the town, and all the vast farmland here belongs to them.

Over the past hundreds of years, Baimu Town has experienced many severe droughts. The town’s canals are interconnected and extend for dozens of miles, and the water basically comes from this canal.

These closely connected canals are the result of hundreds of years of hard work by the Shan family and other farmers in the town.

The dog ran happily along the river bank with its owner. Its shoulder height has grown rapidly in the past few months and is now about 1.6 meters tall. Chen Yu expects its maximum shoulder height to grow to 1.7 meters.

The river water sparkled, and from time to time fish jumped out of the waves.

Baimugou is called a ditch, but in fact its main trunk is more than thirty miles long, and its widest part is more than four feet wide.

It is not the busy farming season now, and there are only a few farmers on the ridges of the fields checking on the growth of rice.

At noon, Chen Yu and his horse stopped in front of a thatched shed. An old man with bare feet was hiding from the scorching sun in the shed.

When the old man saw Chen Yu coming, he thought he was asking for water, so he quickly raised a clay pot. Chen Yu waved his hand, indicating that he didn't need it.

He put down the jar, and a look of panic appeared on his dark face.

The man was riding a tall horse, neatly dressed, with a fair complexion. He did not look like a tenant farmer like him who worked in the fields for a living, but rather a nobleman who had run away from home.

Chen Yu looked kind, like a gentle spring breeze. A monk who was imbued with spiritual energy was naturally approachable, and the old man quickly calmed down.

He was so quiet that he wanted to move. He practiced in space for several days and wanted to come out for a walk and talk to someone.

This was the right choice. The old farmer was a son of the Shan family. He had never attended a private school or left Baimu Town, but he had heard a lot of legends.

Baimu Town has a long history, but it is impossible to determine when people first settled here.

The town's name comes from the fact that there was once an abundance of a kind of white wood here, which was hard and slender, suitable for making spear shafts.

Fengqi Mountain in the north was difficult to cross, and traveling by land was time-consuming and laborious, so they just let Baimu float downstream along the Jishui River.

Da Ning originated in the southeast. The previous dynasty had been struggling in several northern counties, so the demand for war supplies was huge.

All the white wood was cut down at that time, but the name of Baimu Town has been preserved.

Speaking of the Shan family, the old man's face showed a bit of complacency.

The Shan family has the longest heritage among the six major families. It is said that they have lived here for generations before Daning was established. Since then, the Shan family has owned the most farmland in the town.

The previous dynasty eventually perished, and several families that had made mistakes were exiled here and lost almost everything.

They bought a small amount of land from the Shan family, where they multiplied and expanded.

In exchange, they helped the Shan family open up trade routes, and intermarried with each other for generations.

When talking about himself, he said that he had too many brothers and sisters in his grandfather's generation, so they were sold from farmers in the mountains to the Shan family as slaves.

His farming skills were taught to his grandfather by a servant of the Shan family, and then passed on to him through his father.

Sixteen years ago, he made great contributions to the Shan family, so the Shan family burned his slave contract and promised to let a maid give birth to a child for him.

As for what the merit was, he didn't say. He just showed the scar on his heel and said, "My tendons were cut. Now I walk with a limp."

Then he became a tenant of the Shan family, making a living by renting and farming the more than ten acres of paddy fields from the Shan family.

The harvest from the fields was divided into 30% and 70%, with the old man taking 30% and the single family taking 70%. Other than that, there was no distribution. The burden was not light, but it was enough to make a living.

"I'm already thirty-seven years old this year." Chen Yu was quite surprised. This farmer looked at least in his fifties, but it turned out that he was in the prime of his life.

His eldest son worked as a farmhand in the Shan family, but he did not have a slave contract.

Although I have an inexplicable feeling towards the Shan family, I am still more happy to be free again.

"It's a severe drought!" He pointed to the wide gully. "The water wasn't like this before. Since it turned black, it rarely rains on this day."

Clear water means a river with crystal clear water.

One day three years ago, people suddenly discovered that the vast surface of the Chengshui River was dyed into an endless light red, and even the Ji River, a tributary of Chengshui, was no exception.

The red color soon disappeared, but the surface of the river turned black from then on.

A bucket was taken out and it was exactly the same as the river water before. After drinking it, there was nothing unusual. People went from being amazed and uneasy at first to getting used to it.

Since then, the rain in the counties around Chengshui has become less and less. For more than a year, there has been almost no rain in more than a dozen counties.

After bidding farewell to his father-in-law, Chen Yu rode his horse and continued to the lower reaches of Baimugou.

More than ten miles away, the water in Baimugou flows into the Ji River here.

The river is not wide, only about two miles, which seems very small compared to this vast world.

The river was just as my father-in-law had said, deep, dark, dangerous and fast. It was also for this reason that the refugees on the other side of the Ji River could not come to the town to beg for food.

Across the river, Chen Yu could clearly see the empty fields on the other side.

Due to the drought, all the plants died, leaving only a few tree trunks and dead branches standing between the sky and the earth, with a few crows standing on them.

Several figures were searching for something among the withered hay, their messy hair looking like weeds.

The bark and grass had been eaten up by the hungry people. The refugees were so hungry that they grabbed handfuls of hay and stuffed them into their mouths, but they found it so difficult to swallow that they choked on it.

The river bank on the opposite side was much higher than the Jishui River. The man wanted to get some river water to eat grass, but found that there was no way to get down.

The river bank was cut into a steep cliff by the rapids, which was three or four feet high from the river surface below.

The refugees grabbed onto dry branches on the river bank and tried to step out of the mud pit step by step, but the branches had already become dead and brittle due to the drought.

One unsteady move and the tree branch broke, the refugee fell into the river and was swallowed by the waves in an instant.

Chen Yu did not go to save him. He didn't know when his heart became so hard.

The drought was still going on, and all the refugees from dozens of counties on both sides of Chengshui were everywhere. Unless he continued to provide for them, he would only be deceiving himself if he could only provide for them once.

The water of the Ji River gave Chen Yu a familiar feeling, but he couldn't put it into words.

It was just that he intuitively felt that there was no harm.