Anti-Japanese War, weapons designer at Fengtian Arsenal

The villagers of Ergou Village were very confused. How did the Longlong Store owners in other villages know them? These owners had never seen them. Except for the owner named Li Liangwei who went door to door to visit their homes, it was impossible for anyone to know the people in their village so well.

Even if they let their children go to buy the products, the store owner would be able to recognize them, which made the villagers of Ergou Village quite terrified.

Of course, if they insisted on buying, there was no way to stop them. The villagers of Ergou Village found a few familiar villagers from other villages and tried to ask them to help buy the goods. Some villagers disliked what they did and were afraid of causing dissatisfaction from Longlong Store, so they refused. Some people agreed because they had a good relationship with them in the past.

But as soon as you open this loophole, hundreds of villagers from Ergou Village will come to you and ask you for help buying daily necessities. Who can bear this?

As time went by, even a few villagers from other villages with whom they had a good relationship refused to help them buy goods.

The villagers of Ergou Village can only pay others to help buy things for them. There is no other way. Even if they pay others to help buy things for them, the products in Longlong Store are still cheaper than traditional products.

It was fortunate that these problems could be solved by purchasing agents. Many years later, after Longlong Store expanded to include schools, medical care, farmland, movie screenings, and many other commodities, these things could no longer be purchased by agents. It was then that the villagers of Ergou Village truly regretted what they had done, and Ergou Village broke up within a few years.

At this time, an old Chinese doctor came out of the Zhuang family's house and began to pack up his medicine box to leave. Zhuang Youtian and his wife came up at the same time and asked, "Sir, how is my son?"

The old Chinese doctor packed up his things, threw the box on his back, and sighed.

"Your son is suffering from a mental illness. I can't cure him. He must have been greatly traumatized."

Zhuang Youtian’s wife started crying.

"Wow, sir, is there nothing you can do? My son hasn't eaten for three days. If he continues like this, he will starve to death."

The old Chinese medicine doctor shook his head.

"There is no other way. His disease is called depression in foreign countries. Foreign doctors can't cure it, let alone Chinese medicine. We can only let the patient recover on his own and never stimulate him again.

If he doesn't eat, I have an idea.

Go kill a chicken and make a pot of chicken soup. Don't make it too greasy, make it fresher, don't put in the offal, wash the chicken several times, add a small spoonful of fine salt after the chicken soup is boiled, sprinkle some chopped green onions, bring it to his bedside while it's still hot, let him smell it, and then it should be time for dinner."

After saying this, the old Chinese doctor left without taking the money. He had heard of the reputation of this village, which was too bad. If it weren't for the principle of practicing medicine to save lives, he wouldn't have wanted to come here.

The couple sent the old Chinese doctor away and stood in the yard sighing. Zhuang Youtian's wife cried and complained.

"It's all your fault. If you hadn't been greedy for those 10 dollars, would things have turned out like this? Now our village has become a scumbag place in the surrounding area. Every time we go out, people point at us and scold us for a long time! Wuuwuwu!"

Zhuang Youtian was annoyed and replied, "What do you know as a woman? I am doing this for the sake of this family!"

Unexpectedly, these words made his wife explode with anger.

"Bah! You don't do this for this family at all! You do this to satisfy your desire to be an official!

An old boy who can't even read a single word is still thinking about becoming an official. Since you can't become an official, you want to show off in the village. Don't you just want to benefit the villagers and make them flatter you? Bah! You, an old illiterate, still want to become an official! You'll never be one in your next life!"

Zhuang Youtian was annoyed by his wife's touch and was about to start a quarrel with her. At this time, he heard Zhuang Changshu's weak cry from inside the room.

"Dad..."

The two immediately gave up their quarrel and ran into the house.

Zhuang Youtian held his son's hand and asked with concern, "Son, Dad is here, what do you want to say?"

Zhuang Changshu hadn't had a drop of water for three days, his eyes were sunken from hunger, and his voice was floating, like a kite with its string about to break.

"Dad, listen to your son's advice. We did something unkind. We cannot afford to offend the Julong Company. They didn't destroy our village because they are kind. Just look at what happened before. They didn't take the initiative to deal with us. They just told the truth about our village. People from our village will be scolded even if they go out for a walk. If this continues, we will have no place to stand here!

Dad! Listen to me, go and redeem the bicycle and return it to the owner. Go and ask Longlong Store to come back so that we can resume our normal lives!"

Zhuang Youtian felt bitter. Not to mention that most of the money the villagers got from selling their cars had already been spent. Even if everyone collected all the money and went back to the black market to redeem the car, would they return the car to him for 10 dollars?

Zhuang Youtian didn't know that the black market where he sold the bicycle had been visited by Li Xiao, and 30 cargo bicycles had been recycled. Apart from that, the entire black market had become Li Xiao's territory.

According to the black vendors doing business in the black market at that time, a white-haired old man was holding an axe in his hand and was walking around in circles while chopping people. He chopped from the east end of the black market to the west end. He killed one hundred or eighty thugs in the black market by himself and successfully left behind the legend of the leader of the Axe Gang.

Zhuang Youtian promised his son that he would find a way to redeem the bicycle.

The old couple left the room, and Zhuang Youtian said, "It's no good. We have to let our son eat something, otherwise he will really starve to death. So, go to the yard and catch a hen, kill it and stew it, and I'll go outside to buy some green onions."

His wife nodded and told him to go quickly, and Zhuang Youtian walked out the door with his hands behind his back.

On the way, he met a man coming back from collecting firewood. He greeted him with a smile: "Hey, Lao Zhou, you went to collect firewood."

In the past, the other party would definitely greet him enthusiastically, but this time, Lao Zhou just glanced at him, snorted coldly, and walked away.

Zhuang Youtian was a little confused, and cursed in a low voice that the man was ungrateful, then continued walking towards the village entrance.

He met many villagers along the way, all of whom looked at him coldly. Even the few families who used to visit him frequently looked at him in a mysterious way. This made his movements of walking with his hands behind his back and his back straight become stiff, and slowly, his waist bent down. When a person feels guilty, he no longer has the posture of walking upright.

After a while he arrived at the entrance of the village. The reason for coming to the entrance of the village was that usually people would take vegetables from the fields and sell them at the entrance of the village, and people passing by would buy vegetables from them. Especially after the start of production of Julong Steel, the factory's buyers often came on tricycles to buy vegetables, and the quantity bought was large. One tricycle could directly clear out the goods of all the vegetable sellers at the entrance of the village.

But today, there were only a few people selling vegetables at the entrance of the village. The only one, Aunt Liu, was still packing up her things and preparing to leave.

When Zhuang Youtian saw the shallots he wanted in Aunt Liu's winnowing basket, he took out a copper coin from his pocket and shouted, "Aunt Liu, don't leave in a hurry. Give me a handful of shallots!"

Aunt Liu turned around and saw that it was Zhuang Youtian who called her. Her face changed and she spat a mouthful of thick phlegm on the ground and cursed: "Get lost! I won't sell you my vegetables even if they are rotten! You damned thing! It's you who made us all thieves!"