Chapter 478 - 400: Zhang Zhanshan Was Dumbfounded
In the southeast corner of Yong’an Forest Farm’s first canteen, Li Ruhai stood on a stool, making him a head taller than the surrounding workers.
Li Ruhai beamed and cupped his fists to the crowd, but the workers were at the most crucial part of the story. There was no way they were letting him leave.
The story was about how the eldest son of Master Zhang from the second canteen had been stealing corn when he was shot at by the eldest son of Li Dayong, the deputy head of the dispatch team.
So why was the next part titled, "Han Baoyu Loses an Arm"?
And besides, after the shot rang out, was that fellow Zhang Laibao dead or alive?
With so many questions left unanswered, how could the forty or fifty workers possibly let Li Ruhai go? The crowd blocked his way, insisting he had to finish the story before he could leave.
In truth, even if they hadn’t stopped him, Li Ruhai wouldn’t have been able to keep his mouth shut. But there was a world of difference between telling a story of his own accord and being begged by others to tell it.
This was a huge boost to Li Ruhai’s confidence and an immense satisfaction to his vanity.
"Alright!" Li Ruhai’s raised hand clenched into a fist in midair, like a choir conductor’s final, definitive gesture. "In that case, I’ll tell you all another Chapter!" he declared loudly.
"Yeah!"
"Alright!"
For a moment, cheers erupted one after another. Li Ruhai had ended the last segment on a suspenseful cliffhanger, leaving the workers completely hooked.
As they made a commotion, they drew the attention of more people in the canteen, who flocked over to see what was happening.
Watching the ever-growing crowd, Wu Feng couldn’t help but marvel, "Whose kid is that? He’s really got guts!"
He’d used a Northeastern expression that’s originally a verb. It means something like being daring and bold, but it’s mostly used to describe children.
What could Li Dayong say? He just lowered his head and said to Wu Feng without looking up, "Just eat."
The dish at the first canteen today was soybean sprouts stewed with potatoes and cabbage. Soybean sprouts are different from mung bean sprouts—the latter are long, while the former are short.
In fact, the soybean sprouts produced with the local Northeast methods back then were really just soaked and swollen soybeans with the tiniest hint of a sprout.
So, Wu Feng tossed a soybean sprout into his mouth as if it were a peanut, then said to Li Dayong, "I’m gonna go eat over there. You coming?"
Hearing this, Li Dayong frowned. "Let’s just eat here. Why go to all that trouble?"
"I want to hear what that kid is saying!" Wu Feng replied. He speared the two pieces of steamed cake from his lunchbox lid with his chopsticks, nested the main compartment of the box inside the lid, and then stood up, holding the lunchbox in one hand and the cake skewer in the other. "If you’re not coming, I’m heading over."
With that, Wu Feng quickly walked to the nearest table on the edge of the crowd and sat down. Li Dayong glanced over and saw that everyone at that table was from the dispatch team.
By now, a crowd of seventy or eighty people had gathered around Li Ruhai.
Even though the crowd was growing, Li Dayong knew his son wouldn’t get stage fright. That kid was the type who got more worked up the bigger the audience!
Sure enough, seeing so many people gathering around him, Li Ruhai’s shoulders trembled with excitement.
’So many people here at the Forest Farm! You’d never see a crowd like this in the village or at school!’ Li Ruhai’s face flushed. He raised his voice, his words booming out much louder than before as he said excitedly, "To continue our tale! Last we spoke of Master Chef Zhang Zhanshan from our Forest Farm’s second canteen, who dispatched his two sons, the brothers Zhang Laibao and Zhang Laifa. Under the cover of endless night, they snuck into the South Land of Yong’an Village to ruin the unripe corn cobs belonging to the family of the dispatch team’s deputy head, Li Dayong..."
Hearing this, Wu Feng, who was in the middle of a bite of steamed cake, froze and turned to look back at Li Dayong.
It wasn’t just him. The other dispatch team employees also put down their chopsticks and looked over at Li Dayong.
The moment Li Dayong’s eyes met Wu Feng’s, he felt his face flush. He quickly turned away, picked up his meal, and started walking into the distance.
"Dayong!" Just then, a voice called out from the back kitchen. Zhao Youcai emerged and came up to Li Dayong’s side. "How’s Baoyu’s arm really doing? Didn’t you say yesterday it was nothing serious?"
As soon as Li Dayong heard him, he knew Zhao Youcai must have overheard Li Ruhai’s line about "Han Baoyu Loses an Arm."
"Sigh..." Li Dayong let out a soft sigh and shook his head. "It’s a family tragedy."
Li Dayong didn’t elaborate on Li Baoyu’s condition, but that single sentence was enough for Zhao Youcai to understand. He turned his gaze toward the crowd and could faintly hear Li Ruhai’s young voice: "The world was pitch-black, so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. And though a flashlight cut through the gloom, the simple-hearted Li Baoyu couldn’t make things out clearly. He thought it was a Black Bear snapping the cornstalks.
The thought of the corn his parents had toiled so hard to grow becoming feed for a beast made fury surge in Li Baoyu’s heart, and a vicious impulse took hold. He raised the gun in his hand and aimed at the creature..."
After listening to a few lines, Zhao Youcai found it completely engrossing and was left wanting more. He immediately grinned at Li Dayong. "Where on earth did that kid learn to do this?"
"I don’t know," Li Dayong said irritably. "We certainly didn’t teach him this."
"Hahaha..." Zhao Youcai burst out laughing. He and Li Dayong sat down on opposite sides of a table. "I remember now," he said. "During the Dragon Boat Festival, before the lunar new year, our canteen was making zongzi. Ruhai insisted on coming with me, so I brought him along, and he just sat by the radio eating. As it happened, there was an old man on the radio giving a storytelling performance. For every line the old man said, Ruhai would be right there mimicking him."
"Yep," Li Dayong said. "You came back and told me the boy must have picked up something otherworldly, and you insisted I go find Mrs. Han to have his fortune told."
"Hahaha..." Zhao Youcai roared with laughter, doubling over. It was a long moment before he could stop. "Looking at him today," he said, "it seems we might have been holding back his talent."
At this, Zhao Youcai smacked his lips and a wicked grin spread across his face. "It wouldn’t take long. If this kid comes here for two or three days, the entire Forest Farm will know about all the dirty deeds of Zhang Wangba’s family."
"Heh," Li Dayong gave a dry laugh. The thought of Zhang Zhanshan’s reputation being dragged through the mud was satisfying, he had to admit. But seeing his own son acting like this, he really couldn’t bring himself to be happy about it.
After all, the official publicity teams were one thing—they spread positive, uplifting messages. But what his Li Ruhai was doing, to put it bluntly, was just gossiping. That was the sort of thing old village women did when they had full bellies and nothing better to do.
But how could Li Dayong know that his son hadn’t had a single bite of food or a drop of water since that morning?
Meanwhile, inside the Forest Farm’s second canteen, Zhang Zhanshan felt that something was wrong. One by one, the workers were staring toward the back kitchen, whispering among themselves.
But when a hundred people were all whispering, the combined noise was anything but quiet.
Zhang Zhanshan faintly heard his own name being mentioned. His heart skipped a beat, and he had a bad feeling.
But Zhang Zhanshan didn’t know what was happening. He thought about sending an apprentice out to ask around, but on second thought, he came out of the back kitchen himself.
But to Zhang Zhanshan’s surprise, the moment he stepped out, some of the workers closer to the kitchen quickly moved away.
Zhang Zhanshan froze. Knowing something was definitely wrong, he quickly turned back into the kitchen, called over a quick-witted apprentice, and told him to go find out what was going on.
The apprentice returned quickly, but he looked at Zhang Zhanshan with a strange expression.
Zhang Zhanshan quickly pulled him aside. "Well? What’s going on?"
"Well..." The young apprentice seemed to find it difficult to say, hesitating for a moment.
"Spit it out!"
The young apprentice could only bite the bullet. "Master, the word outside is that you sent your son to steal someone’s corn cobs in the middle of the night to feed that Little Black Bear you’re raising."
He paused, then added in a low voice, "And the person whose crops you ruined... was someone from your own village."
"I’m finished!" Zhang Zhanshan’s head buzzed, and his vision went dark. He quickly grabbed the doorframe to keep himself from falling.
He was a bad man, sure, but in those days, even a bad man had to fit in with the collective. You still needed a passable reputation.
Over the years, Zhang Zhanshan had earned a bad reputation in the village, but at the second canteen, and across the entire Forest Farm, he had managed to cultivate a reasonably good one.
But today, he knew his reputation was finished.
No, not just his. His entire family’s reputation was finished!
In those days, stealing grain was a complicated issue—neither a major crime nor a minor one. After all, many people couldn’t get enough to eat. When you were on the verge of starvation, who had time to worry about such things?
People understood. If your family truly had no food, taking a little from someone else’s field was just that—taking a little. The owner would just write it off as a good deed.
But taking it to eat was one thing; ruining the crop was another!
Especially now, when the corn was still in its milky stage and the kernels weren’t yet full. If you boiled it, it would shrivel to almost nothing. It was fit for livestock, but not for people.
Sure, Zhang Zhanshan could raise a Little Black Bear, and he could even feed it corn, but he should have used the corn from his own fields.
Stealing someone else’s corn to feed your own Black Bear—that was just plain malicious!
Besides, grain was precious. To waste it on an animal was an unforgivable offense!
But that was only part of it. What the workers found even more unacceptable was that Zhang Zhanshan had targeted one of his own fellow villagers.
In the village, there was an old saying: "Even a good dog protects its three closest neighbors."
It meant that a dog wouldn’t just guard its own home, but would also watch over the houses on either side.
If even a dog behaved that way, what did that say about a person?
It was similar to the proverb, "A neighbor nearby is better than a relative far away." Both were reminders for neighbors to live in harmony.
But what about Zhang Zhanshan?
Many people knew he and Zhao Youcai were mortal enemies, but no one knew of any grudge between him and Li Dayong.
To ruin a fellow villager’s crops when you had no quarrel with them... that was worse than a dog!
Who would dare associate with a person like that?
Even the young apprentice who had just gone to get the news was now filled with contempt for Zhang Zhanshan’s actions. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have used the word "ruined" just now.
But Zhang Zhanshan didn’t notice any of this. His mind was in turmoil. He was panicking, terrified, and utterly bewildered.
’Who could possibly be capable of something like this?’
The moment this happened, his first thought was Zhao Youcai. But then he reconsidered. Never mind the fact that Zhao Youcai didn’t have the means to pull this off; more importantly, things in the second canteen hadn’t been like this when the meal service began.
Just then, someone threw aside the white cloth curtain nailed to the doorframe and rushed in, nearly colliding with Zhang Zhanshan.
Zhang Zhanshan was startled. When he came to his senses, he recognized the man was none other than his own son-in-law, Dong Zhiming.
"Dad!" Dong Zhiming’s face was a mask of fury. The moment he saw Zhang Zhanshan, he ignored the others standing nearby and shouted, "How could you do something like this? Now how are your daughter and I supposed to show our faces in public?"