If he couldn't hand over half a bushel of moldy millet and thirty bowls of porridge, Jiang Ning's brother would be dragged away by the squire to pay off the debt.
Transformed into an orphan who was deprived of her kitchen during the disaster years, Jiang Ning had no space and no granary. She only had a tongue that could pick out moldy rice and discern the heat, and a pair of hands that were willing to cook. She rescued the hungry people of Qingshiyi from a pot of hot soup of grains and brought back the dilapidated kitchen; then she taught the women how to pickle vegetables, dry grains, and do accounts, and turned the deserted village food court that everyone despised into the most stable rice bowl in the year of disaster.
But grain merchants hoarded grain, gentry cut grain, and official warehouse accounts were falsified at every level. Lu Chenzhou, the warehouse patrolman who always used rules to stop her, admitted for the first time after she brought him a bowl of hot soup: In years of disaster, keeping people full is never a trivial matter.
