Flip the table and divide the family property! Take his wife and daughter into the mountains and eat

It was completely dark.

The Siberian blizzard whipped up ice shards, like thousands of tiny knives flying wildly through the air.

The temperature plummeted to below minus thirty degrees Celsius; if you poured a cup of boiling water out, it would instantly shatter into an ice pop the moment it hit the ground.

"How about... we go back?"

At the edge of the crowd, a young man, shivering from the cold, wrapped his tattered cotton-padded coat tightly and tentatively took two steps toward the village entrance.

He had only walked five meters when a gust of wind carrying heavy snow came crashing down on him, knocking him over into a snowdrift.

He scrambled back, spitting out snow, and cried out, his voice trembling with fear, "We can't go any further! The wind at the mountain pass is too strong; we can't see the road at all in the middle of the night. If we go less than ten miles, we'll all freeze to death in the ravine!"

"Then...how about we stay at a villager's house for the night? Give us some money, we can even sleep in a woodpile or a cowshed for the night!"

Another man, his teeth chattering from the cold, looked hopefully at the dark farmhouses lining both sides of the road.

"Is your brain filled with shit?!"

An older hunter nearby cursed angrily, his eyes filled with a chilling despair: "Over a hundred of us from neighboring villages, armed with butcher knives, came in the middle of the night to smash up the gate of the God of Wealth of Kaoshan Village! Listen to this, the dogs in the whole village are barking! Those villagers have probably already set up their homemade guns on the walls. Who the hell dares to let us, these living bandits, in? If you dare knock on the door, they'll just kill you in the yard, mistaking you for thieves!"

This extremely cruel reality completely extinguished the last glimmer of hope in everyone's hearts.

Entering the village is suicide, leaving the village is freezing to death.

In the vast Kaoshantun village, more than a hundred men from neighboring villages became a group of lonely ghosts with nowhere to hide.

The Zhao family compound, which had shut them out, was now a haven of warmth and life, with a blazing bonfire and sizzling pork stewing inside.

Outside the wall, Old Ba squatted in the sheltered spot by the wall, rubbing his frozen hands vigorously, tears and snot streaming into his mouth.

"What a tragedy!"

Old Ba pounded his thigh and wailed at the bearded man not far away: "When I came, I said, five cents is five cents, weigh it, get the money, and go home to warm the kang (heated brick bed)! My grandson is still waiting on the kang to buy sorghum to cook! You, you good-for-nothing, have ruined it all!"

Fear and the bitter cold instantly ignited the most direct resentment within this group.

"Exactly! You insist on saying you can force Zhao Shanhe to back down, but now he's inside thriving while we're out there starving!"

"You've ruined everyone!"

The bearded man's right shoulder was pierced by a rifle bullet, and the blood had frozen into blackish-purple ice crystals stuck to his clothes.

He was in so much pain that his whole body was convulsing. When he heard his fellow villagers turning the tables on him, he was so angry that his eyes turned red.

"Bullshit!"

The bearded man gripped the snow tightly with his uninjured left hand, cursing, "When I told you to take knives and smash the door, your eyes were practically glowing with greed, you wanted to rob the Zhao family compound clean! Now that you can't afford to mess with them, you want to pin the blame on me? I took a bullet for you, and now you're pretending to be good guys!"

Liu Laizi, whose right hand had been smashed, groaned in pain and gritted his teeth as he chimed in, "We're all in this together now, nobody can shirk responsibility! That ruthless Zhao Shanhe holds a grudge, nobody's going to have an easy time tomorrow!"

In the wind and snow, the crowd suddenly fell silent.

A lean hunter leaned against the doorstep, his eyes darting around twice.

Looking at Liu Laizi and the bearded man writhing on the ground in pain, he quickly began to plot a dark scheme in his mind.

What did the Living Yama just say?

This is called paying for blood debts with blood.

The lean hunter's breathing suddenly became rapid.

Zhao Shanhe only shot the bearded man with the knife, and smashed his hand only at Liu Laizi who threw the ice. He completely ignored the group of lackeys below who didn't dare to utter a sound.

If we just hand over these two plagues, wouldn't we be clean? Wouldn't everyone be able to get a hot bowl of soup and survive?

He gritted his teeth, straightened up abruptly, and walked up to the bearded man, a half-smile on his face: "Brother, you just said you took a bullet for everyone, and we're all grateful to you. But right now, we can't get through this."

The bearded man shrank back warily: "What do you want?"

"Everyone heard what Zhao Shanhe just said. He wants blood for blood!"

The lean hunter turned his head, looked at the hundred or so pairs of hungry, green eyes around him, and suddenly raised his voice: "Zhao Shanhe is a big boss, he's got a big belly, do you think he'd really stoop to the level of us poor folks? He's angry that someone dared to point a knife at his wife!"

Upon hearing this, all the men who were frozen stiff raised their heads.

"Big brother, Liu Laizi."

The lean hunter pointed to the two tightly closed, large, black lacquered wooden doors: "The one who tied the knot must untie it. The trouble you two caused shouldn't drag everyone down with you. Crawl over there now, kneel under the threshold, kowtow, and beg Master Zhao to open the door. Don't implicate everyone!"

The bearded man was stunned.

Looking at the pairs of eyes staring straight at him, he suddenly felt that these fellow villagers were more terrifying than the wolves in the old forest.

"Should I go and kowtow?"

The bearded man roared furiously, "That living devil dared to fire without even blinking! You're forcing me to kowtow now? You're forcing me to my death! I won't go! If we die, we all die together!"

"Are you fucking going or not?!"

The lean hunter stepped forward and grabbed the bearded man by the collar: "You want to drag over a hundred of us down with you? No way!"

"Let go! Are you trying to rebel?" The bearded man struggled fiercely.

"What are you all standing there for!" The lean hunter, pressing down hard on his bushy beard, roared at the people around him, "Tie them up and throw them on the steps! Use them as a pledge of allegiance to Zhao Shanhe! Once Zhao Shanhe sees that we've turned down family for the greater good, he'll surely leave us a little something to eat! He might even get us some skinned alive, otherwise we'd all be freezing to death here!"

The Warlords.

The addition of the phrase "re-skinning" completely shattered everyone's last moral bottom line.

They finally found an extremely high-sounding excuse to justify using their companions as stepping stones for survival and wealth.

"Yes! Tie them up!"

"Let's appease Zhao Shanhe!"

A dozen strong men pounced on them like hungry wolves.

They completely disregarded the gunshot wounds and fractures on the bearded man and Liu Laizi's bodies, and roughly pressed the two men into the muddy water full of icy shards.

"Fuck your ancestors! You bunch of bastards, you'll all die a horrible death..." Liu Laizi let out a pig-like scream, and after cursing for only a couple of sentences, someone stuffed a handful of dirty snow mixed with mud and sand into his mouth.

Lacking rope, they used strips of burlap used for tying sacks to forcibly bind the bearded man's hands behind his back, binding them tightly. The wounds were pulled violently, causing the bearded man excruciating pain that made his eyes almost bulge out. He couldn't catch his breath and immediately passed out.

The fellow villager who had been calling him "Big Brother" just moments before now showed no mercy in his dirty tricks. A few kicks later, the muffled thuds of breaking ribs were particularly clear in the wind and snow.

They grabbed the two men by the hair, dragging them like two dead dogs, leaving long, bloody trails in the snow before throwing them heavily onto the high steps of the Zhao family compound.

boom! boom! boom!

The lean hunter pounced on the steps, pounding his frozen fists against the black lacquered wooden door.

"Boss Zhao! Master Zhao! We've brought the troublemaking bastard here!"

The lean hunter, his voice already hoarse, shouted vehemently through the crack in the door, "We've put the pledge of loyalty on your doorstep! We know we were wrong!"

Seeing someone take the lead, the group of men who were half-frozen at the bottom of the steps grasped at a last straw and immediately began to scramble and push towards the gate.

Some people were struggling to push forward, dragging sacks of leather, while others were panting heavily, leaning on shovels. Their faces, blue and bruised from the cold, were all pressed eagerly toward the gate.

"Boss Zhao, please have mercy! Give me some hot soup!"

"We'll leave the leather for you at 50 cents... no! 40 cents is fine too!"