1885, I came to save Greece

Chapter 170 Black Wheat Waves

Just as the aid team's work found a breakthrough due to that blood-red pact and fell into a stifling stalemate, an unpredictable natural disaster struck.

Without any warning.

That day, the sky first turned a dim yellow.

An irritating buzzing sound began to fill the air.

At first, they were just scattered black dots appearing on the northern horizon.

Immediately afterwards, the black dots converged into black lines, and the black lines expanded into black clouds.

Cover the sky.

locust!

Hundreds of millions of locusts, like a moving, living cloud, flew from the Macedonian region of the Ottoman Empire and swarmed straight toward the fertile Thessaly Plain.

The buzzing they emitted merged into a deafening roar that drowned out all other sounds.

The sunlight was completely swallowed up, and daytime turned into dusk.

The golden waves of wheat vanished the instant the locusts passed by.

All that remains is bare, black earth, completely devoured.

The tenant farmers rushed out of their huts and knelt down in their fields.

They watched helplessly as a year's worth of hard work vanished in just a few hours.

The women cried out in despair, banging their heads against the hard ground.

The men went mad, waving their arms and trying to drive away the endless black tide, but their efforts were futile.

Within days, the entire Thessalian plain was in ruins.

All the crops that were about to ripen were devoured.

There was no harvest.

Desperate tenant farmers gathered in droves at the gates of the manors in various places.

They knelt on the ground, kowtowing, their foreheads stained with blood.

They asked for nothing more than for the landlords to have mercy and, in light of the natural disaster, reduce or waive this year's rent, thus giving them a way to survive.

However, the stewards sent by the landlords brought back a reply as cold as iron.

"Natural disasters are God's punishment for you lazybones, they have nothing to do with us masters!"

A steward, mounted on horseback, looked down at the kneeling tenant farmer with disdain in his eyes.

"It's all clearly written in black and white in the lease! Not a single grain of rice can be shortchanged!"

"Unable to deliver grain?"

The butler sneered and cracked his whip in the air with a loud crack.

"Then use your daughters to pay off the debt! Use the deeds to your few dilapidated houses to pay off the debt! Use your lives to pay off the debt!"

Last hope was dashed.

Under the watchful eyes of the stewards and thugs, the desperate tenant farmers had no choice but to dig out the last bag of food they had buried underground, which they intended to use to survive the entire winter.

That was their family's only hope for survival.

But jackals are never satisfied.

The landlord's private army, led by his steward, stormed into every village.

They were like a pack of hungry wolves breaking into a sheepfold, kicking open doors from house to house.

They used bayonets to pry open the rice jar, whipped any men who dared to resist, and snatched the last piece of black bread from the mouth of a crying baby.

In a village, a young tenant farmer who had just gotten married saw his wife's last bit of wheat, which she had prepared to produce milk, about to be taken away. His blood boiled, and he grabbed a sickle and stood in the doorway.

"This is my family's grain! You can't take it!"

He was met with a heavy wooden stick in the hands of the thugs.

The wooden stick slammed down on his head.

a bit.

Two times.

Three times.

He fell into a pool of blood, at the doorway of his own house, the sickle in his hand rolling limply to the side.

His wife let out a heart-wrenching scream.

Famine, in its most monstrous form, finally spread across this once-rich land.

A true famine.

People began to eat tree bark and dig up grass roots.

Everything that was edible was eaten.

In the village, the children's cries gradually faded, and finally disappeared completely into the deathly silence.

Every morning, stiff, cold corpses, wrapped in tattered straw mats, are carried out of dilapidated houses and dumped in mass graves outside the village.

The aid team is facing an unprecedented predicament.

The medicines and supplies they brought were as insignificant as a drop of water in the face of this massive disaster that swept across the entire plain.

Doctors can cure diseases, but they cannot cure hunger.

They distributed all their food rations to the starving disaster victims.

But soon, they themselves also found themselves in dire straits, running out of food.

Even more terrifying, the landlords blocked all roads leading to the outside world.

They deployed private armed forces to guard every mountain pass and ferry crossing, preventing any grain of food from entering the disaster area from the outside.

Their purpose is clear.

They will use hunger, the cruelest knife, to force all the farmers to relinquish the last remaining piece of land they own.

They intend to use this natural disaster to complete the final and most thorough annexation of the wealth of the Thessalian plain.

At the aid team's camp.

The person in charge, Dr. Corettis, an old military doctor who had participated in the War of Independence and removed countless shrapnel from wounded soldiers under Ottoman fire, looked at the hellish scene before him with tears in his eyes.

A emaciated mother sat by the roadside, holding her lifeless baby, her eyes vacant, muttering to herself.

Several men attacked each other with stones over the carcass of a wild dog that had starved to death, resulting in bloody head wounds.

He felt a deeper sense of powerlessness and anger than when facing enemy artillery fire.

His clinic was packed with people on the verge of death.

But he couldn't prescribe any medicine.

Because these people are not sick.

They were just hungry.

It was late at night.

Under the lamplight, with trembling hands, Dr. Corettis wrote the final secret letter of this aid mission to Constantine, who was far away in Athens.

He reported on the devastation of the locust plague, the cruelty of the landlords, and the spread of famine.

He paused for a long time at the end of the letter.

Finally, he dipped his brush in ink and, with a force that almost tore the paper, wrote the last line:

"Your Highness!"

"There are no sick people here, only hungry ghosts!"

"What's needed here isn't doctors, it's the army!"

"What's needed here isn't a scalpel!"

He pressed down hard with the tip of his pen.

"It's a bayonet!"