Spy Wars: I am the Captain of the Military Police

Chapter 996 Despair on the Verge of Collapse

He took these children back to the refugee camp one by one.

At first, the person in charge of the refugee camp, an old Mr. Chen who was originally a silk shop owner, reluctantly took them in, sighing and saying, "We'll save whoever we can."

Li Shouren also distributed most of the food he found to children and those in greater need.

But soon, problems arose.

The refugee camp was originally a temporary shelter set up by several wealthy merchants who had not been able to escape, using their family's stored food.

Food supplies were already limited, and the sudden addition of a dozen or so hungry mouths greatly increased the pressure.

The porridge became thinner and thinner, and the children's cries and the adults' complaints grew louder and louder.

The conflict finally erupted a few days later.

When Li Shouren returned with a thin, bony child once again, he was blocked at the door by several people.

"Li Shouren! You can't bring any more people in!" a middle-aged man with a gloomy face roared. He was one of the managers in charge of distributing food.

"Exactly! We don't even have enough food for ourselves! Are you trying to starve everyone by bringing back so many little brats?"

"You go out looking for your wife and kids every day, and when you can't find them, you bring back some random kids to make up the numbers! What are you up to?"

A barrage of accusations rained down on Li Shouren like hailstones.

He tried to explain, tried to plead, saying that the children could eat very little and that he could save his share.

But hunger and fear had eroded most people's compassion.

Old Mr. Chen stepped in to mediate, but he also looked troubled: "Shouren, it's not that we're heartless, it's just... there's really no other way. The current situation is that even with money, we can't buy food... there's really nothing we can do..."

Ultimately, under pressure from the crowd, Li Shouren and the fourteen children he rescued were ruthlessly driven out of the refugee camp.

The woman surnamed Sun, who had been asked to help bury her husband, looked at the group of pitiful children, silently packed her meager belongings, and said to Li Shouren, "Brother Li, I'll go with you and take care of these children together. I can't bear to stay here."

Holding the youngest child, Li Shouren looked at the group of emaciated children behind him, their eyes filled with fear, and then at the tightly closed gate of the refugee camp in front of him and the indifferent or evasive gazes. A chill ran down his spine.

In chaotic times, kindness becomes a luxury, and the instinct to survive is sometimes colder than the coldest winter.

After being driven out of the refugee camp, Li Shouren, along with Widow Sun and the fourteen children he had rescued, temporarily settled in a half-collapsed courtyard not far from the refugee camp.

This courtyard may have originally been a small workshop. The storefront facing the street has completely collapsed, but the main structure of the house at the back is still relatively intact. The four walls can still stand at least. Although there are several large holes in the roof, most of the tiles are still there, which can barely keep out some wind and cold.

The yard was a mess, littered with charred wood, broken pottery, and unrecognizable iron parts.

Li Shouren and Widow Sun spent an entire day quietly tidying up their dilapidated dwelling.

They used broken planks, straw mats, and even rags torn from the ruins to barely partition off a few small spaces in the larger main room.

The walls were drafty, so they plastered them with mud.

When the roof leaked, they put up tree branches and then covered it with a thick layer of thatch.

Finally, they placed the children in the most sheltered corner, letting them huddle together and keep warm with each other's body heat.

The well in the yard had been filled with broken bricks and tiles, and the water drawn up was murky and had a strong earthy smell, but at least it was still drinkable after boiling.

As night fell, a dozen shivering lives huddled together in the ruins that could barely be called "home," and a sense of desolation and mutual dependence permeated the cold air.

However, food immediately became the biggest problem that overwhelmed everything.

Li Shouren still leaves home early every day, but his purpose has completely changed.

Although the thought of finding his wife and daughter never disappeared, it was like a faint kite string in the distance, which was pulled to the ground by the more urgent need for survival and the search for something to eat, and its priority was reduced to the lowest.

His footsteps no longer lingered on corners where people might hide, but instead turned to any place where food might be found.

The wasteland on the edge of the city that has not yet been completely trampled, the front and back yards of abandoned houses, and even the garbage heaps that have been repeatedly looted.

He hunched over, digging through the remaining snow and frozen ground for any plant that looked like a wild vegetable, no matter how bitter or astringent it was.

He held his breath and dug through rat holes in the corners of the ruins, hoping to find some food that these creatures had stored up for the winter. Sometimes he was lucky enough to find a few moldy grains, which felt like discovering a treasure.

The worst part was that when he saw the Japanese army dumping swill in the distance, he would wait for the soldiers to leave and then rush over like a wild dog, risking being beaten by the Japanese soldiers, and quickly rummage through the stinking scraps of food with a stick or his bare hands, hoping to find a few scraps of meat, a few bones or vegetable leaves.

Each time he did this, he felt immense humiliation and his stomach churned, but looking at the hungry mouths at home, he could only grit his teeth and bear it.

However, this little bit of dignity and luck gained was undoubtedly a drop in the ocean for fourteen... now eighteen... growing but severely malnourished children and a frail woman.

Li Shouren brought back four more children from outside.

What each child received was often just a small amount of bitter wild vegetable soup or a few mouthfuls of gruel with an odd smell.

The children's faces changed from sallow to ashen, their eyes became sunken, their ribs became clearly visible, and their cries grew weaker day by day, eventually turning into heartbreaking moans like those of kittens.

They huddled in the corner, barely speaking to conserve their energy, their empty eyes staring at the drafty roof.

Widow Sun also visibly aged. She gave her already meager food to her children as much as possible, while she relied on drinking large amounts of cold water and forcing herself to stay awake. Her body quickly became so thin that she began to stagger when she walked.

As evening fell, the sky darkened and the cold wind swept across the ruins like a knife.

Li Shouren returned to the courtyard empty-handed once again.

He emptied almost every rat hole he could find nearby, his hands cracked and bleeding from the cold, but he only brought back a small handful of withered, unidentified grass roots.

He pushed open the creaking, dilapidated wooden door, and a stench of disease, hunger, and despair assaulted his senses.

In the dim light, he saw Widow Sun kneeling beside a straw mat in the corner, her back trembling slightly.

As he approached and took a closer look, his heart sank.

The youngest girl, probably only three or four years old, was someone he had picked up from a pile of corpses. Her face was burning red, her lips were cracked, and she had begun to talk nonsense. Her breath was so weak that it was almost imperceptible.

With red-rimmed eyes, Widow Sun used a relatively clean rag dipped in the cold well water from the earthenware pot to wipe the child's burning forehead again and again in vain.

Hearing Li Shouren's footsteps, she looked up, her face streaked with tears, her lips trembling, but she couldn't utter a single word.

Those eyes were filled with helplessness, heartache, and a despair on the verge of collapse.