C870 Millennial Family Dream (1/2)
The Dragon Lord could understand the reasoning behind their words, because he had personally experienced the entire process of the rise of the Xiang Jia Village from nothing to a little.
The Xiang Family was originally just an ordinary village in the Swallow Mountain Range. More than twenty families were farming and hunting for a living, relying on the roads deep in the mountains and also exchanging goods with caravans. They lived a poor life.
The Xiang Family could only date back to the founding of the Ming Dynasty, when the end of the Yuan Dynasty was chaotic and the north was massacred to the point of being thousands of miles in radius. In order to restore the economy of the north, the Ming Dynasty began a decades-long migration from the south to the north.
Many families in Shanxi, Shandong, and Shanxi had written down the first generation of their family tree in Hongdong County, Shanxi Province, which was the last place to register immigrants from the official organizations of the Ming Dynasty.
The family that had travelled all the way from the south received a small amount of money and grains from the government under the Pagoda tree. Taking out the residence certificate given by the government, they told their families that they would live in Zhengding, Yanqing and Cangzhou.
From that moment on, a new clan was born. Perhaps there were only three people, or only two husband and wife, and they were all ordinary citizens. Those who could read were rarely able to remember the names of the ancestors of the previous three generations.
However, there were always exceptions. Many families that emigrated back then, some of them were literate, and some even had a broken family tree. This was very rare, they could trace their roots back to the Song Dynasty or even to the Tang Dynasty, and some would even travel to the distant Han Dynasty …
The Xiang Family had always claimed that they were the descendants of the overlord of the West Chu, Xiang Yu, while the Xiang Family was a well-known aristocrat of the Chu Country back then. According to the level that Zhou Tianzi had given them, they were not any lower than the imperial family of the Qin Empire.
To outsiders, these legends were nothing more than a smile after a meal. Perhaps a few well-fed scholars would verify these legends, but due to the long history, there was no way to verify these legends. In the end, those so-called scholars were just scammers who swindled mountain goods and drank wine.
However, to the members of Xiang Shaolong's family, this was a heavy responsibility. Several generations of Xiang Jia Village followed the devil, and there was always a ghost that restored the glory of their family that kept bewitching them.
Even when the Dragon Lord went out to learn martial arts, he was actually raised by all the families in the Xiang Jia Village. There was a need to pay attention to the poor and the rich.
Dragon Lord was immersed in deep memories. He remembered clearly that when he had just started learning, he didn't complain at all about how much suffering he had suffered at his master's place. At that time, his dream was very simple, to let herself and the rest of his relatives in Xiang Jia Village have their fill.
There was meat and wine at the table, and the granaries at home had food that he didn't have to worry about for two or three years. His uncle's stupid brother was able to marry the silly girl at the Liu family's house next door … This was Dragon Lord's dream back then, to be simple and honest.
However, humans changed. After he returned from studying, he gradually gained the reputation of a Northern Dragon Lord. The ghost that was previously hiding in the depths of his heart to restore the glory of his family once again came to disturb him.
He controlled the trading road to collect protection fees for the travelling caravans, to hand over to the officials of the yamen to settle the grudges on the martial way, to widely accept disciples to practice and expand the Xiang Jia Village … Even the Dragon Lord didn't know why he was doing this, but at that time, there was a voice that was trying to confuse him, forcing him to do so.
Eventually, Weng Tonghe ignited the devil in his heart. The leader of the Qing Liu faction was going to act as his guarantor, to prove that their Xiang Jia Village was truly a descendant of a noble family in Chu. Furthermore, their family was going to produce a real scholar.