Two days later.
The sun set in the west.
South of the city.
Wu Mountain, leading a team of constables, placed a basket of copper coins and over a dozen buckets of gruel outside the armory.
Wu Mountain held a copper gong, striking it "dang dang dang" outside.
Inside the armory, there was a commotion.
"End of the workday, end of the workday."
The workers constructing the armory immediately put down their tasks, lining up to walk out one by one.
They looked at the steaming gruel buckets, and their stomachs, hungry for over two hours, rumbled along, swallowing hard one after another.
They first approached the governmental officials responsible for distributing wages and collected their pay for the day, ten cents.
Ten wen coins, though not much, could not even buy a jin of millet, yet it was enough to keep a family from starving. In these times, it was already decent, and if saved up, it could be three hundred wen a month.
