Wen Qian nodded and shook her head slightly, which should be the case, but without confirmation she couldn't say for certain.
She thought it was better to be careful. Normally, marbles had great killing power. Staying here until midnight, even if they weren't dead now, they would likely die eventually.
The rain had stopped at this point.
Wen Qian told Big Jin to go home. Since the people inside weren't dead or injured, they probably couldn't crawl out, so she told Big Jin to return home.
Wen Qian then thought of a way to make sure the people inside would certainly die.
She would pour sand and stones inside. When bored in the past, she had collected many items that were temporarily useless, but now they would come in handy.
After Big Jin left, she climbed onto the bedroom roof.
Due to the explosion, many tiles on the kitchen roof had already been shattered, and the entire roof was in shambles.
Wen Qian sat on the roof ridge. She could only see the kitchen roof but not the inside situation. She began throwing things into it.
Since the roof was already in tatters, she initially planned to pour sand, but later decided that throwing objects would be more effective, so she started throwing all kinds of stones.
As the stones rained down from the sky, three of the four people inside were already dead, with only the leader left, who had initially hidden behind the stove.
He was also seriously injured by the second grenade thrown in.
Although he was going to die, he hadn't seen anyone or heard any sounds until the end, when stones started falling from the sky.
He wailed and cursed, but the other party did nothing but throw stones.
So this leader was beaten to death.
After filling half the room with stones, Wen Qian finally felt at ease.
If they still didn't die after this, she would have no other choice. She clapped her hands, slowly moved along the roof ridge to the edge of the storage room, and climbed down using the iron frame.
Previously, her nerves had been tense, and she dared not relax for a moment. Now that she had suddenly relaxed, she felt very tired.
At this time, she had no energy to clean up. Instead, she wanted to find a place to rest. The rain had stopped now, and four people had died here.
She was worried that the strong smell of blood might attract wild animals, so she ate something to regain her energy and started cleaning up the room.
She removed the sandbags, then Wen Qian squatted on the windowsill and entered the kitchen.
She lit an oil lamp and hung it on the wall. The first corpse was behind the door, leaning against a landscape stone, and later buried under stones.
Wen Qian removed two stones, causing the corpse and stones to fall to the ground, while the main door, along with the doorframe, crashed down.
It seemed that if not for the stones blocking it, the door would have been knocked open by them long ago.
After removing the door as well, Wen Qian began clearing away the stones, which simply meant putting back the items she had thrown out earlier.
It wasn't strenuous labor, and Wen Qian didn't find it tiring, just annoying.
The first corpse was revealed, and she dragged it to the hallway, followed by the second and third corpses being cleared out.
She didn't want to put these dead bodies into her storage space for transportation, as these bandits were filthy and tattered.
The stove had collapsed, the chimney had fallen, and the entire kitchen needed to be rebuilt, though the partition wall with the bedroom still looked intact.
The floor tiles were also beyond repair, mostly shattered, and the blood had stained the floor red.
Wen Qian thought she would have to pry up all the floor tiles and relay them.
She straightened her back and looked at the sky. Only a few horizontal beams remained overhead, as the rest had been knocked down by Wen Qian's stone throwing, so she didn't have to worry about falling objects from above.
The four corpses were piled together, still bleeding.
Wen Qian used fire tongs to collect their guns and bullets to one side.
Their clothes were also tattered, and Wen Qian wondered how she should dispose of the bodies.
She didn't want to dig a pit, as burying four people would require an enormous pit, which would be time-consuming and laborious.
But then she thought that if she just threw them into the water, it might not be very friendly to Big Jin downstream, as they seemed to be fetching water from the river.
At this point, Big Jin had already stripped two corpses clean and disposed of them in the river.
The bodies should have been disposed of earlier. Big Jin was about to come and help Wen Qian after finishing his own chores.
He shouted from outside Wen Qian's courtyard wall, then came in and saw her loading the bodies onto her wheelbarrow.
"Are you planning to just throw them into the water?"
"I was going to take them downstream from your place and throw them in."
Big Jin immediately understood her intention and offered to help her.
The two of them pulled the wheelbarrow to the riverside, and after reaching the spot, Big Jin told Wen Qian to go back first.
In his view, Wen Qian would probably just throw the bodies straight into the water.
That way, if they later floated up and caused disgust or scared people, it wouldn't be good.
Actually, Wen Qian and he had the same idea – they didn't want the bodies to become floating corpses. However, Wen Qian's method of disposing of the bodies was to tie them to large stones and sink them.
After Big Jin finished the task, he returned home. On the first trip back, he had only told his family that Wen Qian had dealt with four bandits.
Now, on the second trip back, he gave his family a detailed account of the situation at Wen Qian's house.
Upon hearing that she had even used explosives, they marveled at Wen Qian's extensive supplies, initially thinking she only had a large seed collection.
They felt Wen Qian must have been lucky, as the four bandits had likely underestimated her because she was a woman.
This gang had a total of six members, and now all were eliminated, as they had no way to interrogate any survivors and ask if there were more accomplices.
Although they were worried that more people might come later, they thought there probably wouldn't be more than six people.
If six people didn't return, their accomplices, if any, would likely know they had run into trouble and wouldn't dare to come back easily.
Hearing that Wen Qian's kitchen was ruined, Big Jin's family was relieved that she wasn't injured, as a ruined kitchen was no big deal.
They would see how she rebuilt it and offer help later.
Wen Qian used the dead men's clothes to absorb the blood and water on the floor, then took a bucket of water and added some effervescent cleaning tablets.
Afterwards, she sprinkled water to start cleaning the floor, and once the water was swept out, Wen Qian spread a thin layer of sand.
It was already very late, so Wen Qian used sandbags to block the windows in the bedroom and rested in the storage room.
She was too tired. She took out a warm table stove, extended the chimney from the wall hole in the storage room, and lit a fire in the stove.
The indoor temperature rose slightly. Wen Qian set up a bed, changed her shoes and clothes, and went to sleep.
After a night's rest, Wen Qian opened her eyes in the morning and was startled by the unfamiliar surroundings before recalling where she was sleeping.
After finishing breakfast, Wen Qian took away the sandbags, then began to clean up the battlefield again.
This time, she swept away all the sand and started to pry up the floor tiles. The four walls were basically fine, just with some additional scars that would need to be patched up later.
The two children of the Big Jin family came with their mother, originally intending to help, but they found that she had already cleaned everything up.
The two children were very curious about what the kitchen in Auntie's house looked like after the explosion, but the inside was empty, with only four walls remaining.
However, from the pockmarked iron door of the bedroom, they could still see traces of the previous explosion.
