Jiang Xuegong boiled some hot water, and Ning An took over the task of making tea. Her parents used to drink tea that cost two mao a packet, but since Ning An arrived, she had already switched them to Maojian tea at two yuan and five mao a box. Ning An had tried this tea herself—it was pretty good.
Because of the tea upgrade, her dad had even given her ten yuan as a subsidy.
“Buying fabric and buying tea—you’ve spent all your money by now, haven’t you?”
Ning An replied, “No way. I get eight yuan a month. Sure, this month’s is spent, but I’ve still got my savings from before. I have over a hundred yuan.”
Jiang Xuegong said, “Oh my, aren’t you rich.”
Ning An chuckled. Wasn’t she, though? Looking across the whole village, there wasn’t a single girl her age with as much money as her.
She brewed the tea and added a pinch of Qi-Nurturing Pill powder to it. Their bodies had already been cleansed of toxins with the spiritual spring, so now it was time to nourish them properly.
Zhao Fengxia had suffered hardship from a young age. During the chaos of war, her family members passed away one after another, leaving only her and her elderly mother to depend on each other. She was still young then, yet she held up the entire household on her own. Ning An’s maternal grandmother was an old lady with three-inch bound feet who rarely even left her room, so she had to rely entirely on her daughter for support. This was why Zhao Fengxia had developed such an exceptionally tough character, though tempered with a bit of worldly tactfulness in dealing with people.
Having endured so much hardship without adequate nutrition, Zhao Fengxia’s constitution was weak to begin with, and after giving birth to three children in succession after marriage, her depletion only grew worse.
Jiang Xuegong’s situation was much the same. His father died early, and he lived alone with his widowed mother. Ning An’s paternal grandmother had bound feet too, though not as extreme as the maternal grandmother’s—she could handle the housework and even grow some vegetables in the yard—but she couldn’t work in the fields, so everything outside depended on Jiang Xuegong.
Later, he went to work at a coal mine, descending into the pits to dig coal every day, which was honestly no easier than farming.
If they lived in an era of abundance, with constitutions like theirs, they would probably be taking seven, eight, nine kinds of health supplements—either lying in bed groaning, or off getting massages and therapeutic treatments. There was no way they could do what they did now—still working the fields and going down into the mines!
That was perhaps the unique spirit of people from this era!
Impoverished, yet full of hope. Having suffered every hardship, yet still strong and optimistic. Contradictory, yet so very real.
Ning An’s spatial storage held all kinds of pills, which she had refined for fun back in the Cultivation Realm. Her beginner-level pills were piled up like mountains—they could eat them like candy beans. But, once again, their bodies couldn’t handle that.
Just a pinch of powder was enough to keep their bodies healthy until they naturally grew old. Giving them a little at regular intervals would guarantee they lived to a hundred.
Jiang Xuegong and Zhao Fengxia drank the tea Ning An brewed and praised it nonstop.
“Nothing beats the tea my daughter makes. Mine never tastes like this.”
Ning An felt smug. Her tea tasted good because her brewing technique was excellent—it had nothing to do with the Qi-Nurturing Pill. That medicine didn’t have that effect.
At noon, Zhao Fengxia cooked, while Jiang Xuegong gathered some materials and built a big cage for the rabbits, putting both of them in it to raise. Only after finishing did he realize that the two rabbits his daughter had casually pointed out seemed to be a male and a female. Raised together like this, they’d probably end up producing baby rabbits.
Forget it, never mind, they’d just raise it. Even if it had baby bunnies, no big deal—just raise them. Rabbits only eat a bit of grass anyway. Once they grew up, they could be sold, and he wouldn’t even have to go far—he could slaughter them and take them to the coal mine, where plenty of coworkers would surely snap them up.
The city wasn’t like the countryside, where you could raise your own animals and eat meat conveniently—at the very least, no one cared if you killed a chicken for dinner. In the city, you really had to rely solely on meat ration coupons.
Having figured this out, Jiang Xuegong was in a good mood. After lunch, while his wife and daughter aired out the cotton-padded clothes, he went out to cut grass for the rabbits. He’d have to hurry and cut extra to store at home, or there’d be nothing for the rabbits to eat in winter.
In the evening, he rode his bicycle to Erdaoliang, found the family selling goat’s milk, and spent ten cents to buy back a bucketful. Once boiled, it was just enough for one bowl each for the three of them.
“From now on, An’an and I will stop by their place on the way home from work. We’ve agreed that they’ll milk it fresh when we arrive—that way it’s fresher. Their goat gave birth less than a month ago, and they say it’ll keep producing milk for several more months. An’an can drink it until April or May next year. By then there’ll probably be new kids born, so the supply can continue.”
“That’s wonderful. Our girl can finally get some proper nourishment. Why didn’t we think of this before!”
Jiang Xuegong laughed. “It’s not too late to start now.”
Ning An said nothing.
Her parents’ rose-tinted glasses were thick indeed. She ate and drank well—she didn’t even care for milk powder or malted milk extract, she got meat regularly, plenty of variety in vegetables, eggs every day, and refined grains at every meal. Even by later-era standards, her diet would count as nutritionally balanced. She didn’t need nourishing at all.
Xiao Juza grinned. “This is what they call: a kind of deficiency that exists only in your mother’s imagination.”
Ning An sighed. “The original owner’s fate was such a shame. With parents this good, why did she still care about that man? If he wanted to leave, let him go—just treat him as dead. Why drive herself into depression over someone like that!”
“That’s just how the environment was. A woman without a husband and children seemed to be living an incomplete life. Never mind now, never mind even this country—just look at abroad a few decades later: a woman with a brilliant career and dazzling success, just because she divorced her husband and never had children, was endlessly pitied and gossiped about by the world. As if without a happy marriage, her success couldn’t count as success.”
“Some of the people saying such things are jealous women. They can’t reach her heights or achieve her kind of success, so all they can do is nitpick and judge her by worldly rules and boxes. ‘So what if you’re successful? You’re still an old maid no one would marry.’ ‘So what if you’re successful? You couldn’t even have a child.’ A husband and children are the only things they have to compete with her over. The rest are men whose egos have been wounded. They refuse to admit that a woman can shine just as brightly without a man. They refuse to let women escape the control of patriarchal society!”
“An’an makes a good point! Really, some women have mediocre husbands and mediocre children, but because they have them at all, they can hold them up to prop up their own sense of superiority. Ah, why must women make things hard for other women!”
Ning An burst out laughing. Her Xiao Juza was truly adorable.
That said, Ning An could understand the original owner’s resentment and unwillingness. The education she had received made it impossible for her to be so carefree about it.
After the autumn harvest, the farm work was mostly done. But the farmers couldn’t rest, because they had to begin a month-long stint of “river work.” Dredging the rivers and digging new irrigation channels—this had to be done every year, and the results were real: the irrigation network grew denser, watering the fields became easier, and their ability to cope with natural disasters genuinely improved.
It was just exhausting!
In principle, river work was voluntary—you could go or not go. But everyone in the village scrambled to sign up. What was a little exhaustion? River work not only earned work points, but meals were provided too. Even if it was just pickled vegetables and cornbread, hardly a feast, people were still willing to go. Eating from the collective meant saving food at home, so the elderly, wives, and children could eat a few more bites.
Only male laborers went to do river work, because once there, everyone ate and lived together, and river work was even harder than farm work. So the production brigade screened out the women and only accepted men. The brigade leader gathered the men, led them to the worksite, and they stayed there for a whole month, each carrying his own bedroll.
Xiao Juza reported to Ning An: “An’an, the male lead has gone to do river work too.”
“Did he go in the original plot?”
“No. Back then, the relationship between the educated youth and the villagers was much better than it is now. As young people from the city, they were treated with considerable tolerance. If they didn’t volunteer for river work, everyone thought it was normal. This time around, their relationship with everyone is bad, and with all the brigade’s male laborers going, they’d be too embarrassed not to go. Besides, someone goaded them—saying that since they’d come to the countryside, they should experience everything, and river work was something farmers did every year, so how could the educated youth skip it? So all three male educated youth signed up.”
Xiao Juza showed Ning An the latest surveillance footage.
The male lead looked much more haggard than when he’d first arrived, his back even a bit stooped. Ning An watched with great pleasure.
She said to Xiao Juza, “Pass a message to Li Changling. Let her know that the money she scrimped and saved to send her brother—her brother didn’t spend a single cent of it. He sent it all to Zhang Yujie.”
“Got it!”
Xiao Juza agreed crisply. Stirring up trouble—it loved that the most!