“Mom, did you really buy this for me?” Yuan Si asked, her face a mask of disbelief.
“Of course I did.
If you hadn’t said your Immortal Master uses this stuff too, there’s no way your mom would have wasted money like that.
Didn’t you see the look your cousin Shunzi gave me?” The old lady pouted as she recalled her nephew’s incredulous expression.
‘What’s with that?
Does he think this old lady can’t afford it?
I’ve got plenty of money.’ “Who’s he looking down on?
I may be old, but I just choose not to spend it.
If I took out all my money to buy this stuff, I could bury him in it.”
In reality, the old lady had completely misunderstood him.
He wasn’t looking down on her; he was shocked by how extravagantly she was spending money.
“Mom, why do you care what he thinks?
It’s our life.
As long as we’re happy, that’s all that matters.” Realizing it was truly for her, Yuan Si happily took the items to go brush her teeth and wash her face.
“Right, as long as I’m happy.” The old lady’s words lacked conviction.
After suddenly spending so much on these useless things, it would be a miracle if she were actually happy.
Spitting out a mouthful of foam, Yuan Si felt refreshed from the inside out.
It was a sensation beyond words.
After admiring herself for a good while, she finally finished brushing her teeth.
Yuan Si carefully placed the toothpaste and toothbrush on the windowsill in her room.
“Mom, I’m putting this here from now on.
Don’t you dare throw it away.”
“Do I look like a spendthrift like you?
That stuff cost over a dollar,” the old lady grumbled.
“Hurry up and eat.
I’m heading off to work.”
“Okay, Mom.
Don’t worry, once I save up enough money, I’ll pay you back.” Yuan Si knew how frugal her mother was.
Spending so much at once on these “useless” things must have pained her heart.
“Hmph, as if I care about your little bit of money!” Though her words were sharp, the old lady’s little feet scurried her away.
This significant change in the old lady was, in the end, all thanks to the “Immortal Master.” Ever since Yuan Si’s first visit to her Immortal Master, their family had never been short of fish.
Whenever their supply was about to run out, fresh fish would appear in the kitchen the next day.
Yuan Si explained to her mother that this was her Master, who knew they were out of fish and had specially delivered more in the dead of night.
As for why he came all the way to their house but was never seen, well, that could only be because an Immortal was not someone an ordinary person could lay eyes on.
The old lady had now truly witnessed the prowess of the Immortal Master.
She couldn’t help but value her youngest daughter even more, so she started taking what “Fourth Daughter” said to heart.
However, there were some of the old lady’s habits that Yuan Si couldn’t change overnight.
For example, never running out of fish should have been a happy occasion, but some of the old lady’s methods left Yuan Si feeling exasperated again.
Now that the weather was getting hot, the old lady insisted on curing the extra fish with salt to keep them from spoiling.
When it was time to eat, she would rinse the salt crystals off the surface.
Even the water used to rinse the fish wasn’t to be thrown out.
The old lady would place the wooden basin directly under the hot sun.
Once all the water had evaporated, a layer of fine white salt would be left at the bottom.
Yuan Si found this recycled salt fishy and didn’t want it.
“Mom, let’s just throw this out.
It stinks of fish.” It was one thing for fish to taste fishy, but now that the salt itself had a fishy smell, she found it hard to imagine eating it.
The result was predictable.
The frugal old lady gave her a swat.
“You wasteful child!
What’s a little fishy smell to be afraid of?
We’re just going to use it to cure more fish anyway, and isn’t fish much fishier than this salt?
Besides, we’re only using it to cure meat, not for you to eat directly.
Why are you so fussy?”
Yuan Si was speechless.
She remembered that when the old lady made fish soup, she only rinsed off the surface layer of salt.
The layer stuck to the meat went straight into the pot to be cooked.
In the end, wasn’t that salt going to be eaten anyway?
‘Sigh, forget it.
I shouldn’t argue with an old lady who knows how to be so frugal.’ These times were indeed harder than the apocalypse.
She remembered that even though salt was a scarce commodity in the apocalyptic world, as long as you were strong enough, a trip to the seaside could get you as much salt as you wanted.
But things were different here.
It was a planned economy.
Even if she could scale walls and walk on roofs, she couldn’t get salt through normal means.
She still had to honestly do tedious piece-work to trade for salt granules.
With the supplement of fish, Yuan Si’s life finally stabilized for the time being, and her superpower finally advanced to Level 1.
However, she felt that cultivating her superpower in this life wasn’t going very smoothly.
Logically, since she had already cultivated it once, had the experience, and possessed ample Spiritual Pearls, her training should have been twice as effective with half the effort.
But in reality, her cultivation speed this time was even slower than in her past life.
She summed it up herself: she just didn’t have a good environment for cultivation.
Even though she only had to report to the production team in the morning and evening to hand in her tasks, it was still a disturbance to her training.
‘It’s just like studying,’ she thought.
‘You just get into the groove, and you’re interrupted.
You get into the groove again, and you’re interrupted again.
It’d be a miracle if you could learn anything well.’ Cultivation was the same.
Meditation required one to focus their mind and calm their breath.
If her mind could never settle, the effectiveness of her training was greatly reduced.
But at least she had crossed the first threshold.
After reaching Level 1, she could use her spiritual power to temper her muscles and bones, achieving the effect of strengthening her body.
It’s just that the process wasn’t exactly pleasant. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
‘I feel like I need to pick an auspicious day to begin,’ she thought.
But she was given no such chance.
The village gongs and drums began to sound, announcing the start of the wheat harvest.
The wheat harvest was a major event in the village.
Every year at this time, everyone participated.
No matter how old or young, from the elderly watching over the wheat in the drying grounds to the children carrying small baskets to glean wheat grains from the fields, no one could be idle.
Yuan Si joined a group of little kids, bent over and running all over the fields.
Because the grains the children gleaned didn’t have to be handed over to the commune, they were all highly motivated.
At first, Yuan Si wasn’t very enthusiastic, because no matter how she calculated it, the work just didn’t seem worth it.
The wheat fields had been cut down to just stubble.
You had to be very careful while walking, both to avoid getting your feet pricked by the sharp stalks and not to step on the adjacent corn seedlings, which were already a hand’s breadth tall.
This made progress very slow.
It could take half the day just to find a single grain.
It was a good haul if you could find a handful after walking down one whole row.
But after eating the roasted wheat grains her mother made for her that first evening, she finally understood how delicious they were.
The next day, she even started using her spiritual power, focusing wholeheartedly on gleaning grains.
Someone with a cheat ability like her was perfectly suited for the task of gleaning wheat.
With her spiritual power spread out, the two-meter radius around her became like a radar-scanned area.
She could see where every hidden grain of wheat was at a glance.
It was just a bit tiring.
Every time Yuan Si walked from one end of the field to the other, she had to take a good long rest.
However, the exhaustion didn’t dampen Yuan Si’s enthusiasm.
The final result was predictable: while others had just gathered a handful, Yuan Si had already filled both of her pockets.
But she knew she had to be low-key at a time like this, so she matched the other children by only holding a handful in her fist.
The rest she transferred into her space.
When the week-long wheat harvest was over, Yuan Si’s little face was sunburned red, but her family had managed to save up more than half a sack of wheat grains.
The old lady was overjoyed these past few days.
She truly hadn’t expected her little daughter to have learned such a practical skill from her Master.
To reward her daughter, she specially ground the grains the girl had gleaned into flour, let the dough rise, and made two large flatbreads.
Yuan Si couldn’t stop after the first bite.
She never expected the white flour in this world to be so delicious.
Then again, she had been here for several months and had barely eaten any real grain, mostly filling her stomach with cornmeal mush.
For the past while, it had been fish day in and day out, so of course a sudden meal of white flour flatbread would taste amazing.
“Mom, this white flour flatbread is so good!
We have to eat this every day from now on.”
Well, there you have it.
A single meal of flatbread had sparked Yuan Si’s grand ambitions.
She was no longer satisfied with eating fish every day—now she wanted to eat white flour.