The girls were completely absorbed in cleaning their new home, working with extraordinary enthusiasm.
Since they didn’t want to dirty or ruin their new clothes, they had changed back into their old ones and were constantly moving back and forth, both inside and outside the house.
They remained busy until the sky was almost dark.
Only then did Jinyi remember that they still hadn’t eaten and that Sir was still on an empty stomach.
So she called her younger sisters over, told them to wash up, change into clean clothes, and prepare the meal.
To celebrate moving into their new home, Jinyi, who was normally quite frugal, decided to be generous for once.
She prepared four dishes and a soup, accompanied by steamed white rice.
Zhao Baihui ate until he was completely satisfied and didn’t stop praising the food.
“Don’t leave yet. Let’s have a meeting. This will be our first family meeting.”
“Sir, what is a family meeting?”
As if performing a magic trick, Zhao Baihui produced five small notebooks and five pens.
In the bottom-right corner of the first notebook, he solemnly wrote three characters:
赵锦衣 (Jinyi’s name in Chinese characters)
“Jinyi, this is your notebook, and this is your pen. From now on, take them with you wherever you go.”
Jinyi looked completely bewildered.
She accepted the notebook and pen with great care, as though she were afraid she might damage them simply by touching them.
“Sir, are the characters written here my name?”
Jinyi couldn’t read.
She only recognized the simple numbers from one to five, along with a few commonly used characters such as those for chi, dou, and shi, units of measurement.
And even though she could recognize them, she didn’t know how to write them.
“Sir…”
Jinyi’s eyes reddened again.
Sir was truly too good to them.
Sometimes she even felt that she wasn’t worthy of receiving so much kindness from him.
Then she would remind herself that, in this life, she had been born to take care of Sir and repay his kindness.
Zhao Baihui seriously wrote the names of the other three girls in their respective notebooks and handed them over.
“From now on, I’m going to have a lot of things to do. I won’t be able to handle everything by myself, so you’ll have to help me.”
“Don’t worry, Sir. Jinyi will do her very best and take good care of you and this household.”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about business. More or less the same kind of work the shopkeepers in the village do.”
“Shopkeepers? Sir, can we become shopkeepers too?” Jinwen asked curiously.
Clearly, the idea excited her greatly.
She had already imagined the scene in her mind: herself dressed in the clothes of a wealthy woman, wearing a matching hat, sitting beside a group of long-bearded men while enthusiastically discussing business.
“Of course you can!”
“But aren’t all shopkeepers men?”
“You need vision! You need to think big! Who said women are inferior to men?”
Jinxiu muttered quietly,
“Everyone says that…”
Zhao Baihui shot her a look.
That girl always manages to ruin his own arguments.
“All right, we’ll leave that matter for later. We’re getting off topic. Let’s start with the first point. Jinyi, how much money do we have in the house right now?”
“Sir, we’ve bought a lot of things these past few days. We still have four liang of silver and three hundred and twenty wen left.”
“Hmm… That’s not much money. We need to find a way to make more money quickly.”
The girls reacted rather calmly.
Since they were the ones who handled both the money coming in and the household expenses every day, they only needed to do a few calculations to understand how much that meant.
They knew that Sir was a grain merchant and that he had plenty of money.
At least from their perspective, he was an extremely wealthy man.
“I only make one liang of silver every two days. In a year, that would barely be a little over a hundred liang. It’s far too little.”
The girls were somewhat bewildered.
More than a hundred liang of silver a year, and that was considered little?
There probably weren’t many people in the entire village of Qingniu who could earn more than a hundred liang a year, right?
“That’s why I brought something very important from my hometown. From now on, we’ll have a new main business.”
“Selling alcohol! Selling high-quality alcohol!”
The girls immediately began bombarding him with questions one after another.
Zhao Baihui didn’t explain much and simply told them that the product would take a few more days to arrive.
“Next point. How are we going to organize the household in the future? What things do we need to buy? We don’t have enough money right now, so we’ll have to make a plan and buy things little by little.”
The girls became even more enthusiastic about this topic.
“Third point. From now on, I plan to spend one or two hours a day teaching you how to read, write, and do mathematics. In the future, all of you will have to manage various things. You can’t do that without knowing these skills.”
As soon as Zhao Baihui finished speaking, the lively room fell completely silent.
The girls stared at him as though they had been turned to stone.
Jinwen stammered,
“Sir… are you serious? Are you really willing to teach us how to read and write?”
In all of their minds, studying was something reserved for people of extremely high status.
Raising someone who devoted themselves entirely to studying was an unbelievably expensive undertaking.
At least for a peasant family, it was something they couldn’t even afford to dream about.
Put simply, to support a scholar who devoted himself entirely to his studies, several people had to work just to provide for him.
And a student attending a school likewise needed several people to support his expenses throughout the entire year.
The books, brushes, paper, and inkstones used by students…
none of those things were within the reach of an ordinary person.
If a family didn’t have a hundred mu of good farmland and an annual income of thirty or fifty liang of silver, they couldn’t even consider it.
An ordinary peasant family might have only two or three mu of land, barely enough to feed themselves.
With ten mu of land, they could already be considered well-off peasants.
And if they managed to save three or five liang of silver by the end of the year, that would already be extraordinary.
There was a school in Qingniu Village where an old xiucai taught.
The annual tuition was five liang of silver!
Once food, clothing, daily expenses, and the student’s brushes, ink, paper, and inkstone were added in, at least twenty or thirty liang a year were required.
For an ordinary person, that was an astronomical sum.
They probably wouldn’t even manage to save twenty or thirty liang of silver over their entire lifetime.
So it could be understood this way: supporting a student meant spending twenty to thirty liang of silver every year for an indeterminate length of time.
When would such an investment ever pay off?
Not even the ghosts knew.
If someone hoped to recover their investment through that path, their ancestors’ graves would have to catch fire for them to be that lucky.
And even then, merely having green smoke rise from the grave wouldn’t be enough.
After listening to the girls’ concerns and doubts, Zhao Baihui smiled.
“I’m only going to teach you some basic mathematics and how to recognize characters. As long as it’s enough for what you need, that’ll be fine. Do you really think you’re going to take the imperial examinations?” Visit novelping(.)com for the full chapter.
“All right, there’s still one last point.”
“I plan to hire permanent workers. They’ll only need to cultivate the wasteland around here or work around the house.”
“We need to discuss how many people we’ll hire and how much we’ll pay them. After all, we’re not exactly rich right now.”
“Sir, how many mu of land are you planning to cultivate?”
“Hmm… I haven’t decided yet. If we first hire around twenty people, how much would we have to pay them per day? It doesn’t matter whether they’re men, women, young, or old.”
In any case, he only cared about the number of people.
He didn’t care whether they were men or women, young or old.
After all, each person meant another ten yuan of subsidy per day.
Jinyi quickly calculated in her head before answering:
“An ordinary peasant family has five or six members and owns two or three mu of land. After paying taxes throughout the year and setting aside half of their harvest to eat, they might only be able to sell the rest for one or two liang of silver.”
“At the end of the year, there’s practically no surplus left.”
“If Sir cultivated wasteland and charged slightly lower taxes, you could probably attract some people.”
“I don’t plan to charge taxes or distribute the land. I intend to grow some valuable things on it.”
“I’ll simply pay them a wage. Tell me, how much do you think would be appropriate?”
Although they didn’t understand what Sir meant, if he said they would be paid a wage, then they would be paid a wage.
Jinwen said,
“If they have to buy their own food, wouldn’t a family need to spend around one liang and a little more silver a year? If they bought cheap grain to make grain cakes with wild vegetables or porridge, they should be able to survive.”
Jinxiu nodded.
“More or less. When I lived with my family, wild vegetables were the main thing we ate. My family only needed to spend around one liang of silver a year.”
Using that figure as a reference, Zhao Baihui calculated that a family had, on average, five or six members.
The husband and wife, together with one or two grown children, made up the main labor force.
If a family needed around 1,500 wen a year, that meant an average of about 125 wen per month.
That should be enough to cover their basic expenses.
If he doubled the amount, it would be 250 wen.
With that, they could stop having to supplement their meals with wild vegetables, right?
But 250 didn’t sound quite right.
Then 300.
“Then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll set the standard wage at 300 wen per month per family and first hire a few families as a trial.”
Hiring an entire family for a month would only cost him 30 yuan?
Was there any labor cheaper than this?
“Eh? Sir? You’ll really give us that much?”
“That much? It’s not bad.”
“Sir, can men and women, young and old, really come? Then… can I ask my parents to come?”
“Jinxiu!”
Jinyi reprimanded her in a stern voice.
Jinxiu shrank her neck in fear and, with tears in her eyes, said,
“I’m sorry, Sir?”
“Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid. Jinyi, don’t scold your sister. I need people anyway. What does it matter who comes to work?”
“Jinxiu, if your family is willing to come, bring them. The rest of you can bring your families too.”
Jinxiu, Jinwen, and Jinyuan began crying again.
The three girls suddenly dropped to their knees on the floor and began kowtowing to him.
Zhao Baihui had barely lifted one of them back to her feet before another knelt down again.
“Get up! All of you, get up! If you don’t get up, I won’t let your families come!”