An orphan girl from a farming family: Everyday farming in the mountains during natural disasters

Heihei got a bowl of small fish and shrimps, and ate them with great pleasure. After he finished eating, he lay there, snorting with his mouth open.

After the poultry had been eaten, Xia Qingyue began to prepare her dinner. Without oil, she could only boil fish and shrimp.

It tastes bland, but the fish meat is tender and the river shrimp is firm, so it tastes pretty good.

She changed the dressing on her wound twice a day, and after a few days of rest, it had scabbed over and no longer needed to be wrapped with cloth.

In the next few days, Xia Qingyue went out in the morning, first put the fish cage at the stream, walked far away to look for medicinal herbs, and went to the reed marsh to look for eggs in the afternoon.

The weather has been good recently, and all the medicinal herbs we found have been dried.

She felt that she had found enough, so she decided to go down the mountain at noon the day before and collect a fish cage to use for catching pheasants and ducks.

Catch a few and sell them.

She set up a trap with a basket and waited in the dark.

The waiting period is always the most painful, but today, using fish and shrimp as bait, the chickens and ducks attracted are more likely to take the bait.

In more than three hours, minus the three hours of waiting, she caught five pheasants and four wild ducks.

In the evening, she had dinner and went to bed early.

The next day, Xia Qingyue got up early and tied her long hair into a man's outfit. She found the largest backpack and put the dry herbs at the bottom of the basket. She put two pheasants and three wild ducks in the basket, and tied two sacks of mugwort, cypress leaves, and honeysuckle on top. These things were not that heavy, so there was no need to worry about crushing the chickens and ducks to death.

She carried an empty vegetable basket on one arm, and two sacks of mugwort and honeysuckle. In her other hand she held a basket full of chicken and duck eggs, two chickens and two ducks tied with straw ropes, and an empty basket.

The purpose of the empty basket is to put the things you buy on the street in it and bring them back.

"Heihei, let's go down the mountain."

Xia Qingyue vaguely remembered the way down the mountain. After walking one-third of the way, Heihei knew that they were going down the mountain, and ran excitedly to the front to lead the way.

The mountain road was difficult to walk on, and I carried a lot of stuff with me, so I walked and stopped many times. I came out of the tiankeng at dawn and walked until after noon when I finally saw Xiushui Village at the foot of the mountain.

The thatched houses in Xiushui Village are arranged in an orderly manner. White smoke floats out of the chimneys of some houses, and villagers can be seen walking and chatting on the village roads.

There are crops planted in the fields, and some people are working with their backs bent.

Everything seems peaceful.

Xia Qingyue looked for a while, then deliberately took a road around the village to go to the town.

Half an hour later, Datong Town.

There were guards at the entrance to the town and people lined up in long queues to enter.

While waiting in line, Xia Qingyue learned from chatting with other people in the same line that entering the town is still the same as before. In addition to checking the household registration, there is one more requirement: each person has to pay two cents.

After waiting for a while, it was Xia Qingyue's turn. She paid the money to the household registration office and entered the town smoothly.

According to the comparison with the original owner's memory, the town looks more depressed than before, with fewer people, and everyone has a numb expression and tired eyes.

Following her memory, Xia Qingyue arrived at the market and learned that it would cost twenty coins a day to set up a stall to sell things. If calculated on a monthly basis, it would be cheaper, at four hundred and fifty coins.

She was secretly amazed by what she heard, and suddenly changed her mind and went to the restaurant.

The world is in turmoil and unrest. There is only one restaurant and two eateries in the town.

She went to these three stores one after another, let them see the goods first (the quality of the goods was there), and then negotiated the price.

Seeing that they thought the goods were good and wanted to buy them, she said she would sell them at the market price.

Normally, the things she brought were all mountain products, which were a little more expensive than ordinary things of the same kind.

Seeing that she didn't ask for a high price, they chose what they wanted.

All the pheasants and wild ducks were sold, at 23 wen per catty. Nine of them weighed a total of 36 catties, and I earned 828 wen.

An egg costs three cents each, and a duck egg costs four cents each.

I sold thirty-five chicken eggs and thirty duck eggs, earning two hundred and twenty-five coins.

After selling all the pheasants, ducks and eggs, I went to the pharmacy to sell medicinal herbs.

Xia Qingyue went to three pharmacies in the town one after another and asked about the purchase prices of some medicinal materials with examples.

After some contact, I found one that had a good attitude. They said that the price could be slightly higher depending on the quality of the herbs.

The shopkeeper first looked at the dried honeysuckle and wormwood in the sack and asked, "Are there any other herbs? It would be great if there are some herbs like Panax notoginseng, Bletilla striata and Astragalus membranaceus."

"Yes." Xia Qingyue poured out all the medicinal herbs.

The shopkeeper's eyes lit up. "Anything else?"

"That's all."

"Okay, okay, I'll weigh them." The shopkeeper moved quickly. Each medicinal ingredient had a different price, so they were weighed separately.

The quality of these medicines is good. The shopkeeper readily said that he would increase the selling price a bit, and asked Xia Qingyue if he could find some more of these medicinal materials.

Xia Qingyue did not refuse outright, "My father and I found these herbs in the mountains, but finding herbs mostly depends on luck. If you are lucky, you will find more, but if you are unlucky, you will find less."

"If the medicinal materials you find can maintain this quality, the price will be easy to negotiate."

The shopkeeper fiddled with the abacus in his hands, and the beads made a clattering sound.

At the same time, Xia Qingyue was calculating silently in her mind.

"Four ounces, seven hundred and fifty coins."

After calculating the price, the shopkeeper gave the corresponding silver to Xia Qingyue.

The amount of money was correct, so she took it, appearing calm on the surface but ecstatic on the inside.

She guessed correctly. Hemostatic medicine is in short supply nowadays, and selling medicinal herbs is still the most profitable.

She was afraid of snakes and lived in a sinkhole on the mountain, which was very dangerous, so she specifically asked the shopkeeper for realgar powder.

The shopkeeper was eager for her to continue sending medicinal materials, so he generously gave her a few packets of realgar powder.

In addition, she bought some quicklime at the drugstore. She was worried that the product was not available, so she described some of the characteristics of quicklime and asked the shopkeeper, who said it was available.

After leaving the pharmacy, Xia Qingyue walked briskly with a happy smile on her face.

All the money in my hand added up to eight taels, one hundred and seventy-three hundred coins.

Okay, next is the big purchase.

Last night, she had already thought about what daily necessities she needed to buy.

First of all, my clothes were patched and bleached from washing, and they had a lot of threads loose. I don't know when they fell apart. My only pair of shoes was also rotten, with cracks on the bottom, which hurt my feet when I walked on the gravel road.

The most ordinary cloth shoes cost twelve cents a pair, and the ones with a little velvet cost eighteen cents. She bought three pairs of the most ordinary ones, intending to wear them in autumn and winter. During this period, she wanted to make straw sandals.

The clothes were bought ready-made, one set each in aqua blue, light yellow, gray, and light purple. Each set cost forty cents. I picked out two pieces of linen and cotton cloth, and also bought some needles and thread.

Xia Qingyue said that she bought a lot and asked the shopkeeper for a better discount.

In the past, this would not be considered a large purchase, but under the current circumstances, it was indeed a lot, and the shopkeeper was also generous. A set of ready-made clothes was 39 cents, two rolls of linen were 40 cents, and cotton was more expensive, two rolls were 70 cents. The cloth was 6 cents cheaper here.

In the end, the total cost was 296 coins.

The needle and thread are a gift.

The four pieces of cloth were a bit heavy, so Xia Qingyue left them in the cloth shop and went to the market to buy food.

She went to the grocery store and asked about the prices of rice, flour, oil and salt.

I was shocked when I asked.

The most outrageous thing is the price of salt. A small bowl of about 50 grams of coarse salt costs seven cents, and a pound costs seventy cents.

The price of a cup of snowflake salt has increased several times, now five hundred coins per pound.

The salt in Dayuan was regulated. Each person was limited to buying a certain amount of salt, with no limit on the number of times they could buy it, and the limit was 15 kilograms per month.

"Boss, buy some coarse salt. I want 45 kilograms!"