I trade in both worlds

Xu Xu watched all this silently, considering whether to give Xu Ziqing some advice or just let things take their course. After all, Lin Feng was Xu Ziqi's classmate, and the relationship between the two seemed to be pretty good.

As he was thinking, he fell asleep unconsciously. When he woke up again, he had already left the capital. Xu Xu looked at his phone and it was almost three o'clock.

Noticing that Xu Xu had woken up, Xu Ziqing complained, "Next time, let's not make an appointment so early. It's easy to get sleepy at noon if you get up too early."

"Besides, if you eat breakfast early, you will be hungry early at noon. I was so hungry today that I felt my hands were shaking."

"Okay." Xu Xu didn't care. She was used to getting up so early.

Xu Xu remembered what was mentioned today: natural mulberry silk satin is rare and expensive on the market, and it is also easy to scratch, wrinkle, and difficult to maintain.

She had an idea: "Sister Qing, do you think we should buy some pure cotton cloth to make clothes?"

Xu Ziqing was a little slow to react. The topic jumped too much: "Why did you think of using cotton cloth?"

"It's not like satin is expensive and easy to scratch, and hard to maintain, but cotton doesn't have these problems."

"But..." Xu Ziqing was a little tangled: "But cotton doesn't have the verticality of silk, nor the flowing and lustrous feel of silk. If it is used to make Hanfu, it will lack some spirituality."

Yes, cotton does not have the advantages of silk. Cotton outerwear does not have the visual nobility and elegance of silk. When she saw the cheongsam made of cotton and compared it with the cheongsam made of satin, she was immediately crushed to pieces.

"Ah~" Xu Xu couldn't help but sigh: "Forget it, let's continue to use silk."

"Don't worry about it. Those who can afford our silk won't care. What they care about is the real material."

Xu Ziqing felt that there was no market for cotton cloth. Nowadays, 100% pure cotton was almost everywhere and the price was very affordable. They had no advantage in making pure cotton.

"Okay, let's keep the cotton cloth for our own use." Xu Xu lay down on the seat in frustration.

In a blink of an eye, it was the end of September. The early-maturing potato plants had withered, and the clan leader and Liu Zhubu began to arrange to harvest the early-maturing potatoes.

Early in the morning, Liu Zhubu brought a group of people to Xu Zhuang. The leaders were dressed in ordinary clothes and their identities were unknown, but seeing how respectful Liu Zhubu was to them, one could tell that their identities must be high.

When trying to grow potatoes, there were four households in the clan plus the clan leader and Xu Jizong, a total of six households, and each household planted five acres of land. Xu Jizong's family planted two acres of early-maturing crops, two acres of mid-maturing crops, and one acre of late-maturing crops, while the clan leader's family planted two acres of early-maturing crops, one acre of mid-maturing crops, and two acres of late-maturing crops.

Today's potato harvesting process was arranged by the county government. There were a total of ten acres of early-maturing potatoes. The county government brought thirty people over, and everyone came to the potato field of the patriarch's house. There were dozens of bamboo baskets scattered on the field.

Seeing the clan leader leading a group of people rushing into the village, with each of them holding farm tools in their hands, many villagers didn't know what was going on, but it didn't affect their desire to watch the fun, and everyone followed behind not far away.

A group of people working with farm tools stood at the edge of the field, ready to start working at any time. Seeing this, the villagers also stood around the edge of the field and watched the excitement quietly.

Liu Zhubu looked at the villagers but did not drive them away. He turned to look at the withered potato seedlings in the field and said, "Today we have ten acres of land. We will dig this one acre first. The women from your families will follow behind and pick up potatoes. Do you understand?"

"I understand." There were sporadic responses.

Seeing that everyone understood, Liu Zhubu turned around, bent slightly and whispered a few words to a middle-aged man, then looked at everyone and said, "Let's start digging."

The men first used a shovel to dig out the soil on both sides of the potatoes, and then picked out the potatoes with their hands. The women picked up the potatoes and shook them gently to let the soil and weeds fall off, and finally put them in the basket.

Xu Xu also changed into a worn-out outfit and followed Aunt Xu to pick potatoes. Lin Erya and Chen Lihua did not come, one had to take care of the children and do housework, and the other was pregnant and not suitable for work.

The thirty people brought by the county government, plus a dozen men from six households, nearly fifty people, dug out all the potatoes in less than half an hour, while the dozen women only picked up less than half.

The villagers watching near the clan leader glanced at Liu Zhubu and his men in the distance, lowered their voices and asked the clan leader, "Do you want us to come and help?"

The clan leader glanced at the potatoes in the field and said, "Wait a minute, I'll go ask." Then he walked towards Liu Zhubu.

"What's the matter?" Seeing the clan leader coming over, Liu Zhubu asked.

The clan leader pointed at the potatoes in the field and said, "It's too slow for these women to work alone. I'll ask some villagers to come over here to help pick up potatoes. We'll go to other fields to dig potatoes first."

Liu Zhubu originally planned to let them pick up the trash together before moving on to the next acre of land. Since the villagers were helping, that would definitely be the best.

"Okay, you don't have to go over there yet. Find someone to take care of the arrangements. Come back to me when you're done."

The clan leader told Xu Jizong to take others to the field next door to start digging potatoes, and then take the surrounding villagers to pick up potatoes together.

Dozens of people rushed into the field to pick potatoes. They finished the task in the blink of an eye.

Looking at the thirty or forty baskets full of potatoes in the field, Liu Zhubu's uneasy mood, which had been there since he decided to plant the potatoes, finally settled down.

Just at this rough glance, the yield per mu will not be more than ten or twenty shi. Even if it does not reach twenty-five shi, the yield is still amazing.

Liu Zhubu brought the money and grain master to the side of Patriarch Xu and said, "You arrange for someone to weigh these potatoes and record the yield per acre."

Chief Xu nodded, went to the edge of the field and fetched a backpack full of sacks: "Everyone, put the potatoes into the sacks together, don't pour them out, pick them up one by one to avoid pouring a lot of soil into the bags and affecting the weighing."

After the bags were filled here, the potatoes in the field next door were dug out. The patriarch left four people to help, while the others carried baskets and continued to go to the next acre of field to pick potatoes.

The clan leader and the four villagers who stayed behind weighed the grain together, and the financial advisor was responsible for recording it.

After weighing and counting, there were a total of 38 bags of potatoes, with a yield of 27 shi per mu. The money and grain secretary stared blankly at the records in his hand, wondering if he had weighed them wrong or if he had made a mistake in recording them.

He knew that today was the day to harvest new grain seeds. It was said that the yield of the grain seeds was very high, but this was too outrageous. It was a full twenty-seven stones. The yield of wheat per mu was only one stone. What kind of magical grain seed was this?

The clan leader watched him in a daze, not knowing whether he should wake him up. He looked around and saw Liu Zhubu coming over, so he waited quietly for him to come over before speaking.