Rebirth: Making a Fortune in Ancient Times

Back home, Xia Yu asked Changyun to fetch two buckets of water from the village. She scooped a bowl of cornmeal and a handful of salt from the kitchen, sprinkled them onto the pig intestines in the basin, and began rubbing them repeatedly with both hands until the mucus was washed away. She added clean water to rinse the intestines thoroughly, then turned them inside out and rubbed them again in the same way, cleaning off any remaining grease. Finally, she rinsed them thoroughly with plenty of water. After finishing, Xia Yu filled the basin with water from her spatial well and stored the basin and pig intestines in her spatial dimension. She didn't plan to cook this dish today; the aftereffects of washing pig manure with her brother were too strong, and even if she cooked it now, they wouldn't have any appetite. Besides, soaking it in clean water for two days would make it even cleaner.

Just now, when Liu was watching her wash pig intestines with corn flour and salt, she thought, "I bet no one here would think that such cheap pig intestines would need corn flour and salt to clean properly. It's such a waste of flour and salt." In the end, she couldn't stand the waste and simply stopped watching. She went to the kitchen and cut the piece of pork she had bought that day into strips, so that she could take out a strip whenever she wanted to eat.

When Zhang Youtie returned that evening, he brought back a large water vat. It turned out that after returning the oxcart, he had stopped by the pottery maker in their village and bought a new, smaller vat, less than half the size of the old one. He moved the new vat to a suitable spot in the kitchen. Liu Shi had overheard the children's conversation when Zhang Youtie entered, and she also found it strange that he had bought another vat.

"Dad, why did you buy another jar? What are you planning to put in it?"

“We’ll put the water from our daughter’s precious water in this new vat for drinking. We’ll put the well water we fetch from the village in the other vat for washing vegetables, brushing our teeth and washing our faces. It would be too wasteful to use all the precious water,” Zhang Youtie explained to Liu Shi and the children.

"That's good. I'm just worried that something like what happened last time with the watering vegetables might happen again, and it wouldn't be good if outsiders saw it."

Xia Yu put all the meat her mother had portioned into her spatial storage. No matter how long it was stored there, it would always look the same as when it was first put in. The whole family was too tired today, and it was already late. Braised pork would take too long, so she planned to make it tomorrow. She discussed dinner with Liu Shi, and the two of them unanimously decided to make millet porridge, and boiled shrimp as the side dish. It was delicious, quick, and also because the pool in her spatial storage was almost full of shrimp, so they had to use them up quickly.

Xia Yu cooked even more shrimp this time than yesterday. To eat quickly, the whole family worked together to devein the shrimp. After dinner was ready, the family was too exhausted to talk. They just ate the shrimp. Each of them ate a bowl of wontons today. Actually, no one was full, but it was only five coins to try it. If they really wanted to eat more, they could make them at home.

After dinner, everyone sat around the table and started calculating the money they had earned and spent that day. Each person took out the money they had collected and piled it on the table. The pile was all copper coins. Liu found a long piece of hemp rope, and everyone started stringing them together, one hundred coins per small string. When they finished, they counted and found there were 3,210 copper coins. Xia Yu counted in her mind, and it was the money for 107 catties of shrimp. However, she also knew that there were more shrimp than that today. They weighed the shrimp very carefully for each person who bought shrimp, and they would even add a little more. So she herself didn't really know how many shrimp she had taken out today, or how many she had given away. Only the last three families' shrimp were counted; the rest were all a mess.

Zhang Youtie and Liu were both stunned when they saw the money on the table. They knew they had sold a lot today, but they didn't expect there to be so much money.

"Dad, Mom, don't just stand there, let's calculate how much money we spent today!" Xia Yu urged her parents.

The last few people went through their purchases, item by item, and the price of each item. In the end, the total came to 570 copper coins. Zhang Youtie was astonished; they had spent so much money. However, they still made a net profit of 2,640 copper coins today.

Lying in bed, Xia Yu thought about the conclusion her family had reached earlier. They all agreed that digging a pond in the village specifically for raising shrimp was a good idea. At least they could sell the shrimp openly in the future, and with their daughter's spatial treasure, they wouldn't have to worry about the shrimp not surviving. However, before digging the pond, they planned to go to Ming'an County to sell the shrimp one more time. They didn't dare touch the money they had saved up, as their fourth uncle had gone to take the imperial examination. If he passed this time, he would have to take it again next year, and their family would definitely need to pay for his travel expenses. Therefore, they planned to go to the county town in a couple of days to sell the shrimp again.

However, they couldn't find a seed shop in town today. They asked Liu, and learned that people usually save seeds from their own gardens for the vegetables they eat. Her mother saved seeds for a few common vegetables last year, such as scallions, eggplants, green beans, cabbage, and radishes; that was all. She had just planted some of the seeds she had in her spatial storage. They should be able to harvest a batch tomorrow.

The next morning, the first thing Xia Yu did after waking up was to go to her space and harvest all the vegetables that had grown, arranging them neatly in piles according to their varieties. Breakfast was simple: millet porridge, pickled radish shreds, steamed buns made from a mixture of wheat and corn flour, and a boiled egg for both Xia Yu and her brother. While eating, Xia Yu was already mentally planning what she needed to do that morning.

After dinner, Zhang Youtie went to the fields to do farm work. Liu didn't go today. She hadn't sorted out the scraps of cloth that she and her sisters-in-law had bought a while ago. There wasn't much work to do in the fields today, so she planned to organize the cloth and see what she could make from it.

Seeing that his mother hadn't gone to work in the fields, and thinking that his younger sister could keep her company at home, Changyun decided to go out and play with Jinbao and the others. However, before leaving, his mother pulled him aside to measure his foot size. As soon as Changyun saw the measurement, he knew that she was making new shoes, and he happily went out to show them off to his friends.

Seeing her mother take out the pile of scraps of cloth to tidy up, Xia Yu remembered her mother's promise to teach her needlework. Afraid her mother would bring it up again, she didn't go into the main room. Instead, she took out the still-drying *Anoectochilus roxburghii* (a type of orchid) from the yard to dry, and then went straight to the kitchen. After washing the brown rice, she soaked it in water. Suddenly, she remembered that the large intestine she had received from her spatial storage yesterday needed changing the water after soaking overnight. She quickly took out the basin of large intestine from her spatial storage, but when she saw that the water was exactly the same as it had been yesterday, without any impurities, Xia Yu couldn't help but facepalm. How could she forget that things brought in from outside, except for living things that can grow, are exactly the same as they are when they are taken out. In other words, even if she soaked it in her spatial storage for eighty-one days, the basin of large intestine would still be exactly the same as it had been yesterday.

She placed the basin of soaked large intestines under the shade of a tree in the yard, then covered it with a curtain to prevent the chickens from drinking the water and getting it different. While doing this, Xia Yu thought of something. It seemed that one day she used water from her spatial well to wash vegetables, and she seemed to have poured that water directly into the drain by the door. She wondered if there would be any changes at the drain outlet compared to usual.