"A rooster is fine, and I'll take all the eggs." Ye Zhaoyu chose the rooster as her first choice when she heard that it was available.

“Okay, this rooster has been raised for over a year and is just the right time to eat it, so I’m reluctantly giving it to you.” Aunt Zhang looked heartbroken.

"Thank you, Aunt Zhang. How much money do you need to exchange in total?" Ye Zhaoyu quickly expressed her gratitude.

Aunt Zhang is quite interesting. These days, hens are more expensive than roosters, and people are reluctant to part with their chickens. If they buy a hen, it might even have two eggs inside, while roosters have nothing but meat.

"Eggs are five cents each, 50 eggs would be two yuan and fifty cents. Roosters weigh over four jin, so we'll call them four jin, and they're eight cents a jin. That's five yuan and seventy cents in total." Aunt Zhang calculated it in front of Ye Zhaoyu.

“Okay, no problem, here’s five yuan.” Ye Zhaoyu handed over the money.

"Okay, no problem, I'll go pack the eggs and catch the hen for you right away." Aunt Zhang happily took the money and went home to catch a chicken for Ye Zhaoyu.

Ye Zhaoyu watched from a distance. When Aunt Zhang picked up the eggs, she checked them one by one, and she also picked the fattest chicken.

Ye Zhaoyu carried the rooster and eggs home and placed them in Ling Yunjue's house.

She doesn't know how to kill chickens or cook, so she can only wait for Ling Yunjue to come back before she can cook.

Lock the door.

Ye Zhaoyu went to the house of Wang Pozi, who loved gossip the most, to buy some vegetables.

There were no fresh green vegetables available, so we could only exchange them for some dried black fungus, frozen cabbage, and radishes.

Ye Zhaoyu saw that there were chestnuts, so she exchanged some for chestnuts.

This is also quite delicious for making chicken soup.

By the end of the day, most of the villagers knew that the beautiful new female educated youth was wealthy. Her family sent her to the countryside so that she and Ling, the educated youth, could experience hardship, and that they would arrange for her to return to the city when the time was up.

These were all things that Ye Zhaoyu revealed intentionally or unintentionally.

When Ling Yunjue rode back on his bicycle, everyone in the village was stunned, after all, it was the first bicycle in the village.

Other villages might already have two or three bicycles, or even tractors, but their village is poor and can't afford bicycles.

So when Ling Yunjue appeared in the village on her bicycle that night, everyone came to watch.

"Ling Zhiqing, you're really rich," the villagers said enviously.

"Yes, if I could ride it, I would die happy," someone said enviously.

"No, fellow villagers, I bought this bicycle to rent out. If you want to ride it, you can borrow it from me for 50 cents a ride. As you all know, I sold my job to go to the countryside to catch up with the educated youth who went to the countryside at night. I used all the money from selling my job to buy this bicycle, so I can only make a living by renting it out."

When everyone heard it was 50 cents a time, they immediately ran away.

If I can't afford it, I'd better not touch it.

Half an hour later, the onlookers gradually dispersed.

Ye Zhaoyu came out and went into Ling Yunjue's room.

"Tell me, are all the rumors in the village about us?" Ye Zhaoyu looked at the high-profile Ling Yunjue.

“It should be. Come on, I’ll kill a chicken and make you some soup. I can’t let you lose weight, or Uncle Nian will come looking for trouble.” Ling Yunjue said, looking at the rooster beside her.

"I'm not going. Let you go and show off your loving wife persona." Ye Zhaoyu sat on Ling Yunjue's kang, not wanting to move.

"Alright, I'll go alone." Ling Yunjue heated up the kang (a heated brick bed), picked up the rooster, and went out.

Ling Yunjue took the chicken to a nearby stream to deal with it. The water had thawed, but there were still some ice crystals.

It chills the heart.

"Hey, Ling Zhiqing, why are you the one killing the chicken?" A villager asked when he saw Ling Yunjue cleaning the chicken. Usually, when a family kills a chicken, it's the woman who does the work while the man sits and waits to eat.

This is the first time I've ever seen a man cleaning up while a woman sits at home waiting to be fed.

“Ye Zhiqing especially loves my cooking, and in order to marry her, I definitely have to satisfy her,” Ling Yunjue explained.

"Uncle, let me tell you, you can't spoil women. If you spoil them, they'll start to take advantage of you and run off with other men. Take my advice, from now on, just let women handle this." A gloomy-faced uncle suddenly spoke up to advise.

“That won’t do. My mom said that a man who cherishes his wife will have a better life,” Ling Yunjue retorted.

The uncle didn't say anything, but just stared at Ling Yunjue with a gloomy look.

Ling Yunjue cleaned up the chickens, ignored him, and turned to go home.

"I ran into a strange man when I was killing a chicken. He seemed to have unstable interests, and he might be a bit misogynistic or perhaps he had been betrayed by a woman before," Ling Yunjue told Ye Zhaoyu about what happened by the river.

This kind of person is emotionally unstable; it would be bad if they suddenly went crazy and hurt Ye Zhaoyu.

"You might be talking about the madman in the village, everyone calls him Uncle Da Niu. I heard that when he was young, he was very good to his wife, he would practically feed her. Unfortunately, I heard that his wife didn't appreciate it and ran off with a Japanese man." Ye Zhaoyu matched the person she had heard about with the person in question.

"So, the Japanese have been here before. This place is remote, with no wealthy people or resources. What was their purpose in coming here?" Ling Yunjue continued to chop the chicken into pieces with practiced ease.

“They’re either passing by, building a lab, or digging for treasure. There are two families in the village who are notoriously lazy, yet their animals are all rosy-cheeked; there’s probably something wrong with them too. Whatever the reason, there’s definitely something going on here,” Ye Zhaoyu concluded.

"That's a good summary. It would be even better if you could tell me the answer." Ling Yunjue chimed in with some idle chatter.

"Here, these are chestnuts I just peeled. Put them in the soup with the chicken." Ye Zhaoyu handed the freshly peeled chestnuts to Ling Yunjue.

Ling Yunjue took it, rinsed it briefly, and put it in to stew with the chicken.

The two sat on the kang (a heated brick bed) and began studying the map on the kang table, concluding that it was most likely the map of the laboratory.

If it's hidden treasure, where might it be hidden?

In a corner of the village, unknown to Ye Zhaoyu, people were also discussing them.

"Are you sure their identities are confirmed?" the man whose face was obscured asked.

"He must be an unwanted child in the family, abandoned and relegated to a lower position," the uncle who had spoken to Ling Yunjue explained.

Every time educated youth came to the village, their backgrounds were thoroughly investigated.

Moreover, it's impossible to send the young ladies and gentlemen of Beijing over, for fear they might be there to investigate something.

However, Ye Zhaoyu and Ling Yunjue were specifically assigned to this place by their superiors and cannot be transferred.

According to all the other educated youth who came with him, Ling Yunjue and his wife were sent to the countryside because his family did not agree to him marrying a divorced woman.

There's no information coming out from Beijing, and there are no reports verifying the authenticity of their information.

“Keep a close eye on them and see what they usually do.”

We can't hit them, we can't kill them, we can only keep an eye on them for now, and it would be best if we could drive them away.

Oh shit.

The person whose face couldn't be seen became extremely irritable.