Her parents, sister, and brother-in-law all died one after another during the three years between the ages of twelve and fifteen. No matter how lucky she was, she could not escape the evil of the world.

She only had one aunt and uncle to rely on.

He came from hell, met her, and they became inseparable.

Having been reborn, although he didn't quite remember what the girl who gave him the steamed buns looked like, he did remember her voice.

She gradually began to resemble the girl in his memory.

After being reborn, he spent a year with her and realized that she was the little girl he met when he was a child, and the little girl he cherished in his heart.

"Big brother, why aren't you asleep yet?" Little Fu Bao woke up from her sleep, groggily placing her little hand on Xiao Heng's chest and gently patting him: "Big brother, go to sleep..."

Xiao Heng drifted off to sleep.

At night, in Magistrate Wang's house, Chunniang, expressionless, covered her mouth and nose as she endured the fat man's vigorous labor. The incense burning by Chunniang's bed made Magistrate Wang drowsy.

"My lord! My lord!" Chunniang patted Magistrate Wang's body; he had already fallen asleep on her.

Chunniang pushed away the obese person on her with some disgust, dressed herself, walked to the door, opened it, knocked three times, and whispered:

"He's asleep!"

Then, a young and handsome man slipped into the room, entangled with Chunniang, and kicked the sleeping Magistrate Wang into the room.

Chunniang let the man land on Bai Feng with a look of enjoyment, while teasing the young and handsome man at the same time, "You, why didn't you drug him earlier? You just watched him lying on me like a dead fat pig! You're so bad!"

"That's what makes it exciting! He's no good; he's just a worn-out ox. What a waste of a beauty like you, Chunniang!"

"He's short, and he's always trying to do too much at once, he's just wasting our time! Let Chunniang help you." Chunniang is good at it.

The man and woman in the room were engaged in a passionate affair, and Wang, the county magistrate lying on the bed, was green with envy from head to toe.

A quarter of an hour later, Chunniang was crawling on her stomach.

It wasn't until the fourth watch of the night, after Chunniang had seen the man off, that she finally went to sleep, feeling utterly bored.

In Magistrate Wang's mansion, there were several beautiful concubines, but they were all taken in by Zhuo Shi when she was alive. They were beautiful, but they didn't have Chunniang's charm, and they also didn't have Chunniang's ability to bear sons.

Therefore, Magistrate Wang not only elevated Chunniang to the position of principal wife, but also treated the other concubines less generously than he had treated Chunniang. The other concubines all wore coarse cloth without patches.

Chunniang wore fine silk and satin.

The money that Magistrate Wang gave them was less than what he gave Chunniang. They only received fifty coins a month, which was less than what Magistrate Wang's three daughters received.

Chunniang earns ten taels a month.

They were to serve Chunniang and the two young ladies of the Wang family like servants.

Magistrate Wang disliked his daughters, so he neglected to discipline and raise the two daughters born to his mistress. Fearing that people would say he favored sons over daughters and laugh at him, he simply showered his two daughters with money.

Of course, he wasn't a very generous person to begin with. No matter how much money he spent, he would only give each of his three daughters a thousand coins, so that they could wear four sets of Suzhou embroidered brocade clothes a year, wear jacquard cloth clothes on ordinary days, and have a set of gold-plated silver jewelry.

In the eyes of ordinary families, this is indeed the treatment of a rich young lady, but in reality, it is equivalent to the treatment of a daughter of a small landlord with a hundred acres of fertile land.

For families of officials, such treatment was very low.

On the sixth day of the sixth lunar month, the tenant farmers brought up their rent. The fields had yielded a bumper harvest, and Niu Da allowed them to receive an extra ten percent of grain.

"Landlord, are you really going to give us an extra ten percent?" the tenant farmer asked in disbelief.

These tenant farmers all fled here many years ago. They have neither land nor farmland, and they live off the 30% of the harvest from rented land.

The Niu family used to be poor.

When they were poor, they would collect rent from the fields, and they knew the hardships of tenant farmers. Therefore, the cattle tycoon would give the tenant farmers a larger share of their grain.

"As long as there is a good harvest in the fields, you can all receive an extra 10% of the harvest!" If there is a good harvest in the fields, the landlords will also have to pay an extra 10% of the tax.

The tenant farmers' faces lit up with joy, and they said, "Sir, when you're not farming, please feel free to tell us what you need!"

Niu laughed and said, "Alright!"

These grains would be milled and sifted, and the good rice would be sold in grain stores, while the broken rice used to be sold cheaply.

"Dad, do we also have more than ten acres of glutinous rice fields?" Chen Yu usually doesn't care much about the fields, since the tenant farmers take care of them.

Of the 200 mu of land she bought this year, more than ten mu are glutinous rice fields.

"Yes, what's wrong?" Niu Da asked.

Glutinous rice is more expensive than brown rice and refined rice.

“I was thinking, if we keep making chilled juice like this, and there’s no secret recipe, it’ll be copied sooner or later anyway. Why don’t I try making some glutinous rice wine and think of some new ingredients to add? That way our chilled juice business will keep booming, right?”

"That's true, my wife is really shrewd," Niu Da laughed.

Little Fu Bao said, "Mom, I heard my second uncle say that when he went to take the imperial examination, he saw some sons of wealthy families eating something called cheese, which is made with glutinous rice wine and milk."

Chen Yu said, "This is something my grandmother often talked about before. Your great-grandmother even gave me a secret recipe from the palace, which contained ingredients that high-ranking officials and nobles ate. But I've never made it. Not to mention that the ingredients for making cheese are expensive, if the milk isn't fresh, buying it would just be a waste!"

The fish ate the glutinous rice.

Little Fu Bao asked, "What did my great-grandmother do before?"

"She used to be a palace maid in charge of the imperial kitchen. After leaving the palace, she married my maternal grandfather, and they lived a pretty good life. Unfortunately, she was later envied by her colleagues and framed to death." "My maternal grandmother then took my mother and fled here to seek refuge. It was more than eighty years ago! If my maternal grandmother were alive, she would probably be a hundred years old now."

Old Mrs. Zhong is sixty-five years old.

Chen Yu is twenty-seven years old.

The fish was fermented into more than ten kilograms of glutinous rice wine.

Xiao Heng helped plant the plots of land that Ji Ninghai had given him in the morning, and in the hot afternoon, he helped make fruit juice at home.

Niu Da and Niu Yong are picking fruit from a tree.

This year's harvest is truly abundant; if many fruits are not picked in time, the branches will not be able to bear the weight and may even rot.

"Oh my, Brother Niu, you've picked so many fruits and melons!" Two gossipy women appeared uninvited at the door. One was Niu Er's wife, Mo Xiaomei, and the other was Wang Shi.

After they finished working in the fields, they saw some watermelon seedlings growing on Niu Da's land to the southeast of Niu Li's land. They then remembered that the melons and fruits in Niu Da's own yard were growing taller than his yard wall.

From a distance, it looks like there are quite a lot of them.

Although conditions in Niushan Village have improved somewhat in recent years, if we're talking about who can afford ice, it's naturally the Niu family.

Mo Xiaomei's eyes darted around.

The Niu family's current wealth is enough to make many people covet it. Niu Da has no son, so if she could get her younger sister to marry into the family as a concubine...