Chapter 28 Rice Juice

When they got home that evening, the two of them had no appetite and, unusually, left a large piece of rice uneaten, something they never usually do.

Leftover rice should never be thrown away; every grain represents hard work, a feeling that became even stronger after Zhao Xuan harvested the rice.

Lu An went to cook pig feed, leaving her to wash the dishes. After cleaning the kitchen, she stared blankly at the remaining bowl of rice for a while, then took a clean basin and rinsed the rice several times with cooled boiled water.

She took out a small stone mill that she had been hiding under the kitchen cupboard, scalded it with boiling water, and then moved two stools to the yard. She placed one stool on the stone mill and sat on the other.

She placed her feet on the footrest of the stool holding the stone mill for stability, then put the washed rice into the small hole in the center of the millstone, pulling the millstone with one hand while slowly pouring in cool boiled water with the other.

A stone mill is about the size of an adult man's palm and is not heavy. It is generally used to grind chili powder and cinnamon powder. It can also be used to grind soy milk. The process for grinding rice and soy milk is similar, and it is even faster than grinding beans.

She collected the flowing white rice juice in a clean stainless steel bowl, then added some salt and a handful of sugar after grinding, before pouring it back into the small stone mill and grinding it again.

This will make the rice water smoother and silkier.

This process would only take a minute with a high-speed blender, but unfortunately she didn't have one.

Rice cooker, air conditioner, water heater, toilet... she has none of them!

460, who was watching curiously as its owner ground rice, saw Zhao Xuan sigh dramatically without warning.

Filter the ground rice juice through cheesecloth to remove the coarse residue, then pour it into a prepared glass bottle. The milky white rice juice will turn into a translucent pure white after being filtered through the cheesecloth. Looking through the bottle, it looks a bit like diluted rice wine, and its appearance exudes a refreshing and thirst-quenching aroma.

After sealing the bottle, Zhao Xuan placed the full bottle of rice juice into the refrigerator's crisper drawer.

After feeding the pigs and chickens, Lu An returned with a flashlight. Amidst the chirping of insects in the night, he checked all the doors and windows before locking the gate to the yard.

After the apocalypse, they both went to bed early. Even though they had turned on the lights, they didn't dare to keep them on for too long at night for safety reasons.

After taking a shower, I turned on the fan, lowered the mosquito net, and the fan turned around with a continuous and rhythmic clicking sound, causing the white mosquito net to billow slightly.

The bamboo strips were cool, and the wind carried away the moisture from my body. The lights were off, but the stars outside were bright, and I could hear the cooing of owls. Occasionally, a small black shadow would dart past the window with a sharp "whoosh"—that was a bat flying by.

Zhao Xuan lay on the cool bamboo mat, a small blanket covering his stomach, listening to the white noise of nature outside the window, and slept until dawn.

The moment I opened my eyes, I was met with intense pain.

My arms hurt, my back hurts, and my calves hurt!

Zhao Xuan gasped for breath and slowly crawled off the bed... his whole body ached!

She hadn't done farm work like this in a long time; at least the rice planting in the spring was done in sunny weather.

Lu An watched as Zhao Xuan, whose face was ashen, got up, changed her clothes, and washed up. She smiled but didn't say anything more to tell her not to go.

The sky was just beginning to lighten, the air was humid, and the comfortable temperature silenced even the chirping of insects. As Zhao Xuan poured water into the kettle, he said to Lu An, "The last time my calves were this sore was when our elementary school PE teacher made the whole class practice frog jumps."

As the sun rose, the two young people rode their tricycle away from home.

The day's farm work was rather uneventful, but in the evening, when the sun was still hanging on the mountaintop casting a soft orange glow, a jingling sound of a vehicle came from behind. Zhao Xuan slowly straightened her back, then used one hand to support her waist and the other to shade her eyes as she looked into the distance. She saw Yao Yuan and Zhang Xiaohe each riding a tricycle toward her.

"Brother Yao! Sister Xiao He!" Zhao Xuan waved to them.

The two of them parked the car on the edge of the field. Yao Yuan looked around and pointed to the patches of rice lying on the ground, asking, "Are these all going to be threshed and harvested?"

Zhao Xuan nodded, puzzled. Then she saw Yao Yuan take out a pair of work gloves from his pocket, put them on, and then quickly pick up the rice and go to the threshing machine. He stepped on the machine and began to thresh the rice.

Zhang Xiaohe explained, "We heard from Gougou yesterday that you're planting a second crop of rice, so we came to help you out during our free time." She held a burlap sack in one hand, picking up the remaining rice ears from the field and tossing them into the sack. Looking up, she saw Lu An and Zhao Xuan trying to stop her: "You don't need to be so polite. How much have you two helped us since we arrived? Of course we should help with this little bit. The second crop of rice is time-sensitive. After harvesting the rice, you still need to plow the fields and transplant seedlings. If it's delayed by a month, your autumn rice harvest will be ruined."

With the help of the Yao family, the progress was significantly faster. After threshing the rice, Yao Yuan packed it into burlap sacks, tied the tops, and put them into the back of his tricycle. Then he gathered bundles of straw, tied them tightly together, and put them into the back of the sack as well, piling them into a small mound. Finally, he took out ropes to secure the full load of crops, turned to Zhao Xuan and the others, and said, "I'll take it back for you first!"

The rice paddies weren't far from home, so Yao Yuan quickly made a round trip and loaded the second truck. This time, they went back together, with all four of them filling their truck beds with grain or straw. The straw was moved to the old house next door where the pigs were kept, while the grain was put in the living room.

The group unloaded their goods as if they had been pulled out of the water. Yao Yuan wiped the sweat from his face with his shirt and prepared to leave with Zhang Xiaohe. Zhao Xuan quickly called out, "Brother Yao, wait a moment."

She strode to the refrigerator and took out the large bottle of rice juice from last night. The bottle was full of rice juice, which had separated slightly after settling overnight. Zhao Xuan shook it, and it quickly turned into a translucent white, somewhat like coconut juice. The moment it came into contact with the hot air, a layer of white mist quickly rose on the glass bottle, highlighting the cool rice juice inside. At first glance, the bottle of rice juice had a rather exquisite and beautiful, bourgeois charm.

The bottle of rice water contained about two liters. She then put a thick cloth bag over the glass bottle and hung it on Yao Yuan's car handlebars.

"It's not good to drink iced drinks when you're sweating all over. Just leave this bottle of rice juice here, and it will be ready to drink when you get home."

The Yao couple thanked them with smiles.

For the next four days, they came to help at noon and in the evening, first bundling the straw, then bagging the grain, and then helping to transport it back.

With the help of the Yao couple, the rice was harvested quickly.

Zhang Xiaohe was very meticulous and always followed behind them to pick up the fallen rice ears, so the field was extremely clean, with only clumps of rice stalks standing there, each about a hand's height.

After threshing, the millet was weighed. There were five mu of rice in total. The highest yield per mu was 420 jin, and the lowest was only 290 jin, for a total of about 1,600 jin. If it were milled into rice, it would yield nearly 1,000 jin of rice.

Lu An was very sensitive to numbers. Although he had never farmed, he knew that before the major disease, an acre of land could produce more than a thousand catties of grain.

They worked hard for two seasons, but the income from five mu of land was actually less than the income from one mu five years ago.

But this amount of food was enough to sustain them for a year, especially since they had grown a lot of sweet potatoes and potatoes.

Once the grains are weighed, they are ready to be dried. The flat threshing ground at the bottom of the village can be easily swept up, and bamboo mats can be laid out to spread the grains evenly. Sun-dried grains are easier to preserve and will keep for two or three years in a dry place.

The rice will lose some weight after drying, and with 100 jin of seed rice to be kept, the actual yield of edible rice from five mu of paddy fields is less than 900 jin. Zhao Xuan also considered the possibility of a poor harvest next year and wanted to take advantage of this good year to plant enough rice to last for two years.

The weather was still hot, but it seemed like the rainy season had arrived. Often, a gust of wind would come, and the sky would immediately be covered with dark clouds. Within minutes, the rain would pour down like a downpour.

Lu An's Zhao Xuan would often carry the millet to the threshing ground to dry on cloudless mornings, and then the two of them would carry hoes to plow the fields.

They didn't have oxen, so they could only use hoes to loosen the soil. There were quite a few tractors in the village that could be used for plowing, but they all started with diesel engines, and they didn't have any diesel fuel.

Hoeing is not much easier than transplanting or harvesting rice, which require bending over. Manual hoeing doesn't dig as deep as machine hoeing, so workers have to use much more force to hoe away the rice stalks left in the field, along with the weeds that sprout up in a few days. The plant roots are very firmly rooted, so often one hoe stroke isn't enough to reach the end, requiring a second, or even five or six more strokes… After finally digging out all the roots, they have to be mixed into the loose soil, and the land must be leveled. Uneven land means uneven water levels after flooding, causing some rice seedlings to absorb too much water while others don't, which greatly affects the harvest.

These past few days, most of the time they would dry the millet and then go to the fields to loosen the soil. But after only a few minutes of loosening, dark clouds would gather, and the two of them would run back like cannonballs to collect the millet.

The torrential rains in the mountains are mostly passing clouds. A small patch of cloud, unable to hold all the water, pours down for a while like squeezing out a towel, and then stops. The sun is still dazzling, but the ground is soaked through, and the water vapor rises up, making the whole mountain feel like a fairyland.

Zhao Xuan discovered that human adaptability has no upper limit. On the second day of harvesting rice, the sore muscles could have tormented her to the point of wishing she were dead, but after many days of high-intensity labor, she gradually adapted. Even after a whole day of hoeing and rushing around collecting and drying the rice, it didn't wear her down much. After eating a big bowl of rice and taking a nap, she would feel refreshed the next day. It's just that sometimes, looking at her increasingly rough hands, she would sigh silently.

She had hardly ever done housework growing up. In the countryside, she was always a little shadow following her grandmother around, who wouldn't let her touch a single farm chore. In the city, her parents shared the housework, and if she cooked even one meal, her father would post several updates on social media, as if he wanted to tell the whole world he had the most wonderful daughter in the world. So her hands had always been slender and fair. It wasn't until she started struggling to survive and did so much farm work that she realized her hands were getting rougher, with thick calluses forming on her palms.

But that sigh was only momentary; the next second, she was full of energy and threw herself into the next task of farm work.

For a whole month, Lu An and Zhao Xuan devoted themselves to the busy farming season with great endurance and enthusiasm. This was the most arduous time of the year, hot and offering no chance for rest.

New rice seeds need to be sown on one side, and millet needs to be dried on the other. Meanwhile, a vast five-acre paddy field needs to be loosened and replanted. After loosening the soil, fertilization is needed. Thanks to the four piglets at home, they have fertilizer on hand. In these days without chemical fertilizers, Zhao Xuan pays close attention to the use of farmyard manure, as it is a crucial factor in increasing yield. Wood ash is mostly spread in dry land, which helps potatoes grow very well. Fermented manure can be added to paddy fields and vegetable gardens. Mixing silt from ponds and rivers into the soil is also excellent fertilizer, but pond silt takes time to regenerate after being dug up, making it as precious as manure.

Zhao Xuan remembered that in the countryside, fish fry were used to be released into rice paddies, allowing the fish to grow alongside the rice. The fish hid under the rice leaves, eating pests and using their droppings as fertilizer. These fish were called rice paddy fish, and they could be harvested when the rice grew and the paddies were flooded. They were generally small, but sold for a high price. She had once considered doing the same, but later realized she couldn't catch any of the small fish fry, so she gave up.

Fields cannot be cultivated year after year; their fertility declines with each passing year. Forcing cultivation not only increases pests and diseases but also reduces crop yields, or even leads to total crop failure. Zhao Xuan values ​​these few acres of land highly. They are fertile, located next to a stream, making water collection and drainage convenient, and are not far from her home. Therefore, she takes advantage of the absence of crops in the fields to replenish them as much as possible, hoping to extend the lifespan of the farmland.

Once the fields have been fertilized and the seedlings have grown sufficiently, you can begin transplanting them.

At this moment, a thin layer of water had accumulated in the leveled paddy field. Zhao Xuan rolled up his trousers and sleeves, put a small basket containing rice seedlings at his waist, went into the water, and started planting rice seedlings.

Last year, they planted rice seedlings extremely slowly. The reason was that they were complete novices. Without any guidance, they didn't even know how much to put the seedlings in the soil. Either they put them in too much soil and suffocated the seedlings, or they put them in too shallow, and the next day, the wind blew them over. So the two of them discussed and planned as they planted the seedlings, a process that was serious and cautious, as if they were building an atomic bomb.

Now that they have experience, they are much faster.

—It's hot.

Compared to the stifling heat of being wrapped in long sleeves and trousers during rice harvesting, this was a different kind of humid heat. Hats were no longer effective at blocking the sun, because the water reflected the light, and even with hats with brims as large as those on alien spaceships, the reflected light still illuminated them completely.

Zhao Xuan has a constitution that attracts insects. She had covered herself up well all summer, but now she had to roll up her sleeves. Before long, her exposed arms and calves were covered with bites. Other people's bites might be just small, but hers could be bigger than steamed buns, and from a distance, it looked like she was wearing a bracelet.

She couldn't help but reach out to grab it, and the mud on her hands got onto her skin and clothes. What was most despairing was that her eyelids were being targeted again without her noticing.

A chubby pink bag slowly appeared, stretching her eyelids and turning her eyes into slits. Her hands were too dirty; it was okay to scratch her arms and legs, but she couldn't rub her eyelids.

"Ah—!!" she cried out in a fit of impotent rage.