Chapter 250 A 100,000 Yuan Deal
Sui Yu and Song Xian had their first meal in the mountains at Li's parents' home. The servants borrowed a fire, dug a hole and buried a pot in the open space outside the door to boil water, intending to make a pot of oil tea to fill their stomachs and have a good meal in the evening.
Erlang smelled the fragrance. He avoided his parents, took the bowl and walked over to Xiao Chunhong and sat down.
"Your food smells so good, can I have a taste?" he asked in a low voice.
Xiao Chunhong scooped a spoonful for him and said, "This is fried flour mixed with lard. Have you never tried it?"
Jiro shook his head.
"When you get home, ask your mother to make it for you. Fry the flour in a clay pot until it changes color, then put it in a jar. Whenever you're hungry, scoop a spoonful of it and boil it in water. It's ready to eat." Zhang Shun was curious and asked, "Are you the only child in your family? Your family is well-off and can provide you with white flour every meal."
Jiro nodded.
"Your name is Erlang? Am I remembering correctly? I thought you had an older brother." Xiao Chunhong muttered, "Oh, I see. Your father has an older brother? You have a cousin? That's why you're called Erlang."
"No, my brother died when he was five. He was Dalang and I am Erlang." Erlang looked around and saw that his parents didn't come out. He whispered, "Don't ask my parents. My parents cry when they think of my brother."
"Okay, okay." Xiao Chunhong agreed readily, "I'll tell our master quietly later and don't let her ask."
Erlang nodded, stood up and walked away with the bowl.
Zhang Shun watched him go into the house and said, "This kid came over to have some oil tea, but he didn't mean to tell us something, did he?"
"Then he is quite filial. He is afraid that his parents will be sad again." Gan Da continued.
Sui Yu and Song Xian came out of the house and saw Xiao Chunhong waving at them. They walked over and heard her mumbling a few words. They both nodded in unison.
"Sister Yu, what price do you want to offer for the honey?" Li came over and asked.
Sui Yu had never bought honey or seen a stall selling honey, so she didn't know how to get a price.
"Sister-in-law, although we have only met twice, you should be able to see that we are not those unscrupulous merchants. We will not bargain for prices, and you should not ask for a false price. If the price is right, I will buy it all, so that your father and brother don't have to carry honey down the mountain to set up a stall to sell it. For an honest man, this is really embarrassing." Sui Yu said.
These words touched Li's heart. Her father had to carry honey down the mountain to sell every year, but he couldn't bring himself to hawk it, so he went to her house every year and asked his son-in-law to carry the honey jars and hawk them around the village. In order to sell a few jars of honey, her husband would wear out a pair of shoes.
"We sell it at the foot of the mountain. A bowl of honey costs ten coins. It's the black pottery bowl you used for eating today. That bowl of honey can hold four catties (Western Han Dynasty pounds). Selling honey to you saves us trouble and effort, so we'll sell it at a lower price. How about two coins per catty of honey?" asked Li.
It was cheaper than Sui Yu had imagined. She estimated it to be five cents per pound, and she was glad that she didn't make a generous offer.
"Okay." Sui Yu nodded. "Then let's weigh the honey first? Sister Song, do you want some?"
"Is there still a share for me?" Song Xian laughed. "Forget it, you can buy as much honey as you want. I won't get involved. I'll take people out to look around and see if there are any other rare items."
"Okay, take more people with you so you don't get lost." Sui Yu said vaguely, meaning that she should take more people with her, not go too far, and be careful.
Li went into the house to negotiate the price with her father and brother. After a while, Li's father, his two sons and Qisheng came out carrying honey jars. They went back and forth four times and brought out a total of three and a half jars of honey.
"They sold it to me together with the jars, one jar for one penny. The extra money was the hard-earned money of my two older brothers who went down the mountain to buy the jars." Sui Yu said.
Qi Sheng repeated it in the local dialect to his father-in-law and his two brothers-in-law. The three of them smiled with satisfaction when they heard it. Father Li then spoke to his son-in-law.
"My father said that a jar weighs 20 kilograms. He weighed it when he bought it and filled it with honey." Qi Sheng said to Sui Yu.
Sui Yu had an idea in mind. She had sold pottery jars before and could estimate the approximate weight by looking at the size.
Lifting the lid, the sweet aroma emanated from the honey jar. The jar was black, and the honey looked dark as well. Sui Yu used chopsticks to stir a lump of honey and pulled it out. In the sunlight, the honey was amber, mixed with honeycomb fragments and young bees.
"These are bee larvae that haven't hatched yet. They're not poisonous and can be eaten," Qi Sheng explained. "No pests have crawled in."
Sui Yu pondered for a moment and said, "It's okay, I know."
Gan Da and Gan Er brought the weighing rod and weight. They first tied the honey jar with a hemp rope, and then hung it up with a scale hook. They worked together to lift the weighing rod and used a copper weight to weigh the honey jar.
"One hundred and ninety-two jin (Western Han Dynasty jin)." Sui Yu counted. "Uncle Li, come and take a look."
Qi Sheng sighed and said, "Let me see."
Sui Yu took the wooden board and the burnt stick handed to her by Xiao Chunhong. She wrote down the number on the wooden board and watched Gan Da Gan Er weigh the second can.
"This jar weighs 190 kilograms." Qi Sheng reported the weight.
The third can also weighs 192 kilograms, and the fourth can is only half a can, weighing 106 kilograms.
"It's a total of 680 jin. Excluding the weight of the four jars, the total is 600 jin. One jin is 2 coins, which makes a total of 1,200 coins." Sui Yu quoted the price.
Qi Sheng frowned in thought. He repeatedly pointed at each jar and muttered to his father-in-law how much it weighed, adding and subtracting. After pondering for a long time, he said with relief, "Yes, it's 1,200 coins. My father said he doesn't want the money for the jars."
Sui Yu laughed heartily. "When you make big money, you don't care about small things anymore. Okay, I'll take advantage. Brother Qi, ask your uncles to move out the silk and linen cloth, as well as the mulberry wine. I'll pay for them all."
"Let's pay for the honey first. We will be confused if there are too many things. We are not smart enough to hold many things. Sister Yu, please don't be offended. It's not that I don't trust you." Li said apologetically.
"It's okay, it's okay." Sui Yu asked Qingshan to bring a box of money over.
A string of copper coins contains one thousand copper coins, or ten cents. Sui Yu, Xiao Chunhong and Liu Ya counted out one hundred and twenty strings of copper coins. The three of them counted them once each, and the people from the Li family counted them twice again and weighed them on a scale. Only when they were sure that there was no problem did they happily move the money into the house.
A neighbor next door came over and saw Li holding out a piece of silk cloth. She walked over and asked, "Xiao Lian, how much do you want your silk cloth for?"
"Four hundred coins a piece, and the dyed one four hundred and fifty coins a piece."
"It's cheaper than the price two years ago." The neighbor was a little dissatisfied. She looked at Sui Yu and muttered, "She went up the mountain to buy silk cloth two years ago, right? The price wasn't this high back then."
"If you wait for two more months, by then other people will have sold out their silk cloth, and the price of silk cloth may go back up," said Li.
The neighbor didn't say anything. In two or three months, it would be autumn and the weather would be cooler. Who would still wear cold silk cloth?
Four rolls of undyed silk cloth cost one thousand six hundred coins, and two rolls of white linen cloth cost two hundred and twenty coins, for a total of one thousand eight hundred coins.
Sui Yu and his servants counted the copper coins again. After paying for the silk and linen, they also paid for four jars of mulberry wine, each worth 170 coins, for a total of 680 coins.
"That's incredible! Your family's annual income is quite a bit." Sui Yu calculated and said, "More than 3,000 yuan a year. Even the vendors in the city can't compare to you. I'm jealous of you. When I get old, I'll move in here too."
Qi Sheng didn't believe it, "You don't even think highly of this little thing."
"You think too highly of me." Sui Yu smiled. "I started out as a vendor selling steamed buns. I was busy from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, but I couldn't even make two thousand yuan a year."
"Two or three people are needed to set up a stall at most? My father-in-law's family has six people, not including the children, and they only collected a little over 3,000 yuan, and that's before paying the silkworm tax." Qi Sheng shook his head and said, "Our family is small, and my wife can only weave two bolts of silk cloth a year at most. I help her after I finish my work in the fields, and I can only weave half a bolt more."
Sui Yu's enthusiasm faded, and he sighed, "As long as you want to make money, nothing is easy."
"That's right." Qi Sheng nodded. "Let's not talk about it anymore. I'll take you somewhere else to ask."
"Come to my house. I still have silk cloth and mulberry wine." A neighbor standing nearby said, "I'll sell mine too, so I don't feel itchy when I see you guys collecting the money."
The four servants, Xiao Chunhong, Liu Yaer, Xiao Xi and San Cao, carried two boxes of money over together, while the others stayed where they were to guard the camels, money boxes and goods.
The neighbor had a large family and wove five rolls of silk and three rolls of linen, as well as seven jars of mulberry wine, totaling 3,520 coins.
These two families were considered wealthy families in the mountains, and the other fifteen families had small families. Sui Yu purchased a total of 26 pieces of silk cloth and 7 pieces of linen cloth from these 15 families, of which 10 pieces of silk cloth and 3 pieces of linen cloth were dyed with mulberry fruits, for a total of 11,700 coins.
These fifteen families produced little mulberry wine and did not sell it, so Sui Yu only collected eleven jars of mulberry wine in the mountains.
All this took a day and a half. Afterwards, Sui Yu left most of the people in the valley to guard the camel caravan and the goods. She took Xiao Chunhong, Liuya, Xiaoxi, Sancao, Gan Da and Gan Er, as well as two servants from the Song family. The nine masters and servants rode camels and went to another hill with Qisheng and his uncle to buy more honey.
There were two beekeepers on the mountain. They raised a lot of bees, and their wooden houses were filled with beehives. When Sui Yu and his group passed by, one of the families had taken the beehives to another hill. Fortunately, she had brought a gong with her when she went up the mountain. It was originally used to ward off wild animals. She used the gong to scare the beekeeper back to the other hill.
The two families collected a total of twenty-seven jars of honey, which amounted to nine thousand one hundred and eighty coins. Similarly, neither beekeeper confiscated the money from her jars.
"Sister Yu, they asked if you would come back next year?" Qi Sheng asked. "They also want to sell all the honey to you. They don't want to sell it piecemeal down the mountain."
"If they don't come next year, they should come the year after," Sui Yu said. "Tell them that if they can keep the honey, I'll come back the autumn after next to buy as much as I can."
Qi Sheng conveyed that the two families did not agree to keep her, but kept asking her to come back later.
A man wearing animal leather boots on a hot day brought out a jar of something and handed it to Liu Yaer. He chatted with Qi Sheng in a rapid-fire manner, and Qi Sheng looked embarrassed.
Sui Yu guessed some of the meaning, and Liu Yaer also understood. She put down the jar with a red face, waved her hand and hid behind Gan Da.
The man in the animal-skin boots looked disappointed. He looked at Xiaoxi and Sancao again, and seeing that the two girls were also hiding, he looked angry, snorted, and went back with the jar.
On the way back, they passed a small lake. Xiao Chunhong squatted by the lake to wash her face. She looked left and right, ran to Sui Yu and asked, "Master, am I ugly?"
Sui Yu looked at her in surprise and said, "She's not ugly."
Xiao Chunhong glanced at Liu Yaer and the others and muttered softly, "Is she uglier than them? Why did that man just avoid me? I'm not saying that I meant that, I just thought it was weird."
"You are too smart. Your eyes are rolling around. You can tell at a glance that you are not a person who will keep quiet. He can't subdue you, so naturally he doesn't dare to make a move on you." Sui Yu said.
"Oh." Xiao Chunhong was satisfied. "No wonder."
After dark, they spent the night halfway up the mountain. It was almost noon when they returned to the valley. They rested in the valley for another night. The next day, the group went down the mountain and left.
After returning to Qijia Village, Sui Yu no longer interfered in the village business. Song Xian bought everything for him, including forty-one jars of mulberry wine and seventy-nine pieces of linen, fifty of which were dyed. Although he didn't buy any silk cloth, the harvest was not small.
After bidding farewell to Qi Sheng's family, Sui Yu and Song Xian led the caravan back to the official road. They walked east along the official road and entered a town two days later. After asking the people in the town, they went out of the city and headed south. It was said that there were several villages here with many mulberry trees.
The news was correct. Sui Yu and Song Xian went to seven villages and bought a total of 73,000 coins worth of silk and linen, as well as 50 jars of mulberry wine.
"Sister Song, I think we can rush back tomorrow, sell these things in Chang'an and come back again. Think about it, even after the funeral of the Grand Marshal, there are still the first seven days, the second seven days, the third seven days, and so on. We can take advantage of the opportunity to make another fortune." Sui Yu suddenly had an idea.
Song Xian clapped her hands and smiled, "I had the same idea."
"Then we'll leave tomorrow. We can go back and burn some incense for Da Sima Yaoyao."
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