Chapter 022 Chapter 22 The Lucky Woman of the Farm and the Endless Famine

Wang Xiuxiang stretched out her fingertips and tapped Lin Yue's forehead: "Why don't you say you want to make white flour steamed buns? Who doesn't eat black flour steamed buns now? How many families have run out of food? When they heard that you were going to work, the strong laborers in the village rushed to come. My mother-in-law also knows that you have an allowance now and your life is better. She is afraid that it is too dangerous for you to take care of the child alone, so she dared to arrange for you to build a courtyard wall. Otherwise, she would not dare to mention it now."

Lin Yue was scolded so much that he lost his temper and quickly begged for mercy, saying that he didn't dare.

She had never cooked for so many people before, and the main people in charge of cooking were Aunt Su and mother-in-law Wang Xiuxiang.

Lin Yue and Liu Jianhua had a good relationship, but three people could handle it. If Liu Jianhua was called over, someone might gossip about her behind her back, so he didn't bother her.

The materials used for adobe walls are not hard to come by. A few young men went to Dongwozi early in the morning and picked up a few baskets of yellow clay. Generally, if someone wants to build an adobe wall, the man in the family can take some time to roll up some adobe bricks and build it by himself. However, drying the bricks takes too much time. The brigade has a set of rammed earth wall molds that can be used.

Rammed earth walls are a laborious job. You need to mix yellow mud and straw with water, pour it into the mold, and pound it continuously with a wooden mallet. Several young and strong guys were sweating from exhaustion, but they were full of energy when they smelled the aroma of vegetables coming from the stove. They finished more than half of the work in the morning, and there was still a little left. They worked harder in the afternoon and finished it.

After the courtyard wall was built in the afternoon, several people helped Lin Yue build a toilet in the corner of the wall. The structure was also simple, just two earth walls and the courtyard wall surrounded it, and then a pit was dug inside, and the toilet was placed in the pit, which was a common toilet in farmers' homes. When the toilet was almost full, it was carried to the vegetable garden to fertilize the vegetables.

When asked how he went to the toilet in the past few months when there was no toilet at home, Lin Yue could only say that it was hard to put it into words.

It was getting dark, Lin Yue sent the helpers away, and built a simple chicken shed against the west wall to raise chickens. As for the three sheep, she would have to return them in a few months when the babies were weaned.

Later, Lin Yue secretly bought two lambs and raised them in the space with the three lambs. They also gave birth to several lambs. This matter was not told to outsiders.

Although mutton is also a second-class non-staple food subject to unified purchase and sale, it is not strictly regulated, especially in rural areas. In some special cases, people can turn a blind eye and not take it too seriously. But if you want to make a living from it, you can expect to be caught.

Lin Yue also took advantage of this loophole to secretly buy the sheep.

A few days after the courtyard wall was built, the village began spring ploughing.

Lin Yue still carried the child on his back, with a bottle of cooked goat milk on his waist, and went to the fields with everyone to earn work points.

The two little guys are already more than four months old. It is actually quite inconvenient for her to carry two children at once, but fortunately the brother and sister are very well behaved in the basket and do not make any noise.

Lin Yue had to get up early in the morning to dig wild vegetables. In just a few days, there were many wild vegetables in the field, such as shepherd's purse, noodles, hemp, gray-gray, broom seedlings, bitter herbs... He could fill a bamboo basket with wild vegetables in an hour in the morning. Many families mixed these wild vegetables with sweet potato flour and made vegetable dumplings as their daily food.

Lin Yue's space had no shortage of vegetables and grains, except for wheat and flour. But she was afraid of being discovered by others, so she could only get up early every day to dig wild vegetables like everyone else.

In the novels she read before, the heroine would have adventures when she went into the mountains, either digging up ginseng and ganoderma lucidum or picking up treasures. Lin Yue didn't dare to hope for these, she wouldn't be so arrogant as to think that her luck was so heaven-defying, and she didn't even know what ginseng and shouwu were, and she might not recognize them if she saw them. Otherwise, how can we say that different trades are like different mountains?

What's more, the people in the village sweep the mountains every day, and any unique wild vegetables in the corners can be dug out. If there is something valuable, it will definitely be discovered long ago.

At first, Lin Yue thought so, until one day when she was at work, she heard everyone discussing that Liu Jianhua's sister-in-law had dug up Ganoderma lucidum in the mountains.

On the way home from work, she saw someone pulling Auntie Wang San to ask something. Auntie Wang San's face was full of smiles, and she couldn't hide her joy.

Lin Yue had heard that there were Ganoderma lucidum on Mount Dacang, and a type of Ganoderma that looked similar to ginseng. He had heard from the old people in the village that someone would occasionally dig them up in the past, and they could make a lot of money by selling them to pharmacies in the city.

But these are hardly ever seen in the mountains anymore.

Lin Yue lived close to Auntie Wang San's house, and at night he saw an elderly man trembling as he walked out of her house, muttering, "Yes, that's Ganoderma lucidum. I saw it when I was young, and it looked exactly like this..."

The next day, Lin Yue and Liu Jianhua got together and asked quietly. Liu Jianhua didn't hide it, anyway, the whole village was almost informed: "Yesterday morning, we went to pick wild vegetables. My sister-in-law said she wanted to go to Dongshi Cliff. Our work place is in Xishan. My family didn't want to go at first, fearing that it would be too far and delayed the work. She didn't listen and insisted on going. In the end, she was delayed, but she also brought back a face-sized Ganoderma lucidum."

At this point, she swallowed her saliva and said, "You said I have never seen what Ganoderma lucidum looks like. If I had seen it, I would have thought it was some mushroom that had been dried in the sun, and I would never have thought it was Ganoderma lucidum. But my sister-in-law knew about it and was able to pick it up as a treasure. It would have been fine if she did it secretly, but many people saw it, and those who knew about it could tell at a glance that it was Ganoderma lucidum."

Lin Yue said, "I was also thinking, your family is a bit too high-profile. This is Lingzhi, not some wild vegetable. Aren't you afraid that someone will get jealous and do something behind your back?"

Liu Jianhua heard this and sighed, "Alas, I did say this before, but no one listened to me! You don't know, my father-in-law went out drinking during the Chinese New Year and fell asleep on the roadside. Fortunately, she insisted that the whole family go out to look for him, otherwise my father-in-law would have been frozen to death! Didn't she get sick before the Chinese New Year? After she recovered, she became much more stable. Now she is the apple of everyone's eye. How dare I say anything she doesn't like!"

Seeing Lin Yue's surprised look, she couldn't help but lean over and whispered, "Speaking of my sister-in-law, she is really lucky. Let me tell you, she even brought back a pheasant from the mountain a few days ago! And she didn't catch it herself, the chicken fell into a pit and she picked it up!"

Isn't this a classic plot for later novels? Lin Yue has automatically created a 100,000-word novel "Rebirth of a Little Farmer". Look, this is the treatment of the heroine. She is pampered at home and can pick up treasures when she goes out. This is already a good start.

She was pleased with herself for a moment and then stopped taking it seriously. She couldn't suspect that someone was lucky and had some golden fingers just because she heard that person was lucky.

Lin Yue thought that everyone would get over this matter after a while, and just treat it as a joke. Nowadays, buying and selling are strictly controlled. If something like Ganoderma lucidum is bought and sold privately, the person will definitely be caught and sent to the farm. She thought that no one would take such a risk for the sake of profit.

Unexpectedly, in the next few days, more and more people went to Dongshiyazi, and even people from other villages heard the news. The piece of land where Zhang Xiaohui picked the Ganoderma lucidum was almost trampled flat.

But Ganoderma lucidum is not cabbage, it is not that easy to find, so naturally no one can find it anymore, and gradually people stop going there.

At this time, Lin Yue's mind was no longer on this.

After the Qingming Festival, more and more families in the village were short of food, and the wild vegetables in the wild were almost dug up.

At this time the gap between the rich and the poor can actually be clearly seen. Some families really cannot make ends meet and rely on the wild vegetables they dig to survive. They are really active in digging wild vegetables, much more active than working as laborers. Lin Yue has seen people fighting over the ownership of a few wild vegetables or an elm tree.

But some families actually had more food. Although they could not eat enough, they were not hungry either. For example, the captain's family had a son who ate public food and could eat meat once a month.

On the way to work, Lin Yue saw two little boys squatting under a tree, pulling out a long earthworm from the soil. She recognized the two children as the grandsons of Zhang Zhixiang's family in the west of the village. The older one was six or seven years old, and the younger one was four or five years old.

A few days ago, Aunt Liu Wu's little son was so hungry that he secretly went to the reservoir to catch fish and almost drowned.

Lin Yue felt very upset when he heard this. Seeing the two kids catching earthworms, he thought they also wanted to go fishing. Just as he was about to stop them, he saw the four or five-year-old boy impatiently snatched the earthworm from his brother's hand and stuffed it into his mouth with the mud on it.

Lin Yue was startled and rushed over to dig it out. But the two children thought she was going to steal their earthworms, so they grabbed the box tightly, stood up and ran away. Lin Yue took a quick glance and saw that there were still several earthworms in the box.

Here, when food is scarce, men and women who can earn work points are given food first. Those who do less work eat less. As for children, they are fed as long as they are not starved to death. After all, if the adults starve to death, the children below will naturally die.

This is the wisdom passed down by our ancestors. Lin Yue has always thought that this is very reasonable. Only when adults are well fed can they have the strength to find food for their children. Most families who think they are great and put their children first cannot survive a disaster year.

But when she actually saw two skinny children who were so hungry that they were digging earthworms to eat, she realized how cruel this world was.

Lin Yue stood there, looking at the two children running away, unable to come back to her senses for a long time. When she remembered that she still had to go to work, tears had already flowed down her face.

She wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand and made a decision secretly.