Although Yan Jiangtao made a fuss, it didn't affect Shi Zhen's business. He quickly sold out the remaining pig's head meat, and then said to Guan Baiyu, who seemed a little absent-minded, "Xiaoyu, let's go eat wontons. After we eat, we'll go to the market to buy some wonton wrappers. When we get home, I'll make wontons for you."
Guan Baiyu nodded.
When Shi Zhen arrived at the shop, he ordered a bowl of wontons and asked the shopkeeper for an extra bowl: "I don't really like these soupy things, I'll just eat a few."
It's 1 p.m. now. The steamed bun shop is busiest in the morning, but business isn't so good now. There are only the two of them in the shop.
When the wontons were served, Shi Zhen scooped a few out of the large bowl and gave the rest to Guan Baiyu.
Guan Baiyu glanced at Shi Zhen, his eyes stinging.
Wontons are so delicious, how could his brother not like them?
A bowl of small wontons costs one yuan, and the bowl is a large one, containing about twenty or thirty wontons.
Guan Baiyu ate slowly, feeling that this was the most delicious thing he had ever eaten.
His adoptive parents didn't have much money, but they were willing to spend it on his younger sister. When his sister was still young, his adoptive mother would take her to town and buy her a bowl of wontons. When they came back, she would proudly tell others that his sister had a good appetite and could eat a whole bowl of wontons by herself.
But... his grandma doesn't like to spend money on him, and this is the first time he's ever eaten wontons.
After Guan Baiyu finished eating, Shi Zhen went with him to the market to buy some wonton wrappers before going home.
When they got home, the fire in the stove had long since gone out. Shi Zhen poked the pig's head with chopsticks and started a fire to continue stewing it.
With the stove filled with durable wood, there was no need to keep an eye on it. Shi Zhen then cut off a piece of lean meat from the face of a pig's head that hadn't been cooked yet, chopped it up, added scallions, salt, and MSG to make the filling, and prepared to wrap small wontons.
The wonton wrappers are very thin, and the filling is usually very small. The bowl of wontons they ate in town before had only a small amount of meat filling the size of an unsoaked soybean.
"I'll make wontons for you, and I'll put extra filling in them. I guarantee they'll taste better than the ones sold in town... When the people selling wontons in town make them, they either scoop out all the filling or just a scallion," Shi Zhen said with a smile.
This was the first time Guan Baiyu had heard such a statement. She couldn't help but smile, and after watching Shi Zhen wrap a few wontons, she joined in wrapping some herself.
The Guan family members all have dark skin and generally have somewhat square faces, but Guan Baiyu has a pointed face. Even though he is now too thin and looks listless, you can still see that his facial features are very good.
Seeing that he was in a good mood, Shi Zhen casually asked, "Your deskmate, who often bullies you at school? What's his name?"
Guan Baiyu looked up at Shi Zhen and smiled: "He just said a few things to me, it's nothing really... He's jealous of me because of his bad grades."
Shi Zhen said, "If he bullies you in the future, tell me."
Guan Baiyu's eyes crinkled into a smile: "Mm."
"Do you have lice on your head?" Shi Zhen asked again.
Guan Baiyu's expression froze.
There is a small shop in their village, where they sell most odds and ends.
At three o'clock in the afternoon, Guan Baiyu came to the store dejectedly to buy medicine for lice and roundworms.
That small shop was also one of the villagers' gathering places. A few men came over with bowls at the door, bought some bulk liquor, and were drinking and chatting. When they saw Guan Baiyu come to buy medicine, they all said, "Baiyu, your cousin is very particular!"
"Your braised pig's head is delicious too. Do you have any left tonight?"
"Do you want to buy some wine for your cousin?"
...
Guan Baiyu rarely interacted with these people and didn't know how to respond, so he could only say, "My family has pig's head meat..."
When Guan Baiyu returned, Shi Zhen gave him deworming medicine, and after thinking about it, he took it himself as well.
After eating, he crushed the medicine for the lice, added water, and combed it onto Guan Baiyu's head.
After he finished combing his hair, he even had Guan Baiyu comb it for him again.
It was quite embarrassing; he also had lice on his head.
In the countryside these days, people don't like to bathe in winter, and they wash their hair less often, so there are a lot of people with lice. But in another seven or eight years, when conditions improve, there will be fewer people with lice.
Guan Baiyu was very careful when combing Shi Zhen's hair, which made Shi Zhen's scalp itchy. After finally finishing applying the medicine, he took Guan Baiyu to wash his hands, making sure they were clean before daring to touch the food.
The pot of pig's head was ready around 4 PM. Shi Zhen took it to town, planning to catch the evening market. As for Guan Baiyu, he was left to stay home and continue stewing the pig's head.
In the evening, there was also a group of people buying groceries at the market; they were all people who had worked during the day and had just finished get off work.
Shi Zhen kept calling out to customers, and the pig's head meat, which weighed only a dozen kilograms in total, was sold out in about an hour.
After selling everything, he bought a stainless steel basin before going home.
It was a bit late when he got back. Shi Xinghuo was already home. As soon as he saw him, Shi Xinghuo started telling him what he had done during the day and what he had eaten for lunch—they had stewed meat with bean curd again for lunch today, which he especially liked.
Shi Zhen listened to him with a smile, and then grabbed him and applied medicine to his head to kill lice. Of course, he also gave him some medicine to treat roundworms.
One dose of deworming medication is enough, but lice-killing medication needs to be used for several days. Once the lice are gone, as long as you avoid getting too close to people with lice and wash your hair frequently, you won't get them again.
That evening, many people living nearby came to buy pig's head meat. About half of the pig's head was sold. Shi Zhen stewed the remaining two pig's heads and put them in two stainless steel basins to sell in town the next morning.
The next day was Monday. For breakfast, they ate wontons and rice crust. When cooking in an iron pot, there is often a layer of rice crust at the bottom. When Guan Baiyu was reluctant to use more firewood, there was almost no rice crust. Recently, he bought a lot of firewood, so the rice crust became a bit thick.
Previously, they would just scrape off the rice crust and eat it while eating. Yesterday, there was a bit too much rice, so they left the rice crust. After Shi Zhen finished making wontons, he brushed a layer of oil in the pan, stuck the rice crust on it to bake, and then drizzled a little oil on it and fried it... It was fluffy, crispy, and especially delicious.
It's a bit oily, so most families wouldn't be willing to use that much oil.
Over the next few days, Shi Zhen remembered to apply medicine to Guan Baiyu every day, and the lice on Guan Baiyu's head finally disappeared. The lice on his own head also disappeared.
In addition, he was busy going back and forth every day, and he could sell about four pig heads a day, earning about forty yuan.
He finally had a little more money, but he still didn't dare to spend it recklessly—if he ran out of money now, he wouldn't be able to expand his business at all.
However, some necessary expenses still needed to be spent... Shi Zhen successively bought suitable knives, as well as cutting boards, iron weights, shampoo, towels, and the like.
He sold pig heads for four days, but by Friday, business was slow; he had only sold three.
Especially the villagers who come to him to buy pig's head meat are even fewer. Instead, some people go to town to buy a pig's head to stew and eat themselves, which has caused the price of pig's head to rise to seven cents a pound.
No matter what it is, once it stops being unsaleable, the price will go up.
Fortunately, Shi Zhen had already made an order with Butcher Zhu, so even though the price had gone up, he wouldn't be unable to buy it.
Although business wasn't as good on weekdays, it was better on weekends. Even so, on Saturday afternoon, Shi Zhen still left home to go to the next village to look for someone.
He had inquired with the villagers over the past few days and now knew enough about Yan Jiangtao.
The Yan family is from a nearby village. A few years ago, Yan Jiangtao's father bought a loom and the family became wealthy. Now they have a total of six looms and have even hired people to watch over them.
After his family became wealthy, Yan Jiangtao became extravagant and arrogant. He disliked Guan Baiyu at school and often caused trouble for her.
Guan Baiyu said that Yan Jiangtao didn't do anything, but according to what Shi Zhen found out, Guan Baiyu was bullied by Yan Jiangtao quite a bit.
Such a person... deserves to be taught a lesson.
But the person Shi Zhen went to wasn't Yan Jiangtao, but someone else—someone who had joined his engineering team earlier than Guan Baiyu in his previous life and had been working with him ever since.
He used to work on construction projects here. At first, he did everything himself and only employed people from his own village. But as his business grew, he couldn't keep up with the demands, so he hired some locals. That man was one of the people he hired. He was a year older than Guan Baiyu, born in 1977 or 1978. According to what Guan Baiyu had found out, he had already graduated from junior high school and was currently unemployed and a layabout.
This man used to brag to him a lot, saying that when he was in junior high school, he was the boss of the school and could do whatever he wanted. Shi Zhen wanted to see if it was true.
The man Shi Zhen was looking for was surnamed Qian and named Qian Qi. When Shi Zhen arrived, he was lying on a recliner in his main room, looking quite lazy.
Shi Zhen asked, "Are you Qian Qi?"
"Yeah? What's wrong?" The man glanced at Shi Zhen lazily.
Shi Zhen said, "I heard you're really good at fighting... Shall we have a match?"
Upon hearing Shi Zhen's words, Qian Qi jumped up from the recliner with his feet, overjoyed: "You've come to challenge me to a duel? I'm that famous now?"
Shi Zhen said, "Anyway, I've heard people say you're very capable."
In recent years, martial arts dramas have become popular. At that time, young people did not have computers or mobile phones to kill time. They had a lot of energy to spare during their restless teenage years, so they were more enthusiastic about things like fighting.
Qian Qilai is one of the people who is particularly enthusiastic about it.
When Qian Qi first started working at his construction site, he even practiced Iron Palm techniques in the sand during his breaks, repeatedly stabbing his perfectly healthy hands into the sand until they swelled up the next day...
He listened to martial arts stories on the radio and watched martial arts TV shows back then, all because of Qian Qilai's strong recommendation.
By this time, Qian Qi should have already become quite interested in martial arts novels.
Qian Qi was filled with excitement. He hadn't expected that he would become so famous that someone he didn't even know would come to challenge him... He couldn't wait to have a match with Shi Zhen.
"Fine, let's fight!" Qian got up, swung his arms, twisted his neck, and started to move his shoulders.
Shi Zhen hadn't done any warm-up exercises, and right now... he felt a sense of things being different.
Before he died, Qian Qiqi suffered from diabetes and fatty liver, with a protruding belly and an oily face. Now he is a thin young man.
I just don't know what he was thinking, he actually grew a bit of a mustache above his lip... He's not that old, but he only has a few sparse hairs, which looks really unpleasant.
When Shi Zhen was in the village, he was an exceptionally skilled fighter; no one from the nearby villages could beat him. Later, he became a contractor, and because he had read too many martial arts novels recommended by Qian Qi, he even practiced martial arts. It was only later, through self-cultivation, that he stopped doing such things.
Even though he hadn't fought for many years, he still knew which parts of a person's body were weak.
More importantly, Qian Qi, who is a year older than Guan Baiyu, is only sixteen years old and just over 1.7 meters tall.
Shi Zhen bullied the minor for a moment, then quickly pinned him to the ground: "You're not as strong as me."
"What was that move you just made?" Qian Qi wasn't angry after being knocked down, but he couldn't help wondering how Shi Zhen had managed to defeat him.
Shi Zhen said, "I learned a little from someone before, and I know where people's weaknesses are..."
"Can you teach me?" Qian asked without thinking.
Shi Zhen said, "Of course, but I'm very busy and don't have much time."
“Teach me whenever you’re free… By the way, where are you from? I’ve never seen you before,” Qian Qi asked in rapid succession, his thin face full of curiosity.
Shi Zhen laughed: "I didn't live here before, I just came here not long ago."
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