Chapter 209 208: Eating Alone
Yang Chunyan poked him and said, "Let's go to the ditch and wash it out to see what it is."
"Let me do it!" Zhou Huaian picked up the piece of "wood". "It's still a little heavy, but it doesn't feel very hard!"
"Yes!" Yang Chunyan followed him to the ditch. "I heard that ebony will sink in water. Let's put it in a place with slightly deeper water to see if it will sink."
"Yes!" Zhou Huai walked to a deep water location and cleaned the black thing in a few strokes. After letting go, he saw it sink to the bottom of the water.
"Yan'er, look, it's sinking."
Yang Chunyan nodded, "Pick it up and take a look."
Zhou Huaian reached out and scooped up the black thing. A faint fragrance lingered around the noses of both of them. "It looks like ebony, but it doesn't look very good."
"Yeah!" Yang Chunyan thought it was better not to make it public. "Don't tell anyone when you go back. If it's ebony, you have to hand it in."
Zhou Huaian curled his lips, "I won't hand it in. If it's like what my classmate said, if we find a dozen-meter-long ebony, we'll only get a few dozen yuan as a reward after handing it in. What's the point? It's better to just bury it in the ground."
Yang Chunyan looked at it over and over again. "Ebony is usually round and long, but this one looks like an old tree stump. It's so ugly."
Zhou Huaian nodded, and suddenly had an idea, "It's black and has a fragrance. It would be great if it is agarwood. Such a big piece would be worth tens of thousands at least."
Yang Chunyan frowned and touched the black thing, feeling it was oily and smooth. This was beyond her cognition. "I have never seen it even in my dreams. However, agarwood should not be like this!"
"No matter what it is." Zhou Huaian suddenly looked at her with shining eyes, "If it really is agarwood, hehe! We will be rich!"
Yang Chunyan laughed and said, "Such a large pile of agarwood is just like a sweet dream!"
Zhou Huaian cunningly placed the black thing under the Polygonum multiflorum vine, raised his head and said with a smile: "Good luck can't be used up. Let's dig up the Polygonatum odoratum and Asparagus cochinchinensis and go home."
Yang Chunyan rolled her eyes at him and said, "I think you are just a lazy person with many excuses!"
"You are the boss and you make the decision. If you want to continue going up after you finish digging, I have no objection!"
“…” Yang Chunyan was too lazy to pay attention to him and picked up the hoe and started digging.
The two men dug up the Polygonatum odoratum. Zhou Huaian picked them up and put them in the ditch, and then started digging the Asparagus cochinchinensis.
Zhou Huaian grabbed the vine stem and was pricked by the small thorns on it. He quickly retracted his hand, "Yan'er, be careful, this thing has thorns."
"Got it." Yang Chunyan came forward with a medicine hoe, "Let's cut off the vines first, and then dig along the rhizome."
“Yes!”
The two men used hoes to dig up a dozen vines and started digging along the roots, first scraping away the stones before starting work.
These Asparagus have indeed been there for quite a while, with vines entwined around the bushes and everywhere. Fortunately, the soil near the ditch is soft and the Asparagus did not grow very deep, so it didn't take long to dig up a nest.
There are a lot of asparagus roots dug up, and they look like small sweet potatoes when picked up.
Zhou Huaian pulled up a nest of potatoes and smiled as he looked at the potatoes hanging below. "Oh my god, this nest is at least ten pounds, and the big ones are as big as sweet potatoes. This thing can give birth even better than a sow."
Yang Chunyan also dug out a nest. "Because it bears so many fruits, the herbalists gave it the nickname 'Duoerpo'!"
"It's quite vivid." Zhou Huaian said as he picked up a piece of asparagus that had been dug up and looked at it. "It's white, tender and juicy inside, just like a young white radish that hasn't grown up yet."
Yang Chunyan nodded. "I heard that you can use the water boiled with asparagus and japonica rice to make porridge. When the porridge is almost cooked, add some rock sugar. It will have the effect of clearing heat and moistening dryness, benefiting the stomach, and moistening the lungs and benefiting the stomach."
She paused, "It is said that the great doctor Li Shizhen also recorded a prescription, using asparagus and rehmannia root to grind into powder, and then make into bullet-sized honey pills, and take three pills with warm wine. After taking it for about 10 days, you will feel light and have clear ears. After taking it for 20 days, all diseases will be cured..."
Zhou Huaian sneered, "You're just bragging. If it were true, the emperors in ancient times wouldn't have asked Taoist priests to make elixirs for immortality."
Yang Chunyan smiled and said, "That's true!"
The couple talked as they worked, spending more than half an hour digging more than a dozen nests. But these dozen nests weighed at least 100 kilograms.
Zhou Huaian picked up two nests of Asparagus cochinchinensis and walked towards the ditch, "Yan'er, I'll put these down there and wash them after I finish washing the Polygonatum odoratum."
“Yes.”
As Yang Chunyan spoke, she cut two handfuls of wild grass and tied up a few bundles of grass. The two of them squatted on the rocks in the ravine and began to scrub the Polygonatum.
After soaking for more than half an hour, most of the mud on top was washed away by the water. The two of them pulled out the roots on top and rubbed them with a straw handle and they were clean.
Zhou Huaian was still thinking about the black thing, "Yan'er, what do you think that thing is? How about we send it to Doctor Xiao Wang for a checkup?"
Yang Chunyan thought for a moment and said, "Forget it. If it is really a valuable treasure, we still have to ask people to keep it secret."
Zhou Huaian said with a smile: "I think as long as we call out loudly, Doctor Wang will keep it a secret for us. Forget it, let's hide it and wait for the right opportunity to send it to Doctor Wang for a check."
Yang Chunyan stopped what she was doing, looked at him and said, "Aren't you afraid that our elder brothers will find out and say we are eating alone?"
Zhou Huaian looked at her seriously and said, "It's not a matter of eating alone. Think about it, when we sold Magnolia officinalis and Ganoderma lucidum, we had already divided out half of the money that belonged to us. Especially the third sister-in-law and the second brother, they didn't think we were good and were jealous.
If that thing is really a treasure, unless we take out the money from the sale and divide it equally, otherwise, they will definitely be jealous that we get much more money than them. Even my eldest brother and sister-in-law will have some thoughts in their hearts.
Otherwise, why did my mother take out several hundred yuan from the money she sold the steel bar quota last time and give it to us privately? It was because she was afraid that my brother and sister-in-law would feel unbalanced.
Also, if word gets out that we got a treasure and sold it for a lot of money, we won’t have a good life in the future. We might as well ignore it now and wait two years before sending it back to see if it’s really a treasure, we’ll subsidize them somewhere else in the future.”
Yang Chunyan looked at him, "You clearly know everything, why were you so lazy before? Why didn't you go into the mountains to look for wild beehives like you do now? I think you are just lazy and don't want to use your brain!"
Zhou Huaian spread his hands and said, "I tell you, I don't know what happened before. Whether I went into the mountains to look for beehives or wild animals, I never found anything big. Erchun and his friends often said that I was a bad luck melon. They never found anything good with me, and even if they did, something would go wrong.
The wild beehives we found only yielded three or four pounds of honey. After the money from selling the honey was divided among several people, we spent it on cigarettes and a movie. I felt that there was no future for me to work for the family, and my brother and sister-in-law were not as mean as those in other families, so I didn’t bother to think about it.
After hearing this, Yang Chunyan felt that both he and his previous life had bad luck. "Now we have found a way. As long as we work hard, things will only get better and better!"
(End of this chapter)
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