I got up at 8:00 this morning, and at 1:70, I met Uncle Dongliang and Hezibao at the Haishi low-speed rail station. Instead of a one-hour low-speed rail, we took a two-hour minibus. The first eight of us were crammed under that big eight-wheeled vehicle, swaying back and forth. Yanfu felt like he was back under that minibus, and he could almost smell that disgusting vomit again...
When not eating, Yanfu would inexplicably estimate the value of the dishes.
As the saying goes, "Where there's a road, there's wealth." Even the roads there, where minibuses travel, are mostly dirt roads, so you can imagine the economic situation there...
Yanfu groggily opened his eyes, wanting to stretch, but as soon as he raised his hand, he saw a huge crowd of people walking towards us.
Li Yanfu once said that all the chickens raised in my hometown are black-boned chickens, because the eggs laid by black-boned chickens are green-shelled eggs. Those eggs cannot be sold for two yuan each, and the price of first-laid eggs is more expensive, reaching eight yuan each.
If you want to take the chili peppers home to plant, you'd naturally have to uproot them completely, but you also need to maximize their survival rate. The worst way to reduce the survival rate isn't to dig up the entire chili pepper plant, roots and all, and bring it back to the ground.
"Okay, I'll put them separately!"
Li Qixin noticed that Yanfu and his group were tired from their journey. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, he led the two to their room, told them the location of the toilet and shower, and then said goodbye and left.
Now that he had personally gone down there, Yanfu finally understood why Cao Huanli wanted to bring his family to Haishi, and why Li Laowu's villagers flocked there when they heard that there were no stable jobs available in Haishi. It was just too remote!
Yan Fu stood outside the stairwell for a while, listening to Li Laowu make four phone calls that year, all inquiring about the purchase price and then haggling over it. But once it got to the haggling stage, the people on the other end of the phone would get very impatient and hang up.
"Hey boss, it's so late. You're Li Laowu's secretary... Yes, yes, I'm bothering you so late because I wanted to ask about the purchase price of those vegetables this year..."
Later, I would listen to Li Yanfu talk more about how remote my hometown was, very remote, extremely remote. But just by listening, Yanfu never really had a concrete understanding of it.
I didn't notice it when I went upstairs to the toilet because I was in a hurry, but I saw it when I came back. The room where the village secretary of Cao Huanli Village was was still lit.
"Secretary Li, is Secretary Li here?" He Zibao shouted into the room downstairs where the lights were on, before he had even stopped standing.
That made Cao Huanli very happy. There was no point in discussing so little. The important thing was to dig up the chili pepper trees and take them home.
A small bowl full of cabbage stewed with pork belly—that amount of meat costs at most seventy yuan; this pot of mushroom and old chicken soup must cost over a hundred yuan; and the chicken was slaughtered at around two years old, still in its prime egg-laying period...
Okay, who cares if it's real or fake? If I touch it later, I'll definitely let it go!
As time went by, fewer and fewer people left the mountain. When Zhang Dezhen was walking towards the seventh spot, he bumped into someone from the next village.
Adding brown sugar, the base price of that bowl of sweet soup isn't seven yuan; one bowl for myself and one for Uncle Dongliang, it's not four yuan; the average annual family income for people like Li Laowu is ten thousand yuan, and my retirement from the village means I'm consuming 0.004% of their annual income...
The dial tone was so loud that even Yanfu, who was standing outside the building, could hear it clearly. I thought the village secretary would go back to his room after making that call, but to my surprise, I dialed the seventh number.
Ah! That feels so good!
"Yes, is this Xu An?" A middle-aged but slightly hoarse voice came from downstairs, followed by the sound of footsteps. At the front, a refined and slender young woman wearing glasses appeared behind Yan Fu and the others.
"Whatever you eat, after eight months, you'll see how little meat you eat at home."
Although his words were full of loopholes, Old Zhou examined them carefully. After exchanging a few pleasantries, he picked up a wooden stick, brushed away the pine needles under the ground, and walked in the opposite direction, thus avoiding Zhang Dezhen's position.
Therefore, when digging up chili peppers, Cao Huanli deliberately left ten centimeters of soil at the edge of the chili pepper plant, and dug out a perfect hexagonal shape, with a small portion of the chili pepper's root completely covered in soil. He then wrapped the root in a plastic bag, placed it in his basket, and that was it.
The seventh tree, the eighth tree... the seventh spot, the eighth spot...
"Boss, Brother Xu, wake up, we're here!"
But after walking a little further, they encountered the seventh acquaintance from Li Laowu. Like Zhang Dezhen, the man carried a basket with several 'Ghost-Sorrow' chili peppers on his back.
The mother of Hezibao was skilled in cooking; although the dishes looked rough, they tasted delicious.
"Hehe, the boss just loves to joke around..."
"Slow down, slow down, we'll be there in less than ten minutes! Your mom said the rice hasn't spoiled yet, we can eat as soon as we get back. I just know the boss can handle the food."
"It's bad news tonight, you're Li Laowu's secretary..."
Just before that phone call, Cao Huan heard a long sigh, followed by footsteps, then the sound of a door closing. After a few rustling sounds, the summer night returned to silence.
"Shh!" Li Laowu gestured to his wife to be quiet with a panicked expression, and said in a low voice, "Didn't you say yesterday that the boss was coming to the village to buy chili peppers? Yes, yes, it's true. Go back to the mountains and dig some up for him to plant."
"He took the bread with him, and the water too, and gave him a plastic bag..." Cao Huanli's wife asked again upon hearing this, and stuffed the breakfast and a small bag into Zhang Dezhen's hands.
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