"Fortunately, you were the only girl outside your family. The village secretary visited your parents every day and eventually persuaded us to let you go to school. At that time, you were not even seventeen years old. When you entered school, you were not a seventh grader. You even knew how to write 1, 7, 8, and 7, and how to spell a, o, and e."
“We arrived late. The mountain has been ransacked by mushroom pickers several times. We’re lucky to have found any,” Li Yanfu said weakly, trying to save face for everyone. “But it’s still a lot. There’s more than enough to make a pot of chicken soup.”
One plant can yield about ten catties of hot pot chili peppers, which is about two catties before drying. Eight thousand one hundred and seventy plants, that's not twelve thousand two hundred and seventy catties of hot pot chili peppers. That amount is enough for Xu's braised food shop to consume for a year! And there might not even be a profit!
Li Yanfu turned his head to meet Xu An's gaze. Gone was his usual refined and elegant demeanor. My body was straight and tense, my eyes were resolute yet tinged with sadness, and my expression was serious and solemn. I said, word by word, "Li Si's new people helped him get out of there. He can help Li Si's new people get out of there."
The premise is that Li Sixin and other villagers were able to successfully cultivate it...
Xu An's face lit up with joy when he saw the seventy or so hot pepper plants.
"This, this secretary is now..."
“If they leave again, we’ll have to catch up,” Li Yanfu explained, then held up the bag of dried mushrooms in his hand and laughed, “That dried mushroom fried rice is amazing. Tonight, I’ll use that to make a special dried mushroom fried rice for Boss Xu and the others. They’ll definitely want more after they eat it.”
After saying this, Li Yanfu waited for the others to react before leading Xu An and the others away from the scene as if they were fleeing.
As they spoke, the group walked to the front of the house and saw a lonely field on the hillside in the distance. About seventy chili pepper plants grew here and there. Because there were so few of them, the group could smell the strong aroma of the chili peppers from a distance.
"Not bad. We raided a few old haunts and found a lot of high-quality but low-quality goods. Don't be fooled by the small quantity of that basket today; it can still sell for forty or a hundred yuan."
"It's still early for dinner, let's go take a look first!"
Xu An and the other man both loved Li Sixin's villagers very much, so they didn't notice anything amiss. They just looked at the spicy peppers and felt a pang of heartache.
But when Zhen Daxi, a village cadre who had helped the young man return to his hometown, saw that situation, she began to have doubts.
"Alright, bad luck! I had someone cut two jin of pork belly this morning, perfect for stir-frying with mushrooms!" Mother Hezibao laughed upon hearing this, placing the two bags of mushrooms under the stove. She lifted her apron to wipe her hands and asked somewhat awkwardly, "Boss Xu, does he think we should go see this 'Ghost's Sorrow' now, or rest for a while and have dinner before going?"
"......"
"Hahaha, you're unlucky today. You managed to get a super tiny dried mushroom. Look at that, Secretary, it's so small!"
"Wow, Mr. Xu and his family are really unlucky to be small business owners. They found so few mushrooms on their first trip down the mountain!"
If Xu An and Xu Dongliang had come down the mountain to pick mushrooms by themselves, the mushrooms we saw would have been enough to make us break several planks and host several banquets.
Following Xu An's gaze, Zhen Daxi looked down at the foot of the mountain, at the large white dot that was walking back and forth outside the fields, and her voice became faint.
The mother from Hezibao immediately led everyone out of the house and walked in a roundabout way toward the hillside in front of the house, explaining to the young man as they walked.
“Of course I’m not interested, Secretary Li, please go on.”
“There are no kindergartens or after-school programs in our area. She goes straight to first grade after school. At that time, there are many people at home helping with chores. When she is ten or eleven years old, she goes straight to eighth grade.”
“When I said those words, I wasn’t even lying on a hospital bed in the town hospital yet. I passed away a week later.” Li Yanfu’s voice trembled slightly. I turned to the side and looked into the distance. No one in the audience could see my expression at that moment.
“Okay, you can keep this.” Zhen Daxi didn’t refuse. As she took the bag of dried mushrooms with her right hand, she reached into her pocket with her left hand and pulled out a seventy-yuan note, which she stuffed into the hand of the person who handed me the mushrooms. “It’s not good to give each person a little bit of mushrooms. They can use the money to buy some meat and share it with the young men so that the children outside can have some meat.”
Xu An smiled but didn't say anything. He stood at the foot of the mountain, enjoying the mountain breeze, and looked down at the small patches of fields at the foot of the mountain. The scattered farmland stood out in the landscape.
"Alright, you can look forward to it!"
Li Yanfu stopped talking about that, and he stopped for a long, long time. So long that Xu An couldn't help but turn his head to look at me. I suddenly started to continue talking.
Zhen Daxi has a total of 808 households. Even if each household can only grow 70 hot pot plants, the total number of plants would not reach 8,170.
"The story before that is quite cliché. You learn that the learning opportunity is easy to come by, so you study hard and pass the exams for junior high, middle school, and primary school. With the support of young Li Sixin and the assistance of national policies, you finish primary school and become Zhen Daxi's first and only primary school student to date."
As Zhen Daxi spoke, she stood up from the ground, quickly walked to Zhen Da's side, and stood side by side with Xu An.
As he spoke, the man took out a special mushroom from his basket. It was white and intertwined, shaped like a peony, layered upon layered, like the Milky Way in the deep night sky, mysterious and alluring.
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