Chapter 19 Explosion, Waking Up in the Pigsty
"Big brother, why aren't you asleep yet?" Lin Luoxi skipped back home, only to be startled by the figure standing at her door.
Just as he was about to retaliate, he realized that the person was his own older brother, standing there empty-handed, so he quickly stopped.
"I'm just worried about you..." But he was also afraid that if he went there, he would be a burden to Lin Luoxi, so he could only wait here.
"Don't worry, big brother, you have to believe in my strength. From now on, with me here, no one will dare to bully our family again," Lin Luoxi patted her chest and assured him.
"Second sister, didn't you go...? Why didn't you..." Lin Wenqian saw that Lin Luoxi's hands were empty and thought that Lin Luoxi had not succeeded.
"Big brother, I've hidden the thing in a very safe place. I'll take it out later." Lin Luoxi didn't tell Lin Wenqian where she hid the thing, looking mysterious.
"It's good that you didn't get it back. It's getting late, go to sleep!" Lin Wenqian saw Lin Luoxi's mysterious look and didn't press her for details. Instead, he told Lin Luoxi to go to sleep early and then headed home.
"Okay!" Lin Luoxi replied to Lin Wenqian, but as she entered the courtyard, she went straight to the wooden basin where the fish were kept.
I grabbed a knife from the kitchen, picked up the still-live fish, and started processing it.
"Second sister, why aren't you going to sleep? What are you doing here?" Lin Wenqian couldn't understand Lin Luoxi's actions.
"Big brother, you should go to sleep first. It's summer now. Let's clean out the fish's innards and marinate them with coarse salt first, otherwise they'll rot by tomorrow," Lin Luoxi replied without looking up.
"What? These fish need to have their internal organs removed?" Lin Wenqian was surprised when he heard Lin Luoxi's words.
In the past, when the villagers were so hungry they caught fish, they would put the whole fish in the pot to cook. I've never heard of them gutting the fish!
"Ah! Didn't you remove the fish's internal organs before eating it? Fish have gallbladders inside. If you don't remove them, the cooked fish will naturally be fishy and smelly, and you won't be able to eat it."
Lin Luoxi finally understood why Lin Wenqian was so reluctant to eat fish; it turned out to be this way of eating it.
The way they eat is so bad that even a pig wouldn't eat it, okay!
"Then I'll help you process these fish, and then we can go to sleep." Lin Wenqian looked at the many fish still in the basin, squatted down, and helped out.
"These fish not only need to have their internal organs removed and the black membrane inside scraped off, but their gills also need to be taken out, as these are the main sources of the fishy smell."
"As long as the fish is prepared properly, both the cooked fish and the soup will be delicious." Lin Luoxi explained to Lin Wenqian while painstakingly scraping off the black membrane inside the fish's belly with her chipped and broken kitchen knife.
Lin Wenqian, being a young man, joined in, making the processing of the fish much faster.
"The fish are all cleaned and salted. We'll cook them tomorrow morning," Lin Luoxi said excitedly, rubbing her aching back.
If it weren't so late, Lin Luoxi would definitely have started a fire to cook the fish.
In the evening, she only managed to eat two bites of barely edible bran. After a whole night of tossing and turning, she was starving.
"Well, it's getting late, let's get some rest." Lin Wenqian also looked longingly at the delicious fish that Lin Luoxi was talking about.
Their family hasn't eaten meat in a very long time, so if they could eat fish, that would be a good choice.
But knowing it wasn't the right time, he could only suppress his cravings and wearily walked back to his room.
...
As dawn broke and the sun rose over the mountains in the east, the villagers gradually awoke and began their work.
Meanwhile, as the sky turned a rosy red, the village chief boarded his oxcart and headed towards the county.
He promised Lin Dayou yesterday that he would go to the county to help Lin Dayou set up a separate household account.
Early in the morning, he had a feeling that something was going to happen, so he quickly got up and went to the county to take care of Lin Dayou's matter.
Not long after the village chief's oxcart left Wutong Village, several screams were heard from the village.
"ah!"
"ah!"
"ah!"
"ah!"
Four screams startled the busy villagers, who dropped their work before they could even pick it up.
"What's wrong? What happened?"
"Is it going to be war soon?!"
"No, we live in a peaceful and prosperous era now, the chances of war are slim. It's more likely that bandits have invaded the village..."
Startled by the screams, the villagers rushed out of their homes in a panic, not even bothering to close their own gates properly.
The villagers, bearing the marks of time, had lived through an era of war, chaos, and rampant bandits. Upon hearing those screams, their hearts leaped into their throats.
They all ran outside at their fastest speed ever, completely different from the people who usually had to walk with crutches and groan from time to time.
"Did you hear that? It seems something's happened to the Lin family..."
As soon as the villagers ran out of their homes, they saw the neighbor next door to Old Lin's house, who, with a look of not wanting to miss any trouble, began to spread the story of the screams that had just occurred at Old Lin's house.
Knowing that something had happened at Old Lin's house, and that it wasn't bandits entering the village or a war about to break out, the villagers who had originally planned to go to the village chief's house quickly changed direction and headed to Old Lin's house to join in the fun.
By the time the villagers from the surrounding area ran to Lao Lin's house, several layers of villagers had already surrounded the wall of Lao Lin's house.
Before they could even speak, the villagers who had gathered around were eager to share the gossip they had seen and heard with the later arrivals.
It turns out that the screams earlier came from the elderly Lin couple and their eldest son and his wife.
They didn't know what happened, but when they woke up in the morning, they found themselves sleeping in a pigsty with their faces covered in pig manure that hadn't been shoveled away yet.
The pungent smell almost made them faint; they vomited for a long time in the pigsty before they recovered.
Suppressing his nausea, he struggled to his feet, only to find that they were all naked, which terrified him.
After letting out another series of screams, she quickly covered her pale body and ran towards her house.
It was an hour later when Grandma Lin finished getting ready.
When they came out to feed the pigs, they discovered that the pigsty where they had slept all night was completely quiet.
When she peeked inside, she discovered the pigs were gone. After screaming again, and with the bizarre events of the past few days causing her such emotional turmoil, she couldn't take it anymore and fainted.
When the first scream came from the Lin family, the neighbors next door either came out or put up a ladder to look into the Lin family's house. They saw what was happening and all of them smiled knowingly.
So, the villagers who arrived later didn't even need to see it for themselves; they just heard the neighbors next door to the Lin family vividly explaining the gossip about the Lin family.
"Mother, Mother! What's wrong?" Lin Daguang, who was busy wiping pig manure off his face inside the house, still had some conscience.
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