Farming to Defy My Fate 3

Chapter 3: The Price of Salt is Too High

The strawberry seedlings were growing in a patch of wild grass in a gap between the trees. If it weren’t for Qin Tong’s sharp eyes, they would have been impossible to find. The seedlings were only about ten centimeters tall, which explained why the strawberries they produced were so small.

Zhao An carefully used the stick in his hand to pry the roots of the strawberry plant out of the surrounding soil, then wrapped them in mud. After a careful search of the vicinity, he eventually found eleven strawberry seedlings.

Hai Bo and Qin Tong joined in digging for strawberries. It was only after they had finished that Hai Bo remembered to ask, “Young Master, what illness does this wild berry treat? Does it sell for a high price?”

“This isn’t a medicinal herb for treating illnesses. It’s just a type of wild fruit. I want to dig them up, take them back, and cultivate them properly. Then they’ll grow big, sweet fruit,” Zhao An explained carefully, realizing Hai Bo had misunderstood.

After hearing Zhao An’s explanation, the smile on Hai Bo’s face stiffened slightly. He felt the Young Master was just playing around, but his hands remained very careful with the seedlings. Well, let him play. They had caught several big fish today, enough to eat for three to five days. Tomorrow, he would take Qin Tong out to find short-term work. They would be able to get by.

Once the excitement of finding the strawberries had passed, Zhao An suddenly realized that Hai Bo and Qin Tong didn’t recognize strawberries at all. The original body’s memories, as the son of a Prime Minister, also contained no mention of strawberries, only raspberries and mock strawberries. He stopped pulling weeds and turned to look at Qin Tong. “You don’t even recognize strawberries, so why did you dare to pick and eat them?”

“They look pretty much like wild berries,” Qin Tong said, scratching his head. “I tasted a little bit just now. Other than being very sour, it wasn’t bitter or astringent, so it’s definitely not poisonous.”

Were people in ancient times really this hardcore?

Zhao An shook his head slightly and said sternly to Qin Tong, “In the future, don’t just eat things you don’t recognize.”

He stared intently into Qin Tong’s eyes until Qin Tong promised him he wouldn’t randomly eat things anymore. Only then did he continue pulling weeds to make a cushion for his beloved little strawberry seedlings.

While pulling weeds, Zhao An began to think seriously about the historical background and food information. Strawberries were a purely South American crop, belonging to a completely different genus and species from China’s native wild strawberries and raspberries; they just looked similar.

The name of the country in this book’s world was the Xu Kingdom, which was clearly a fictional setting. According to the original body’s memories, this country already had the three high-yield crops of corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. The imperial examinations tested the eight-legged essay. This world had evidently entered the Age of Discovery, corresponding roughly to the Ming Dynasty.

However, aristocratic women could walk the streets freely instead of being confined to their boudoirs like in the Ming Dynasty, and there was no cruel custom of foot-binding. More importantly, this world actually had martial arts. Although the book didn’t describe a wuxia world, when the male and female leads first met, the female lead’s kite got stuck in a tree, and the male lead leaped into the air and onto the tree to retrieve it for her. There were also brief descriptions of the male lead using highly skilled experts under his command to assassinate his rivals during his power struggle for the throne.

This is truly magical. Zhao An clenched his fingers. It felt as magical as his own ability, completely beyond the scope of classical physics. But on second thought, perhaps the author had created the existence of martial arts simply to make the male lead appear more dashing, rather than having him clumsily climb a tree, and also to provide a reasonable explanation for how he, as the heir of a vassal king, could become emperor.

So why would strawberries appear in this place? Aside from the world’s will filling in the gaps, Zhao An’s understanding was that Changxi County was close to Jiaozhou and also very near the Nanyue Kingdom. The Nanyue Kingdom might have already introduced strawberries. Birds could have eaten the strawberry seeds and then pooped them out here in the Xu Kingdom.

Even if someone discovered these strawberries growing wild, because they don’t keep well, they would just be eaten as wild fruit and that would be the end of it. They wouldn’t appear on the market as a normal fruit.

Therefore, the plan to cultivate and sell strawberries was highly feasible. Because strawberries were beautiful, fragrant, and delicious, and also very rare, they would surely fetch a high price. It might be even better than his original plan of digging for precious medicinal herbs, because this would be an exclusive business.

With the unexpected harvest of strawberry seedlings, this trip to the mountains to pick wild vegetables was, for Zhao An, a triumphant return. Because they had caught fish, Hai Bo and Qin Tong were also very happy. On the way back, their steps felt much lighter. The psychological excitement offset their physical fatigue, and since they were going downhill, the return trip was even faster than the journey up.

They arrived home just as every household was finishing lunch. Hai Bo didn’t let Qin Tong help but personally went to the kitchen. He used the last layer of lard from the oil pot to pan-fry the plump mandarin fish before making a soup.

The purely natural food, without any additives, didn’t taste particularly good. However, their bodies, lacking fats and protein, were brutally honest. Zhao An alone ate the fattest part of the fish belly with its fragrant, crispy skin, and drank three large bowls of fish soup boiled with shepherd’s purse and fiddlehead ferns before setting down his bowl in satisfaction.

Hai Bo and Qin Tong shared the better half of the fish tail and the head, licking every bit of flavor from the bones before starting on the vegetable soup. They drank the entire large pot of soup in one go, then clutched their bellies and sighed.

After resting for a while, Zhao An said to Hai Bo, “We have no grain left. Why don’t we take the remaining fish and trade it with the villagers for grain?”

Hai Bo, still clutching his stomach, nodded with a smile. “If the Young Master wants to eat grain, then let’s trade for some.”

“How much grain can one carp be traded for?” Zhao An sensed something was off and asked.

Hai Bo cupped his hands. “Probably this much unhusked grain. After milling, it would be enough for the Young Master for two meals.”

“That’s not right. As I recall, buying a carp costs over ten wen, which is enough to buy a dou of rice. How can it only trade for a handful of unhusked grain?” After the original body’s parents passed away, he had managed the household for a time, so he had a decent understanding of prices.

[T.N:Dou: An ancient Chinese unit of volume, roughly equivalent to 10 liters.]

Hai Bo said, “Over ten wen is the price in the city. In the countryside, fish aren’t valuable. They have small fish and eels in their fields, and the children often catch them to eat. Besides, our fish is already dead. If it weren’t for the fact that the fish is large and has fewer bones, we probably couldn’t trade it for any grain at all.”

[T.N:Wen : The lowest denomination of ancient Chinese currency, a small copper coin.]

Zhao An understood. In the value system of the country folk, fish meat was not as valuable as grain. But that carp had to be at least four or five jin. Trading it for a handful of grain was simply not worth it. So, Zhao An said to Hai Bo, “In that case, let’s salt it and hang it in the kitchen to make preserved fish.” He had eaten preserved fish made from rice-paddy carp as a child and remembered it tasting quite good.

[T.N:Jin : A unit of weight, equivalent to about 500 grams or 1.1 pounds.]

“That would be too wasteful of salt. It’s better to just soak it in brine once and then place it directly in the fire pit to dry into fish jerky using the residual heat from cooking.” Making preserved meat and the like wasted a lot of salt because as the moisture evaporated, the brine would drip from the fish. Hai Bo couldn’t bear the waste, nor did he feel that a few fish caught from the river were worthy of such careful treatment.

Hai Bo’s reminder made Zhao An recall that in this era, even illicit salt cost more than twenty wen per jin, while official salt could sell for forty to fifty wen. As a result, illicit salt was rampant, much like the situation in the Ming Dynasty. The An Kingdom also controlled salt and iron, treating salt as a form of hidden tax.

Zhao An’s former hobby was reading novels, so he was very familiar with this kind of plot. One of the major cheat codes for transmigrators was the terraced field method for sun-drying sea salt. The male or female lead would offer it to their lover or the emperor to advance their status or deepen their relationship, or they would produce salt themselves for profit.

The thought of being a great salt merchant, where “pearls are like dirt and gold is like iron” was not an exaggeration but a descriptor, was tempting. But it was just a thought. Selling illicit salt would be met with military crackdown. As for giving it to the emperor, he didn’t actually need it. The Xu Kingdom was not a landlocked country. With such a long coastline, they could obtain large quantities of salt just by boiling seawater. The fundamental reason for the high price of salt wasn’t the production cost but the hidden tax; all the money for military campaigns came from it. Of course, the operation of this system inevitably involved layers of exploitation, and in the end, it was the common people who suffered.

After becoming an ability user, Zhao An also had to undergo ideological education at the New City Base, so he was quite sensitive to these matters.

So, now was not the time to consider how to produce salt. He agreed with Hai Bo’s method of drying the fish and went out to plant his strawberry seedlings. Once he made money from selling strawberries, he would find a way to improve the grain seeds in Zhaojia Village. When the whole village became prosperous, his living environment should be much better than it was now. As for places further away, he couldn’t manage them. He was still a person disliked by the emperor.

Before Zhao An’s father became an official, the Zhao family had a tradition of farming and studying. The courtyard was well-built, paved with bluestone slabs, but it didn’t have a garden like truly wealthy people. Zhao An didn’t want people like Zhao Tongming to discover his secret of growing strawberries, so he could only use the basket to dig soil from outside and bring it back. He also gathered some stones and built a small orchard by the wall himself.

This time, no one came to help him. They all thought he was just acting on a whim, planting some flowers and plants for fun. Besides, Hai Bo needed to dry the fish, and Qin Tong had gone out with a rope to gather firewood. The ancient world had no natural gas or running water. To live a normal life required a great deal of effort. Fortunately, there was a well in the Zhao family’s courtyard; otherwise, even carrying water to plant the strawberries would have been a hassle.

Zhao An used a shovel carved from a piece of wood to dig the soil. After carrying back two basketfuls, he searched around for stones and built a small orchard of about one square meter near the well by the enclosing wall. The work left his back aching.

But he couldn’t rest. While the strawberry seedlings were still viable, he quickly planted them in the soil and watered them. The seedlings he had gathered from the mountain still looked wilted. Zhao An then injected his wood-elemental ability into them one by one. The amount of energy that could have ripened two plants was distributed among them. All eleven strawberry seedlings began to grow vigorously, even sprouting runners and blooming with many small white flowers that swayed gently in the spring breeze.

Qin Tong, who had just returned with a bundle of firewood, happened to witness this miraculous scene. He was so shocked he couldn’t speak. The bundle of firewood on his back fell to the ground with a thud.

Hearing the noise, Hai Bo came out to check. Seeing that Qin Tong had dropped the firewood, he was about to scold him when his gaze followed Qin Tong’s and landed on the vibrant little orchard.

Hai Bo quickly closed the courtyard gate and said to Zhao An, who was squatting by the small orchard watering the plants, “A withered tree comes back to life in spring. Young Master, you truly have the bearing of a noble person.”

Zhao An’s hand, which had been tightly gripping the gourd ladle, finally relaxed. In ancient times, where legend and history intertwined, stories like slaying a white snake to become emperor, a mud horse crossing a river, or a golden dragon entering a dream were all too common. Making plants grow was nothing; some people could even swallow fire and swords.

As long as his closest servants didn’t suspect him, it was impossible for others to question his identity.

Zhao An turned his head and said to Hai Bo and Qin Tong, “It’s not a withered tree coming back to life. It’s a divine art taught to me by an immortal in a dream. Tomorrow, these strawberries will bear fruit. The taste is incredibly sweet. You’ll know once you try it.”

Qin Tong, who had tasted the extremely sour strawberries, had no particular attachment to the fruit. He was only concerned with, “What does the immortal look like?”

Just as Zhao An was about to say it was a white-bearded old man whose face he couldn’t see clearly, he was interrupted by Hai Bo. “Don’t ask what you shouldn’t ask.” Then Hai Bo bowed to the sky and said, “Amitabha, may the gods and immortals protect us.”

[T.N:Amitabha: A common Buddhist chant, often used as a general expression of prayer, gratitude, or even as a greeting or exclamation in various contexts. ]

The corner of Zhao An’s mouth twitched. A real immortal would probably be angered to death.

Author’s Note:

No one can refuse strawberries.jpg