Chapter 4: So Qinggong is Real
[T.N:Qinggong : A martial arts technique often depicted in wuxia fiction, allowing practitioners to move with superhuman speed and agility, including leaping great distances and heights.]
“Try one. They taste very good.” Zhao An picked a bright red strawberry and popped it into his own mouth. Then he picked two more and held them in his palm, letting Hai Bo and Qin Tong take them.
The enticingly rich aroma of the strawberries wafted to Hai Bo and Qin Tong’s noses. They swallowed but didn’t dare to reach out, because these were fruits grown with an immortal’s magic.
Even the usually carefree Qin Tong had tossed and turned last night, barely sleeping, after seeing the Young Master use magic in the afternoon. This morning, he saw the Young Master use magic again, and the little white flowers on what the Young Master called strawberry seedlings quickly bore fruit, which then instantly turned into big, fragrant berries.
“Such beautiful and fragrant fruit must be immortal fruit for the gods to eat. If servants like us eat them, it will shorten our lives.” Hai Bo seemed afraid that Qin Tong wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation, and even pulled him back a step.
Zhao An ate another strawberry. In truth, these strawberries, having just been cultivated from a wild variety, weren’t very large—only three centimeters in diameter. They couldn’t compare to the superior varieties cultivated in modern times, let alone the mutated varieties from after the spiritual energy revival. However, being able to eat strawberries in a historical world like this was indeed a joyful thing.
To pass on this joy, Zhao An directly pressed the strawberries into Qin Tong and Hai Bo’s hands. “This isn’t immortal fruit, just ordinary wild fruit. If I can eat it, you can too. I’m even planning to take them to the city to sell for money. Then men and women, old and young, will all be able to buy and eat them.”
After speaking, he picked a bowlful of strawberries and placed them by the well. “Alright, these are for us to eat. The rest are to be sold.”
In reality, there wasn’t much to sell, only about two or three jin. The eleven original strawberry seedlings had only produced a total of twenty-two plants, so the amount of fruit they could bear was limited.
However, given Zhao An’s ability level, caring for these twenty-two strawberry plants was already his limit. Fortunately, strawberries were perennial herbaceous plants. As long as he could maintain the plants’ vitality, with the amount of energy he could currently use, he could make the strawberries produce a batch of fruit every two days.
But besides his ability, this small orchard would need a lot of fertilizer. The strawberries’ fruiting would also consume the soil’s nutrients. If he frequently used his ability to force-grow the plants without fertilizing the land, it could even lead to desertification. This was all based on Zhao An’s own experience.
After Zhao An, Hai Bo, and Qin Tong finished sharing the bowl of strawberries, Zhao An was about to get the manure bucket to fertilize the plants. He was stopped by Hai Bo again, but this time, Zhao An still didn’t listen to his advice. “I’m going to be living in Zhaojia Village from now on. I should know how to do all this farm work. My grandfather was also born a farmer. You must have seen him, right? Why can’t I farm?”
“But, didn’t the Young Master say he was going to teach and write letters for people?” Hai Bo used Zhao An’s own previous words to block him.
Zhao An knew his own business. Based on the original body’s memories, he had no problem recognizing or writing a few characters, and even starting a literacy class would be fine. But teaching the people of this era to read the Four Books and Five Classics and write eight-legged essays was asking too much.
He didn’t want to lie this time, so he said shamelessly, “Even scholars should engage in regular labor. Otherwise, they’ll end up in poor health like my father.” He also knew that manure smelled bad. It was precisely for this reason that he couldn’t comfortably act like a young master and order others to suffer this hardship for him.
Zhao An didn’t want to dwell on this issue any longer, so he said to Hai Bo, “Hurry up and cook. After I eat, I’m taking the strawberries to the city to sell.”
Accustomed to following orders, Hai Bo immediately went to think about cooking. It wasn’t until Zhao An started spreading the manure that he reacted, but he no longer had the standing to stop him. He simply went to cook. At Zhao An’s instruction, Qin Tong also began to gently place the strawberries into a basket lined with a grass mat.
After eating a breakfast of soup made with dried fish, Zhao An took Qin Tong, who had the basket on his back, to Changxi County town. Hai Bo stayed behind to watch the house, clean up, and do the laundry.
Zhao An only had three sets of presentable clothes to wear out, and they were all rather thick autumn and winter styles. It was early spring in March, so it wasn’t necessarily hot to wear them yet. But in a while, he would definitely need to get summer clothes. This was another reason he urgently needed to earn money. Besides himself, Hai Bo and Qin Tong only had two sets of clothes each, just enough for washing and changing.
Besides clothes, the number of things this household needed to purchase was practically endless. If Zhao An wanted to live well here, the money from selling strawberries once would be far from enough, even though he had already planned in his mind to sell them at a high price.
Zhaojia Village wasn’t far from Changxi County town, and there was an official road to follow. Zhao An and Qin Tong walked for only half a shichen before entering the town.
It was more of a small town than a city. The entire town was laid out in the shape of the character “井”. Apart from the bustling central crossroads with its many shops, teahouses, restaurants, and inns, the other streets were relatively quiet, mostly consisting of workshops—blacksmiths, builders, furniture makers, lantern makers, incense and candle sellers, and pharmacies. Zhao An led Qin Tong through all the streets, both quiet and lively, but didn’t see a single shop that specialized in selling fruit.
[T.N:井 : The Chinese character for “well,” which looks like a tic-tac-toe board (#).]
Finally, he inquired with an old woman selling yarn and learned that there was a fruit peddler in the county town who delivered fruit to the large households on a regular basis. If anyone else wanted to buy fruit, they had to be lucky enough to run into him.
“Besides, for us common folk, when do we ever get to eat fruit? It’s usually only needed for weddings and funerals. At those times, we just let the fruit peddler know. Or occasionally, some villagers will bring fruit to town to sell, but the fruit they sell is nowhere near as good as what the professional peddler sells.” The old woman, seeing Zhao An’s handsome, scholarly appearance, was willing to chat a bit more with him.
In the original body’s memory, the capital city had shops that specialized in selling fruits and vegetables. He hadn’t expected that in a rural place, one had to go door-to-door to sell fruit. As for setting up a stall, he hadn’t even considered it. It wouldn’t fetch a good price and would waste a lot of time.
The traditional way of selling fruit was too troublesome for Zhao An. After bidding farewell to the old woman selling yarn, he took Qin Tong to the busiest street. At the crossroads stood a large, two-story restaurant that occupied ten storefronts, named Ruyi House.
Besides being delivered directly to the homes of the wealthy, expensive fruits could also be sold in high-end restaurants. Zhao An used a strawberry to open the way and quickly met the manager of Ruyi House.
The manager actually recognized Zhao An, calling him Young Master Zhao upon meeting and bowing with clasped hands. After returning the courtesy, Zhao An asked the manager’s name and learned it was Feng.
“The local county magistrate’s surname is also Feng. I wonder if Manager Feng knows him,” Zhao An asked.
Manager Feng nodded with some pride. “He is my clan cousin.”
Zhao An had already guessed as much. “No wonder Ruyi House’s business is so successful.”
In ancient times, relying on clan relationships was a matter of course, so when Zhao An said this, Manager Feng would only take it as a compliment, not feel displeased, and would even be quite happy.
After a few pleasantries, they finally got down to business. “I hear that Young Master Zhao wants to sell fruit to our Ruyi House, and on a long-term basis at that.”
At Manager Feng’s question, Zhao An quickly took out a strawberry and placed it before him. “This is a new variety of fruit I discovered. I call it strawberry. It looks a bit like a wild berry, doesn’t it? But the plant is completely different, and the taste is much better.”
In fact, Manager Feng had already tasted the fruit Zhao An had someone send in earlier. Now, seeing this sweet, fragrant, and beautiful fruit, he found it adorable no matter how he looked at it.
But to avoid appearing too eager, Manager Feng could only suppress the urge to eat another strawberry. To get a good price, Zhao An also had to negotiate with Manager Feng. After several rounds of back-and-forth, they finally settled on a price of three wen per strawberry. They counted the strawberries Qin Tong had brought on the spot. Excluding the two given to Manager Feng for tasting, there were a total of eighty-two, and the two hundred and forty-six wen was paid in full immediately.
After agreeing with the manager to deliver goods every other day, with cash on delivery each time, Zhao An left Ruyi House with Qin Tong.
Two and a half strings of copper coins were placed in the basket, feeling even heavier than the strawberries. When Qin Tong put the basket on his back, his shoulders sagged a bit, but his face was flushed with a smile. After they walked out of Ruyi House, he whispered to Zhao An, “I knew I shouldn’t have eaten those strawberries. I ate five this morning. That’s fifteen wen! I could have bought fifteen eggs with that.”
“You’re right. When we get back, we’ll find someone and buy a lot of eggs. Then we can have them boiled, fried, or steamed,” Zhao An said. When he smiled, his peach-blossom eyes narrowed slightly, clearly also very happy.
Although two hundred and forty wen was only a little over three qian of silver—the price of silver was relatively cheap recently, with one liang only fetching about eight hundred wen—earning three qian of silver every other day meant fifteen liang a month. In a rural area, that was more than enough to live on.
[T.N:Qian and Liang : Units of weight used for silver currency. 1 liang = 10 qian.]
Just as Zhao An was planning how to spend the money and Qin Tong was imagining all the different ways he could eat eggs, a young master dressed in brocade walked toward them.
The brocade-clad young master’s gaze fell on Zhao An, sizing him up carefully. Zhao An didn’t know who he was and could only nod politely.
However, the man was extremely rude, turning and walking directly toward Ruyi House. But when he reached the entrance, he didn’t go in. Instead, he leaped up, jumping from the doorway to the window of the second floor.
It wasn’t until the figure disappeared that Zhao An closed his astonished jaw. Is this the legendary qinggong? To be able to jump directly onto a second-floor windowsill over four meters high. The man’s inexplicable scrutiny from moments before was completely forgotten.
In the private room of the restaurant that the brocade-clad young master had entered with qinggong, a man in tight-fitting black clothes was already seated. His hair was jet-black, his slanted eyebrows were sharp, but his eyes were a gray-blue that was impossible to see to the bottom of.
The brocade-clad young master clasped his hands in a bow to the man with gray-blue eyes. “I’ve made Brother Hu wait.”
“Brother Feng, no need to be so polite.” He leaned lazily against the window, watching Zhao An’s receding back. “Is that the Young Master Zhao you mentioned?”
“How did you know?” Feng Shaoping asked curiously.
Hu Sheng took a sip of light wine. “For a young master with such delicate skin and peerless features to appear in Changxi town, one can only think of Consort Li’s younger brother.”
Feng Shaoping was even more surprised. “I can’t believe you’d praise someone’s looks. How come you’ve never praised me?”
Hu Sheng could only turn his face away and not speak to the man. Just then, he heard a waiter knock on the door. “The restaurant has acquired a new fine fruit. The manager asked me to bring some for the Fourth Young Master to have with his wine.”
Author’s Note:
Guess who the gong is. Okay, no need to guess, the answer is obvious. ╮(╯▽╰)╭
