Farming to Defy My Fate 42

Chapter 42: Sending Money

If one couldn’t reunite with family during the Mid-Autumn Festival, it was natural to feel a sense of melancholy and parting sorrow. But if it was spent with a loved one, then there would be endless joy.

Especially for two young and vigorous people like Zhao An and Hu Sheng, who were also in excellent physical condition, they couldn’t help but challenge some high-difficulty moves. It felt very natural at the time, but thinking about it the next day, they would still blush.

And besides blushing, Zhao An found that his legs were trembling just by putting them on the ground. He even had to have breakfast in bed.

So much so that after Hu Sheng returned to the stronghold, Hai Bo, pretending to get something, came into his room two or three times, hesitating to speak. Finally, he said, “You should be more restrained when you’re young.”

Zhao An could only nod obediently, thinking that when winter came and the farming was slack, he must find someone to rebuild a large house. It would be best to make it soundproof. On one hand, it would be for his own convenience; on the other, it would be better not to disturb the old man, who was a light sleeper.

Fortunately, Zhao An’s physical fitness was also far superior to that of an ordinary person. By noon, he could walk freely. Because from the day after the Mid-Autumn Festival, the conscripted workers would start repairing the road from the county town. Zhao An decided to go to the construction site every day to check, to prevent the yamen runners in charge of managing the workers from lining their own pockets too much. At the very least, most of the grain he provided had to end up in the workers’ mouths.

However, when Zhao An arrived at the county town that afternoon, the construction team had not yet started working. Instead, they were lining up outside the county town to record their names, villages, and other information.

But to put these people at ease, Zhao An had someone cook a large pot of congee with the corn and brown rice he had just brought for them to eat. He told them to gather at the entrance to the city at the chen hour tomorrow morning, at which time they would be given breakfast before they started work.

“If anyone is late, there will be nothing to eat,” the clerk who was helping with the recording shouted. Everyone answered in a not-so-uniform manner, “Okay~” “Got it~”

Seeing the sun setting in the west, everyone quickly headed back. At this time, most people had night blindness. After they went home today, they would come back tomorrow with torches and their belongings. From then on, they would live in temporary shacks and would not go home.

The clerk who was helping with the work also packed up the name list and put it in a bamboo basket along with his writing materials. Seeing that Zhao An was getting on the mule cart to go back, he quickly ran to the front of his cart and said with a smile, “Is Young Master Zhao going back?”

Zhao An nodded at him. “Clerk Zhang, you should go back early too. I’ll have to trouble you to work hard with me for the next few days.”

“Not at all, not at all.” After waving his hand, Clerk Zhang got to the point of why he had come to find Zhao An. “I wonder if Young Master Zhao has any spare shower and drainage pipes. My family would also like to install a set.”

Clerk Zhang’s family had been clerks in Changxi County for generations, starting from his great-grandfather. Their connections in Changxi County might even be wider than County Magistrate Feng’s. It was just that their family was also a respectable one and had never used their seniority to deceive their superiors and subordinates for personal gain. At most, they would take a share of what the county yamen was entitled to.

After several generations of accumulation, they also had a family fortune of several thousand liang of silver. They couldn’t be called extremely wealthy, but they could be said to be well-off, with no worries about food and clothing, and even a few servants.

It was precisely such middle-class families that had a greater demand for showers and drains, because they didn’t have as many servants as the extremely wealthy families, and at the same time, they could afford to spend a few dozen liang of silver to improve their lives.

Faced with such a business opportunity that had come to his door, Zhao An naturally would not refuse. He looked at the book basket in Clerk Zhang’s hand. “Leave me your address. I’ll have someone deliver the things tomorrow and help you install them.”

“Good, good, good,” Clerk Zhang agreed and wrote down his address for Zhao An.

In the following month, life in Changxi County gradually stabilized. Zhao An also allowed the people who had been repairing the road for a period of time to choose to go home and have someone else take their place. Of course, they could also choose not to.

To handle the handover, he stayed in the county town that night. When he returned home the next day, he saw that Hu Sheng had moved a large box into his room. When he opened it, it was full of silver.

The sugarcane grown in the Nanyue Kingdom was very sweet, and the cane sugar made from it was also very popular with the people of the Xu Kingdom. Although the price of sugar was no longer as expensive as in the previous two dynasties, where only the top-level nobility could afford it, it was still not something that ordinary people could consume on a daily basis. At most, it was used to entertain guests during weddings and childbirths.

So the sugar that Hu Sheng’s caravan had brought back this time was sold at a very high price, earning him nearly two thousand liang of silver in one go.

Zhao An had also earned several thousand liang of silver recently, but he was a spendthrift and couldn’t hold onto money. He had never seen so much silver at once.

He looked up at Hu Sheng. “Are you really going to give all this money to me? You still have to do business. Don’t you need capital?”

Hu Sheng smiled. In fact, he didn’t need much capital. He only needed to spend two or three hundred liang of silver to buy some outdated styles of silk in the Nanyue Kingdom, and he could exchange it for tens of thousands of jin of sugarcane. However, it still required some manpower to boil the sugar into blocks themselves.

It sounded like the profit was exorbitant. Why didn’t anyone else do this business? Of course, it was because others didn’t have strong military power. Perhaps with the national strength of the Xu Kingdom, the country could open up trade.

But the Xu Kingdom’s attitude towards Nanyue and Ü-Tsang, these tributary states that posed no threat, was very perfunctory. It was not as good as the Xiongnu, who had been fighting with the Xu Kingdom for years. At least the court still wanted to trade for warhorses from the Xiongnu. For a small place like Nanyue, the Xu Kingdom’s court completely looked down on it.

As a result, the road from Jiaozhou to the Nanyue Kingdom was all jungle and wilderness. If one wanted to buy local specialties like grain and cane sugar from the Nanyue Kingdom, one had to take a detour by sea to do business. If one went by land, not to mention the ill-intentioned bandits and strongholds, even the tigers, leopards, and wolves could make a caravan of a hundred people disappear without a trace in the mountains.

Only Hu Sheng could think of doing business in a military way. Every time they set out, they would form a military formation of more than a thousand people and sweep away all obstacles along the way with violence.

Moreover, the purpose of their trip to Nanyue was not only to sell sugar and make some money, but more importantly, to exchange for enough grain. The climate there was very suitable for growing grain, and it could be harvested three times a year.

But perhaps because the gifts of heaven were too abundant, the people there were very lazy and unwilling to tend to their fields diligently. When Li Dake led a team over to exchange for grain, he had to find the border commander of the Nanyue Kingdom and use silk to exchange for their military grain.

This was also a crime of corruption, but it was another country’s business. Li Dake would not accuse the border commander of his crimes. Instead, he would praise his wisdom and make another deal with him. The next time he came, he would bring brighter silk for his wife to make new clothes, and also a full set of white porcelain tableware.

To get these silks and white porcelain, the Nanyue general was willing to pay one hundred thousand jin of sugar blocks. He could have his soldiers start boiling the sugar now, and Li Dake and his men could just pick it up the next time they came.

When Zhao An heard from Hu Sheng that the Nanyue Kingdom liked the Xu Kingdom’s silk and porcelain very much, he looked at the box of money, his eyes shining. “Then would they like glassware?”

Hu Sheng said, “Of course they would. If you can make glassware, the nobles in the capital will like it even more and be able to pay a higher price.”

When Hu Sheng said this, his tone was affirmative, because he had long since discovered that there was something unusual about Zhao An.

Zhao An had made some money from making ceramic drainage pipes and showers, but that thing didn’t have much technical content. Zhao An had heard from Feng Shaoping that large kilns in the prefectural city had already started to imitate them. This made him have to think of another way to make some special things, at least so that the kiln he had built with great difficulty would not be idle.

Today, Hu Sheng had mentioned that porcelain was a very popular high-end commodity abroad. He suddenly thought of making glass. Silicon dioxide should be easy to fire.