He didn’t know if his colleague had spread the word in the village, but he followed routine, going to work every day and putting in overtime whenever there was the opportunity.
Since he was an apprentice, he didn’t qualify for accommodation in the factory complex. If he really wanted to stay, he’d have to share a large dormitory-style room with a dozen other people, and even then, he’d have to write various reports and applications.
He found this too troublesome and opted to spend two yuan a month for a room in a rural area near the factory with a lonely old man.
The village was only a half-hour walk from their factory, much closer than his own home, and the old man wasn’t too demanding.
There were houses in the town, but they were expensive, averaging three to five yuan a month. He couldn’t afford them, so he thought of looking for a place in the village.
Staying in someone else’s home was too inconvenient, so living with the lonely old man was the best option.
The old man’s son had died, his spouse had passed away, and his daughter was married far away and could hardly visit more than twice a year. Life was tough, but the old man remained optimistic.
Since he started living with him, he helped the old man with some chores. In the evening, he took care of the vegetables, and the old man provided the seasoning and the pot, working well together. If there were no staple foods, he gave the old man money—twenty cents a meal—and the old man never refused, which relieved him.
He feared giving and not having it accepted or, worse, accumulating obligations after a refusal or a later hike in price. So, paying upfront felt better.
He left particularly early each morning, not eating at home because he delivered vegetables to others. He already had deliveries for over ten households. Follow current ɴᴏᴠᴇʟs on novel•fire.net
The vegetables were freshest in the morning, so by six o’clock, he was in town, going from door to door, finishing a little past seven.
These vegetables were planted the previous night and picked that morning, without much effort: there were red and white radishes, cabbage, garlic sprouts, and garlic.
He had planted these five types of vegetables on five plots of land. The remaining plot was used to plant more cabbage. From one seed in each plot, he could harvest five jin, and with six plots, that was thirty jin in total. In the morning, he sold thirty jin at a rate of five cents per jin, earning him a total of 1.5 yuan in the morning. After work in the evening, he made another round of deliveries, earning another US$ 1.5, adding up to three yuan a day.
If he came across someone with food stamps, a jin of vegetables could be exchanged for three taels of food stamps. Meat and cloth tickets weren’t exchangeable, so currently, he had no money even to buy clothes.
Seeing that he hadn’t changed clothes for many days, the old man decided to give him some of his late son’s clothes. Although they were worn out, at least they were wearable, and he didn’t mind, considering he had already saved up US$ 58. With the time left before the end of the year, he could still earn more, hoping to have saved about one hundred yuan by the time work settled after the new year.
As for clothes, they were just external possessions. As long as they were clean and didn’t smell, nothing else mattered.
The "space" operated fifty hours a day, and at Level 2 or below, she could grow crops through five cycles, with each cycle maturing every ten hours, meaning she had a harvest of 330 pounds daily.
She could harvest wheat and rice twice a day, thirty jin each time, totaling sixty jin.
But he couldn’t farm and sell every day, and still had to trade in the "space" for Gold Coin to keep the cycle going.
Thus, she would plant vegetables one day and grains the next—planting vegetables for five cycles and trading them in the "space" for three cycles, leaving two cycles’s produce untraded.
The same went for wheat and rice, selling one cycle’s worth in "space" and storing another cycle’s produce in the "space" warehouse.
Over these days, he had accumulated two hundred jin each of wheat and rice, all manually threshed by hand after beating them.