In her past life, she could buy medicine at the store, but in this life, she wasn’t qualified to do so. It all came down to not having earned enough merits in her previous existence. By comparison, this life’s achievement of saving only Zheng Kai, a child, meant her merits were even fewer. She worried about whether she’d still have land to farm in her next life. Indeed, everything depended on luck.
The Sky in her hometown wasn’t as cold as the Northeast, but it still dropped to minus ten degrees or so. Although the elders had a bit of money, cotton was hard to come by, and fabric was even harder to purchase. Everything required tickets. How to buy? What to buy?
Thus, they would take old clothes, wash them, unravel, and mend to make do. Even so, Zheng Kai felt like he was living in heaven now.
There was no work in the fields during winter, and everyone huddled at home to overwinter. The village chief had already mentioned that come next spring, he’d arrange work for Zheng Kai cutting pig grass, earning three to four work points a day. With Grandpa herding sheep and bringing home five work points daily, the two of them together made as much as an adult. Although it wasn’t much, it was still better than the prior five work points. Besides, they had a little plot of personal land, which could yield a little harvest.
In this era, the yield from crops was nothing like that in later times. Thus, an adult working from the beginning to the end of the year might only make hundreds of dollars, equivalent to about five cents per work point.
Before, Zheng Long had never considered the problem of food. Now that he knew, he certainly couldn’t let the two elders go hungry and decided to send them some grain every month.
During this month at home, which coincided with Chinese New Year, he managed to transport one hundred pounds of wheat out of the space. The house had a millstone, so they ground the wheat, husks and all, into flour. One hundred pounds of it was enough to last the two for most of the year.
"This, where did you get such good quality grain?"
Zheng Long reassured Mr. Zheng, "Grandpa, don’t worry, I neither stole nor robbed. It’s just that the source isn’t exactly aboveboard,"
Mr. Zheng immediately thought of something, "Black, the black market? You’re from the liberation army, if you were caught, wouldn’t that be the end?"
"Don’t worry, Grandpa. I was in disguise when I went there. Look at what you eat at home; you need to have finer foods when you’re older. Your stomach can’t handle coarse grains every day. This is one hundred pounds of flour. Make do with it, and I’ll try to find some other good stuff later."
"No way, you don’t make that much money in a month. After buying this one hundred pounds of flour, how could you have any money left?" The source of thɪs content is NoveIꜰire.net
"Grandpa, I have money. I get rewards for missions, truly. If you eat well at home, I can rest easy when I’m away, right?"
It wasn’t three days later that Zheng Long brought home a twenty-pound bag of rice, a thirty-pound bag of walnuts, a fifty-pound bag of potatoes, and thirty pounds each of cabbage, White radish, carrots, and twenty pounds of lotus root, and so on. These were all grown in the space and were of very high quality; even the radish greens were intact, and the cabbages were big and firm, not varieties you could find outside.
The only downside was the lack of meat, oil, and pitifully little salt.
Fortunately, the grain and vegetables from the space, even cooked in plain water without any seasoning, still tasted quite good.
Rarely did they get to eat dumplings during the New Year—filled with radish and tasteless without meat, but because these were white flour dumplings with a few added eggs, they managed to have a meager meat-like meal.
In that era, dumplings were an extreme luxury. So, a meal of white flour dumplings made the New Year feel all the more meaningful—it was the taste of a reunion meal.