Chapter 58

The snow this year seemed to melt faster than the last. Before they had even finished fluffing the cotton for the newcomers’ quilts, the weather turned cold, dry, and sunny for many days.

Without a calendar, no one knew which day was New Year’s Eve. They just recognized the snow—when the last snow melted, that year had passed.

Just as early spring arrived, the female donkey from the previous year gave birth. Donkeys have a relatively long gestation period, usually carrying the foal for about a year. Fortunately, the birth was a normal, head-first delivery.

As the weather warmed in spring, the exploration team set out on their long journey again, their ultimate destination the open-pit iron mine. The iron ore brought back this year would be used to forge the steel drills and iron wedges needed for mining the stone quarry.

Remembering the complaints from last year when digging the irrigation canals, Li Cunxin planned to divide this year’s canal project into three phases, spreading out the labor so it wouldn’t all pile up at once and become unbearable.

The first phase was in early spring. The wheat wasn’t ready for harvest yet, and it wasn’t time for rice or cotton planting. What needed tending was the ramie harvest, the start of various vegetable plantings, and the breeding season for the livestock and poultry. Overall, it wasn’t too busy. Besides housing construction, efforts focused on the water conservancy work.

The second phase came after the wheat harvest. This year’s plow fire wasn’t set in the rice and wheat fields, but burned west of the village, on the land where potatoes and panax notoginseng were grown.

Now that potato seed stock was ample, if not for the varying urgency of needs, they could easily plant ten or more mu.

The fields opened here were for planting ramie. For now, cotton only just sufficed for one quilt per person, with little surplus. The cloth for everyone’s clothes still mainly relied on the ramie.

Of all the crops, ramie was the least demanding for Li Cunxin. Once planted in a suitable environment, it just kept growing, allowing for at least three harvests a year.

Perhaps because of the direction, after this plow fire was set, people kept trickling in intermittently—sometimes two, sometimes three, and even groups of six or seven—all the way up until the rice seedling transplanting period.

Before they knew it, the village had grown to seventy-some people. Even with Xu Yin’s team not yet back, they could still transplant rice seedlings while splitting off a group to build houses.

For the first time, Li Cunxin felt the village had many people, so many it was noisy. Before, when she went out for a walk and left the vicinity of the houses, she’d see no one. Now, there were people everywhere.

Everyone came to her with problems. If they lacked something, they came to her. If they wanted something, they came to her. For leave or shift changes, they came to her. With strange and fanciful ideas, they came to her. Wanting to find someone to chat, they came to her. Even if they didn’t recognize some plant or flower, they came to her. How to grow vegetables, how wide and deep the irrigation ditches should be—people even broke down the explanations to ask her these things bit by bit.

Li Cunxin felt like a tiny person was living in her brain, dancing a square dance all day long. To sum it up in one word: chaos.

The village was chaotic, and so was she.

Work became cumbersome and sluggish; things weren’t as crisp and smooth as before. Often, there were too many people in one place—one person’s job being done by two—while another place was short-handed.

Back when there were fewer people, whoever was free would either fill in the gaps or do work related to their own talent. Like Xia Qing—furniture was always in short supply. Except during the busy farming season for planting and harvesting, she would return to her carpentry work on her own. Like Liu Cuo Jin—she essentially only needed to smelt for one month a year. The rest of the time, she didn’t need to go to the workshop. After the busy farming season, she would help Jiang Beibei spin hemp fibers into yarn.

Though they were short-handed, everyone had direction and purpose. These matters didn’t require Li Cunxin’s management. Since she never worried about them, she forgot they needed managing at all.

So now, with the village population surging, during the off-season from farming, everyone was idle. Those whose talents were useful, like the Bamboo Craftsmen and Carpenters, knew to go with Miao Bing to weave bamboo mats and blinds, with Xia Qing to build roof trusses, and with Ning Yikui to make tables and chairs. But those whose talents were currently useless, with no one assigning them tasks, would go to the construction site, see they had more than enough hands, and, privately unwilling to do hard labor, would turn and head to Jiang Beibei’s house. In a group of a dozen or so, they’d chat idly while fluffing that pile of cotton.

Across the road, in the oil-pressing workshop, Di Wanling and a few others were working so hard their sweat poured down. It wasn’t that they didn’t have enough people, but if just two more came to help grind the powder and wrap the oil cakes, sharing the burden, the others could have some relief.

At the small breeding farm to the east, where the chickens and pigs were kept, only four people were looking after the entire place. Zhou Huan was washing the pigsties and setting up the farrowing pen; another sow was about to give birth. The pigsty and chicken coop were adjacent, but outside the two buildings was a fenced area. During the day, the chickens were let out to roam, so not only did the coop need cleaning inside, but the outside also needed constant tidying.

Zhou Huan called for help, but no one answered for a long while. Yan Baiyu walked in and asked, “What’s wrong?”

Zhou Huan said, “Where is everyone?”

Yan Baiyu said, “Gone to cut pigweed.”

Zhou Huan said, “That sow needs dry straw for her nest. I can’t leave right now.”

Yan Baiyu said, “I’ll go get it.”

Yan Baiyu leaned her broom against the fence. Because the breeding farm’s odor was strong and needed to be away from the residential area, and because animal waste could easily contaminate water sources, it had to be kept clear of them. The farm was some distance from everyone’s homes. Though no one was there at night, the three wolves would keep watch here, not only preventing wild beasts from stealing chickens or piglets, but if a beast truly attacked, the wolves could feed themselves. The small wooden hut outside the farm was built for these three wolves.

Walking back from the breeding farm, one had to pass Jiang Beibei and Liu Cuo Jin’s house. The main door was wide open, and the scene inside the main hall was fully visible.

Yan Baiyu stopped in her tracks, standing outside and observing for a moment, lost in thought.

Liu Cuo Jin called out, “Sister Baiyu, what are you standing outside for? Come in and sit a while.”

The gazes clustered inside all surged towards the door.

Yan Baiyu stepped slowly into the house, took off her hat, and discreetly scanned the people present. “Where’s Cunxin?”

Liu Cuo Jin poured her a cup of water and brought it over. “She should be at the potato field. Said there’s some pest or disease in the field; she went to check.”

Yan Baiyu took it. “Thank you.” She drank two slow sips, then gave a soft “Mm” as if pondering something.

Liu Cuo Jin asked, “Did you need her for something?”

Yan Baiyu put down her cup with a slight smile. “Zhou Huan needs a hand over there. I was looking for her to get a couple of people.”

Liu Cuo Jin was just about to say there were plenty of people here and tell Yan Baiyu to take two, but Yan Baiyu had already given a general greeting and turned to leave, her movements swift and decisive.

Yan Baiyu turned west and headed to the potato fields. This area now had a bit of scale. Besides the acre-plus of panax notoginseng, there were five mu of potatoes and over ten mu of ramie. A gentle breeze stirred the ramie leaves into a rippling green wave.

Yan Baiyu stood at the edge of the field and looked around, but saw no one. “Cunxin!” She called twice, faintly hearing a response from the opposite bank.

Yan Baiyu walked along the raised field path. The sun baked the earthy, grassy scent of the soil into the air. The opposite bank was bordered by a stretch of withered grassland. Beyond a sparse cluster of trees lay a somewhat denser area of woods.

Yan Baiyu stopped in front of a plum tree. The tree wasn’t very thick, and its trunk forked low. Li Cunxin was up in the tree, standing on the fork, clinging to a branch, looking down. “Why did you come over here?”

Yan Baiyu squinted upward in the bright sunlight that bleached the yellow-brown earth and the distant green trees into a glaring white expanse. The tree was laden with plums, a mix of green and red. “Come down first. Be careful you don’t fall.”

Li Cunxin said, “This height won’t hurt anyone if I fall. I never checked this side before—didn’t know there were plum trees here. Look, they’re doing so well.” Despite her words, she still climbed down the trunk.

Yan Baiyu said, “Zhou Huan’s short-handed over there. Wanted to find a few people to go help.”

“Oh, that! You didn’t have to come to me for that. You could have just called two people over.” Li Cunxin took off the straw hat hanging from her neck by a cord. The hat was tilted upwards, its bowl filled with plums, red fading to black.

“You’re the Village Chief.”

Li Cunxin sighed helplessly. “Fine, I’m the Village Chief. Serving the people.”

Yan Baiyu remained silent. Li Cunxin glanced at her, looked away, then looked back. “Wait, hold still.”

Yan Baiyu turned her head, seeing a hand reaching towards her face. Her translucent, jade-like eyes reflected the hand—a hand with thick joints, thick rounded calluses below the fingers, and a raised, thin scar across the back of the middle finger. The scar was pale, stark against the wheat-colored skin.

The hot wind stirred the leafy waves with a rustling sound like rain.

That hand, looking clumsy, moved with great care. The fingers landed on her hair, gently plucking off a cocklebur that had snagged there.

Li Cunxin held the small green prickly fruit, laughing. “How did you even get a cocklebur in your hair?”

“Are there any more?” Yan Baiyu asked a beat late, touching her hair.

“None.”

Yan Baiyu’s gaze shifted away, over the fields, towards the village, the leaves of the silk tree, the dandelions by the roadside. She found her voice again from the silence. “Cuo Jin said you came to the fields to check on a pest problem. What’s wrong with the potato field?”

“There are some aphids.” Li Cunxin said, troubled. “We didn’t have them before. Don’t know if it’s because we didn’t rotate the crops, or because the environment changed after we started planting, and they just gradually appeared.”

“Is it serious?”

“Not too bad. Just need to cut some water pepper later, boil it in water, and spray.”

The two returned to Jiang Beibei’s place. A few people were using combs to remove cotton seeds from the lint. The rest, holding the few remaining cotton bolls, were peeling them in a half-hearted manner.

Li Cunxin walked in, carrying her hat, and said, “Hey, perfect timing. You’re almost done with the cotton. Come on, two of you go with Baiyu to help out at the breeding farm.”

“Doing what?”

“You’ll know when you get there.” Li Cunxin smiled. “Just do whatever they tell you over there. Hurry up, don’t dawdle.”

Hearing it was to help at the breeding farm, three or four people slowly rose from their seats, chattering and moving their chairs.

The person who had spoken with Li Cunxin wanted to wait for the others, not in a hurry to move. Curiously, he glanced at the hat in Li Cunxin’s hand. “Village Chief, what’s in your hat?”

“Plums.”

“Give me one to try.”

“There are plum trees on the opposite bank of the potato field, lots of them. Go pick your own if you want some.”

Li Cunxin didn’t give him one, but his hand was quick, and he still grabbed one. He wiped it on his shirt front and bit into it. “Hey, it’s sweet.”

Li Cunxin slapped him on the back.

Yan Baiyu said, “Zhou Huan’s still waiting for the dry straw over there. Move faster.”

The room fell silent for a moment. Seeing people still dragging their feet, Li Cunxin directly named four people. “Hurry up, hurry up.”

The people who had been joking around moments before stopped fooling with Li Cunxin. They got up and followed Yan Baiyu out, all in the blink of an eye.

Li Cunxin carried her straw hat to the kitchen to wash the plums. She poured the plums into a bamboo basket Miao Bing had woven, specifically for holding fruit and pastries. She had just bent down to scoop a ladle of water when Yunxiu returned, carrying a round winnowing basket. The basket was spread with dried chili peppers, dried crisp. Before she even entered the shed, she stopped and looked west. “Did something happen over at Penglai’s side?”

“What’s wrong?” Li Cunxin quickly came out and followed Yunxiu’s gaze west, only to see a dark mass of people approaching.

Li Cunxin tossed the ladle back into the water vat and ran over, clutching her straw hat. Yunxiu looked left and right, then placed the basket on the stove and followed.

After a few steps, she realized what was going on. The approaching group had donkeys and carts—a formation that stirred up a breeze as they marched.

Who else could it be but the returning expedition team?

The exploration team was only five people. Yunxiu had been mistaken because the five who had left were returning with a team of nearly twenty.

Li Cunxin waved. “Uncle Xu!”

This year, fearing Xu Yin’s return date was uncertain, the water buffalo had been kept at home, waiting to plow the fields. The cart was being pulled by a single donkey. Xu Yin, holding the cart handles, passed them to Wang Ran, then detached himself and walked over first.

Taishi Huan, leading a cargo-laden donkey, trotted over eagerly. Both of them looked exhausted, yet their spirits were high.

Li Cunxin smiled. “Welcome home. Did the journey go well?”

Xu Yin looked Li Cunxin over, saw her vigor remained undimmed, and smiled slightly. “We ran into quite a few things.”

Taishi Huan gazed straight at Li Cunxin, patting the donkey’s back as if waiting for praise. “Do you know what we found?”

Li Cunxin tilted her head, looking at the group coming up behind them. “People? Your trip this time was even shorter than last year. Where did you find so many people?”

Taishi Huan said, “What people? Soybeans!”

With that, Taishi Huan pulled out a plant stem. The stem had withered and dried up, untended.

Li Cunxin took it from him. This soybean plant must have been picked early and unmaintained—it hadn’t even formed pods.

Li Cunxin was still staring, somewhat dazed, at the plant. But Yunxiu was already excitedly slapping Li Cunxin’s arm. “Oil! Oil!”

“It’s a pity soybeans have a low oil yield. If only it were rapeseed…” Li Cunxin said this with her mouth, but her heart leaped with joy. Grains, tubers, beans, vegetables, meat—all five staples were now in place.

Taishi Huan let out a cheeky grin.

Yunxiu said, “What are you laughing at?”

The cart came closer, and they understood. The rapeseed plants were too tall to bring back potted. The team had instead dug up the whole plants, tied them in a bundle, and placed them on the cart.

The rapeseed had already formed pods. Unlike soybean pods, rapeseed pods were slender and long, with a row of tiny seeds inside. As they matured, they changed from green and tender to purple-red and hard.

Li Cunxin laughed. “These are already mature. You could have just stripped the rapeseed pods and brought those back. Why carry all this cumbersome stuff?”

Xu Yin said, “To be safe. None of us knew how to plant this; we were afraid of damaging the seeds. We also stripped some pods to store the seeds separately.”

Li Cunxin’s gaze fixed on a few round, dark-green objects beside the rapeseed. She couldn’t help but laugh, her nose stinging as a wave of emotion nearly brought tears to her eyes. She touched the objects affectionately, the way she stroked Mei Wenqin’s head. “Where did you find watermelons?”

Wang Ran said, “We didn’t find them. These friends planted them.”

Behind the caravan were thirteen people, leading a goat and three donkeys. They carried a few domestic fowl in their arms—looked like ducks. The donkeys’ backs were laden with household goods. Thirteen pairs of dark, glistening eyes stared at her expectantly, making her skin prickle under their gazes.

These thirteen people were like Wen Mi’s group of four, like the people by East Lake—they had already settled. After encountering Xu Yin’s hunting party, communicating and understanding the situation, they were willing to relocate and live in the village.

The talents of these thirteen mostly overlapped with the group’s existing ones, except for one with the talent Gunpowder and another with Paper and Ink—talents their side lacked.

None of the thirteen had the Farming talent, but some knew a little about planting. Those watermelons were grown from seeds they’d discovered.

The watermelons weren’t like the wild ones with pale, greenish-white flesh and bland taste, but they also fell short of modern seedless watermelons—crisp, sweet, bright red flesh, thin skin, rich pulp. These watermelons were mostly red-fleshed, interspersed with some white, looking unripe but actually fully mature and quite sweet.

Li Cunxin led the group back. The villagers were astonished at the exploration team bringing back so many people, and the exploration team was equally shocked by the village’s sudden population surge.

It was only mid-year, and the village already numbered around ninety. Zhao Penglai had been waiting for the iron ore to return so it could be smelted and forged into tools for the stone quarry. The remaining construction materials in the village were all used to build houses first; the canteen hadn’t been built yet.

Now, the meals were divided into three portions, and the people into three groups, eating in the main halls of Li and Yan’s house and the two adjacent houses.

With the dormitory not yet built, the original adobe houses couldn’t accommodate this sudden influx. Several of the newly constructed houses had to be vacated for the newcomers to temporarily live in.

People like Yu Muyang had long since passed the novelty phase with their houses and had no objections to lending them out. What pained them was the grain in the storehouse.

The population increase was too sudden. The surplus grain calculated for this year was likely to be gone again before the autumn harvest.

Back when fewer people arrived, an extra mouth or two at the table wasn’t noticeable. An extra catty or two consumed daily didn’t hurt much. But a sudden surge of twenty or thirty people, consuming over a hundred catties of grain before the harvest—that was truly heartbreaking.

Li Cunxin was very much open-minded about this matter, however. She didn’t practice her grain conservation on this front; otherwise, she wouldn’t have unconditionally accepted people like Xu Yin and Yu Muyang from the beginning.

She always felt that the more they ate and the more they used, the more they would plant. Effort always yielded returns—just like the rice. However many seedlings you transplanted, that’s how vast the rippling waves of grain would be.