Chapter 5

Chapter 5

The academy’s coursework was heavy, so he could only come back once or twice a year. One of those trips was always during the autumn harvest, where he had to go down to the fields and help out. When he got tired from the work, he would flip through the essays I hadn’t sent out, reading them carefully, page by page. During those days, even the buzzing flies looked pleasing to my eyes.

Especially when Sister-in-law gave birth to Yuancheng and Yuanxin, he stayed at home for half a month.

But after turning fifteen, he didn’t even come back for the New Year. His teacher thought very highly of him and personally came to our house to tell Sister-in-law that he needed to make every second count in his studies. Succeeding in his education as early as possible would be his greatest contribution to the family.

Because he hadn’t returned for so long, gossip gradually spread throughout the village. Zhao Qingzhu’s wicked aunt stood in our courtyard, spitting out sunflower seed shells while making sarcastic remarks:

“Your family is tightening your belts so much to provide for him, but now he doesn’t even come back once a year. I bet he can’t keep up with his studies anymore and is just out there having fun with your money. And even if he does get lucky and passes some exam, do you really think he’d still look twice at your Liu Ya?

“He’s just an ungrateful little wretch. Back when we wanted to send Xianglan to a wealthy family to enjoy a good life, he was just afraid there’d be no one left to provide for him, which is why he brought out all those laws to scare us.”

My brother swung a large broom at her. “Enjoy a good life? You call sending my wife to be an old man’s concubine enjoying a good life? I’ll beat you to the ground today and send you over to enjoy that good life!”

After chasing off that habitual troublemaker, the other gossipers wouldn’t come to our door to spout their nonsense, leaving you with no one to hit. As a result, I didn’t much like going out anywhere else, except to the fields.

Holed up at home, spending my days reading the things I had written to relieve my boredom, I suddenly discovered that there seemed to be an incredible secret hidden within them.

Unlike my dad, who was a seasoned veteran at farming, I loved blindly experimenting with new things.

One day, I would pour the fertilizer I’d concocted myself into his fertilizer and mix it up; the next day, I’d adjust the spacing between the seedlings he had carefully planted. My dad would stomp his feet in anger and threaten to beat me, but in the end, he couldn’t bear to do it. He could only hand over the smallest, poorest plot of land we had and let me mess around with it, saying that if I couldn’t grow anything, I’d have to obediently listen to him next year.

That plot wasn’t big, so I tried out different tricks on every single row. In those essays, I had detailed all these experiments. During the recent autumn harvest, I separately weighed the grain harvested from each row of wheat. Most of them yielded about the same as a normal, low-grade field, but there were a few rows whose yields calculated to be just about the same as my dad’s few acres of top-grade fields.

Relying solely on my memory, I wouldn’t have been able to remember what random things I had done to those specific rows of wheat seedlings back then. But now, flipping through these essays, I felt like I had faintly grasped some tricks for increasing the yield. I took a piece of charcoal and sketched it out on paper again and again, pleasantly surprised to discover that the things I had done to them really did share a common thread.