Transmigrated Farmgirl's Scheme to Get Rich - Chapter 4
The Mo family lived at the outskirts of the village, so the pond wasn’t far from their home. They just had to walk south after leaving the alleyway and cross a small field to reach it. Green grass grew by the pond, while two willow trees provided ample shade. There were birds singing on the branches, and a cool breeze, giving the pond a fairly relaxed atmosphere.
Second grandma started digging up clay from the banks of the pond, while Mo Yan sat down in the shade. Then, Mo Yan saw a person standing on the other side of the pond. He was in his early teens, and she could tell from his stylish clothing that he wasn’t from Chenzhong village.
“Second grandma, who’s that?”
She looked at the person and said, “Oh! That’s Sir Lu’s grandson. He’s come here from the Upper Valley, and I’ve heard that his dad is an accomplished general there.”
The youth kept standing there, not moving or sitting down. There wasn’t a fishing rod in his hand, so he wasn’t fishing, but what was he doing?
“Second grandma, why is he just standing there? Do you think he wants to jump in?”
Second grandma looked at her in mock anger, “Don’t say that, he might have taken offence if he had heard that.”
A small grasshopper jumped past Mo Yan, and she swiftly trapped it with her cupped hand. When her second grandma came back from digging up clay, she saw Mo Yan’s hand on the ground, and found out it was a grasshopper after asking. Then, she broke a cattail, slowly opened up Mo Yan’s hand, and swiftly tied the grasshopper up with the cattail. She said to take the grasshoppers back to feed it to the chickens
Yesterday, Mrs. Liang said they were going to sell the eggs in the basket for money. If she caught more grasshoppers to feed the chickens, they would lay more eggs due to being better-fed. As it would be helping out her family, Mo Yan started catching grasshoppers.
A gentle breeze disturbed the surface of the pond, and it rippled with a prismatic sheen under the sunlight. The shadow of a fish flashed briefly before diving back into the water.
“Second grandma, there are fish in this pond?”
Second grandma was sitting in the shade of the willow tree, and answered while making the clay birds, “Yes, but they’re all small fish. It’s not worth it to catch them.”
Aside from cats, ducks and geese also liked eating small fishes. No one owned this pond, so if they put some duck and geese in the pond and let them eat the small fish so they could lay eggs to be sold, wouldn’t it be very cost-effective? After all, it wouldn’t cost a lot to buy a few young ducklings or geese.
The clay birds Mo Yan’s second grandma made looked simultaneously like and unlike the real thing, and were extremely hilarious. Mo Yan didn’t know if they’d make a noise after they dried, but said she liked them anyway, and took them back home alongside the grasshoppers she caught, all tied up by cattails.
After going back to the front courtyard, the first thing she did was put the grasshoppers down on the ground. They were eaten by the chickens in a flash. Then, she put the clay birds on the windowsill to dry, so they could possibly be played.
When Mo Ling returned from working the fields, Mo Yan asked about buying ducks, and she agreed to take Mo Yan to the market to have a look. Mrs. Liang didn’t object to this either, as they’d still make good money if they successfully raised the ducks, whether they sold the duck meat or the duck eggs.
The next day was a market day, so Mo Ling brought Mo Yan to the market in the nearby Qianshui Town. Of course, they weren’t just going there to buy ducks, as their main objective was to get a plough. They couldn’t use a plough drawn by livestock, but a hand plough was better than nothing. [1]
Maybe it was because she was getting on in years, but Mrs. Liang felt exhausted from this harvest and decided to buy a hand plough.
When they asked for a price, they were told that the cheapest hand plough would cost a silver tael. After finding a good plough, Mo Ling fished out a pouch from the purse on her waist, and carefully opened it. Inside were those silver bells Mo Yan saw when searching the house.
“Is this enough?”
The cashier at the plough shop grabbed a silver bell and examined it carefully, “It’s from the Feng bank, and it’s pretty high-quality.” Then, he measured the entire pouch with a scale and smiled as he said, “You’re a little short, but you can have the hand plough.”
The transaction was so swift that Mo Yan was sure that wasn’t the case. We should’ve bargained with him a little more so we had a silver bell left to buy some ducks!
However, she didn’t criticise her sister, and Mo Ling let her sit on the hand plough as she happily carted her to the livestock market. Most of the animals sold there were livestock such as pigs and sheep. Mo Yan heard other people negotiating prices, and found out a donkey cost over a dozen silver taels, so it’d be the price of over a dozen hand ploughs!
“Ducklings! Sis, I found ducklings, come look!”
Mo Ling stopped, and Mo Yan hurriedly got off the hand plough, running towards the sound of quacking ducklings. Inside a crate was a bunch of newly-hatched ducklings. In another crate were many chicks. They were all small, fluffy and adorable.
“How much for a duckling?” Mo Yan asked.
“It’s 5 dollars per duckling.” The man selling the ducklings had a hand stretched out, with all five of his fingers splayed outwards.
Mo Yan looked back to see her sister, not knowing if she had any money to spare to buy the ducklings, only to see Mo Ling smile as she groped from something in her purse and produced a silver bell sitting squarely on her palm.
My sister was smart enough to keep one of the silver bells spare! Mo Yan was so happy she was about to jump up in joy.
“Sis, how many ducklings can this buy?”
Mo Ling’s eyes whirled, “Well, the eleven silver bells we used to buy the hand plough earlier were worth a silver tael…”
She was trying to test Mo Yan.
A silver tael was a thousand dollars, so this silver bell was worth just under a hundred dollars.
Mo Yan raised the silver bell up to the person selling ducks and asked, “I’ll trade this for twenty ducklings. What do you say?”
The duck seller was on the fence about making the deal, as he wasn’t sure whether the silver bell was authentic or not, and whether or not it was a profitable trade. Mo Yan knew he was hesitating, but she remembered what the cashier at the plough shop said.
She gave the silver bell a gentle shake in front of the seller’s face as she said, “This bell was made by the Feng bank, and it was even part of my mother’s dowry! It’s definitely authentic, we’ve even used them at the plough shop. You can go check with the cashier if you want.”
The Feng bank was very prominent in the local area, and it was where most local people would go to buy wedding accessories.
The duck seller took the silver bell with a smile, “It seems high-quality, and there’s a horse engraved on it too. It just so happens that my son was born in the Year of the Horse, so I can sew this onto his hat.”
Bells would often be sewn onto children’s hats, which would produce a jingling sound when they moved. It was said they could chase away evil spirits.
The man grabbed a few ratty straw cages and started putting the ducklings in them as Mo Yan kept reminding him to only put females inside. He counted the ducklings, and gave the cages to them. Mo Ling placed the duck cages on the hand plough, and put Mo Yan on the hand plough too, then pushed them back home.
The ducklings were tiny, so they couldn’t be placed into water. They had to be cared for at home for a few days first. So then on, Mo Yan took care of the ducklings every day, and she stopped going to school.
The two acres of farmland the Mo family had had already been tilled, and the seeds had been sown. However, there hadn’t been many good rain showers recently, so they didn’t know if the harvest would turn out well or not.
There were some families in the village who hadn’t finished reaping their first harvest yet, such as Cao Zhang’s family. Cao Zhang’s father was a doctor, and he had a clinic in Qianshui Town, so he rarely worked in the fields. Cao Zhang’s mother had been pampered her whole life and wasn’t used to working in the fields.
The Cao family had an impressive thirty acres of good farmland, and was considered rich by the village’s standards. Every harvest, they were always in need of more hands to work their fields, and this year was no different.
Edited August 17, 2023, to try and get the rest of the story up to the current standards. This includes using the current terms and polishing up the translation.
PS: If you read the previous version of this chapter, it should be noted that I’ve simplified some things by making everything more consistent with later chapters. See the footnotes on Chapter 2 for an explanation on the monetary system.
[1] So I just realised that Qianshui City was supposed to be Qianshui Town, after over an entire year. Whoops.