Chapter 19: Liu Hongmei

Sick pig meat could make people seriously ill, and in extreme cases, it could cost lives.

Liu Changquan paused for a moment and then spoke loudly, “It has been confirmed that a household in Shijia Village sold sick pig meat at the market, causing several villagers to get food poisoning and end up in the hospital.

I want to tell everyone that selling sick pig meat is illegal! The person who sold the sick pig meat has already been arrested, so you all need to be cautious. If you come across sick pigs, make sure not to sell them!”

After Liu Changquan finished speaking, the crowd erupted into conversation, with villagers discussing the swine fever outbreak.

Jiang Cuihua patted her chest and sighed in relief, “Thank goodness we listened to you and didn’t eat the pork we bought.”

If Liu Yinyin hadn’t warned them, they would have had pork for lunch today.

And then there’s my daughter, who’s pregnant. If she had eaten that pork…

Jiang Cuihua couldn’t even finish thinking about it, and a chill ran down her back. The person who sold the sick pig meat was truly heartless, doing such a wicked thing. They deserved to be arrested!

Liu Yinyin asked with concern, “How are the pigs at home doing?”

With so many households in the village experiencing issues with their pigs, it couldn’t just be a coincidence.

Sigh.

Liu Yinyin didn’t want to think about the swine fever happening, but all the signs pointed to it being unavoidable.

Jiang Cuihua sighed, furrowing her brows so tightly she could squash a mosquito, “One pig seems a little better, but the other one is still the same. We’ve already separated them and are keeping them in different pens.”

She still held onto a bit of hope. There was nothing more they could do. Now, it was all in fate’s hands.

Liu Yinyin felt a pang of sympathy. Swine fever doesn’t spread to humans, but…

This year, the villagers lost a lot of money from raising pigs, and next year looks just as bad. It’s going to be even harder for them.

The situation didn’t improve in the following days. More than ten pigs in the village had already died from swine fever.

Liu Changquan and the team leader, Liu Baomin, discussed and decided to dig a large pit on the mountain to bury the infected pigs.

As if the situation couldn’t get worse, not only did the pigs fall ill, but the chickens in the village also began getting sick one after another. Within a few days, more than half of them had died.

Liujia Village was plunged into gloom, with every villager lamenting and crying to the heavens for mercy.

More than a month passed, and the weather turned extremely hot. Perhaps after the prolonged sun exposure, the swine fever and chicken plague finally began to subside.

The pigs and chickens in the village stopped getting sick.

However, after all this, the villagers had lost most of their pigs and chickens, and their lives became even harder.

Liu’s family also lost a pig, and out of the six laying hens they had, only two remained.

Because Liu Yinyin’s home was far from the others, and her chickens hadn’t been in contact with those from other families, they had managed to keep their six hens alive. Moreover, two days ago, her hens had started laying eggs!

For the past two days, she’d found one egg each morning, and today, she found two!

Although the eggs were few, with this beginning, she could buy extra eggs from the system to make up for the lack, and at least… her family wouldn’t run out of eggs in the future.

It was now the end of July, and the sun was scorching hot, making it hard to breathe.

Pregnant women naturally feel heat more intensely, and during this time, Liu Yinyin was struggling.

In this weather, she couldn’t possibly go to work. It would be a challenge just to manage the two pieces of land at home.

Liu Yinyin lived far from the others and didn’t interact much with the villagers.

But she knew that many people in the village were gossiping about her behind her back, calling her a lazy woman, saying she was avoiding labor just because she was pregnant, hiding at home and being lazy.

However, due to Liu Yinyin’s selfless act of sharing the recipe for making tofu with the villagers, many people had reservations, but on the surface, they treated her with politeness.

Liu Yinyin didn’t care what others thought of her. When it was time to treat herself well, she made sure to do so.

Anyway, now that food rations were distributed according to work points, the fewer work points Liu Yinyin had, the less food she would get. She didn’t mind, as it didn’t affect anyone else.

The world was big, but the baby in her belly was the most important. She couldn’t take risks before giving birth.

In these times, having a lot of food wasn’t always a good thing. If Liu Yinyin worked too hard to earn work points, her food allocation at the end of the year would increase, and she might attract unwanted attention.

Her family was poor to the point that even thieves wouldn’t bother to break in.

However, she wasn’t exactly idle at home. While she didn’t go to work much, she frequently went to the mountains to gather wild vegetables and look for wild mushrooms.

At home, Liu Yinyin had already stockpiled three large sacks of dried wild vegetables and had sun-dried over ten pounds of mushrooms.

Recently, many wild fruits in the mountains had ripened, such as myrtle, lantern fruit, and thorny plum…

Every day, Liu Yinyin returned from the mountains with a full harvest. If she couldn’t eat it all, she would sell the excess to the system. Her system balance had already reached over 7,000, nearly 8,000 yuan.

Living in the village didn’t cost much, and this amount of money would be enough for Liu Yinyin to use for several years.

Busy as ever, it was now the end of August. The weather remained hot, but there had been a few rain showers, and the crops in the fields were growing well.

In just a couple of days, the village would start harvesting rice, followed by corn, soybeans, and sweet potatoes…

Almost all the crops were nearing harvest time, and in the coming month or so, it would be the long-awaited autumn harvest for the villagers.

“Yinyin, are you home?” Liu Hongmei called from the doorway.

“Yes,” Liu Yinyin replied, putting down the book in her hand and getting up to open the door.

Liu Hongmei was her cousin and 18 years old this year.

Liu Yinyin’s family had grown a lot of sweet potatoes, but they didn’t raise pigs. So, recently, several households in the village had come to ask her for sweet potato vines to feed their pigs.

The Liu family only had one pig now, and it couldn’t eat all the sweet potato vines, so it would be a waste to let them go unused.

Thus, Jiang Cuihua had agreed to give the vines to a few relatives they had a good relationship with.

They didn’t ask for much in return, just a small token exchange, like one egg for a bundle of sweet potato vines.

“Hongmei, you can pick the sweet potato vines yourself. I’ll go gather the beans from the field.”

Liu Yinyin had been busy drying vegetables. A few days ago, she dried a basket of eggplants.

These past couple of days, she had been picking long beans to dry. The vegetables in her private plot were almost all eaten up.

Only a few eggplants, radishes, cabbages, and some green onions, garlic, and ginger were left.

However, the crops in the field were planted in succession. She had planted another batch of fast-growing vegetables, so in another ten days or so, they would be ready to eat again.

“Okay, I’ll handle it.” Liu Hongmei was well-known in the village for being capable.

She worked during the day and still had to take care of the two pigs at home after work.

She was diligent, and her pigpen was always spotless. When the swine fever outbreak occurred earlier, her family’s pigs were the only ones unaffected.

As a result, her reputation in the village was quite good, and since she had reached marriageable age, matchmakers had been constantly visiting her home.

However, Liu Hongmei hadn’t been interested in any of the suitors. The young woman didn’t fancy the rough men from the village.