Chapter 165

Shuiqing hadn’t expected that both Fan Qian’s and Fan Dazhu’s families would come to buy lime.

Lime, simply put, is used for disinfection and prevention of viruses and bacteria.

Whether it’s effective or not can’t be seen immediately, but buying it with money is real.

Why would they be willing to spend money on something that doesn’t show immediate results?

Moreover, their families are different from others in the village. Other households in the village raise rabbits, and after floods, there’s a lot of damp and rotting things, so it’s good to disinfect and prevent in their rabbit pens and around.

But these two families don’t have rabbits. They don’t even have many chickens, ducks, or geese. What do they need lime for!

However, her family stocked a lot of lime originally for fear of any harmful bacteria after the village floods, not prepared for villagers to spend money buying it. Now that even Fan Qian’s and Fan Dazhu’s families are buying it, is she afraid of having too much money?

Of course not.

Shuiqing smiled, looking like she was taking care of her own people, “We are all from the Fan family. I won’t overcharge you; I’ll sell it to you at the original price.

But if you buy a lot, it wasn’t easy for the head of the household to carry it back in the first place. How about this? From the prefectural city to Shanshui Village, it’s more than an hour’s journey on foot. Carrying back these several big bags of lime, let’s calculate five wen for transportation. Not much, right?”

Fan Qian and Fan Dazhu gasped in shock!

Fan Qian was thinking that he and Fan Jin were brothers! Brothers, and his younger siblings were actually asking him for money.

Not only asking for money but also charging for transportation!

Fan Dazhu was thinking that he had only heard that buying more would be cheaper; he had never heard of extra transportation charges for buying more.

Did his younger siblings become obsessed with money?

Shuiqing still smiled gently, worried, “This is the same price as in the prefectural city. I’m not overcharging you.

But if you buy so much at once, my family will have less left for ourselves. We’ll have to buy more from the prefectural city, and who knows when we can go there.”

Upon hearing this, Fan Qian and Fan Dazhu immediately agreed to buy!

Not only did they buy, but they bought quite a bit.

It’s a joke. His sister-in-law, who doesn’t understand market prices, and the two big men do!

Uncle Ding had said that lime in the prefectural city would definitely rise in price after the flood.

Now that they bought it, they made a profit.

The two returned home with their carts, seeing villagers pushing wheelbarrows, pulling carts, and carrying baskets to and fro on the road.

They were extremely pleased.

Their younger siblings probably didn’t buy much, so these people probably returned empty-handed.

It’s their loss for not running fast and coming early!

The two returned home loaded, hauling several sacks of lime, and didn’t feel it was hard at all.

As soon as they arrived home, Fan’s mother and Sun Jinhua looked at the piled-up lime with faces as dark as the bottom of a pot.

“Son, why did you buy so much useless stuff?”

“Is that Ding guy cheating us?”

Fan Qian’s face turned ugly at the questioning. “The old village chief and the other elders bought it in advance. Could it be fake?

What does a mere woman like you understand? If I hadn’t run fast, I wouldn’t have been able to buy this back.”

Sun Jinhua dared not say a word.

The household silver was either in the hands of the mother-in-law or the head of the household, and it wasn’t her decision whether or not to buy, how much to buy.

Fan’s mother was distressed over the silver, muttering with a hoarse voice, “The crops in the fields, the food…”

Fan Qian grew impatient hearing his two family members with a cacophonous voice, interrupting, “Okay, okay, quickly spread this lime everywhere. We spent money to buy it, so be careful where you spread it!”

On the other side, Fan Dazhu’s mother and mother-in-law also looked displeased at the lime.

They hadn’t even built a house; what did they need this for?

Fan Damu was starting to regret a bit now. When he heard there was almost none left, he wanted to buy quickly, but now he felt he had spent money unnecessarily.

However, since he had already bought it, he naturally couldn’t admit that he had made a mistake.

On the other side, in front of Shuiqing’s courtyard storeroom, there was a bustling scene of lime purchases.

When Fan Qian and Fan Dazhu had come earlier, she didn’t let the younger ones handle it, let alone her family members. Otherwise, if they were pressured by the elders or regarded themselves as part of the Fan family, how could they discuss money? How could they collect money?

But now, it was all people from the village, all decent people, so she left the lime purchasing to the younger ones.

She stood at a distance, watching quietly, and whispered to Fan Jin beside her, “I really didn’t expect that. Originally, I was worried about how to distribute it and make the villagers willing to spread it, but now they’re coming to buy it voluntarily.”

You have to know that changing the mindset of rural households is quite difficult.

Especially for things that don’t show immediate results, even if done under the pretext of being good for them, getting them to work isn’t easy.

Fan Jin’s lips lifted slightly with a faint smile, “It’s Uncle Ding. He made them believe that there might be epidemics after the floods and that lime is useful.”

This also had to do with the corpses he had seen with his own eyes a few days ago.

Who in the village isn’t afraid?

Shuiqing thought, with Uncle Ding behind her and Aunt Ding ahead of her, this Ding family really benefits her.

She watched Hu Wenhua carrying a large sack of lime, as relaxed as holding a bundle of cotton, and casually asked, “How old is Uncle Ding’s daughter?”

The Ding family moved here later, with a small population, and their style of speech and conduct was quite different from the people of Shanshui Village.

They didn’t farm or buy land and relied on collecting medicinal herbs for a living.

They had opened a small plot of fallow land behind the village to grow vegetables and raise a few chickens and ducks, and built three adobe brick houses, which were not bad but not prominent either.

Because they lived at the far end of the village, they rarely interacted with the villagers and had a very low presence in the village.

But every time something happened in the village, they were extremely reliable.

Like this flood, the mushroom poisoning before, and Fan Qian’s family’s poisoning, oh, you can’t blame Aunt Ding for that.

No matter which mother, her own daughter did nothing wrong, and yet she was scolded at her doorstep.

The Ding family and the farmers in the village were completely different levels.

She wondered how Sun Jinhua could think that the Ding family was definitely interested in her son? And only her son would do.

Fan Jin tried hard to think about it, but also did not expect, frowned and said, “I don’t know, you can ask Guifan sister-in-law, she knows the most about the village’s affairs.”

He couldn’t ask about things between women.

Guifan sister-in-law grew up in Shanshui Village since she was a child, and married Li Wenge, a kind-hearted person who knew everything about the big and small things in the village.

Shuiqing originally just casually asked, seeing Fan Jin’s self-reproachful expression, couldn’t help but smile.

It was normal for a big man like him not to know the age of a village girl.

And it’s not like she asked him, so he had to know.

“Don’t rush, maybe we’ll meet her someday.”

That’s what she said, but Shuiqing also knew it would be difficult to meet her.

First, the Ding family lived at the far end of the village and rarely moved around in the village;

Second, her family was also divided into branches of Shanshui Village, and also rarely moved around in the village;

With two people who don’t move, how could they possibly meet?