The calamity at Qianyang Mountain had finally ended, and Chen Shi relaxed. He had been on edge and highly tense these days; it was only now as he relaxed that he felt exhausted.
That night, he slept soundly.
In the middle of the night, he suddenly woke up and sat up with a start, only to see several people had appeared by his bedside.
He jumped in fright, and upon closer examination, it was Xiao Wangsun, Li Jindou, and others, while his grandfather stood in the corner, still holding a green umbrella.
The five of them looked at him with strange eyes, unblinkingly.
"Tonight there was no fit."
Grandfather shook his head and walked outside with his umbrella.
The other four also let out sighs of pity and one by one left Chen Shi’s room. Granny Sha said, "Could it be that the souls of those killed by cannon fire can’t be eaten?"
Chen Shi was utterly bewildered. Had they come to his room to watch him sleep, simply to see if he would have a fit?
The next morning, Chen Shi got up to pay his respects to his godmother and saw that people were already laboring in the fields. Although the demon transformation had been ferocious and terrifying, resulting in numerous deaths, life still continued.
By the third day, the villages had mostly returned to normal, and markets were even opening up.
Because there were five additional mouths to feed at home, including patients like Li Jindou, Granny Sha, Jin Hongying, and Xiao Wangsun, plus Chen Shi himself who needed medicine, the Chen family quickly ate through their reserves.
Granny Sha had always been poor, making a meager living as a witch for the villagers, and recently she had gone broke while treating Chen Shi as her own son.
Although Li Jindou came from the prominent Li Family from Quanzhou, his refined yet simple attire suggested he wasn’t very wealthy either. The fact that he only took out a few pieces of silver to pay for his temporary lodging at the Chen family’s place indicated that both grandson and grandfather were in a tight spot.
Xiao Wangsun, who traveled at night, would even stop to pick up ten pieces of silver he found on the road, suggesting that he likely spent much of his money maintaining his dignity.
Here, the wealthiest individual was Jin Hongying, a military officer from the Divine Mechanism Camp, who had a high salary.
But after Jin Hongying was injured, she dressed like a village girl, indicating she was probably extravagant with money, finding herself short when it really mattered, a sort who’d eat her way through wherever she went.
Using the local rural expression, this was called being ’flat broke’.
The medicinal herbs they used every day were worth over twenty silver pieces, and with the household too poor to even lift the pot, Chen Shi pondered selling the turtle shell he had found in the Mountain Lord Temple at the market.
The shell he had discovered while cleaning the temple had an astonishing hardness and he thought it might fetch a good sum.
Grandfather was also going out to buy medicinal herbs, and it was convenient to take Chen Shi along.
Chen Shi lifted the turtle shell onto a cart, and they set off with Black Pot leading the way.
Chen Shi, looking at his grandfather’s green umbrella, found it odd. Ever since the demon transformation ended, his grandfather had always carried the umbrella, which had never been closed.
Even at night, he still held it open.
Chen Shi also noticed Yao Wangsun from the black-clothed Xuan Shan stand outside their house for no apparent reason the previous night and only left at dawn.
"Black Pot, have you noticed anything strange about grandfather and Xuan Shan?" Chen Shi asked the dog.
Black Pot hesitated and dared not answer. frёeωebɳovel.com
The wooden cart started moving towards Bridge Bay Town.
Despite the great disaster, Bridge Bay Town remained bustling. The town, though not large with just a few hundred families, was very prosperous, located on the main route to Xinxiang County. Thirty miles east was Xinxiang city, and thirty-two miles to the northeast was Water Buffalo County. Thus, people traveling between the two county cities would often stop here.
In Bridge Bay Town, what one saw most frequently were people coming down from the mountains, usually men or women in their forties or fifties, not tall but strong-bodied, wearing short jackets, their suntanned skin dripping with sweat as they carried loads of over a hundred pounds.
Often, after setting down their burdens in Bridge Bay Town and drinking a bowl of tea for five wen, they would pick up their goods and set off for the county thirty miles away.
They walked there and back in a day, all for a few dozen wen.
Dangerous streams, rickety bridges, cliffs, wild beasts would sometimes claim lives.
But such was the ordinary life of country folks.
Generation after generation, it had always been this way.
Right after the great disaster, many families needed money, so there were many men preparing to go to the city with goods on their shoulders to exchange for cash.
Seeing this, Chen Shi thought of Li Xiaoding asking him to draw a Peach Talisman and giving him fifty silver pieces, and felt that something wasn’t quite right.
As for what exactly was wrong, he couldn’t say.
Grandfather first went to a medicinal herb shop in town to buy herbs, while Chen Shi planned to find an empty spot in the market. However, he was late, and the market stalls were already overflowing with people. But when they saw Chen Shi, the plain villagers turned pale and quickly moved aside to make space for him.
The buyers and sellers here were all villagers from ten miles around, all familiar faces who recognized Chen Shi.
Chen Shi expressed his gratitude to the kind folks, set down the turtle shell, and waited for business to begin.
"What a huge turtle shell! Are you selling this dog too?" A Talisman Master from out of town passed by and took a great interest in Black Pot.
"Not for sale!" Chen Shi declined curtly.
"What a pity. If killed, you could get a lot of Black Dog Blood." The Talisman Master shook his head and continued to browse other stalls.
At the market in Bridge Bay Town, many cultivators from the city would select items; some things that seemed ordinary to the country folk were regarded as treasures by them, who often would pay a good price.
Chen Shi waited for a moment before the Talisman Master came back, saying, "Ten silver pieces for your dog, what do you say?"
Chen Shi shook his head: "The dog can’t be sold."