Feeling Like I'd Been Cheated

Feeling Like I'd Been Cheated

Today's lunch was lavish. Besides the abundant ingredients for the seafood hot pot—abalone slices as thin as cicada wings, lobster meat, Emperor Red Snapper fillets, Sea Bass fillets, all kinds of prawns, squid rings, oysters, chicken, and various vegetables—

Old Xu also prepared sashimi from Red Grouper, along with a shrimp-and-crab porridge.

The seven of them ate until their stomachs were bursting.

After lunch, Jiang Xia and Zhou Chenglei left Sea Island with Old Mai and the others, returning to the waters near the village to check on the mussels they were raising.

The tide had begun to recede today. Dozens of mu of wooden stakes emerged a short distance above the water, covered in mussels.

Once Zhou Chenglei brought the boat a little closer, they could see the mussels beneath the water.

Old Xu glanced at them. "They're still not big enough. The price won't rise until the shells grow to at least five or six centimeters. Most of them are still on the small side. Let them grow for another six months. There's no rush. But if you don't mind the trouble, you can pick out some of the larger ones to sell."

Old Xu knew that mussels raised this way were usually harvested from an entire wooden stake and sold together. That saved both effort and labor costs.

Picking out the larger ones to sell was troublesome. The mussels were raised in the water, so they could only be conveniently harvested at low tide, and having workers pluck them off one by one was extremely laborious. The labor costs would not be low, either.

However, wages in the mainland were currently extremely low. There were people willing to work for one yuan and fifty cents a day.

Moreover, mussels had been introduced