"?! Dear God! Is this? Sil-silver? This is silver?! A silver cake?!!"
"A real silver cake? Grandpa Shaman actually gave me a silver cake?! Such a heavy silver cake? More than ten taels? A full jin? Sixteen taels of silver to a jin?!"
"What is Grandpa Shaman doing? Could he be... could he be buying me as a slave? But in the guard post, buying a slave boy only costs three taels. Even a pretty maidservant in the first bloom of youth would be five taels at most! Is this sixteen taels meant to buy all three of us brothers? Daniu and Erhu included?"
"But we've already agreed to serve the local chieftain! We're to open up wasteland and farm it for the village, and the village will see to it that we get wives and start families. As for the foxtail millet we grow, aside from our own food rations, all the surplus goes to the village."
"Rrrr! Rrrr!"
Warhorses neighed as the great troop of Jurchen armored riders halted outside the village. Chen Dayong's face was blank with confusion as he hugged the bright, cake-like silver token, feeling the heavy weight of that wealth, sweat squeezed out on both hands. In the current Hongzhi years, gold and silver had not yet flowed in en masse from Wagoku and the Americas, and Great Ming had always been in a state of precious-metal scarcity. In the north, one tael of silver could be exchanged for three shi of wheat or millet, and one shi was 180 market jin. Liaodong Garrison was bitterly cold, with only one harvest a year, very little irrigation, and mostly dry fields. The yield per mu of dry field here could not compare with southern paddy fields, nor even with Hebei dry fields, and did not