The meal the Yi Household ate could have been called brunch.
So before noon even arrived, the whole Yi Household headed out to the fields together.
This was a broad expanse of adjoining paddies, with ridges crisscrossing between them and villagers bent over transplanting rice seedlings.
The Yi Household's paddies lay amid this great sweep of farmland. Their own fields, together with those they rented, totaled twenty-nine mu—a figure Yi Shuyuan had found astonishing when he first heard it.
But on reflection, it did not seem so excessive. The rice yields here were what they were, nowhere near those of the twenty-first century in Yi Shuyuan's memory.
Take Yuanjiang County, for example. Disasters were relatively rare here, yet even with diligent farmers, there was only one harvest a year, and a yield of a little over two hundred jin per mu was considered good.
After rent and assorted taxes were deducted, and rice was sold to buy household necessities, the farmers' ability to weather adversity was decidedly limited.
Of course, while the people of Yuanjiang County were hardly wealthy, life was not too bitter for those who worked diligently.
Ten or twenty years ago, nearly all twenty-nine mu had belonged to the Yi Household. Over the years, however, that had become half owned and half rented.
Yi Shuyuan did not know the full bitterness behind it, but he now understood a little more of his sister-in-law Zhao's complaints.
The Yi Household stood beside a paddy ridge. Yi Shuyuan, Yi Baokang, and Yi Yong'an had already taken off their shoes, tucked their robe hems into their waistbands, and rolled up their trousers.
His nephew's wife, Li, would also be working in the fields, but she was helping Mai Ake arrange her clothes for now.
This wandering swordswoman's outfit was attractive and