"You made it sound so nice just now. 'If there's treasure, you can get in the water and dig it up.' And it hasn't even been a few minutes before you've gone back on your word."
Chen Haichao put on his gloves. Women's mouths were lying devils.
Chen Pandi's scalp tingled as she watched the worms wriggling in the brine. "I don't believe there's treasure here."
"Watch!"
He squatted down and got a clearer look at the brine worms in the hollow. Countless tiny, dark-red worms were swimming slowly through the shallow water, packed so densely that they looked like flowing threads of blood.
They were a little gross, but this was treasure. He would get used to looking at them.
He plunged his hand straight into the brine, scooped up a handful, then thrust it in front of Chen Pandi without warning.
"Ah!!"
Startled by the sight up close, Chen Pandi screamed, her expression changing slightly as she backed away a few steps.
"Heh heh, scaredy-cat. Take a closer look. They actually look a bit like tiny shrimp."
He cupped his hand, and a great mass of tiny brine worms writhed and churned in his palm. Their numbers were astonishing.
On closer inspection, they were extremely small shrimp. Imagining them as tiny shrimp made them less frightening.
"Shrimp?"
Chen Pandi cautiously leaned closer for a look.
Chen Haichao poured away most of the brine worms in his hand, leaving just a few in his palm for her to examine.
She was a little surprised. "Hey, they really do look a bit like very, very small baby shrimp."
"Not scared anymore?"
"Nope, heh heh."
He turned his hand over and dumped them all back in, then stood up. "Come on, let's go home."
"Huh? Home? Weren't you going to scoop up treasure?"
"I'm done."
"You meant these worms?" Chen Pandi stared at him in disbelief, as if he were a fool.
"Don't underestimate them. Our family will be counting on them to strike it rich from now on."
She rolled her eyes and let out a laugh, paying him no mind as she walked behind him. She assumed he'd suddenly lost his marbles and come running here on a whim.
Chen Haichao thought as he walked. He definitely couldn't come and scoop them up before contracting the land, or he would beat the grass and startle the snake. No secret could stay hidden in the village.
Even if they didn't know they could make money from them, some people with dark hearts simply didn't like letting others have things on the cheap. They couldn't bear to see others doing well.
Take the commotion outside his house that morning. Someone had gotten jealous just because his family was drying a little more dried shrimp, accusing them of cutting off the tail of capitalism and taking advantage of the collective.
They were obviously worthless things nobody wanted, but some people just couldn't stand seeing others have them. Even if they didn't want them themselves, they wouldn't let anyone else have them on the cheap.
The entire abandoned salt field looked to be around thirty or forty mu, with dozens of salt pans of various sizes. Brine worms filled the pools everywhere. After years of abandonment, it had become a natural breeding ground instead.
The salinity of the tidal flats elsewhere was too low for the worms to survive. The hollows left here were uniquely blessed by nature.
Once he contracted it, all he had to do was repair and reinforce the earth-and-stone embankment around the outside and enclose the area, leaving just one entrance and exit.
But the key question now was, where would he get the money for the contract?
Even though this was an abandoned salt field, contracting it would surely cost a fair bit. After all, there were thirty or forty mu, and he wouldn't be contracting it for just one year. He would have to contract it for five or ten years in one go.
A single penny could stump a hero!
It would also cost money to repair and rebuild the place once he had contracted it. He didn't know how much money the family had.
He'd heard that the production team had settled the work points and distributed the money yesterday, but he'd been reborn too late. Otherwise, he would have tucked the money from his own work points into his pocket first.
Getting a large sum of money out of his mother's hands was harder than climbing to heaven. Besides, asking her for money for something so uncertain would be no different from cutting out her flesh.
These days, rice at the grain station's fixed price cost only fifteen fen per jin, pork cost seventy fen to a little over one yuan, and marrying a wife cost two or three hundred yuan.
The several hundred yuan he needed to contract the salt field could bring him two or three wives to wait on him. It would probably empty the family's coffers.
He felt around in his pocket and found only a few yuan. He wasn't married, so the money from his work points when the brigade settled up was all in his mother's hands. He still had to find a way to make money on his own first.
Only during the New Year period did he have time to himself. Once the New Year was over, the production team would have to start working again.
The production team, a collective labor organization, would only be abolished after the household contract responsibility system was introduced and would become a villagers' group. Only then could each household become an independent production unit, with farmers and fishermen no longer participating in collectively organized labor.
He had forgotten when their village divided the land among households and implemented the household contract responsibility system. He vaguely remembered it being around this time in the early eighties. All he remembered was that just after the New Year, the provincial daily published a related editorial, and before long the county's policy was passed down to the various townships.
After that, people in the county seat and towns gradually began doing business openly instead of sneaking around. Although everyone looked down on self-employed people, they couldn't deny that self-employed people had money.
As he walked, he thought about how to make money. Why hadn't the heavens given him a system or a golden finger?
Didn't novels and videos on that fruit app always have them?
He called silently in his heart: System? System? Come out, baby?
Bah! Damn heavens, did you forget to issue me one?
Chen Pandi turned her head and watched his strange expressions, then waved a hand in front of him. "Abao? What are you doing?"
"Call me Haichao. You're not allowed to call me Abao anymore."
"Why?"
"I'm grown up. You can't call me by my childhood name anymore."
"Doesn't it sound nice? It's better than your friends Gousheng, Heidan, and Pigou's names."
Chen Haichao looked constipated and couldn't find a word to say.
"What were you thinking about just now? Your expression kept changing."
"I was thinking about a shortcut to instant riches."
"Hahaha, you'd get there faster by taking a nap at noon."
Chen Pandi was beside herself with amusement and assumed he was joking, unaware that he was telling the truth.
The truth had never been easy to believe.
The siblings walked back together, and there were more people on the road now, all children running and playing everywhere.
With the New Year approaching, children were the happiest of all. They looked forward to it all day long: there were new clothes, lucky money, all kinds of snacks, and firecrackers to set off.
By the time they got home, Mother Chen had already cooked all the little red shrimp they'd caught that morning and spread them out to dry. Seeing them stroll back at their leisure, she flew into a rage.
"All you know how to do is shirk work. You go out and stay gone all morning, and you don't even know to come back early. The youngest is nowhere to be seen, and neither is the older one. Go tidy your own rooms, and sweep and wipe everything clean, inside and out. The New Year's almost here, and you still can't see a single chore that needs doing. You won't move unless someone gives you a shove."
Chen Pandi hurried off to the room she shared with Chen Sidi.
Chen Sidi poked her head out of the room and winked at her. "How did your matchmaking meeting with Wang Zhiwen go? Will we be hearing wedding bells soon?"
"Nothing like that. I don't want to marry him. I'll see if there's anyone else suitable."
"Why?"
Chen Pandi remembered Chen Haichao's warning not to breathe a word before catching them in bed, lest she beat the grass and startle the snake. So she didn't say much, only that she hadn't taken a liking to him.
Chen Haichao glanced at his two sisters whispering together in the room and edged over to his mother. His parents would surely have the final say in his sister's marriage, so he had to tell his mother what needed telling.
"Mom, I just went to call Chen Pandi back. That Wang Zhiwen won't do. You can't marry my sister off to him."
"Why won't he do? He seems like a fine young man to me, cultured and polite. He doesn't even mind that your sister is older than him, and he took the initiative to have someone come propose the match. Your dad and I both think he's quite suitable. Let your sister spend a few days getting to know him. If it works out, we'll settle it sooner rather than later. Otherwise, you're all getting to that age..."
"That Wang Zhiwen is no good."
Chen Haichao leaned close to his mother's ear and whispered, "Last night I saw Wang Zhiwen hugging and kissing an elderly widow."
Although he hadn't seen it, that didn't change the facts.
Mother Chen's face was full of shock. "You must have seen wrong, right? How could that be? Which old widow?"
"Shh, keep your voice down. I can't remember her name right now. Once I've gone around the village and remembered, I'll tell you."
He'd known everyone who heard it would be shocked and wouldn't believe it. If it hadn't come out in his previous life, he wouldn't have believed someone would get together with an old woman more than ten years his senior either.
He could understand a rich older woman, but he really couldn't understand an old widow in the countryside. How much of a mother complex did he have? Was he following Zhu Jianshen's example? Or did he just like gnawing on old bones?
Weren't eighteen-year-old young beauties fragrant, tender, moist, and smooth?
It had been almost the millennium when it came out in his previous life. His sister had said they'd been fooling around since before the marriage. They'd certainly been devoted. The old widow had been sixty by then; no matter how much of her former charm remained, surely her face had been covered in wrinkles and age spots?
After so many years, he'd been old when he was reborn, and for the moment he'd rather forgotten the old widow's name. Who could blame him when the names of the village's older generation were all some combination of Lan, Chun, Mei, and Hua? They were basically all much the same, just those few characters arranged in different orders.
But if he went around the village and listened, he would surely remember.
After his third sister caught Wang Zhiwen in his previous life, she'd been too ashamed to tell anyone and hadn't had the courage to divorce him. Worried about the effect on the children and her family, she'd simply swallowed her anger.
But she hadn't expected Wang Zhiwen to have her completely in his grip. Far from restraining himself, he'd gotten even worse. He didn't mind the smell of an old person and even brought the widow into their home while his sister was away.
He'd also beaten or cursed his third sister in their daily life. Chen Haichao had occasionally heard a few things from the neighbors and had fought him several times.
Later, villagers caught them, and the scandal of Wang Zhiwen's affair with the old widow stunned the entire village. People had feasted on the gossip for years, and some still brought it up with relish.
Chen Haichao had gone to Wang Zhiwen's door with a knife, and only then had Chen Pandi made up her mind to divorce him. But because of it, she hadn't been able to hold her head up in the village.
Now, just thinking about it made him grind his teeth with hatred, but without proof, he couldn't go shouting about it everywhere.
Even if he did, nobody would believe him, given the huge difference in their ages. But he could tell his own family. He trusted his mother's fiery eyes of discernment and her blazing fire for gossip.
Fortunately, the fire hadn't reached his own family yet. The two weren't engaged, so there was still time. Now that they'd met, she could simply say he wasn't suitable and she didn't like him, leaving neither of their future marriage prospects affected.
Still, he had to dig into it, drag the person out early, and hammer them to death. What his sister had suffered in his previous life had to be paid back in this one.