Page 15

That morning, the men of the households went out to work in the fields, while those who stayed home either wove cloth or spread grain out to dry.

Xie Ning put on his hat and went to the kitchen. Lin Jin carried a basket inside and sat by the doorway, shelling corn. "I washed the eggplants. What made you think of steaming them to make dried eggplant?"

"My mother used to make it when I was little. I liked eating it, so I learned from her."

Xie Ning cut the eggplants in half, took a fire starter to light the stove and boil water, then put the eggplants in the pot to steam.

While he waited for the eggplants to cook, he brought over a small stool and sat opposite his father-in-law to help shell the corn.

"Where was your mother from?" Lin Jin kept his hands moving as he chatted with his son-in-law.

Xie Ning answered obediently, "Ganpan. During the famine, she followed the other villagers all the way here."

"The famine? That was quite a few years ago. Your mother must have suffered a lot as a child." News traveled poorly, and Lin Jin himself had only heard vague accounts of famine elsewhere.

"My mother said that when they were desperately hungry, they ate anything. They came up with all sorts of ways to make a tiny amount of grain fill their stomachs."

Xie Ning only remembered sitting on his mother's lap when he was very young, listening to her tell him about those times of hunger so that he would cherish food.

The dried corn was hard, but easy to shell. At one point, Granny Zhou came into the kitchen to fetch something. Seeing Xie Ning, she came closer and stared at his hands.

Xie Ning drew his hands back, not daring to shell any more corn. Granny Zhou left him with a curt "Don't let him shell it," then took her things and left.

Lin Jin reassured him, "It's all right. They look clean to me. Come with me this afternoon to have this ground into corn grits. You're visiting your family tomorrow, so take some back with you."

In the countryside, people liked to give grain as gifts. It was practical.

"All right. Thank you, Father." Xie Ning stood up. "I'll go see if the eggplants have steamed soft."

The eggplants had already turned dark brown. Xie Ning lifted them out one by one with chopsticks, slit each section open with a knife, and spread the flattened pieces on clean winnowing trays.

There was a bamboo-pole rack in the courtyard. He set the two trays covered with eggplant on it. They only needed a day in the sun, and he would process them further tomorrow.

He spent the whole morning shelling corn with his father-in-law. At noon, Lin Jin and Lin Guihua took over the kitchen to cook lunch, and Xie Ning hurried back to his room to soak in the water.

He had to go out that afternoon, so he needed to let his body drink its fill of water.

Meanwhile, Zhou Jinian walked to town, a journey of two hours. The bamboo basket had left red marks on both shoulders. Once he started sweating, the sweat seeped into the raw skin, leaving him exhausted and sore. He was young, after all, with soft, tender skin.

His first stop was the medicine shop, where he sold the fresh schisandra berries and the China root his family had dried previously.

The medicine shop's proprietor saw that the schisandra berries he had brought were fresh and of excellent quality. The shop could process fresh medicinal ingredients more professionally, preserving their medicinal properties better.

The proprietor was a kindhearted man and did not try to drive down the price, buying everything at the going rate. Zhou Jinian received three hundred and sixty wen altogether, a decent bit of income.

Zhou Jinian thanked the proprietor and headed for the bookshop with his empty bamboo basket in hand, making his way through bustling Qingshui Town.

Qingshui Town had many shops. With the summer harvest underway, quite a few people had also set baskets along the streets to sell vegetables, all freshly picked from the fields.

Dressed in a long black robe, his long hair secured beneath a hair crown, Zhou Jinian cut a striking figure and drew sidelong looks from many passersby. He kept his gaze straight ahead, passing through streets and alleys and crossing a small arched bridge to reach the street of bookshops frequented by scholars.

Nearly every shop along the bookshop street sold brushes, ink, paper, and inkstones. A few teahouses stood among them, hiring storytellers and selling tea to earn a little money from the crowds.

Zhou Jinian entered his usual Zhangwen Bookshop. Shopkeeper Zhang remembered him: he often came to buy paper and ink, and his handsome features were not easily forgotten.

"Oh, it's been a while! Mulberry-bark paper again? How many bundles?"

Zhou Jinian nodded in greeting. "I hope you've been well, Shopkeeper Zhang. There's no hurry. My main reason for coming today was to ask whether you had any book-copying work."

"I do." Shopkeeper Zhang hesitated. "But you'll be taking the prefectural qualifying examination next spring. I'm afraid it might interfere with your studies."

"That won't be a problem. I'm confident I can manage." Zhou Jinian looked calm and assured.

"All right, then. The usual rules: you buy your own paper, and I provide the brush and ink. Write a few characters for me to see."

"I'll take one bundle of mulberry-bark paper first."

Paper was expensive. Scholars often overestimated their abilities and came looking for copying work, only for their handwriting to prove insufficiently neat, wasting the bookshop's paper. Those losses added up to a considerable sum over a month, so the shop had made a rule that copyists had to supply their own paper.

Mulberry-bark paper was the kind most commonly used by ordinary people. It was thick and coarse, but it was the cheapest.

Zhou Jinian followed Shopkeeper Zhang into the back room. Shopkeeper Zhang took out one of the most popular storybooks of the moment, opened it, and selected a page for Zhou Jinian to copy.

"Copy this page. Come out and call me when you're done." With that, Shopkeeper Zhang went back to the front of the shop.

Zhou Jinian ground the ink himself and flexed his wrist before settling down to copy. He did not, after all, have the wrist strength he had developed in his previous life. He slowed down, writing stroke by stroke and keeping his pressure as steady as possible.

Once he finished, Zhou Jinian lifted the sheet to let the ink dry before taking it to the front of the shop and handing it to Shopkeeper Zhang.

"Oh!" Shopkeeper Zhang exclaimed. The characters on the page were square and well-formed, their hooks and strokes strong as iron. The overall effect was stately and imposing; on closer inspection, a proud, unyielding spirit could be seen between the lines.

"Excellent calligraphy!" Shopkeeper Zhang's face was full of satisfaction. "It would be a waste to use handwriting like this to copy storybooks. I have the Complete Poetry of Qing here, seven volumes in all. Five hundred wen per volume. What do you think?"

"How much is the deposit?" That was all Zhou Jinian cared about.

Shopkeeper Zhang rubbed his chin. The Complete Poetry of Qing was a must-buy for wealthy scholars, and it was only sold, never rented. It collected works by famous poets from across Great Qing, and the seven-volume set sold for fourteen taels of silver.

"How about this? If you don't mind the walking, take one volume at a time, with a deposit of two taels. I'll supply the paper. Use white mulberry paper. How does that sound?"

Copyists normally bought their own paper, and the bookshop inspected their work afterward. If any sheets failed to meet its standards, those sheets were discarded at the copyist's expense, and they had to buy more paper and recopy the missing pages.

Though copying books could earn money, it required considerable skill and was troublesome work that strained the eyes and wore out the hands. Scholars intent on earning scholarly honors would not take on such grueling work for money.