A Heavenly Delicacy for Eighty-Two Fen

"Recharge!"

Liang Xin didn't hesitate.

And so the twenty-five yuan, plus the one yuan He Ting had given him, vanished.

Only a few coins remained in his hand.

"That was over twenty-six yuan. What, you look down on loose change?"

After grumbling, Liang Xin hurriedly pulled up his pants and casually slipped the remaining coins into the pocket of his outer pants.

His underpants had a pocket, but he was never going to use it again!

Even if he risked losing money, he was never going to use it again!

Wouldn't it stink?!

Especially when he remembered that plenty of people in this era might use that trick all the time.

And as a purchasing agent, he handled money every day.

A sudden, inexplicable wave of nausea washed over him.

"I'll eat some more meat later to push this feeling down!"

"System, give me some nice, layered pork belly... forget it, give me some fatty pork instead."

"Strange. Why don't I feel sick now that I'm thinking about fatty pork?"

One jin of fatty pork, without a scrap of lean meat.

Seventy fen per jin!

When it came to the meat in the system, if you wanted it fatty, you got fatty meat; if you wanted it lean, you got lean meat.

If you wanted pork belly with alternating layers, you got pork belly with alternating layers. Wholehearted service to the host was the name of the game.

And it never shortchanged him on weight, either.

Well, it wouldn't give him a gram extra, though.

First, he put a strip of fatty pork in the pot and boiled it through.

Then he took it out and set it aside to cool.

After that, he put half a jin of dried noodles into the water, which was covered in droplets of fat.

The dried noodles cost twenty-two fen per jin, while flour cost sixteen fen per jin. They made it into noodles for you, so wasn't it reasonable to charge a little processing fee?

The dried noodles of this era came wrapped in paper.

They were much like modern dried noodles, except there was no writing and no thin plastic wrapping.

To be precise, Liang Xin didn't know how to cook.

He'd eaten in cafeterias and ordered takeout for more than ten years. How would he know how to cook?

But people could be driven to do anything, and everything was ready to hand, so boiling it all until it was cooked was no problem.

He could even eat while it cooked, and that way he'd know whether it was done.

Fatty pork wasn't easy to eat while it was cooking, so he'd just boil it a while longer.

If only he had instant noodles. He had no trouble cooking those.

The problem was, there weren't any. The shop only had dried noodles.

After tasting them for the umpteenth time, he decided the noodles should be done.

They were just right, too: neither undercooked nor mushy.

It seemed he actually had quite a talent for this.

If he hadn't joined a big company, maybe he could have become an excellent chef.

He fished out the noodles, then cut the fatty pork, which had cooled a little, into pieces.

He dipped a piece of fatty pork into a bowl of soy sauce and mashed garlic, put it in his mouth, and chewed vigorously.

His mouth was instantly filled with the rich flavor of meat.

He picked up a mouthful of noodles and ate them along with it.

"Delicious! So delicious! This is definitely one of the three best meals I've eaten in my entire life!"

"It's so good!"

This body was desperately short of fat.

The fatty pork, without a scrap of lean meat, tasted like the finest delicacy in the world the moment it entered his mouth.

Once he started eating, he couldn't stop.

Then he ate the whole jin of meat and half a jin of noodles.

He was a little stuffed, but not too uncomfortable.

His ravenous body was rapidly absorbing the nutrients.

The meat cost seventy fen per jin, the half jin of dried noodles eleven fen, and he'd count the odds and ends like soy sauce and garlic as one fen.

The meal cost eighty-two fen, and it left Liang Xin feeling blissfully happy.

Looked at that way, one yuan a day seemed like it might be enough.

Looking at the small pot of broth covered in droplets of fat, Liang Xin smiled and poured it away.

"Hehe, there's more fat left floating in this than in Aunt He's stewed cabbage. If she saw it, she'd probably scold me for being wasteful."

"There's still twenty-five yuan and eighteen fen left in my balance."

"I get one yuan for signing in every day, thirty yuan a month. I have a job too. Even though an apprentice's wages are low, only eighteen yuan a month, that adds up to forty-eight."

"That's even more than Aunt He, a grade-one worker, makes!"

"Hmm, maybe a little less than her husband, Uncle Jiang. Was he a grade-three or grade-four worker again?"

"Wait, I just remembered. Didn't I earn experience today? Does that mean the system can level up too?"

"Once it levels up, I'll definitely get more for signing in, right?"

"The future looks promising!"

"At least I shouldn't go hungry!"

"Then that's enough!"

"In this life, I definitely won't work myself to the bone for that little bit of pay again, not to the point of dropping dead from overwork."

"As long as I have food and drink, I can just enjoy life!"

The working class here followed an eight-grade wage system.

Base wages differed from industry to industry.

Relatively speaking, the harder the work, the higher the base wage.

Take the supply and marketing cooperative where Liang Xin worked, for example. An apprentice earned eighteen yuan a month in the first year.

An apprenticeship generally lasted three years.

Eighteen in the first year, twenty in the second, and twenty-two in the third.

After that came the regular worker's wage of twenty-five yuan.

Only above that were the eight wage grades.

The lower the number, the lower the wage.

But even becoming a grade-one worker was very difficult.

You either made an outstanding contribution and received an exceptional promotion,

or put in many years, getting promoted after eight or ten years.

A grade-one worker at the supply and marketing cooperative earned thirty-three yuan.

Grade two earned thirty-eight yuan.

Grade three earned forty-four yuan.

There was no grade four. Work at the supply and marketing cooperative didn't require much technical skill, so grade three was as high as it went.

In other industries with higher grades, a grade-eight worker generally earned around a hundred yuan.

Grade-eight workers were rare, and really impressive!

A big factory with ten or twenty thousand workers might not have a single one.

Small county towns and the like basically didn't have any, either.

The eight-grade wage system applied only to workers.

The civil service system was much more complicated.

It had dozens of grades.

Generally, pay could exceed a hundred yuan at the section-chief level, which was the level of a county magistrate or deputy county magistrate.

National-level leaders, meanwhile, could earn as much as five or six hundred yuan.

But ordinary people could forget about that.