Business is business

Yin Yunze had long known that the day would come when the villagers asked him for grain.

After all, ancient farmers were terribly ill-equipped to withstand hardship.

Unlike modern farmers, ancient farmers worked hard all year, only to have barely enough grain left to scrape by after paying their taxes.

In fact, most of the time, their remaining grain was barely enough to keep them fed. To live even a little better, farmers had to take odd jobs and do handicrafts alongside their farmwork just to keep themselves fed and clothed for the year.

Under those circumstances, it did not even take a natural disaster. If the main breadwinner in a family fell ill, that alone could bring the whole household crashing down.

Take the drought that had struck Clear Creek Village. On the surface, it seemed to have no direct connection to their grain reserves.

But in reality, the drought meant farmers would not have enough water to irrigate their seedlings during spring planting.

And there was only a narrow window for spring planting. If there was no water, they had to buy it to get their crops in the ground.

Otherwise, even if they had enough stored grain to last through this year, what would they eat next year?

The vast majority of farmers could barely make their stored grain last until the next harvest.

And where would farmers with no savings get the money to buy water? Naturally, they sold their stored grain.

After all, people were gamblers at heart. They kept hoping that if they could just hold on, it might rain in a couple of days.

And once their crops began to sprout, the farmers were even less likely to give up.

Then came a vicious cycle.

That was why, in ancient times, the slightest natural or man-made disaster could reduce farmers to selling their sons and daughters.

They truly could not withstand the wind and rain.

"Of course I have grain." With a major agricultural country at his back, Yin Yunze had every confidence in saying so.

But although Yin Yunze did want to help, as the saying went, the Dharma was not lightly passed on, nor was the Dao sold cheaply.

If Yin Yunze obediently handed over grain the moment someone asked for it, he would win neither respect nor faith.

Sometimes, to make sure both sides were satisfied, you had to make things a little difficult for the other party.

It was not that you did not want to help, but that you wanted the other party to take the matter seriously.

If you acted as though you did not care, how could you expect the other party to care?

Yin Yunze had no wish to be treated like a sucker people could take whatever they wanted from, so he asked calmly, "But why should I give it to you?"

"This..." The woman was struck speechless by Yin Yunze's question. After thinking for a moment, she asked apprehensively, "Lord Fox Immortal, did I do something wrong?"

"Sincerity!" Having spent so much time dealing with people in this ancient village, Yin Yunze knew he needed to spell it out for them. "If you want me to bestow grain upon you, you must show me your sincerity!"

Even though Yin Yunze had put it plainly enough, the woman still asked timidly, "Lord Fox Immortal, what is sincerity? Should I buy some incense and candles to worship you? Don't worry, as long as you bestow grain, I'll definitely..."

"Who the heck wants incense and candles?!"

The woman's idea was not a bad one, but incense and candles were essentially just a means of carrying faith and worship. The ritual of burning them strengthened a believer's faith in the immortals.

But Yin Yunze had no shortage of ways to strengthen his believers' faith. In his eyes, incense and candles were no different from lumps of yellow clay, except that they could burn for a while.

"Gold. I want gold." With that, Yin Yunze simply named his price. "One tael of gold can be exchanged with me for twelve shi of polished rice or refined flour. It can also be exchanged for fruit, vegetables, fish, and meat."

Through Sun Qin, Yin Yunze had gained a rough understanding of some of this world's weights and measures.

In this world, one shi was roughly equivalent to eighty jin in the real world.

That meant one tael of gold could be exchanged for a thousand jin of rice or flour from Yin Yunze.

Some might think that, going by prices in the real world, a tael of gold was fifty grams and, at current gold prices, was worth more than ten thousand jin of grain. Here, Yin Yunze had cut that by a factor of ten. Wasn't he an outright unscrupulous profiteer?

Even by the purchasing power of gold in ancient times, one tael of gold was worth ten taels of silver, or ten thousand copper coins. Going by the average grain price of roughly three or four copper coins per jin in peaceful ancient times, Yin Yunze should have provided at least three thousand jin.

But first of all, as Yin Yunze had said before, one tael of gold could only be exchanged for seven taels of silver in this world, or seven thousand copper coins.

Second, the price of three or four copper coins per jin existed because ancient farmers generally had stored grain and did not need to buy it to survive.

And now this area had been in drought for more than half a year. Who could still have grain to spare?

Forget three or four coins. Even thirteen or fourteen coins could no longer buy a jin of grain.

According to Sun Qin, she had already heard that the price of rice in the county town had risen to twenty copper coins per jin.

And people had better not complain about the price. If they thought it was too expensive, plenty of others would buy it.

Everyone knew that once the price of rice started rising in a disaster year, it would only get more expensive by the day.

Unless it rained or the imperial court distributed disaster relief grain, once rice prices went up, they would not come back down.

The former depended entirely on Heaven's will, and the latter...

When it came to something that could affect their careers, local officials would not report it until the drought had lasted a year or so and public resentment was boiling over.

Even if an official was a good person, unafraid of such a stain on his record, there were still other considerations.

For one thing, like the common people, he might hope for the best. What if it rained in a couple of days?

For another, what if he did report it, only for it to rain the next day?

He would have reported a severe drought, and then the court would send someone down to find favorable weather and nothing wrong.

If that really happened, the consequences could range from serious to extremely serious.

He would count himself heaven-defyingly lucky to lose his post and return home in one piece.

Thus, for all sorts of reasons, natural disasters were often dragged out into man-made calamities by human nature.

In other words, the actual purchasing power of one tael of gold was now only a little over four hundred jin of rice, and that did not even account for the increases over the past few days.

Not to mention that what Yin Yunze offered was polished rice hulled using modern methods.

Just as in modern times, ordinary rice could cost a little over two yuan per jin, while branded rice cost seven or eight yuan per jin.

In this world, polished rice like this also cost nearly twice as much as the brown rice eaten by ordinary people.

Even if he sold it to a rice shop, Yin Yunze estimated he could get thirty copper coins per jin.

Anyone with a bit of business sense could haul that thousand jin of polished rice into town with a little effort and exchange it for four or five taels of gold.

Honestly, if he had not lacked the people and connections for the time being, Yin Yunze would have wanted to make that money himself!

Most importantly, Yin Yunze knew very well that although he wore the skin of a fox immortal, he was ultimately doing business, not charity.

Yin Yunze could make a less ruthless profit, but he absolutely did not want to rely on small margins and high volume.

If he could transfer resources between two worlds, only to work himself to the bone and earn about as much as a wage worker, what the hell was he doing all that work for?

In fact, compared with the time-consuming, labor-intensive business of selling grain for little profit, Yin Yunze would rather buy some silver in the real world and exchange it directly for gold in this world.

Silver cost only a little over seven yuan in the real world, while gold cost six hundred. That ninetyfold difference in price was only sevenfold in this world.

Even if the gold in the ancient world was not pure enough, after removing the impurities, the return would still be more than tenfold at the very least.

Rather than spend time and effort selling grain to these poor, suffering farmers, he might as well exchange silver directly for gold.

It was convenient and quick, and it would not have much of an impact.

Aside from the gold shops, perhaps no one else would even notice that someone had bought out their stock.

But the same value in grain might amount to well over a hundred thousand jin. Given ancient transportation conditions, moving it alone would be enough to give an ordinary person a headache.

The only problem with exchanging silver for gold was that Yin Yunze's influence was limited to Clear Creek Village.

Outside the village, Yin Yunze could not sense anyone, not even his believers.

And of the only two people he could place some trust in, one was a little girl, and the other was a vulnerable woman.

Never mind whether Yin Yunze trusted them not to run off with the money. The risk of having them carry a large sum of silver to do this was itself far too great.

And if he assigned an adult man from the village, Yin Yunze thought there was a good chance the man would simply pocket the silver and never come back.

Whenever he thought of this, Yin Yunze could not help lamenting that, if he were not trapped here, he would not have to live such a miserable life!