Transmigrated as A Farm Girl Making Her Family Rich

Chapter 74: Chapter 73 Immortal Delivering Rice

“Bang, bang, bang,” as usual, Mrs. Lai was outside, knocking on the door to wake her son and granddaughters for work.

Ye Shiqi, hearing her father and three elder sisters getting up beside her, felt relieved that they had narrowly avoided revealing their secret due to lack of time.

Awakened by the knocking, Hongji opened his bleary eyes to see the pitch-black room. Accustomed to his mother’s routine, he sensed there was something more on the table in addition to the oil lamp. When he lit the lamp, he found five wooden pieces carved with the Bodhisattva’s image and two pieces resembling little black and white pandas.

The wooden animal toys he had placed on the table yesterday, already carved, had vanished without a trace.

Hongji didn’t think much of it and wrapped the wooden pieces in another garment, urging the children to wear more clothes in the morning to avoid catching a cold. Then he opened the door and stepped out to begin another day’s work.

Days passed, and together with his father, they fulfilled all the orders for wooden Bodhisattva statues from the villagers.

While Hongji’s father helped him work, he couldn’t make the dowry for his second daughter and had to entrust the task to another craftsman.

With villagers buying Bodhisattva statues and word spreading, people from surrounding villages also came to their house to buy wooden Bodhisattvas.

The father and son continued their business, daily finding their carved statues insufficient to meet the demand, yet Hongji’s desire to sell abroad remained unfulfilled.

But he harbored no greedier thoughts than that. Working like an ox from dawn till dusk, the money from selling the wooden Bodhisattvas didn’t go into his pocket. There was only one comforting thought—he could still make two different animal toys each day.

Every evening, he would place two wooden toys on the table; then, the next day, it was back to work.

Ye Shuzhi and Ye Shuzhen felt it odd that their elder brother placed the finished toys in his room every day. They had sneaked into his room to investigate, wondering where he could be hiding them.

Surely a mouse hole couldn’t hide that many items? Neither had they seen their brother digging a hole under the bed for storage. So where were the things being hidden?

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The two sisters paid close attention every night to whether their elder brother would leave his room again or hide the items somewhere outside the house.

After sharing this curious phenomenon with their mother, Mrs. Lai quietly took note, not daring to tell her daughters that their rice jar often mysteriously filled up.

The family had only harvested and husked new rice once after the farming season, and by counting the days, it should have been consumed long ago. Yet, the kitchen rice jar still had plenty. Whenever the rice jar lessened, it would secretly refill, resembling the legendary cornucopia.

Mrs. Lai even suspected her rice jar was the mythical cornucopia and secretly wrapped one tael of silver in a cloth and placed it in the jar. The next day, the silver remained the same, but there was more rice.

Thinking the cloth might be preventing the silver from multiplying, she quietly placed some Copper Coins in the jar at night, only to discover more rice but the same amount of Copper Coins the next day.

Mrs. Lai began to believe that the rice was a gift from an immortal, and the jar was a magical source of unending rice.

Thinking that they might never have to farm or buy rice again, they were generous enough to cook dry rice every day, confident that the jar would continue to replenish.

Eating the dry rice, the family felt it tasted better than the rice grown in their own fields, attributing this to the freshness of new rice.

At night, Ye Shiqi would enter “space” to exchange the wooden statues. During the day, she would harvest the crops in the “space” using her mind. For now, she only had rice seed.

She couldn’t be bothered to find other seeds, thinking that as long as the family could fill their stomachs with dry rice, it didn’t matter if they had no meat to eat; pickles would taste delicious with the rice grown in “space.”

In this process of growth, Ye Shiqi was not only sitting stably but had started to stand, supporting herself on objects and even taking a few steps while holding on.

Hongji and his daughters noticed their youngest sister’s gradual growth. At only four or five months old, she was already standing and learning how to walk, bringing her father immense happiness.

“Wuwa, your mother will be so happy to see that you can walk now, hehe.”

Hongji didn’t know if his daughter could understand or not, but always felt she could; he wasn’t just talking to himself.

“Hehe, Qing is so clever.” Siwa laughed happily, of all the sisters, she was the one who had never left Qing’s side for even a moment and felt the strongest sisterly bond with her.

The responsibility of taking care of her younger sister every day, witnessing her growth, gave her a sense of achievement and joy that matched their father’s.

“Siwa, you’d better work hard, Qing can walk now, and in the future, she will be taller, smarter, and even more capable than you,” Daya joked.

Er Ya and Sanya also laughed along.

Ye Shiqi smiled foolishly as they talked, ever since she could crawl and realized how far her intentions could reach, she had replaced the boiled cool water her elder sisters wanted to drink with spiritual spring water from her space.

Every day she heard her sisters and father exclaim how sweet and fresh the water at home tasted when drinking it.

Hongji, who drew water from the well every day, merely thought the quality of the well water had improved; he never visited other people’s homes to drink water and wasn’t aware that what he drank wasn’t the well water at all.

He only noticed that over the past month, in addition to his youngest daughter, whose complexion was always rosy and plump, the faces of his three older daughters who worked outside and his fourth daughter had begun to whiten, soften, and their yellowish hair turned darker.

He simply attributed these changes to the saying ‘a girl changes eighteen times between childhood and womanhood,’ believing his daughters were growing more beautiful as they grew up.

Ye Shiqi counted the days and realized that today was the day her mother was supposed to return for a visit.

Perhaps it was on their father and sisters’ minds as well, as from the time they got up in the morning until after a satisfying breakfast, the smiles on their faces never faded.

Third Aunt Ye Shuzhen wondered why they were all so happy and murmured puzzledly, “What’s gotten into everyone today? It’s like they’ve found some treasure.”

Mrs. Lai heard her daughter and said with a mysterious smile, “If they are happy, I’m happy too.”

“Mom, look at big brother, his mouth is grinning like a dog’s head that’s been scorched, he can’t even close it. What’s that about?”

Ye Shuzhen pointed out her big brother with even more bafflement.

“Of course, he’s happy. Mrs. Li is coming back for a visit today,” Mrs. Lai tapped her daughter’s head with her finger.

“Oh, no wonder you said they’re happy and so are you. It’s because you’re going to get money today,” Ye Shuzhen said enviously as she glanced at Mrs. Lai, the housekeeper, who had money pouring in every day.

In hopes of getting some money herself, she had once playfully asked her mother for some to buy rouge, but Mrs. Lai was stingy and said that there was no need to buy rouge and powder to look pretty if she wasn’t going out. For whom was she dressing up?

Ye Shuzhen, of course, was not satisfied, saying she was growing up and certainly needed to dress up. The family was making so much money; she wanted to buy clothes as well.

Mrs. Lai, though not very willing, generously bought fabric for her two daughters so they could make their own clothes.

Ye Shu and Ye Shuzhen spent several days learning carving, but not only were they unable to outperform the youngest child at home, but all the other children were also learning better than her. Eventually, she ran out of patience, gave up learning carving, and went back to her room to sew.