Chapter 160 - 123 Welcoming the Bride! Firetreading White Cloud (Seeking Recommendations and Monthly Tickets)_i
It’s been ten months since the Houses of Liu and Zhao were extinguished and completely removed from the stage.
During these ten months, the Wang family celebrated many joyous events. The Spiritual Platform banquet for the sixth grandfather, Wang Xiaohan, was held very grandly. Subsequently, the wedding of his older sister, Wang Luoyi, and Chen Fangjie took place.
In just a few days, it will be his own, Wang Shouzhe’s, wedding day.
The Wang family is truly thriving, with continuous joyful affairs.
It’s also the upcoming autumn harvest season.
In Fenggu Farm.
In the thousands of acres of fertile land, the mid-late stage rice plants, filled with grains, sway like ocean waves in the wind; it’s a spectacular sight.
Tenant farmers are busy in the fields, carefully tending to the rice plants, fertilising when necessary, and identifying the barnyard grass that has slipped through the net among the rice plants.
Barnyard grass looks very much like rice plants, and could be considered the ancestor of rice. Our ancestors selectively cultivated the barnyard grass generation after generation to produce the rice we have today. Barnyard grass grows wild and is hard to eradicate, competing with rice for precious nutrients.
If not properly managed, it will certainly affect the grain filling of the rice.
Although the work of the tenant farmers is laborious, this year they all display a look of joy and satisfaction amid their arduous tasks.
That’s because this year, the main family brought in a new variety of rice. They are planning to plant this new variety in half of the land of Fenggu Farm.
Initially, the tenant farmers were grumbling in private, fearing that the new rice variety would not adapt to the local soil and climate, and if the harvest is poor, it would affect their share of the yield.
However, the main family kindly promised that for tenant farmers who plant the new rice variety, they would distribute the minimum annual average income. If there is a bumper harvest, they could get an additional distribution.
Thus, after planting for a season.
The closer it gets to the grain filling stage, the more the tenant farmers see the advantages of the new rice variety. Not only are the plants tall and not easily lodged, but the grains are also bigger and more numerous than the common variety.
Many of the tenant farmers are old peasants, and they know that if things go as they are, this year’s yield per acre may increase by a catty of rice, and the quality is very likely to be better.
Currently, the price of new rice is already slightly higher. Even if calculated at the original price, every twenty acres will yield an extra Qian Gold in profit! This income is pure additional revenue, excluding taxes, fertilisers, bulls for ploughing, labour, and so on.
When this is divided among each tenant farmer, it amounts to thirty copper coins per head!! If there are also improved varieties of wheat, wouldn’t there be an extra sixty copper coins in a year?
How could the tenant farmers not be happy about this?
This additional income can be saved entirely, for future dowry for their children, or to send their kids to learn a craft. With a crafted skill, not only will they no longer need to labour in farming, but their income will be higher, and even finding a bride will be much easier.
Many tenant farmers have begun to imagine that in the future, they would be able to save up Qian Gold more quickly to buy enough farmland to make their descendants self-sustaining farmers.
With this in mind, their enthusiasm for work has increased.
At the same time.
Standing at the head of the fields, the spirited fourth grandfather, Wang Xiaozhi, excitedly says, “Shouzhe, the Wang’s N0.9 rice variety that you researched is indeed a high-quality variety. If all our farms were to plant the Wang’s N0.9, we would earn a lot more this year.”
Now the Wang family has abundant food, so those senior members who used to be frugal, like Wang Xiaozhi, have been ordered to supplement their diets with spirit food and even use the Little Pei Yuan Dan to cultivate more diligently.
As a result, Wang Xiaozhi looks good this year and even seems to have gained a few more years of youthfulness. Even if there’s no hope of reaching the Spiritual Platform in this life, at least he can live healthily for much longer.
Wang Shouzhe doesn’t want these elders, who have strived hard for the family for a lifetime, cultivating generations of children, to be unable to walk their own path past eighty, leading a desolate old age.
“Fourth Grandpa, let’s plant it on another piece of land next year to see if there are any problems. If nothing goes wrong, we would convert to Wang’s N0.9 on all our farms,” Wang Shouzhe, who was quite satisfied with the Wang’s No.9 that he painstakingly developed, responded.
The reason he was able to research a variety of rice was due to his mystical and elusive bloodline abilities. When he discovered that he could make dead wood come into spring and flower in an instant, he had already thought of cultivating spiritual medicines and grains.
Unfortunately, after some research, he realised he was oversimplifying things.
Reviving dead wood and making it flower instantaneously can only be applied to ordinary plants.
Moreover, they can’t be catalysed in an extremely short amount of time out of nowhere, because without the replenishment of nutrients and rapid catalysis, their potential for life will be exhausted and they will wither quickly.
For spiritual grains and plants like them, of course, there’s not a complete lack of catalytic effects.
However, for catalysing a single sprig of White Jade Spiritual Rice, if catalysed hastily in an extremely short time, the rice husk in the end would be empty.
If cultivated normally and nutritionally enhanced, it would take Wang Shouzhe more than ten days to mature it and end with a sprig of White Jade Spiritual Rice.
And that’s just one plant; the cost-effectiveness is extremely low.
As for the catalysis of spiritual medicines like ginseng, that’s even more unspeakable. More than ten days of painstaking catalysis could only increase the year count of the ginseng by a year at most. The effect of the catalysis is but a chicken rib.
However, Wang Shouzhe speculated that it was because his mysterious bloodline level was too low and too thin. Perhaps one day when the mysterious bloodline awakens to its peak, he might be able to catalyse a hundred-year-old ginseng in a flash.
But the current situation is that stimulating spiritual seeds is really too tiring and not cost-effective.
After repeated considerations, rather than stimulating spiritual seeds, it would be better to improve the common rice and wheat seeds first. Therefore, he built a lab and started small-scale catalysis of rice seeds.
His bloodline ability has a great advantage over ordinary plants.