Chapter 641: Imperial Examination Family-Building System (50)

Song Zhisheng's family was going to Jingcheng to enjoy a life of ease, so for the past few days, their home had been bustling with visitors; some people they didn't even know brought gifts to see them off.

As for the gifts from the villagers—dried vegetables and meat sauce, which were not particularly expensive—Song Zhisheng and his wife did not decline them, as it was, after all, the kind intention of the fellow villagers. Besides, they had prepared return gifts; they took the high-yield grain harvested from those ten mu of Paddy Field, kept enough for seeds, shared a portion to give back to the village, and packed the rest in waterproof tarpaulins, loaded them into baskets, and took them to Jingcheng.

Regarding the expensive gifts from unfamiliar faces, the couple held a consistent stance: they would not accept them from anyone, only saying they appreciated the thought.

Just kidding! These people were neither their relatives nor familiar friends, and they didn't even know the backgrounds of these people. If they rashly accepted valuable gifts, and later these people did bad things under their son's name, wouldn't it be their son's reputation that suffered?

Although the couple had only ever traveled as far as Qingfeng City and their foresight was not as far-reaching as the village head or the village chief, they still understood these principles: who would give benefits to unrelated people for no reason? If there were such people, they were seeking even greater benefits.

If Xie Yang heard her parents-in-law's inner thoughts, she would definitely give them a thumbs up. Having parents-in-law who were clear-headed was a blessing for them as the younger generation.

However, she was busy right now.

Song Yanqing had placed first in both the Metropolitan Examination and the Palace Examination, was personally appointed as the top scholar by the Emperor, and entered the Hanlin Academy directly, receiving a wave of flowing rewards, including books, robes, boots, and fabrics.

Among them, what satisfied Xie Yang the most was the ice, indispensable for cooling off in summer, and a tray of silver.

There were twelve ingots of Silver Ingot, each weighing twenty taels.

With these two hundred and forty taels of reward silver, plus the first salary received after joining the Hanlin Academy, and the savings on hand, Xie Yang immediately went to Jingjiao to scout for a Farm.

It had originally been a dowry given by a young lady of an official's family to her maid who was getting married, but unfortunately, the maid married the wrong person, and her husband was a gambler.

The young lady helped her several times, but later, seeing that not long after she paid off his debts, he owed another mountain of debt, she advised the maid to divorce him and even offered to pick a better husband for her. Who would have expected the maid to cry and say she was the husband's family's person in life and their ghost in death; the young lady was truly helpless and stopped caring about her from then on.

The maid had no choice but to rely on selling her dowry to make a living. This Farm was the last piece of dowry she had on hand.

Xie Yang heard this story from the Main System, which loved to gossip, and her mouth twitched.

In the myriad worlds, there really were all kinds of people. She could have originally lived a life without worry about food or clothing with this dowry, but she stubbornly turned it into a disastrous ending herself.

But this had nothing to do with her; she bought this twenty-mu Farm, which had been desolate for quite some time and had its price pressed down to five hundred taels, from a middleman.

It was precisely because the maid had taken all the income from the Farm to pay off her husband's gambling debts that she couldn't even pay the monthly wages of the servants. Before winter last year, the servants on the Farm finally rebelled, and the maid had no choice but to take out their indentures and dismiss them.

In other words, from that time on, this Farm had been left unattended.

The grain harvested in autumn and put into storage had been hauled away by the maid and sold to pay off debts.

The winter vegetables in the fields had been pulled up and stolen by the dismissed servants out of spite. The usable farm tools and household items had also been stolen until nothing was left.

Before Xie Yang took over, several groups of people had actually come to look at the Farm. After all, the price was two or three hundred taels cheaper than other farms in the same area and of the same type, so many people were tempted.

But upon seeing how desolate the Farm was—not even a gatekeeper, the fields overgrown with weeds taller than one's knees, the pond covered in duckweed, and the houses filthy and dilapidated—even if they hired people to clean it up, it would truly take a lot of effort. If they missed the summer planting, it would be equivalent to losing half a year's harvest, and it didn't seem like they were getting much of a bargain, so they all backed out.

But Xie Yang wasn't afraid; she had a Mining Robot. At worst, she could send out the robot at night and have it treat the weed-choked fields like a mine and dig through them once. How much labor could that save?

The most important thing was that this Farm was very close to the valley she had her eye on. Behind the Farm was a low hill, only thirty or fifty meters above sea level, and over the hill was a relatively flat valley.

When she had money in the future, she would buy the back hill along with the valley. By then, she would plant fruit trees on the hillside and wine grapes in the valley; the prospects were bright!

Thus, on the night she bought the Farm, Xie Yang released the Mining Robot, dug through the weed-covered fields three feet deep overnight, and even expanded the pond.

This Farm covered a total area of twenty mu, consisting of six mu of Paddy Field, ten mu of dry land, one mu of pond, and three mu of residential land.

The three mu of residential land had two rows of houses, front and back. The front row was tall and spacious, with storehouses at both ends and several rooms in the middle for the owner of the Farm to stay in when they visited; the back row was shorter, but there were quite a few rooms, enough for the people working on the Farm to live in.

The pond existed mainly for irrigating the fields and was not specifically used for raising Fish, Shrimp, or Crab. The drinking water for the residential area mainly came from the spring water on the rock wall. Since that was the case, Xie Yang planned to expand the pond, firstly for irrigation and secondly for aquaculture.

She expanded the one-mu pond into two mu.

The excavated soil was used for composting, which would be spread evenly over the dry fields later; its nutritional content would be no worse than farm manure.

Into the expanded pond, she poured the Water Quality Purification Liquid redeemed with points. In just one night, the pond, which had been foul-smelling and had poor water quality due to a large amount of duckweed, was already clear to the bottom.

Xie Yang dripped a drop of Spirit Spring into it, then lured some Fish, Shrimp, and Crab from a nearby river and stocked them in the pond.

She spent another night having the Mining Robot dig a water storage pool of about one hundred ping between the houses and the back hill, and built a small pier by the pool to make it convenient to squat down and fetch water.

She opened an outlet on the side of the pool closer to the back hill where the terrain was slightly higher, then dug a ditch following the slope of the hill, and placed a large water vat close to the rock wall. The spring water flowing down the rock wall filled the vat, and the overflowing water flowed into the pool along the ditch. The water in the vat was used for daily drinking, and the water in the pool was used for washing.

She then opened another outlet in a lower-lying area and built a drainage ditch; when the water exceeded a certain level, the water in the pool would flow along the drainage ditch toward the Paddy Field.

In this way, the water in the pool was no longer stagnant.

After digging the domestic water pool, Xie Yang had the Mining Robot dig a Septic Tank behind the chicken and duck coops.

This Farm was relatively small in scale and belonged to the category of a small farm, so the chicken and duck coops were not built very large. However, Xie Yang had no intention of expanding the breeding for the time being; raising thirty or fifty of them according to the size of the coops was enough for her own family to eat.

When she built the vineyard in the valley in the future, she could raise another flock under the grapevines.

After the labor-intensive work of plowing the land and digging the pond was handled by the Mining Robot, Xie Yang entrusted an agency to hire a few old hands at farming.

In the Jingcheng area, there were often refugees fleeing from the northwest; if she gave them a bite to eat and provided a room for them to live in, they would ask for very low wages.

But Xie Yang stated from the beginning: "The wages will be what they should be; I will not shortchange you. When you have saved enough money and want to leave, I will not force you to stay."

Therefore, many people were willing to come and work for her.