Chapter 319: Heavy Snow

Not long after the Ghost Festival came the Mid-Autumn Festival. During the last Mid-Autumn Festival, Xu Jia held a ritual to awaken Chang Yu, that Mountain God of Three Pure Ones Mountain.

This time, a harvest celebration was also held. The last ritual on the fifteenth day of the seventh month was to offer sacrifices to ancestors and hungry ghosts, while this fifteenth day of the eighth month was to celebrate the living; it was both a harvest and a reunion.

To offer congratulations is not inappropriate.

What are we congratulating?

Congratulating you on still being alive, having grain to eat, and having clothes to wear.

The autumn sky was high and the air crisp, the moon bright and the atmosphere clear. Everyone sang and danced, using melons and fruits to offer sacrifices to the moon, enjoying the moonlight and eating together. Shunji sent one hundred thousand fat crabs from Poyang Lake, their roe thick and their meat sweet, to provide for this banquet.

Everyone cheered and jumped for joy, especially those who had come as refugees. They had experienced war, plague, and famine, and even death, yet here they were, jumping for joy.

Although people still died here from time to time—some who could not swim drowned while catching fish and shrimp, some died of heatstroke, and some died of difficult and strange illnesses that even the White Family Immortals could not cure.

But no one froze to death, and no one starved to death.

From here on, there must be no more starving or freezing to death.

In Luzon, crops can be rotated three times, and the second crop is already planted. At the same time, Xu Jia has started the second round of migration. Before winter arrives, a group of people must be sent there. The grain from there need not be sent back for now; wait until they have planted the third round, expanded the land, and occupied the entire Luzon Island, and once the grain can fully support the local population, then send it over.

However, the route for purchasing cheap foreign grain in places like Siam and Annam continues to operate. Coupled with the continuous sacrifices from America, if Xu Jia only wanted to seek peace in one corner, this grain would be more than enough. Shunji blesses the Poyang area with favorable weather, and Ao Jin and Yuan Jiangjun bless the Xinzhou area with favorable weather; this is completely sufficient.

But the times are difficult, and the refugees who were previously persuaded to head south have arrived one after another.

They arrived in the Jiangnan West Circuit and were distributed one by one. Once their bodies were strengthened and their illnesses cured, those with families were all sent to migrate overseas. Those without family were stuffed into various production teams to reclaim wasteland, striving to have five mu of land allocated to them within two years, along with marrying a wife, before migrating the whole family overseas with triple the benefits.

Luzon is a treasure land; with three harvests a year, even without chemical fertilizers, through simple intensive cultivation, it could support tens of millions of people once the population and land are saturated. Using this as a foundation, one can develop ports, trade, and industry, following the path of the early British Empire.

But no matter how much of a treasure land Luzon is, it is still a small place. It can solve an immediate crisis, but it cannot replace the Central Plains, a place of abundant natural resources, and can only serve as an accessory.

………

Time flew by, and another month passed. Before the tenth month, in the ninth month, winter had already begun to set in over Jiangnan, and it was even earlier in the north, where snow was everywhere. Fortunately, the second round did not involve planting grain, otherwise, it would surely have frozen to death. This time they planted beans, and while the snow had not yet grown thick, the farmers went to harvest them.

Bean stalks can be used for firewood, and beans can be ground into soy milk or made into tofu. In the canteen, there is fresh ground soy milk every morning, piping hot, served with thin crispy pancakes, fresh steamed buns, and sometimes a boiled egg, to give them energy.

"The snow came earlier this year," Xu Jia said, sitting cross-legged on Three Pure Ones Mountain, which appeared as if it were spring all year round.

Three Pure Ones Mountain became a Daochang. Chang Yu did not like hibernating, so he stimulated the geothermal heat, causing springs to gush forth. Although it was not quite spring all year round, it was no longer covered in snow and cold. With the warm springs, Jin Chan accelerated the construction progress, hiring a large group of skilled craftsmen. They were all experts at repairing temples and monasteries, but this was their first time building such a grand Daoist palace.

But this did not trouble them; on the contrary, they were excited. This was a craft that had not been passed down for generations, and the things and experience they could learn and pass on to their children and grandchildren would be a survival skill for generations to come.

Even in winter, they were rushing the progress; when tired, they would go soak in the hot springs, and when hungry, there were hot drinks and food.

The archways, caisson ceilings, pillars, railings, stone steps, or the covered corridors, water pavilions, secluded gazebos, cloud halls, immortal pavilions, towers, and altars... construction was underway everywhere. Thousands of people were sent to repair the road up the mountain; since there was no farm work in winter, they might as well do some odd jobs, and Jin Chan was not short of money.

The sooner the Daochang was built, the sooner he would receive this merit.

Spring had much rain, summer was busy with farming, and the autumn harvest was even busier. In the end, only in winter, as the year drew to a close, could one rest. As the ancients said, sow in spring, harvest in summer, store in autumn, and hide in winter.

This was originally a good time to stay at home, but winter became a good time for Xu Jia to promote education and universal literacy.

Every villager received a small notebook to learn characters. Each brigade leader would first undergo a seven-day crash course; those who could recognize three hundred characters were considered qualified, and those who recognized five hundred would be awarded actual prizes, and then the brigade leaders would be sent to preach literacy.

Xu Jia's requirements were not high: those over fifty could freely choose whether to learn or not. For those under fifty, recognizing three hundred common characters and knowing addition and subtraction within one hundred, as well as the multiplication table, was the bare minimum. Upon completion, they would receive a Literacy Certificate.

As for school-age children, Xu Jia was currently targeting those under sixteen, because in this era, most people prepared to marry at sixteen, and some even started at fourteen.

School attendance was mandatory, but the teaching staff was severely insufficient. Xu Jia could only let some scholars and old students teach them to recognize characters and read some articles, but more often, there were people teaching them labor: how to weave a bamboo basket? How to forge a kitchen knife? Or how to reel silk from cocoons.

These labor classes were classes that taught skills, and the common people were happy to send their children to learn, even willing to send girls to study and learn skills. If they only studied books, it would be very difficult to change the fate of most people.

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

This is exactly what Xu Jia was doing. It was hard to find math teachers here, but one could find accountants; it was hard to find painting teachers, but one could find female dyers; it was hard to find physics teachers, but one could find craftsmen who built houses and could tell them about structural load-bearing... In the hundred trades and crafts here, perhaps some would hide a unique secret skill, but common techniques were still exchanged and improved. Or rather, the civilization brought by the American sacrifices Xu Jia received had surpassed most of their unique secret skills.

The power of enlightenment was slowly growing in this process.

Knowledge changes destiny; it is not just talk. Smart students had already been discovered and recommended to the Daoist temple to study Daoism. Their destinies were destined to be vastly different from the past; they would study alchemy and chemistry, artifact refining and physics, Daoist scriptures and philosophy, Daoist medicine and biology...

"This is the flintlock from your blueprints. We have conquered the seamless steel pipe technology, and the rest is not difficult."

A Daoist sent the weapon to Xu Jia. It was a Magic Tool with gold and silver inlay patterns, suffused with magical light and imbued with the righteous energy of the Heavenly Dipper.

(End of chapter)