Chapter 22 Purchasing

Chapter 22 Purchasing

Chapter 22 Purchasing
Li Wuxiang turned to look at Xue Baoping and found her standing at the door, her chest rising and falling rapidly, as if she had just had a fight. After looking at Li Wuxiang, she let out a long sigh and a trembling smile appeared on her face, as if her face had been tense for too long because of the tension and excitement just now, but she didn't know what to say.

Li Wuxiang smiled at her and said, "Sorry."

Xue Baoping was stunned: "Ah?"

"I'm sorry to ask you to open the door and let you hear those words." He sighed, picked up the wooden shovel from the door of the wing room, and filled the bright red blood puddle on the ground with wet mud. "But this is the simplest and most effective way. It's impossible to reason with people who bully the weak and fear the strong. The way we just dealt with it is the most direct. But I can't let them think that I'm an unstable and dangerous person, otherwise they might go to the town owner to ask for help. So I have to let them provoke me first, like I did just now, and then they will know that I'm not easy to mess with, but before that, I'm harmless."

Xue Baoping took a few breaths before coming back to his senses: "Then...will they go find the town owner——"

"Can I just walk into the town owner's house?"

"It seems impossible. There are people guarding the door..."

"Then, did the three Wang family members kill anyone in your town?"

"No... no, what's wrong?"

"Then there's nothing to worry about. I beat up an idler with no relatives or friends. Who would sue me? Even if they did, your town master probably wouldn't bother to take care of it. The father and son of the Wang family are the villains that no one dares to mess with in your town. If they are afraid of people like that, there's no reason for them to continue messing with me."

Li Wuxiang washed the mud off the shovel in the puddle, looked up and smiled at her: "This is what it's like in troubled times. When you want to abide by the law, you'll always get into trouble. But if you want to be an outlaw, you'll find that everything goes smoothly. We won't be bad people, but we won't be unlucky good people either."

"My parents told me to be a good person..." Xue Baoping thought for a while, "But I feel more comfortable with you."

The first meal of the day for the two of them was millet porridge, but it wasn't watery at all. They cooked up the remaining half handful of millet. Xue Baoping ate the rice, and Li Wuxiang drank the soup. Xue Baoping sat at the door and ate two mouthfuls before looking at him awkwardly: "Actually, I could really eat less."

Li Wuxiang shook his head: "Actually, I really don't want to eat rice. You know I'm not a human—"

Xue Baoping quickly held the bowl and looked around guiltily.

"——That's why I like to eat meat more. I tried dried meat these days, but it was very uncomfortable to eat. It was just like rice and I couldn't digest it very well. Today I felt a little better. So we have to get more meat."

"Well, we still have silver... Didn't you make them think you brought silver?"

"That's our capital. We'll have other uses for it this afternoon. Don't worry, we should be able to turn it into something more." Li Wuxiang stared at the bloodstains he had buried in front of the door and sipped the rice soup. "Tell me more about the town lord's family and his daughter. What's her name?"

"Chen Xiu... I haven't seen her for a long time. The last time I saw her was last year. In the summer, she came over from the river in a big wooden basin. At that time, there were lotus flowers and water chestnuts in the river. She picked water chestnuts in the river to eat. She came to me and asked for a bowl of water to drink, and she also gave me a handful of water chestnuts."

"So she didn't bring any maids or servants. Where does she usually stay? What are her hobbies?"

"Ah... her family had servants, I think there were quite a few, helping them farm and feed horses. One year -"

Li Wuxiang stared at the blood slowly seeping out of the wet mud while drinking rice soup, listening to Xue Baoping telling him everything he saw and heard. These days, she spoke more and more fluently. When she was not in a hurry, it was almost impossible to tell that she had a language barrier. She was just a normal girl who liked to chat and spoke slowly.

So he had a general impression of the town owner's family.

The town owner was called Chen Xin, his wife was called Liu Jiao, and his daughter was called Chen Xiu. They were a family of three. There were probably one or two servants in the family, but they sounded more like farmhands doing rough work. They were not the wealthy family with a high gate and a large courtyard that Li Wuxiang had imagined before. They sounded more like a powerful landlord in the town, with more than 40 town soldiers, and with the intricate relationship between relatives and friends, they were able to firmly control this town with a population of about 600.

Judging from the more details recounted by Xue Baoping, this family was not completely free from production. The town lord occasionally took his servants and some soldiers to work in the fields. The town lord's daughter was more like a jade girl rather than a lady. Her temperament was not particularly bad and arrogant because of her father's status, and she was even a little greedy.

This information was very helpful for what he wanted to do next.

He had been feeling more and more uncomfortable these days. After absorbing the flesh and blood of the three Wang family members, he had only digested it slightly last night, and the blood circulation in his body had become a little smoother. He tried to practice Guang Chanzi again, wanting to completely exhale and refine the impurities in his body, but after a short while, he felt an extremely strong feeling of hunger.

Vegetarian food like rice and noodles could only bring a little false comfort when they entered the mouth, and things like dried meat could only suppress the feeling for a short while. He was going crazy thinking about that steaming, pulsating flesh and blood, and felt that he was about to turn into a soft human skin again.

There must be a way to solve this problem. Either he could refine a pill similar to the Marching Pill, or Guang Chanzi's practice method had other auxiliary means. He needed to quickly determine whether Zhao Qi and Zhao Kui had a close relationship, so as to know if he could find a solution from him.

So after the meal, Li Wuxiang helped her put up the door, dyed her hair with soot from the bottom of the pot again, and took out a few pieces of silver: "Let's go to the street and see what delicious food I can teach you to make today."

The two of them walked slowly along the road towards the west of the town, carefully avoiding puddles along the way. After passing two small bridges, they saw more and more people coming. When they arrived at the west of the town, they found that the road on the street became smoother, and some places were even paved with bluestone strips.

People looked at them along the way, not as strangers, but as if they had heard something a long time ago. But there were rarely any blatant and rude stares like in the morning. Apparently, as Li Wuxiang expected, in a small town like this where there was little news, the news of what happened not long ago spread very quickly.

Xue Baoping felt uncomfortable with this kind of look, so she glanced at Li Wuxiang and found that he smiled at her quickly. She subconsciously reached out and wanted to grab the corner of Li Wuxiang's clothes, but the next moment she reacted and quickly pinched the corner of her clothes and took a deep breath.

Two-story buildings began to appear in the most prosperous area in the west of the town, and the streets were slightly wider, able to accommodate two carriages. Some people set up stalls on the roadside, selling sundries, most of which were covered with mud marks, probably fished out of the river. This place was very similar to the ancient street scene in Li Wuxiang's mind, with wet stone slabs, low wooden houses, polished steps with moss on the sides, and thin people.

He saw a few shops selling cloth, rice, flour, and oil, a food shop that he didn't know if it was closed, and a few vendors selling vegetables, fruits, and melons on the roadside. He stopped and looked around as if no one was around. The vendors didn't greet him, but looked at them carefully. There were very few varieties, and he couldn't recognize some of them, but when he saw half a winter melon, he knew what he should teach Xue Baoping to do today.

Going further forward, we came to a diagonal T-shaped street intersection. Across the road was a shop with a slightly larger frontage. It had four doors, a counter on the left, shelves on both sides, and a cloth sign next to the door that read: "Chen's Grocery."

This is the property of the town owner Chen Xin, and it is also the place where he is going to buy today. There are a few idle people standing by the wall of the shop, leaning against the wall, hugging their arms and talking. One of them is Chen Sanyao. Now his head is wrapped with a piece of cloth soaked in blood and turned black and brown. When he saw Li Wuxiang, his eyes glared and he stood up and took two steps forward.

Li Wuxiang also stopped and stared at him. The two looked at each other for a while, and Chen Sanyao spat on the ground and shrank back. Several people around him said a few words to him and looked over at him.

Li Wu smiled at them and walked into the shop.

The shopkeeper was an old shopkeeper, tall and thin, standing behind the counter. When he saw him come in, he didn't stare at him like others, but just glanced at him and continued to lazily calculate his abacus. Li Wuxiang walked to the counter, greeted him politely, and took out a thin wooden board from his sleeve and placed it on the counter: "Please help me find these few things - I need an extra pound of sugar, and I don't know if there is lime."

The old shopkeeper didn't stop working until he glanced at the thin wooden board and then stopped.

The handwriting on it was Li Wuxiang's. When he was reading Guang Chanzi, he had already learned the characters from that book - they were basically the same as the traditional characters from his home world, except that some characters were simplified, just like the world he came from. In his world, many of the popular simplified characters were also ancient, and he couldn't tell whether it was the same here.

But it didn't stop his handwriting from being beautiful. Although it was written with charcoal sticks, it was neat and delicate, at least not inferior to the sign of Chen's shop.

The old shopkeeper stared at his writing, and couldn't help but glance at him before he slowly said, "White sugar or brown sugar?"

“White sugar is best.”

"The sugar got damp."

Li Wuxiang smiled and said, "It's okay. I'll buy it at the market price."

The old shopkeeper looked at Xue Baoping again and nodded: "Wait a minute."

He turned around and pulled out a few sheets of paper from under the counter. He squinted his eyes to check the number of items from a distance, put one back, and then slowly moved to the shelf to look for the items he had listed.

Xue Baoping hid behind the wall and waited, while Li Wuxiang turned around and looked at the people outside who were also looking at him. Many details that were not worth noting in the eyes of ordinary people contained a lot of information for him. For example, although the people in the town were skinny, since they were curious about him, they rushed to the river to rescue people yesterday, which meant that they felt that life in the town was not too bad at the moment, which showed that the rule of the town owner here was not very strict.

The town's business is single, and there are few varieties of vegetables, fruits and melons on the roadside, which means that communication with the outside world is not very convenient. Perhaps it is some remote place in this world, so the "Eight Mysterious Sects" mentioned by Xue Baoping cannot rule here.

The town upstream of Jinshui River is "Lijiawan Town", where the Li and Xie families live. But the continuous heavy rain first caused a flash flood in the upper reaches of Bishan, destroying half of the town, and then caused the Jinshui River to burst its banks in a river bend over there, destroying the other half. A small town with a population of nearly a thousand was wiped out in two days.

The people who were staring at him and talking to each other gradually became tired of his interested look, or perhaps their curiosity was satisfied and they gradually dispersed. A little later, a garrison soldier came over. Just like the one he had seen from afar before, he was wearing a navy blue cloth and holding a stick that was iron-clad at both ends.

The town soldier walked two steps towards the store door with a slightly frown on his brows, but suddenly he froze, stopped, and retreated to the side of the road, watching while leaning on his stick.

Li Wuxiang also turned sideways and glanced into the shop pretending to look at the goods - the garrison soldier had been staring at him, as if he was going to interrogate him, but his eyes suddenly glanced over his shoulder into the shop before walking back. When Li Wuxiang glanced at this, he saw the door curtain leading to the inner room of the main hall of the shop swaying slightly, as if it had just been let down.

Then, he heard a slight ding-dong sound, as if some stone tool accidentally touched the door. At this time, the sky cleared up, and the setting sun shone obliquely into the door. He smiled at Xue Baoping, walked slowly toward the door, and stood in the setting sun.

So the town lord's only daughter behind the door curtain could see Li Wuxiang clearly through the gap in the curtain.

The profile of this handsome young man was set off by the golden sunlight, which softened his facial features, as if he had walked out of a painting. He was wearing a short cloth shirt and cloth shoes. Like most people, his clothes were slightly loose. But his clothes were folded finely on both sides and tied with a belt, which made him look elegant and simple.

Chen Xiu frowned slightly, looked at him, and recalled the words she heard from the townspeople at noon - a wild boy who was fished out of the mud, rude and impolite, a scoundrel who didn't care about his life... But none of these words could be applied to the young man who was standing at the door now.

She had never seen anyone in the town speak like him, slowly, clearly, softly and pleasantly. And he could read, so he must be good at writing, otherwise Chen Da, the shopkeeper, would not have looked at him again after reading his handwriting.

Zhao Qi, the new Qigong master who had recently made his father do things in a mess, looked a bit like him, but Chen Xiu had seen Zhao Qi cough up phlegm while eating and spit it on the ground without paying attention to anyone around. And Zhao Qi was cold and indifferent to others, which was totally unlike him... He smiled again and said a few words to Xue...what was it?

He can't be from an ordinary family, he should be a young master from Lijiawan above... How pitiful, he has lost his family, his parents, and today he is still being bullied in Jinshui...

Chen Xiu just covered her bracelet and stared at him until she heard Shopkeeper Chen ask him "What is this fennel?" and when he turned his head, she quickly took a step back.

"Aniseed... the kind with eight corners, a spice... star anise?" Li Wuxiang said as he glanced at the curtain again and smiled apologetically, "Maybe your name is different, I should have written it more clearly."

"It's star anise." Shopkeeper Chen nodded, holding some oil-paper bags in his hand, he walked to the counter and put them down, then looked at him again, "Is your last name Li?"

Li Wuxiang was slightly stunned, then turned his left toe towards the door: “Yeah.”

"Ah, I guess he is the young master of the Li family in Lijiawan." Manager Chen sighed slowly, "When I was young, I worked as an apprentice at Heshengji in your town. That is your family's business, right?"

Li Wuxiang turned back on his toes. The faint and polite smile on his face was replaced by a gloomy look, and he just let out a breath.

"As long as you're alive." The shopkeeper shook his head, nodded at him, and slowly walked away to find quicklime for him.

Li Wuxiang turned to look at Xue Baoping, and she also let out a sigh of relief.

　Two chapters merged into one. Sorry, I accidentally deleted chapter 21
　　
　
(End of this chapter)