roccoschili Chapter 250 Chapter 8 is here
Chapter 250 Chapter 8 is here
After buying the sheepskin boots, he gave the items to Fang Youfu and others to carry, and then went into other shops to buy hand warmers.
He did not buy only the hand warmers for his family. He planned to give the extra ones as year-end bonuses to Fang Youfu, Bai Jingshan and others who had worked wholeheartedly for him and Gu Wenxuan.
After estimating the approximate number to ensure that everyone would have one and some left over, Bai Jingzhou began to select hand warmers based on the different patterns on them.
Like Bai Jingzhou, Gu Wenxuan had plenty of money, so when she bought things, she acted as if she was doing wholesale.
She first quickly selected gold and silver jewelry to give to the women in her family, and then bought Bai Jingzhou a medium-quality Hetian jade pendant that was priced at seventy taels, but she eventually bargained it down to sixty-six taels.
The jade pendant has a delicate and warm texture and feels comfortable. At first glance, it looks like a square pendant with rounded corners. But if you look closely, you will find that the back of the jade pendant is flat and smooth, while the front is engraved with an auspicious pattern that symbolizes "Fish Leaping Over the Dragon Gate" (the bottom is a fish jumping over the Dragon Gate, and the top is a dragon riding on the clouds).
The carving of the jade pendant was indeed as the waiter said, delicate and meticulous, and it was obvious that much care was put into it.
Gu Wenxuan bought a bunch of gold and silver jewelry and the jade pendant at a relatively affordable price. Because she bought a lot, the owner of the silver shop even gave her a pair of small and exquisite silver earrings as a gift.
Bai Jingzhou didn't get any gifts, but he was better at bargaining than Gu Wenxuan. He always bargained down to the psychological bottom line of the store owner, and other shoppers stared at him and the aggrieved store owner, which was quite a sight.
When Bai Jingzhou and his companions arrived at the silver shop with bags of things, Gu Wenxuan accompanied him to the Mu Family Bookstore, the largest bookstore in the city.
On the one hand, Bai Jingzhou wanted to see if there were any books that interested him, and on the other hand, he also needed to buy some economical ink sticks and paper suitable for daily use.
While he was busy picking things, Gu Wenxuan strolled around the shop.
After a while, she found some folding fans on the top shelf in an inconspicuous corner of the shop.
It is winter now and the sales of folding fans are not good, so the owner of the bookstore had people put this thing in the most inconspicuous corner.
Gu Wenxuan took a few and took a look, and found that the quality of these folding fans was quite good, so she waved to the waiter to come over.
The waiter didn't expect that someone would buy a folding fan in the middle of winter, but after a brief surprise, he immediately and enthusiastically introduced it to Gu Wenxuan.
In the end, Gu Wenxuan chose the best quality and most expensive folding fan in the shop. The ribs of this folding fan were repeatedly polished with fine sandpaper, soaked horsetail grass and elm leaves, and then waxed. The moist and delicate bamboo ribs were like white jade, and the fan surface was made of silk cloth embroidered with green bamboo. It was both grand and exquisite, and it also implied the character of literati, which was very much to Gu Wenxuan's liking.
She planned to keep this folding fan and the jade pendant she bought before until the first month of next year and give them to Bai Jingzhou as birthday gifts.
After Bai Jingzhou finished selecting the books, ink sticks and paper, the two of them went to a pastry shop on the way home and bought some pastries and candies that were not available in the county town. They also picked out some beautiful and affordable coarse cloth, fine cloth and silk from the cloth shop and bought some.
In addition, the two also bought some things that are essential for life, such as food, salt, meat, vegetables, cloth, needles and thread, wooden barrels and basins, etc.
The vast majority of these things were prepared by the two for Zheng Rong's family, and only a small part of them were to be taken back to the village.
That night, Mu Hanzhi held a banquet at his home and warmly entertained Gu Wenxuan, Bai Jingzhou and others.
When they said goodbye and left, Mu Hanzhi asked the steward and servants to prepare a generous thank-you gift for them, thanking Gu Wenxuan and Bai Jingzhou for agreeing without hesitation to help him shelter his stepmother and younger brother when his family was in the most difficult situation.
The next day, Gu Wenxuan and others returned to Baijia Village in the carriage given by Mu Hanzhi.
In Mu Hanzhi's words, now that Bai Jingzhou has received the emperor's reward, it would be unwise for him to continue to be so extremely low-key.
Although we cannot learn from some superficial people and become arrogant when we are successful, it is still okay to improve the living standards of ourselves and our families appropriately.
Bai Jingzhou felt that what he said was right, so he readily accepted the carriage given by Mu Hanzhi.
Not only this horse, but also the one they keep on the farm can be taken out for use occasionally.
Not long after they returned to the village, it was Laba Festival, the day they had discussed distributing porridge.
Gu Wenxuan and Bai Jingzhou, who had prepared rice porridge early, first sent some of the porridge to Jiajia Village and asked Jia's father and mother to help pass it on to the head of the Jia family, who organized people to cook sweet Laba porridge for the villagers of Jiajia Village. Then they hired the Fang family, Gu Tong's family, Gu Yonghe's family, Li Laosi's family, Li Laoliu's family, Bai Jingshan's family, Bai Rong's family, and Bai Yu's family, who were close to them, to help cook the porridge.
As for the families of Bai Jingzhou's eldest uncle and second uncle, one of them does carpentry work and the other one runs a bean products business. It is not suitable for them to do things like cooking and distributing porridge.
For the families that Gu Wenxuan and Bai Jingzhou had chosen, the work of receiving rice, cooking porridge, and distributing porridge went according to plan and smoothly for the first few families. Only for Baiyu's family, as soon as the rice was brought back, his eldest brother and sister-in-law wanted to grab it directly.
The two Baiyu brothers said that the rice was not theirs, but was given by Gu Wenxuan and Bai Jingzhou, and was to be cooked into Laba porridge and distributed to other people in the village. However, the couple looked at the brothers as if they were idiots.
Their eldest brother even gave them some bad advice, "Why don't you just add a little more water when you cook the porridge? If there are one or two bags of rice missing, how can they tell what's going on?"
Bai Yu and Bai Yi were furious. How could they possibly do such a thing!
The two brothers were so angry that they rolled up their sleeves and wanted to beat their brother. His mother stopped the two sons, telling them not to delay their work because of a momentary impulse. At the same time, she threatened to call the head of the village, Bai Jingzhou and Gu Wenxuan over, and scared away the eldest couple who were taking advantage of her.
Bai Yu and Bai Yi took a deep breath. Their father comforted his two sons, "Work hard and save money. Next spring, we will build a high wall to separate the two sides of the courtyard."
The old man has had enough of his eldest son and his wife. If he didn't have to save money for Bai Yu and Bai Yi to get married, he would have wanted to buy a new piece of residential land and move to the end of the village with his wife and two sons to live in peace and quiet.
At this moment, the old man doesn't know that next year, his goal of moving to the end of the village with his wife and two sons to a quiet place can be achieved ahead of schedule because Gu Wenxuan and Bai Jingzhou assign a large amount of work to the villagers. Of course, this is a story for later.