Medicine Master Disciple’s Cultivation Notes

Chapter 80: Digging a Cellar Beneath the Bedroom

Chen Liang would continue to handle the accounts, with all goods coming in and going out personally overseen by him. Liu Da would serve as shopkeeper, primarily responsible for running the shop floor and managing various social dealings.

Yan Hui was the head of the caravan's guard team, with the Rakshasa ghosts and the giant Aye all under his command.

Li Qiuchen, as the manager of the inner household, would be primarily responsible for Wulala's daily life and her education going forward.

To put it simply, the two major departments of finance and personnel remained firmly in the boss's own hands.

Liu Da had become a sales manager, and Li Qiuchen was the live-in nanny and household steward exclusively assigned to the boss's own daughter.

In terms of trust, Boss Tang had indeed placed a great deal of trust in the two brothers, and this sort of work was not something just anyone could do but in Li Qiuchen's view, the company's structure was still quite loose, barely holding together the framework of a functioning organization.

What's that? You say the boss has no shortage of money? Well then, never mind.

"Get a feel for things first. See what the house is missing and pick it up as needed. We'll officially open for business after the Lantern Festival."

Boss Tang was flush with money and gave Li Qiuchen two hundred taels of silver on the spot without blinking.

The courtyard had been taken over from a previous owner. It was a grand walled compound with three courtyards front and back, more than a dozen rooms of blue brick and tiled roof, and it lacked for nothing in the way of furniture and fittings. Boss Tang generously allocated the front courtyard to his own people, and both Liu Da and Li Qiuchen were each given a side room.The back courtyard for now had only Wulala living in it.

Li Qiuchen's main job was to use these two hundred taels of silver to get the back courtyard properly sorted out, including bedding, clothing, needles and thread and all the little things a girl would need.

Of course, the most important matter was people.

"I want to live in this cellar!"

Wulala walked two laps around the house and immediately fixed her eyes on the cellar.

No northern household would ever be without a cellar. It was needed for storing the vegetables and grain that had to last through the winter.

The problem was that cellars were almost always attached to the kitchen.

Could a wealthy young miss really live there?

After these days of contact, Li Qiuchen had gradually come to understand this little girl's temperament.

Mischievous. Willful. Aggressively spirited.

But that wasn't to say she had no virtues. The virtue was that you could negotiate with her, and once terms were agreed upon, she was actually quite obedient.

"That won't do. It smells of pickled cabbage in there. I'll find you a room, and then you can dig your own underneath it."

Wulala accepted this suggestion with great delight.

In the inner compound there was a small garden, perhaps forty or fifty square meters in area, with a few wintersweet trees planted in it, right beside the women's quarters. The previous owner had apparently been a person of refined and elegant taste.

"Start digging from here. The whole garden is yours. Put a cellar door right here... don't start digging yet. I'll draw you a plan first, and you dig according to the plan. We can't go collapsing the rooms above ground, can we?"

"That is absolutely not going to happen!"

Wulala hugged her little pickaxe and looked completely serious, "You have to trust my talent and technique. I've been digging my whole life and I have never once been buried alive."

That was genuinely impressive... wait, was that something worth boasting about?

Li Qiuchen offered patient guidance, "Even without knowing anything about civil engineering, I know that you can't break ground in winter. You'll have to wait until spring when the snow melts before starting work. Set this aside for now. We're going out to buy things, and you are not allowed to run off on your own while you're with me, understood?"

Wulala was like a donkey in temperament, perfectly docile and obedient when handled the right way.

"I won't run off, but you have to buy me snacks."

"Deal!"

The bustling level of the county seat's streets far exceeded Li Qiuchen's expectations. For a brief moment, he almost thought he had returned to his old world.

The commercial shops lining the streets were dazzling in their variety, a feast for the eyes.

When it came to snacks at this time of year, dried and fresh fruits didn't come close to the top. There was only one thing that truly held authority, and that was sugar.

The local specialties related to sugar came in two forms. First, stove candy. Second, tanghulu, the candied fruit on skewers.

Stove candy was made from maltose and carried a completely different flavor from cane sugar, with a particular sweet fragrance of grain and rice. A plain, unadorned stick of stove candy was the most authoritative representation of the thing in its purest form, needing no sesame seeds for embellishment. Anyone who truly knew what they were eating would never buy the kind coated with sesame. Sprinkling on sesame seeds was a sign that the seller lacked sufficient confidence in the quality of their own product.

As for tanghulu, that was a common enough item without much technical distinction. But in the north, the most authoritative tanghulu was absolutely not the hawthorn variety. It was made with black dates.

There were some factors at play here that couldn't be ignored.

It wasn't that black date tanghulu was necessarily tastier than hawthorn tanghulu. The main issue was that hawthorn contained seeds, and the person making the tanghulu might not have removed them all cleanly.

In other places, if you bit into a hawthorn seed you just spat it out and moved on.

But here, in the dead of winter with average temperatures dropping below thirty degrees, the tanghulu froze as hard as stone. If you bit down hard and hit a hawthorn seed, you could enjoy the experience of having your tooth cracked on the spot.

Li Qiuchen bought Wulala one black date tanghulu and one hawthorn tanghulu, letting her alternate between the two flavors. He then stuffed a few sticks of stove candy, frozen brittle enough to snap, into his pocket. For a northern child, that was already a configuration of extraordinary luxury.

If you also stuffed some firecrackers in the other pocket, that was the full maximum loadout.

Keeping the little ancestor happy was of paramount importance. Questions about dental health were not something Li Qiuchen was going to concern himself with at the moment.

Your teeth don't pay his salary.

He had come out today to take care of two things.

First, to bring Wulala out for a stroll and buy her whatever she wanted.

Second, to buy people.

Li Qiuchen, being a country bumpkin who hadn't seen much of the world, wasn't sure whether buying and selling people was illegal in the county seat.

He could only start by asking around.

As it turned out, the Great Chu's legal system was indeed quite well developed.

Especially when it came to population and household registration policies, it was particularly rigorous.

Buying and selling people was not illegal, but private transactions were not permitted. Taking in adopted children or purchasing household servants all required registration with the authorities and the signing of the appropriate contract documents.

Broker houses, meaning the establishments that dealt in the trade of people, likewise required official authorization, with licensed practitioners operating under proper credentials. There were also a considerable number of complicated restrictions and requirements regarding the identity information of those being bought and sold.

In short, it was a tremendous amount of trouble.

It was not as simple as having money and going out to casually buy a couple of little maids to bring home.

Hiring workers was much simpler. The city had a dedicated labor market that had formerly served as a gathering point for miners and porters, but now you could find anything there from cooks to household guards.

Li Qiuchen followed the directions he was given and made a circuit of the place, hiring one cook and two women for heavy housework.

He still hadn't found a young maid.

Obviously. It wasn't a year of famine or disaster. What decent family would send their daughter out to show her face in public?

Households that genuinely needed maids didn't go to the open market for them either. They only used girls born and raised within the household.

By the time the sun had climbed to midday and was nearly at its peak, Wulala's snacks had been more or less demolished. Li Qiuchen decided to find a restaurant and sample some of the local cuisine.

Seeing that one shop on the street looked particularly lively, he brought Wulala inside, turned his head, and came face to face with Tu Feiyun sitting there eating mutton with a few of his soldiers.

How are you everywhere?

Li Qiuchen silently cursed his luck and steeled himself to walk in anyway.

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