On June 7, 1647, Qing, Wuding Township, Luoqia County.

With the crow of roosters, Li Qun sat up from the bed in a daze. After a while, he suddenly remembered something. He lifted up his pillow and counted the stack of "bills" hidden under the pillow, and then he grinned with confidence. The two hundred yuan Northwest Reclamation Bank acceptance bill, God, when will we, Lao Li, have we been so rich?

After a while of smirking, Li Qun put on a cotton dress, put on a pair of cotton shoes and got out of the bed. The door was wide open, and a cold morning breeze blew in from outside the door from time to time, which made Li Qun shudder. His foreign lady opened the door early in the morning, which was really disappointing. Li Qun yawned, then walked to the door and leaned against the door frame.

A hanging basket was hung under the wooden rafters under the eaves. Li Qun walked over gently. Inside was his sleeping young son. Li Qun looked at his sleeping son and laughed foolishly for a while, then walked into the yard. At this time, the sunshine in the yard was a little dazzling. Li Qun narrowed his eyes and adapted for a while, then picked up a piece of corn from the still steaming iron stove and ate it, just as breakfast.

After eating, Liqun threw the clean corn cob at the foot of the wall. Several Gaul chickens who were originally walking leisurely in the house immediately started to scramble and quickly pecked at the food residue on the corn cob. Liqun laughed and then went out to wander around.

At this time, his Greek lady should still be cutting sweet potato vines in the field. Not long after the establishment of Wuding Township, it belonged to a "backward agricultural township". Every household only planted five acres of thin fields divided by the government. So far, only a few households spent money to redeem some land. The crops they planted were mostly corn, potatoes and sweet potatoes. The income was generally not high, which was far worse than the "traditional agricultural townships" in the northern Yazihu ​​area. Therefore, every household here would help Luoqia leather factory tanning some raw leather to earn some pocket money to subsidize the household.

Liqun's neighbor, the newly appointed village chief Huang Renshi, held a meeting outside the village water lifting station a few days ago, and ambitiously proposed to go to the village to ask for special agricultural loans and encourage villagers to reclaim more land. In the future, if conditions permit, a three-cross rotation system will be carried out in the village.

Li Qun was very optimistic about this. Huang Renshi was a veteran of the 103rd Company of the Army. After Korentez was discharged from the army due to injury, he was reluctant to hang out with the Fighting Army Farm. So he was settled here by his superiors. This man's military career came to an end, but he still wanted to make progress in his career, so he put forward some unrealistic ideas. Li Qun can understand this, but it does not mean that he will agree with his opinion. Soldiers are all passionate but not mature enough. What Li Qun admires is still a person who is as mature as Master Zhu Heng and very decisive when he should take action - although he has always been hurting others.

After wandering around the homes of his neighbors for a few random circles, Liqun turned to a small dirt road at the east end of the village. The road directly leads to the market in the countryside. Today is the weekend market day. At the same time, it is the beginning of winter on the east bank, and the market must be more popular than usual. Therefore, the bored Liqun decided to go shopping at the market and buy some meat, noodles and other things. It's the beginning of winter, so it's time to have dumplings. Liqun smacked his lips, and then walked onto the small dirt road with his hands on his back.

On the side of the small dirt road, there was a group of Englishmen in sky-blue jeans, and the Scots (all from across the border from Brazil) were planting oak trees. Liqun was not interested in these stowaways sentenced to one year of labor, so he accelerated his pace and soon arrived at the market.

Today's market was indeed very popular, but after careful observation, Liqun found that there were many people watching and few people buying. For example, the mutton sold by the Tatar butcher from Crimea, a group of people gathered there to bargain with him, but few people bought it. For no other reason, the price was too expensive.

The eldest son of the butcher was wearing a pair of leather pants and was peeling a goat hooked on a wooden rack next to him. His technique looked very skillful, which reminded Li Qun of the scene when he killed a sheep for the scholar-official family in his hometown in Henan. It was just that he killed sheep at the beginning, but the world was broken, and later he killed someone...

Li Qun walked over with his hands behind his back, picked and picked at the mutton stall, and then picked four pounds of mutton and two pounds of mutton bones. After the butcher calculated it, he said in a puzzling Chinese accent: "A total of 50 cents."

Li Qun grinned slightly, and it doubled! However, recently he started to make a fortune in grain speculation and made a fortune in business. He was not short of money at all, so he took out a five-yuan bank acceptance bill from his pocket and handed it over.

The butcher wiped his hands on the greasy clothes, frowned and took the bill of exchange, and said, "It costs six cents to pay with bills, and now it's the market. I used silver dollars when I went to the countryside to collect sheep, but the country people didn't recognize bills of exchange. My small business is not easy to turn around, so I can only charge you one more cent."

Li Qun was speechless. However, he was in a good mood today and did not intend to argue with the barbarian, so he took the 4 one-yuan silver coins and four one-cent silver coins found by the butcher. After buying the mutton, he went to buy one-cent five-cent dumpling skins, and some cents of green onion and ginger and other seasonings. After buying it, he felt unsatisfied and spent two cents to buy ten expensive eggs. Today, the various ingredients for this dumpling were considered complete.

The above things cost a total of one yuan, which is one-sixth of the monthly salary of ordinary workers on the East Coast. It is really not cheap. A year ago, it only cost less than 40 cents to buy the above things. It can be seen that the shortage of materials caused by war has affected the lives of ordinary people this year.

Of course, these are only relative to the old people. For the Ming people or Livornians who have immigrated, they can eat white noodles, occasionally eat some cheap meat (pickled whale meat) provided by the government or drink some beer in a luxurious way. This day is like a paradise compared to the previous life of stagnation. As for the shortage of supplies and the rise in prices caused by the war, they have no personal feelings, because these people don’t spend much money on the market to buy things. They save almost every penny, and buy a license from the government for every five yuan they save.

After all, for them, land and food are everything. As for consuming some non-necessary items, I'm sorry, they don't have this habit. In addition, there is a lack of a large number of handicraftsmen in the East Coast to manufacture various small commodities (even sewing needles and fish hooks must be imported), so they can only import in large quantities, which has led to the high prices of many non-necessary items, which makes these frugal farmers afraid of them.

Liqun has been to the East Coast for two years and is barely considered an old citizen. Although many commodities such as tobacco, sugar, spirits, cocoa, etc. have disappeared from the shelves of government stores due to the war, his attitude towards the war is not as full of complaints as his business partners. Those merchants, large and small, were originally doing foreign trade business in Colonia, but now that the war broke out, they are naturally unemployed, so they are full of complaints about the government.

Although Li Qun is also a businessman, he is full of contempt for these people: What's the matter? When they were all uneasy, they came to the east coast, but now they have made some money in business and don't know how much they have. They actually questioned the need for the government to launch a war. They picked up the bowl and ate meat but put down their chopsticks to curse. It's really a waste of time.

The most popular place in the market is the stage. At this time, hundreds of farmers were watching. Li Qun looked at it from a distance. Today he was still an old play - "Five Warriors of the Santa Fe", which tells the story of Taoist priest Shou and four East Coast soldiers, the deputy company of the 101st Company of the Army, fought bravely, defeating the savages' raid in the pouring rain with unstoppable hand-to-hand combat, and finally seized the enemy's position with his comrades. At this time, the drama was at the end of the play. "Taoist Shou" killed the "Captain of Spain" with one sword, and then spoke a glorious line, and the audiences in the audience cheered enthusiastically. Especially the five or six half-some children who looked like students, they rushed to the stage excitedly and shouted some radical slogans. It seemed that they wanted to transform themselves into the East Coast officers and soldiers who were fighting with the barbarians at that time.

Li Qun also likes watching this drama very much. When he first came out, he watched it six times, almost never tired of it. I still remember that when he first watched it, he was as excited as these students and could not help himself. Unfortunately, the troops did not accept it, which made people helpless. Thinking of this, Li Qun pulled out a bank bill from his waist. He saw that it was a five-yuan bank acceptance bill. After thinking about it, he put it back and took out a ten-yuan bill again. Then he strode to the military donation box next to the stage and put the ten-yuan bill in.

After doing this, Liqun left the bustling market and walked back to his home. His Greek wife had already returned home and was feeding pigs. After asking her wife to deal with the vegetables and meat to eat dumplings at night, Liqun took out an old horse eliminated from the military horse farm in the livestock, turned over and rode on it and headed towards Luoqiang Port.
Chapter completed!