Chapter Forty-Six

Yangzhou

Different from the turbulent mountains, the river at the foot of Yanyun Mountain is gentle and wide, and there are flat valley bottoms on both sides of the river. Along the way, the reeds and the wind are very refreshing and very comfortable. After going down the mountain, the whole journey took three hours and ran for nearly 100 years from the villa.Kilometers to Jiangnan.

Half of Qin Jun's three souls and seven souls were gone, and she said disgruntledly, "Are you tired? Run slower."

Ji Si drove the horse, and Qin Jun walked on the riverside road unhurriedly. There were small wild flowers growing along the road, and the two dismounted as if they were on a spring outing, walking and wandering casually.

The further you go down the Yanjiang River, the wider the surface of the river becomes, and the water changes from slow to choppy.

At the pier above Jiangnan, Ji Si handed over the horse to the ferryman's wife, gave a penny for the ferry, and also helped the boatman's wife to feed the horses with grass and water.

Qin Jun asked, "Boater, how many round trips does this ferry make every day?"

The boatman leaned on the boat, dodging the undercurrent of the river familiarly, and shouted in the sound of the river: "As long as there are people, gather enough people to set off, punting the boat at sunrise, and resting at sunset!"

Qin Jun nodded, looking at the river, the sound of the waves in the distance, she couldn't help being curious, "Is there a cliff in front?"

Ji Si put on the cloak for Qin Jun, fearing that she would feel unwell from the wind blowing too much.

Boatman: "Miss, this is the first time you've come to Jiangnan?"

"The front is just a cliff!" The boatman said high.

"Catch it!" said the boatman.

The boat swayed suddenly, and Qin Jun grabbed Ji Si's wide sleeves, and got close to her, staring into the distance with starlight in his eyes.

Ji Si bent her lips and held Qin Jun's shoulder.

The boat drifted into the river, and with the help of the river water, it approached the aurora, where the brightest sky and water meet.

Where the water and the sky are the same color, the sound of the waves can be heard endlessly.The turbulent river water seemed to be poured from a hundred-foot cliff into a huge bucket.Haohaotangtang, horizontal boundless career.

An eagle's howl resounded above his head, Qin Jun opened his mouth slightly, and from the mountain stream, he saw the picture-like scroll slowly emerging from the end of his field of vision, Jiangnan in the corner!

"What a nice view!"

The boatman laughed loudly, "Miss, you can't go any further. If you go any further, you will be swept off the cliff by the waves, and you will lose your life."

Seeing the speed of the boat going down the river, not far away a piece of rotten wood collided with a hidden reef and was smashed to pieces, Qin Jun screamed, closed her eyes and turned her head into Ji Si's arms.

The boat uses skillful struts to keep the boat out of the current, like a leaf slipping quietly out of the current.

"Are you ready?" Qin Jun asked in a muffled voice, quietly raising one eye to look around.

Ji Si curled her lips and covered Qin Jun's face with her hands: "Not yet, don't look."

Qin Jun tightly hugged Ji Si's waist, trembling with fright, "..."

"Oops," Ji Si said suddenly, reminding Qin Jun, "Hold tight!"

Qin Jun wrinkled her facial features, locked Ji Si's waist tightly and screamed, "Ah!!!"

Boatman: "Hahahaha!"

Half an hour later, the boatman said, "Miss, we're here."

Qin Jun froze for a moment, opened her eyes and reached the shore, "..."

The boatman: "Miss is so timid, the old man can hold on faster."

The spring breeze was blowing on her face, warm as the sun, Ji Si pursed her lips, looked at Qin Jun with half a smile but not a smile, she put her arms around Qin Jun's shoulders, but it was Qin Jun, who was holding onto Qin Jun like a life-saving strawHolding Ji Si's waist.

Qin Jun: "..."

Just now Qin Jun pushed Ji Si away with a red face, got off the boat and went ashore, and said to the boatman, "...Thank you."

There is a gentle slope winding down the mountain beside the waterfall. Wooden frame ropes are set up along the way to serve as handrails to prevent people from rolling down the slope in rainy and muddy days. Qin Jun walked in front step by step, and Ji Si followed behind with her burden.

"Are you angry?" After a while, Ji Si asked aloud.

Qin Jun: "..."

Ji Si: "Slave made a mistake, miss punish me."

Qin Jun's ears were slightly red, and she turned her head to stare at her displeased, "What are you punishing! Tell me!"

Ji Si: "Punish—"

"Forget it!" Qin Jun didn't know what to think of, her face turned red even more, and she muttered, "What good ideas do you have, they are all crooked ideas, I will punish...you will be punished to copy Sun Wu's Art of War a hundred times."

Ji Si pursed her lips, "Less less."

Qin Jun raised her eyebrows, "That's too much? I'm going to Jiangnan today, and I'm going to find you a master with strict apprenticeship!"

Ji Si twitched the corners of her mouth, and Qin Jun turned around contentedly and continued on her way.

Fireworks go down in Yangzhou in March, and now it is April and May, the season when hundreds of flowers are blooming.Among them, the apricot blossoms in Jiangnan have faded, and the peach blossoms are in full bloom. When the peach blossoms are exhausted, the pear blossoms begin to show their bones. They bloom in summer. Before the golden autumn, there are lilac roses, and in autumn, there are tea berries.

The entire Jiangnan is like a fairyland on earth, and Yangzhou is even more so, it is a place even more Jiangnan than Jiangnan.

Outside the city of Yangzhou, Taolin Fangfei was crowded with cars and horses. Qin Jun and Ji Si put on curtain hats and were interrogated and sent into the city. If nothing serious happened, people who left the city would not be interrogated.

"Capital accent?" Chengwei asked.

Ji Si nodded.

Chengwei: "What are you doing in Yangzhou?"

Ji Si: "Go home."

Chengwei handed back the paperwork and looked at Qin Jun, "Is this your girl?"

Ji Si said softly, "This is Miss."

Qin Jun: "..."

The prosperity of Yangzhou is no less than that of Capital, and it is located in the Central Plains, with the water diverted from the cliffs and waterfalls of the Yanjiang River. The land and water routes extend in all directions inside and outside the city, which makes the business here prosperous, and there are many business travelers regardless of the season.

It took Qin Jun and Ji Sishen half a day to get down from Yanyun Villa to Jiangnan. It was already dusk when they entered the city, and it was too late to find the Shengping Bank. The two planned to find an inn to stay.

Qin Jun threw herself into the quilt, and her waist was pulled back.

Ji Si: "Finish and wash first, Miss."

Qin Jun: "..."

The next day, Qin Jun and Ji Si were wandering around the city while looking for a bank. Ji Si carried two hundred taels of silver in her bag, and the remaining several thousand taels were all in the villa. Seven thousand eight hundred taels of silver were too eye-catching to carry.When you come out, you can only come to the bank to take care of things, and use manpower or a horse-drawn cart to pull them.

Originally, it was something that could be resolved by letting other people come to inform, but Qin Jun insisted on coming in person, because she also wanted to see what kind of business was going on in Yangzhou, Jiangnan.

I saw everything in the market, dried fish, shrimp, seafood, seafood, mulberry tea oil and rice are also very popular in the city, and many people buy and sell in the city, as well as fruits and vegetables and various gadgets, silk fabrics, gold and silver jewelry, antique pawnshops...there are countless.

Qin Jun was chewing a bunch of candied haws, and together with Ji Si, they watched buskers swallow swords, breathe fire, climb mountains of knives, and break boulders in the downtown area.

Qin Jun was dumbfounded: "!!!"

If Qin Jun was happy watching, Ji Si flicked a few copper coins into the entertainer's reward bowl.

"Look, there's another rice shop!" Qin Jun pointed to the sign on the door - Xu's Grain Store.

Looking from the outside, there are only a few customers in the store, the young man dozed off with his face propped up, and there are all kinds of millet, wheat and flour.After another few hundred meters, it was the Mizhuang branch again.

Qin Jun raised her head, narrowed her eyes slightly, and dragged Ji Si along the street for another 100 meters. At a bustling intersection, she saw Xu and Liu Liangzhuang, and they each opened an oil shop.

Ji Si and Qin Jun walked around and asked, "Planting rice?"

Qin Jun thought for a while, then shook her head, "Yanyun Villa is mostly slopes, even if it is cultivated into terraced fields, it can't compare with Jiangnan's yield per mu."

After shopping all morning, the two found a restaurant to eat in the wing room.

Ji Si tried two mouthfuls of the dish, "It's delicious."

"Well, is there any salt?" Qin Jun immediately picked up the chopsticks and tasted a couple of mouthfuls.

Ji Si: "Not as good as the cook at home."

Qin Jun smiled: "Cooking in the palace, it's easy to lose your head if you don't cook well."

Ji Si smiled and picked chicken legs and fish maw for Qin Jun.

Qin Jun said, "You eat too."

Ji Si insisted on serving Qin Jun's dinner first, and sharing the table with Qin Jun. She mostly ate Qin Jun's leftovers.

Qin Jun: "...Let's go together, or I'll blame you or something."

Ji Si looked up at her with an ambiguous expression: "I just think it's very interesting to feed the princess like this."

Qin Jun: "..."

Ji Si asked: "There are almost no people in the grain store, why is there almost one store in Yangzhou?"

Qin Jun thought for a while, then explained to Ji Si according to her own understanding, "For monopoly..."

Those who sell rice are all big merchants, who contract thousands of hectares of land to grow grain, hire tenants to farm the land, and tenant commoners work in the landlord's house. They have to pay rent for several percent of the harvest every year, and the rest is only enough for self-sufficiency.I bought millet again, but I didn’t dare to sell the rice. If I sold it, I wouldn’t have enough to eat. The excess grain would be taken away, and it would naturally be collected in the hands of big households.

Large grain households control the grain market, collect grain at low prices in good harvest years, transfer the grain, and sell it to other regions.In drought years, the price of food will rise, and local trading will save customs fees and shipping money, so it will not lose money.

Jiangnan is not as barren as Jiangbei. There is plenty of water and fertile flat land. Not only is there no shortage of rice, but the excess rice is in the granary of the family. just asked all the way, but found that the price of food is not cheap.

This is a market that has been saturated for a long time, and it is not easy to intervene. To do business, you need to manage government documents. In this situation, documents are definitely not easy to obtain. In addition, if there is no foundation to fight with the aristocratic clan, the big family can drag down the small ones by lowering prices.

Even if local small landlords or retail investors in Jiangnan want to do food business, they mostly let the big ones take it away to earn food and drink, and there is not much money left.

Qin Jun drank a cup of tea before continuing: "The people in the city want to buy and sell grain and rice, because the people in the city don't farm, and they have to buy food and drink. The grain and rice are too heavy. They should be sent by the rice farm regularly. Bigger onesFor the family, they will buy their own fields and grow some grain to keep them in storage, and most of the time they still have to buy rice."

"Beekeeping?" Ji Si said casually, still feeding Qin Jun's cloth vegetables in a leisurely manner.

Qin Jun chewed, and her voice was vague: "Jiangnan has flowers blooming all year round, and beekeeping is also good, but our family is not in Jiangnan, and there are only trees and grass on the mountain."

Ji Si: "..."

Qin Jun laughed and wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes, knowing that Ji Si's question was just to clear her mind and had no other meaning.

Ji Si: "Have you eaten?"

Qin Jun nodded, she was only half full, but her mouth was spoiled, and she couldn't eat the food from the restaurant outside.

Ji Si said in a more indifferent tone while eating, "making salt is very profitable."

Qin Jun looked at the bowls and chopsticks on the table. Because of the lack of salt in Jiang Prefecture, even the cooking of the palace is tasteless. In order to reduce costs, ordinary inns even skipped salt.

Ji Si brought Qin Jun to a good restaurant, so she was willing to put salt in it.From Capital to Jiang Prefecture, Qin Jun stayed in a hotel all the way and had an estimate of the amount of room and board. When paying the bill, the three dishes and the box cost a tael of silver.

"So expensive?" Qin Jun asked.

The accountant turned over Byakugan and said, "Miss, among the restaurants in Yangzhou, our family is the one most willing to eat salt."

Ji Si frowned: "Don't be rude."

Qin Jun waved her hand to indicate that she was fine, and then asked the shopkeeper, "Is salt so expensive?"

In the hall, the wine guests kept wiping their mouths, chewing on the bacon, and said with gusto, "One tael of salt and one tael of silver, what are you eating here?"

"Hahaha, isn't this food just salt!" The rest of the people kept echoing, and Qin Jun left the inn with a heavy heart.

Ji Si asked, "Want to sell salt?"

Qin Jun put her index finger on her lips, and said in a low voice, "Shhh, we don't have any salt at home, so we keep half of the half-carriage of salt in the palace, and eat the other half by ourselves... If we go to Linhai to pull salt, we don't even have the capital.Moreover, salt is bought and sold by the government, and salt smuggling requires a U-turn, and you may be arrested and sent to prison before you even get the customs card."

Ji Si: "Go to the bank, I'm sure I can inquire about it."

Shengping Bank was opened two streets away from the busy city. Qin Jun was stopped outside the door and was invited in after showing the government sticker.

"Yanyun Villa? Is it Tianmao?" From a distance, a heroic female voice heard her voice before seeing her, and said excitedly, "Isn't it Mama?"

The person who spoke was excited, and came quickly from the atrium, "What's your surname?"

Boy: "The surname is He."

Aunt Liu suddenly felt disappointed: "Why?"

Qin Jun and Ji Si looked at each other.

The author has something to say:

Thanks to the little angels who voted for me or irrigated nutrient solution during 2022-01-12 18:46:06~2022-01-15 18:22:16~

Thanks to the little angels who threw mines: deep in Qiwu 2;

Thanks to the little angels of the irrigation nutrient solution: 20 bottles of peeping leopard in the tube; 10 bottles of TAE TEA; 7 bottles of Gabriella; 2 bottles of Zifeiyu; 1 bottle of Linai;

Thank you very much for your support, I will continue to work hard!