Chapter 14: Unexpected

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation  Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Jiang Yue noticed Xue Xiao’s frustrated face, but she didn’t say anything about it. She went straight to the point and asked calmly, “What are your plans for the future?”

“What?” Xue Yan was having a headache and couldn’t understand her for a moment.

“Why did you stop studying?”

He understood what she meant with that one sentence.

He didn’t plan to hide it and nodded. “I do have a plan.”

He wanted to be an ordinary farmer now, but life would still be very difficult if he just planted crops. He had to consider other problems that may arise as well. Naturally, he had other plans. He wanted to make his family’s life better, but not stand out too much.

“Come with me.” He said.

Jiang Yue nodded, got off the bench, and walked out with Xue Yan.

They went to the kitchen.

Yu Hongyan was sitting under the shed picking beans. When she saw them moving from the central room to another room, she just thought that the two children were playing and didn’t take it to heart.

In Xue Yan’s room, the stove was still there, but it was covered with a wide wooden board, and several boxes were placed on it.

In the boxes were the clothes of the people who lived in the house.

The place where the rice jar was originally placed was next to the wall. A brick bed was built, and it was still possible to squeeze four people on it.

Even his table had found a place. In the middle of the table, the brush, ink, paper, and inkstone were still there. The few books that were originally on the shelf were also placed in the upper left corner of the desk.

There was no bench in the room, but there was a small bench at the door. Xue Yan brought it in and put it beside the desk.

Jiang Yue understood and stood on the small stool, so she could see the situation on the desk better.

Xue Yan sat on the edge of the table and took out several pieces of paper with drawings from a stack of yellow papers on the desk. He spread them out and pushed them in front of Jiang Yue.

“I want to make use of the water there to build a type of equipment. I can use it to hull the rice to earn some money while I plant crops.

“I once read in a book about a water wheel that can turn and hull rice. This is the structure of the water wheel I drew. It mainly requires water to function. Take a look, I think it should work. I would need to build a workshop before that too. Here it is.”

Rice hullers were the tools used by the farmers to peel the sh.e.l.ls of rice into fine rice. They were usually made of willow or bamboo to weave a bottom ring, they would fill it with clay in the middle, and hammer it into hardwood teeth. The upper and lower rings were stacked together.

However, if one relied on human or animal labor to rotate the husks and peel the rice, they would not be able to peel much in a day.

However, if he used water power, he could make the machine rotate day and night, and the efficiency would be much higher.

Jiang Yue was quite surprised by this idea.

She didn’t expect Xue Yan to be that smart. Just by looking at the water wheel, she could tell that much thought had been put into it.

Every part of the design was drawn in great detail.

It was indeed very feasible.

She remembered that during the apocalypse, there was a record of modern times that a grain crop was found in Jinci town, Taiyuan. The diameter of the upper ring was 80 centimeters, the height of 70 centimeters, and the lower ring was 38 centimeters. It could extract 3000 pounds of grain in a day.

The size that Xue Yan drew on the paper was even bigger, and it should be able to get at least 3000 pounds of grain per day.

“It’s possible.” Jiang Yue nodded.”But it’ll take a lot of money to create one. Do you have the funds for that?”

They were building a small workshop. Just the house alone would require at least one room to shelter them from the wind and rain. It shouldn’t be exposed to the air obviously. In any case, it was impossible to not spend a lot on this.

“There is.”

Jiang Yue was surprised for two reasons. In her eyes, he was not a seven-year-old child at all. He seemed to be reliable and smart for someone that young. Secondly, wasn’t this daily poor? Where did he get the funds from?