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The incident of the Chen Family from West Village stealing children came to a temporary end.

However, the people of East Village started to look even more unfavorably at those from West Village, even a small sign of friendliness was rare.

A few women were more dramatic, when people weren’t looking, they pried out the laundry stones near old Chen Laoshuan’s house on the west bank of Chuanhe River, expressing their dissatisfaction and contempt.

West Village had become a nest of child thieves, all of them were troublemakers! They didn’t deserve to wash clothes or rinse rice in the same river as the people of East Village!

Meanwhile, the Jiang Family worked day and night to remove all the cotton seeds, and the three Jiang brothers began to pluck the cotton with their longbows.

Surprisingly, this method worked quite well, the plucked cotton was softer and easier to turn into cotton coats and quilts.

Therefore, Madame Jiang and her mother-in-law, Madam Jiang Liu, were busy making new cotton clothes for the family, using delicate ramie fabric. The ramie fabric had been dyed and the colors were very attractive.

In the past, poor people couldn’t afford dyed fabric and mostly just made clothes out of white ramie fabric.

Now that the Jiang family had money, they could afford to dress everyone in clothes with color and patterns.

They also made a dozen or so quilts, ensuring that everyone had warm, fluffy, cotton pads on their beds. It was almost like being treated like an aristocratic family.

After plucking the cotton, Jiang Sanlang and his two brothers went to North Mountain to dig out the kudzu roots that had been untouched for four years.

The roots had grown bigger than a man’s thigh, easily breaking with a hit, they contained a good amount of starch.

They scraped off the skin, cleaned the roots, cut them into small pieces, and crushed them in a stone mortar.

They then soaked these kudzu root fragments in water to draw out the starch, leading to a white sediment the next day.

Once dried, the kudzu powder was easy to store. During leisure time, a little could be dissolved in water, cooked, and served with syrup for a better taste.

Though an ancient peasant food, it wasn’t common because the kudzu root takes three to four years to grow before it can be dug up for its starch. Moreover, most roots yielded very low starch content, making the process time-consuming and inefficient.

However, the kudzu vines could be harvested annually. Like retting hemp, it required a complicated process of peeling and beating.

The woven kudzu fabric was a favorite summer garment material, it was cool and didn’t cling to the body.

For aristocratic families, fine kudzu fabric was a holy grail for cooling-off in summers.

Once the weavers sold their kudzu fabric to the cloth stores, it was often immediately bought by customers.

Yingbao watched her father and others crushing the kudzu roots, soaking and filtering the starch, and found it very interesting.

The process was similar to making tofu, with only one less step of boiling the brine.

According to Shennong’s Classic of Materia Medica, kudzu is sweet in flavor and neutral in nature, it quenches thirst, treats fever, vomiting, various pain and raises yin energy, counteracting all kinds of poisons.

But according to Lady Wen, kudzu is cold in nature and shouldn’t be consumed by people with weak spleens and stomachs, as well as pregnant women and young children.

Mentioning Lady Wen, Yingbao thought of Mr. Wen.

It had been a long time since Yingbao had seen Mr. Wen, which made Lady Wen quite unhappy recently.

With her being responsible for teaching two classes of students, she organized Yingbao and Wen Shu’s class schedules to be in the mornings, assigned homework for them to complete at home in the afternoon, so she could teach the class with Huzi and the others.

However, Lady Wen still purchased Yingbao’s premium golden and Xue’er fungi.

For five kilograms of golden ears, Yingbao received over sixty taels of silver.

With the previous silver ingots, she was indeed a little millionaire now.

Her parents also made a lot this time, most likely over a hundred taels.

Dani and Erni each made more than seven taels of silver, they were overjoyed and urged their eldest cousin to take them shopping in the market.

Yingbao didn’t have much to buy, so she didn’t go to make a fuss at the market. Instead, she devoted herself to studying medical classics at home.

The medical classics, also known as books of prescriptions, are divided into four parts: classics, pulse diagnosis, prescriptions, and medicine.

The scholar says: “Master the ways of the classics, navigate the arts of pulse, understand the workings of prescriptions, recognize the nature of herbs; have all of these four, and you’ll have all the skills needed.”

It implies that mastering these four skills: “classics”, “pulse”, “prescriptions” and “herbs” would qualify someone to become a doctor.

The term “classics” here encompasses the “Inner Canon”, the “Difficult Canon” , the five viscera, acupunctures, gynecology and pediatrics, surgery, health preservation, medicinal recipes, herbal texts, food Canons, and so forth, into 23 categories.

Yingbao has only learned the Inner Canon so far; becoming a doctor is still far from reach.

The Inner Canon, also known as “The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon,” includes

“Plain Questions” and “Spirit Pivot.”

“Plain Questions” is mainly a dialogue between the Yellow Emperor and his teachers, which discusses the deductions of the human body and its organs, as well as the relationships between heaven and man; some of it is abstract. “Spirit Pivot” is a work on acupuncture, emphasizing the practice of meridians and acupuncture.

Yingbao has finished studying Plain Questions, and is currently learning human acupoints and acupuncture techniques from Madame Wen.

However, Madame Wen did not stress the importance of mastering acupuncture, but urged her to have some understanding of it.

Because acupuncture cannot really cure diseases, it can only alleviate some symptoms.

Similar to how shamans perform bloodletting to cure people, it’s just another medical method.

Next, Yingbao will start to learn the Difficult Canon.

The “Difficult Canon”, also known as “Eighty-one Difficult Questions,” focuses on basic theories, while also analyzing various related diseases.

The content includes meridians, viscera, Yin and Yang, the Five Elements, diseases, circadian rhythm, conduit acupoints, acupuncture, etc., covering normal human physiology, anatomy, diseases, diagnosis, and treatment.

Studying medicine strains the mind; many things require rote memorization, causing Yingbao immeasurable anguish.

During her spare time, she would call her two younger brothers to recite texts for her.

The two twin boys were very smart and had already learned to recite the Three Character Classic and Hundred Families Surnames.

Therefore, Yingbao also started teaching them to recognize and write characters.

And encouraged them that whoever learned ten characters first each day, she would take them out to ride a deer and visit the piglets Wen Hengyin was raising.

So, the twins became diligent and competed with each other to learn more and faster.

“Look at what you’re scribbling, every character takes up a whole page, where else can you write?”

Not teaching leads to ignorance, but teaching results in shock.

When Yingbao saw their scrawling handwriting, she almost fainted out of exasperation.

The characters were not only skewed but also written outrageously large.

If not for fearing to dampen her brothers’ enthusiasm for learning, she would like to smack their little claws with a ruler.

Oh well, for the sake of enjoying the benefits when her brothers become officials in the future, she will just have to endure it.

As the days went by, the weather became colder and colder.

The people of the Jiang Family were huddled up at home, enjoying the winter. They even bought a sheep to slaughter and everyone gathered around the fire to roast and heat the mutton.

However, the good times did not last long before the village official was knocking on the gong door-to-door, announcing the commencement of river work, which was essentially providing labour service.

This work was not within the village, but rather according to the direction of the county magistrate, it was allocated to other places.

This might take up to ten or twenty days, or even a month. During this period, if you fell ill or were hungry, no one would take care of you, because the county government did not provide for the labourers’ meals, nor did they care about where the labourers lived.

So Chunniang quickly prepared bedding and dry food for her husband, along with a rain-hat and raincoat, and even sewed a small tent with sheepskin for him.

In case it rained or snowed, her husband and the two brothers would have a place to take shelter.

Their family could pay for labour, but the village official said that for large families like theirs, even if they paid for labourers, at least one of the brothers would have to go serve. Otherwise, it would be difficult to account for later on.

In other words, they could buy two quotas at most, but one must go work.

The three Jiang brothers discussed and decided that they all might as well go. It was not easy for one person to be out there alone, in case something happened, no one would know about it..