CTF 0018

Mother Xu looked at her daughter in suspicion. “Yinyin, be honest with Mom. Are you seeing someone?” 

“No, absolutely not!” Xu Yin hastily and vigorously waved her hands. “I just don’t want to be known a lazy girl!”

Mother Xu calmed down and asked, “Is it really true? Is everyone really saying that?”

In this day and age, diligence was indeed a highly-valued quality in a wife. If a girl earned a reputation for being ‘lazy’, it’d be difficult for that girl to find a partner. 

Even those who did come knocking would be the bottoms of the barrels.

“Yes, Mom. They all talk behind our backs. Who would dare say it to you and Dad’s face? I only heard it occasionally. Anyway, I don’t want to be known as the lazy girl!”

Xu Yin hugged her mother’s arm and pouted.

“I still want to go to college. If they keep records of these things, even if I do get in, they might not admit me.”

“Huh? Is it that serious?” Mother Xu was a bit shocked. “If you do less housework, will that go into your records?”

Xu Yin nodded solemnly. “Everything goes into your records.”

“Then what should we do? How about this, when I’m out and about, I’ll praise you for being diligent. We can even say that you did certain chores, even though in reality, your sister-in-law is the one who did it.”

“No, that won’t work. We have to be honest. The school places great importance on moral education. They assess it every semester, and it goes into your records. If they catch you lying or cheating, not only will your records look bad, but you might even get expelled.”

“Why do they have to record everything like that?” Mother Xu grumbled, but ultimately stopped trying to get her daughter to stop doing housework.

In truth, she was thinking about finding some easy housework for her daughter, especially those that would be seen by others.

Xu Yin wiped her sweat. Brainwashing someone was also a demanding and exhausting task.

After finishing the dishes, Xu Yin tidied up her room and then took a piece of yellow fabric with white dots to her sister-in-law’s room.

Ever since they started receiving orders every week, Xu Yin had convinced her mother to move the sewing machine into her brother and sister-in-law’s room. She even helped rearrange the furniture to give the sewing machine a dedicated, well-lit spot.

She handed the meticulously designed pattern to her sister-in-law, who, after a few initial questions, could fully understand it and immediately started cutting the fabric.

Xu Yin picked a few old buttons that were the same size as each other from the button bowl. Then, she used a rubber band and a few pieces of relatively bright-coloured rags to make a headpiece, which was very suitable for a young girl.

“Yinyin, you’re actually good at this!”

Xu Yin’s sister-in-law was surprised by how skillful Xu Yin was.

“It’s not that difficult.”

Xu Yin gave her some pointers, and soon, her sister-in-law picked it up.

“It’s indeed not difficult, but it uses up a lot of buttons,” Xu Yin’s sister-in-law commented.

It took six buttons to make a single headpiece.

Xu Yin smiled and said, “Next time, I’ll buy buttons in bulk. If there are small copper buttons or imitation jade buttons available, I can even make brooches.”

“Brooches? Are those like decorative pins for clothing?”

“Something like that.”

After thinking for a moment, Xu Yin’s sister-in-law asked, “Can we sell them as matching accessories with clothes?”

Xu Yin gave her a thumbs up. “Sister-in-law, you’re becoming more like a girlboss these days.”

“A girlboss? What kind of person is that?”

“…”

For the next few days, Xu Yin’s sister-in-law continued making clothes in her room.

Xu Yin had some free time on her hands and got bored. She sat in the courtyard and began tinkering with her bicycle.

Initially, Mother Xu thought she was just cleaning the bicycle. However, she soon realised that Xu Yin was actually disassembling it. 

“…”

Mother Xu couldn’t help commenting, “Yinyin, why are you disassembling a perfectly good bicycle? Didn’t you say you want to visit your grandma? Why don’t you go there today?”

“I’m not going today. I want to tinker with the bicycle a bit more.”

Xu Yin hadn’t been able to sleep last night, so she had decided to clean up her inventory. Then, she noticed that when she unlocked the 

She couldn’t sleep last night, so she simply cleaned up her system inventory. She noticed the electric bicycle there, which she had got when she had unlocked the Intermediate Cycling Skill.

She couldn’t use it freely yet, but that wasn’t stopping her from tinkering with it.

She had the design, tools, as well as materials for its assembly.

Even if she had poor skills with her hands, she could turn on the Scene Simulation feature and practise a few times. In time, practise would make perfect.

Just to be safe, though, she didn’t use the tools and materials that the system had rewarded her with. Instead, she rummaged through the cabinets in her home and gathered all the scrap materials that she could use. 

Around this time, she also made a trip to the county town. 

In order to submit the deliberately worn out design drawings to the state, she racked her brains and made up a reasonable story of how she’d come upon it. 

There used to be a cowshed in the back hill of the village, where an old engineer who had studied abroad lived. Unfortunately, he had poor health and died of illness a few years ago. The villagers divided his belongings, which could be useful to them, among themselves. As for the ones that they found unusable, those were left to dry in the wind and sun.

There was also a lot of gravel in that hill. Villagers would go there to pick gravel when they needed to build houses.

Xu Yin said that she had picked the design up while picking up gravel. She thought that it looked like it could be something useful.

However, the person that she talked to didn’t understand the worth of the design. Not only did he not accept it, he also looked at her like she was crazy, and said, “Have you mistaken that hill for a treasure mountain? Do you think that everything you dig up there is a treasure? You can’t even use this as firewood. How could you think that you could get any reward for this?”

She had to take the design back again.

Still, she gained a lot that day. She spent 50 cents at the waste recycling station and found a lot of useful things, though she still hadn’t found everything she needed to assemble the bicycle. 

She ended up disassembling their family’s radio without her parents’ knowledge. Now, she hade everything she needed!

Three days later——

“Doudou, come here! I’ll take you out for a walk.”

She carried Little Douding onto the back seat of her electric bicycle, which she had modified into something like a small cushioned chair. With a push of her feet, her new electric bicycle began sliding effortlessly down the road.

“Wow! This is so fast!” Little Douding clapped his hands happily. 

Xu Yin pedalled for a while. In truth, she wasn’t using any force at all. She rode down the entire village road in just a few minutes. She could feel the light and the wind on her back. 

Solar electric bicycles were indeed a different kind of breed!

With this, it’d be really easy for her to go to her grandma’s house.

The day before she went back to school to get her report, Xu Yin went to her grandmother’s house carrying a large watermelon from their house.

“Yinyin, you’re here! Come in, come in. It’s such a hot day; you must be really exhausted since you rode here. Why did you bring a watermelon? It must’ve cost a lot. Your uncle also planted some watermelons this year, but they aren’t ripe yet.”

The climate in the mountains was generally cold, and crops there matured slowly. While the watermelons that were grown outside of the mountains during the second half of the year were starting to be sold, the watermelons that were grown in the mountains during the first half of the year would only just have become ripened.

“Oh, I didn’t buy this. My father grew this, actually. Our harvests over the past few years have consistently been good, so he decided to free up some land to plant watermelons in. This isn’t the biggest one that we ahrvested. My mother got worried that the watermelon might fall while I’m on the way, so I brought this one. Otherwise, I would’ve brought the biggest one for Grandma.” 

Grandma Geng had a wide smile on her face. “This one is already very big. It must be almost twenty kilograms, right? it seems that your family’s harvest this year has been really good.”

“That’s right. Grandma, my family will be harvesting rice in a few days. I went to the field to check and the ears of the rice seem heavy. It’s almost twice of what it used to be in the past.”

“Oh, you’re going to harvest in a few days? You can ask your uncle to help,” Li Axiang said. 

Xu Yin nodded.

This was actually why Mother Xu had sent her here.

Their family had few hands to help with farm work and, each year, had to rely on other relatives for help. 

Fortunately, because Xu Yin’s uncle’s fields were located in the mountains, and his crops matured later, too. After work finished up at Xu Yin’s family’s fields, they could then come together immediately to work on her uncle’s fields.