Traveling through the 1970s: The young wife loves to make trouble

Chapter 38 Black Market
In the black market.

A woman who looked to be in her forties, with a cloth wrapped around her head and wearing a worn cotton coat, had just put down her backpack when someone walked up to her.

"Sister-in-law, what's in your backpack?" the visitor asked in a low voice, still looking around.

The woman was Tao Qiuyi in simple disguise.

Looking up and seeing the person coming, Tao Qiuyi smiled in his heart.

An acquaintance!
This is a big buyer.

"Mushrooms and wood ear mushrooms." Tao Qiuyi replied. Yesterday, at the same time and place, the man in the Zhongshan suit bought her a whole wild boar.

"Can I see if it's fresh?" the man asked again.

"Of course." Tao Qiuyi spread the straw on top of the backpack on the ground, and then poured out the mushrooms and fungus in the backpack respectively.

The man squatted down, picked up a mushroom and looked at it, put the mushroom down and went to pick up the wood ear. After doing this several times, he nodded and stood up.

"Looking at the quality, you must have picked them from the mountain yesterday afternoon. They are quite fresh." The man said as he took out two small sacks from the sack he was carrying.

Handing it to Tao Qiuyi, the man said without further ado, "One for mushrooms, one for wood ear mushrooms, fill them up until they are full."

"Okay." Taking the small sack, Tao Qiuyi filled it quickly and efficiently while feeling proud in his heart.

She said that this person must be a big buyer, and sure enough, when she sold the wild boar to him yesterday, she guessed that this person must be a purchasing agent for a restaurant or a supply and marketing cooperative.

Tao Qiuyi recognized the man, but the man did not recognize her.

Last night she came to sell wild boars, wearing Wei Jingyuan's clothes and disguising herself as a man in his thirties. Today she came to sell mushrooms and fungus, and it would be inappropriate to disguise herself as a man again.

So on the way here, she entered the space and disguised herself as a woman in her forties.

She feels that people nowadays are very simple and honest, and the image of a rural woman with an honest face is more reassuring.

After filling the small sacks, the man tied the mouths of the sacks tightly with ropes. After the two sacks were tied up, he asked, "How much is the total?"

"I'm going to sell mushrooms for 50 cents a pound, and black fungus for 3 yuan a pound," Tao Qiuyi replied. "There are about 12 pounds and 2 ounces of mushrooms, so 12 pounds is 6 yuan, and there are about 13 and a half pounds of black fungus, so 4 yuan, a total of 10 yuan."

"You can estimate the weight without weighing it!" The man was surprised by her words.

He suddenly remembered that he bought a wild boar from a rural man in the early hours of yesterday morning. The man estimated the weight of the wild boar without weighing it. He didn't believe it, so he went back and weighed the wild boar, and the weight was exactly the same as what the man said.

Without any deviation.

He was stunned.

"Almost exactly." Tao Qiuyi's answer was quite subtle. In her previous life, she often worked with herbs, and her hands' sensitivity to weight was the result of years of training.

"Do all of you rural people have this ability, or are there only a few individuals who have it?" the man asked casually, taking out two five-yuan bills from his pocket and handing them to Tao Qiuyi.

Are you from the countryside? Upon hearing this, Tao Qiuyi knew that the wild boar he sold to him yesterday morning had been weighed after he returned home.

"I don't know. Thank you, boss. Welcome to come next time." He calmly took the money and put it in the pocket of his old cotton-padded jacket.

The man nodded and walked away with the sack.

Tao Qiuyi looked around and saw that everyone was being cautious and no one was paying attention to her. She used the backpack to block the way and took out some mushrooms and fungus from her space to replenish them. Mushrooms and fungus were rare vegetables at that time, and many people bought them. After the big buyer left, more people came to buy. In just over half an hour, she had sold out all the fungus in her ring space.

There were still some mushrooms left that had not been sold. Tao Qiuyi looked at the sky and decided not to sell them today.

A man walked up to her while she was packing her backpack.

"Big sister, are you still selling your mushrooms?" the visitor asked.

Hearing the voice, Tao Qiuyi looked up at the person who came. She was probably in her fifties, and her figure... in this era when people were generally thin, she was considered plump.

Tao Qiuyi guessed her purpose and asked, "Sister, do you want to buy mushrooms?"

"Yes, I want to buy mushrooms." The elder sister nodded.

She said she wanted to buy, not that she wanted to buy. Tao Qiuyi didn't waste any words and removed the straw covering the backpack to let her elder sister see the mushrooms inside.

"Hey, big sister, your mushrooms are good, they are big and look very fresh. This is the first time I have seen such good mushrooms. They are bigger and better than the mushrooms sold in the supply and marketing cooperatives. They will definitely taste good when stewed into soup." The elder sister reached out and picked up a mushroom, praising it without hesitation.

Tao Qiuyi was speechless. Why would the buyer praise the item? Shouldn't he try to devalue the item to lower the price?

"Yes, the pheasant soup our family made last night with this mushroom was really delicious and nutritious." Tao Qiuyi echoed her elder sister's nonsense.

"Your family can even eat pheasant and mushroom soup!" The eldest sister widened her eyes in surprise.

She just said it casually, but the elder sister still looked surprised. Tao Qiuyi paused and didn't talk about the pheasant soup. Instead, she said it implicitly. "Our village is at the foot of the mountain. When we go up the mountain to collect firewood, we occasionally encounter pheasants. If we are lucky, we can catch them."

Anyway, it depends on luck. Whether it exists or how much it exists is unknown.

"Pheasant soup is nutritious to begin with, and with such good mushrooms like yours, it becomes even more nutritious." The eldest sister was extremely envious.

Tao Qiuyi nodded. "When winter comes, there's less farm work on the team, so people in our village go to the mountains to collect more firewood to take home in preparation for the winter. They also pick up mushrooms and wood ear mushrooms if they see any. Usually, the family eats them themselves. If we're lucky and pick up more than we can finish, we'll sell them to supplement the family income."

If her elder sister hadn't praised her mushrooms, Tao Qiuyi wouldn't have said this to her.

"Yes, yes, that's right. You are closer to the mountain, so it will be easier for you to go up the mountain to pick mushrooms and black fungus than for us. If you don't sell the mushrooms and black fungus you picked, how can we eat mushrooms and drink mushroom soup?" The eldest sister agreed very much.

If she didn't live in the town, she would have wanted to go to the mountains to pick some mushrooms and fungus, and it would have been even better if she could have come across a pheasant.

Thinking that even if she encountered a pheasant, she would not be able to catch it, the eldest sister gave up the idea.

"Sister, how much do you want to buy?" Tao Qiuyi brought the topic back to where it had strayed.

"Big sister, I want to know how much you sell these mushrooms?" The elder sister couldn't let go of the mushrooms.

"I was planning to take it home and eat it myself. If you want to buy all of it, just give me one dollar," said Tao Qiuyi.

The elder sister looked at the mushrooms in the basket and guessed that there were about three or four pounds of mushrooms. She said readily, "Okay, I'll buy them all."

Tao Qiuyi smiled and put all the mushrooms into the cloth bag that her elder sister brought. Her elder sister handed Tao Qiuyi a dollar, moved closer to her, and whispered, "Sister, can you still catch a pheasant?"

Tao Qiuyi took the money and lowered her voice when she heard her elder sister ask this. "Sister, do you still want to buy pheasants?"

Of course she could catch it.

(End of this chapter)