Chapter 7

Sang Luo led the two children across two hills before finally locating her target for the day: the *Premna microphylla*, also known as the "fairy tree" or "Guanyin greens."

Before setting out, while Shen An was still boiling porridge, Sang Luo had been calculating what food to forage. Weak and starving, she had recovered slightly after eating, but she dared not overexert herself. To conserve her strength, everything had to be planned. Scouring the memories of her predecessor, she recalled this plant, though the image was blurred and fleeting. Finding it again had been no small feat, and since she couldn’t be certain of where the original owner had seen it, she had spent the morning wandering the mountain paths with Shen An and Shen Ning.

Fortunately, heaven rewards the diligent. Just as she was nearing exhaustion, she found it. Sang Luo was delighted, but since she lacked the energy to harvest it herself, she directed the two children, teaching them to pick the lush, thick, vibrant green leaves.

Shen An and Shen Ning were dumbfounded. They were desperately poor, but there were plenty of hills nearby where they could forage for wild vegetables; surely it hadn't come to eating tree leaves? Shen Ning, gentle and closer to Sang Luo, voiced her doubt: "Sister-in-law, can these leaves really be eaten?"

Her question echoed Shen An’s thoughts.

"Of course, and not only can we eat them, we might even be able to trade them for some grain."

What Sang Luo intended to make was known to the older generation as "fairy tofu." If she hadn't lived in the mountains for years in her past life, she wouldn't have known it either, but most people are familiar with its close cousins: grass jelly and bean jelly. The "fairy tofu" resulted in a texture very similar to grass jelly, though the ingredients, color, and taste differed.

Of course, Shen An and Shen Ning didn't know this. When they heard it could be traded for grain, they were even more skeptical. Who would be so foolish as to trade precious grain for mountain leaves?

Sang Luo didn't explain much. In her predecessor's memories, tofu existed in this dynasty, but the technique was held by the servants of wealthy, powerful families. A girl born into a minor branch of a clan like the original owner would only have heard of it, never tasted it—let alone the common folk. Most commoners likely hadn't even heard of it.

Sang Luo couldn't help but sigh; even in a different time and space, class privilege remained the same. The Great Qian Dynasty did not have a large population—it couldn't compare to her homeland in the future. A hundred households made a *li*, and five hundred made a *xiang*. A village of ten *li* totaled only about twenty households; it took several villages just to form one *li*.

The population density in her predecessor's memories was low, and the population of the entire dynasty was not high. Constant wars, natural disasters, disease, and forced labor all took their toll. However, the majority of the land in Ten-Li Village was not owned by these twenty households, but concentrated in the hands of wealthy landowners. Aside from wasteland and mountains, ordinary people had little good land of their own and were forced to rent from the wealthy. This applied to land, as well as to the transmission of knowledge and technology; everything was controlled by the upper classes.

Therefore, what she was making was truly a novelty here. She didn't dream of getting rich by selling the recipe—the local market didn't have such wealthy patrons, and even if it did, she wouldn't happen to run into them, nor would they necessarily be interested. In Sang Luo's view, the most realistic plan was to keep the method secret in the short term, avoid unwanted attention, and earn a few copper coins to buy rice so she and the two children could survive.

Though puzzled, Shen An and Shen Ning found it easy to snap off the branches. Working together, they soon had two large bundles. Back home, they picked the leaves and washed them. The branches weren't discarded either; they were left outside to dry, as the ash from these branches was the preferred ingredient for making fairy tofu. For now, however, they had no dried branches, so ordinary wood ash would suffice. They didn't need to look far—the simple stove contained ash from the rapeseed stalks they had burned to boil the morning porridge, which was perfectly suitable.

Sang Luo scooped a handful of ash into a bowl, added cold boiled water from the clay pot, stirred, and let it settle. Shen An and Shen Ning watched without comment. Their sister-in-law had first claimed leaves were edible, and now she was messing around with stove ash... The siblings watched, feeling both bewildered and strangely calm, even curious about what she would come up with.

Shen An felt his own reaction was absurd. He felt his sister-in-law had been different today. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but he attributed it to the illness of the past two days, especially the long period of unconsciousness yesterday. In fact, had it not been for the clever way she caught fish earlier, he might have suspected that her illness had damaged her brain. He quickly pushed the thought aside, feeling it was disrespectful.

With the wood ash water settling, it was time to process the "fairy leaves." The problem was: there was no cheesecloth. Sang Luo sighed internally, her composure honed by years of illness in her past life. They were simply too poor!

She thought for a long time, then washed the only handkerchief in her predecessor's bundle, boiled it in the clay pot for disinfection, and used it as a makeshift filter. While the cloth was being disinfected, she had Shen An and Shen Ning wash the leaves. Then, the two siblings watched as she blanched the leaves, crushed them, and filtered them into two bowls of vibrant green juice.

Yes, two bowls. Aside from the one with the ash water, the other two bowls—one containing the bit of porridge Shen An had saved and another with the maltose left by Old Lady Chen—had been cleared. The porridge was given to the children to share, and the maltose had been set aside on a clean bamboo slip during breakfast.

They were so poor; they had only one clay pot and three bowls.

Shen An and Shen Ning felt a pang of heartache as they shared the small portion of rice porridge. Who would waste food like this? In these times, people only ate twice a day. Look at their house: sugar and salt water in the middle of the night, thick white porridge at dawn, and now another meal mid-morning. It was unheard of. Although the portion was pitifully small, they had been eating like this for months and didn't realize anything was wrong. In the end, most of the porridge was fed by Shen Ning to the ailing Sang Luo, though that was beside the point.

Once the bowl was washed, Sang Luo filtered the remaining juice from the clay pot into the second bowl. Both large bowls were seventy percent full.

Shen Ning looked at the cheerful green liquid and tilted her head. "Are we just going to drink this?"

"Of course not." Sang Luo smiled. Under the wide-eyed gaze of the siblings, she stirred the ash water into the green juice. She poured in the right amount, stirring continuously in one direction until she felt a change in the resistance, then stopped. She repeated the process for the second bowl.

Shen An and Shen Ning were stunned. They hadn't believed the leaf juice was drinkable, but now that ash water was added, it was surely ruined...

Amused by their expressions, Sang Luo laughed. "It's done. Wait an hour and you'll see."

Seeing the worried look on their faces, she smiled and said, "Don't just stand there. Let's go do something else."

The siblings' attention was quickly diverted. "Do what?"

Sang Luo picked up a small sickle from the corner—the only iron tool among the farm implements the Shen family had given to the eldest branch when they divided the household. "We're going to cut some wild hemp."