Chapter 248 You Pretend We Don’t Exist, We Also Pretend You Don’t Exist_1
Ten days later, Wang Youbao sent Yu Daming and Yu Erming to deliver a grain rice huller. Thereafter, An Jing and Xiao Changyi together gave the huller to Shi Xiaolan. Fearing that Shi Xiaolan would refuse it, An Jing did not mention how much the huller truly cost, simply saying it was made of bamboo and loess and wasn’t worth much money.
Shi Xiaolan’s family used a stone mortar to hull rice, which was truly time-consuming, laborious, and exhausting. Therefore, they accepted the huller given by An Jing. However, they could also tell that the huller was a rare item and definitely worth a good deal of money.
An Jing also asked An Fu to take a look at how her family’s Stepping Dehusking Machine was made and told him to make one for his own use. She said that the huller would produce brown rice, which still needed to be polished with the Stepping Dehusking Machine to become white rice. In fact, one could also use a stone mortar, but it was not as fast or as labor-saving as the Stepping Dehusking Machine.
Before that, Wang Youbao had sent someone to buy a large amount of tofu from An Fu, saying that it was An Jing and Xiao Changyi who referred him as a customer. As a result, An Fu and Shi Xiaolan were extremely grateful to An Jing and Xiao Changyi and did not know how to repay them.
Later, An Fu and his parents discussed it and decided to place the huller An Jing had given them in An Village for communal use under the name of An Jing and Xiao Changyi, claiming it was a gift from An Jing to their village. An Fu and his family did not have other intentions; they merely wanted to gain some good reputation for An Jing and Xiao Changyi as a way of repaying them.
In this era, reputation was highly valued, and An Jing and Xiao Changyi had virtually no reputation to speak of, which led them to come up with this idea.
When Shi Xiaolan talked to An Jing about this matter, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
She did not care about reputation at all; whether she had a good reputation mattered little to her. If it had, she would not have fallen out with the people of Jiuping Village in the first place.