I See through Everything

Perhaps a simple, peaceful life was what truly mattered.

In the past, he had cared too much about his career and his Ph.D., which was how his advisor, Du Bolun, had gotten such a hold on him.

The moment he chose to give up on his doctorate, everything changed.

...

The next day, Jiang Miao and Lin Shuya continued to immerse themselves in their research.

Meanwhile, in a mountain village in the central part of Lianhua County, located within the Luoxiao Mountain Area of Gan Province.

Since it was the weekend, Li Hao took the opportunity to return to his hometown from the city.

This was Yanxi Village in Nanling Town.

He looked at the old house, now covered in vines, then brushed off the stone steps under the eaves before sitting down.

He gazed into the distance.

Before him, the mountains rolled like waves.

The trees crested like seafoam.

This was his home.

After sitting for a while, he opened the rusty metal gate of the old house. From a room cluttered with odds and ends and farm tools, he grabbed a straw hat, a hoe, and a sickle.

He rode his electric scooter along the village’s narrow concrete paths.

The sun had already climbed high in the southeastern sky, bathing the land in light and heat.

A mountain breeze still carried the lingering cool of the morning.

Before long, he parked his scooter on the side of a hillside road by the reservoir. The slope above was his family’s leased twenty-five-mu plot of mountain land, planted with navel oranges, oil tea, and peaches.

Just one look at the weeds choking the fruit trees told him the orchard was poorly managed. In truth, many of the surrounding orchards were in the same sorry state. Some trees were so overgrown with weeds and vines that you could barely tell they were fruit trees at all.

Li Hao surveyed his family’s plot. Since his father came back for a month or two each year, the weeds under their trees weren’t too dense, only reaching his calves.

He ignored the misshapen navel oranges and peaches, swinging his sickle to clear away the spiderwebs between the trees as he made his way to the center of the five-mu oil tea grove.

The oil tea trees were already bearing small fruits, but he didn’t feel happy. This year’s extreme weather had resulted in a very poor yield. He mentally calculated that this year, the five-mu grove might not even produce one hundred kilograms of oil tea fruit.

Li Hao had been wavering for the past few days over his old classmate Jiang Miao’s proposal.

As a Lianhua County native, he knew all too well about oil tea. The economic return per mu was terrible, and cultivation was extremely labor-intensive. If it weren’t for the continuous government subsidies over the years, it would never have attracted the interest of farmers or small-time entrepreneurs.

Li Hao didn’t have high hopes for the improved oil tea variety Jiang Miao had mentioned.

After all, he worked for the local Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs; he knew the ins and outs of promoting oil tea like the back of his hand.

Even the best current varieties, under ideal conditions, yielded no more than 50 kilograms of tea seed oil per mu.

Never mind that many people on the market boasted that tea seed oil could sell for over a hundred yuan a kilogram.

In reality, oil pressing companies typically bought the seeds for about 20 yuan per kilogram, which equated to roughly 40 yuan per kilogram of crude tea seed oil.

In other words, under ideal conditions, the oil from one mu of oil tea trees could only be sold for 2,000 yuan.

In a year with frequent extreme weather like this one, a glance at the grove in front of him was telling enough. Five mu would only yield about 100 kilograms of fruit—not even enough for his own family’s use. You couldn’t make a damn cent off that.

This reality had caused many of the oil tea plantations around Lianhua County to fall into a state of semi-abandonment.

Often, you could rent a large oil tea plantation for as little as 30 yuan per mu annually.

It was so cheap because the local villagers knew how hard it was to profit from oil tea. The low price was just a way to lure in some sucker.

Once someone was willing to take over a plot, the larger the area, the more impossible it became for them to manage it alone. They would have to hire locals for weeding, spraying pesticides, fertilizing, watering, pruning, and harvesting. That was where the real money was—for the villagers.

The villagers wanted to earn money from day labor, which was why the rental prices for the plantations were so low.

If Li Hao wanted to, he could easily rent several hundred mu of plantations in the village just by asking.

But it was an unprofitable investment that no local would touch—only an outsider who didn’t know the business would.

And now, he was facing that very choice.

His family had five mu, and by pooling that with some land from relatives, he could scrape together about fifty mu.

It was an awkward size. Too much for one person to manage alone, but not nearly enough to compare with the massive plantations that spanned hundreds or even thousands of mu.

Fifty mu was indeed an awkward scale to work with.

But if he wanted to expand, the hundred-thousand-odd yuan he’d saved over the past few years wouldn’t be enough for a very large area. The rent might be cheap, but labor was the real major expense.

After thinking it over and over, he decided to start with the fifty mu. His savings of over one hundred thousand yuan should be enough to last him two or three years.

For day-to-day management, though, he would have to ask his uncle’s family in the village to keep an eye on things, while he himself would come back to work on weekends. That was the only way to cut down on labor costs.

Even though he’d made up his mind, Li Hao was still filled with uncertainty. ’I hope Ah Miao’s new variety is the real deal,’ he thought. ’Otherwise, all my money is going down the drain.’

He then sent Jiang Miao a message on WeChat, telling him his decision.

However, Jiang Miao was still in the lab and hadn’t brought his phone in, so he didn’t reply right away.

「Not until 11:30 AM.」

Jiang Miao patted his sore, stiff back as he walked out of the lab. After opening his locker, he finally saw the many unread messages on his phone, including the one from Li Hao.