She Only Cares About Cultivation

The issue with Anning will be carefully considered after the children are all on holiday; for now, it is best to keep nurturing it in the space.

The next day, back to the city, she went directly to the new house and placed all the usable furniture from the space into the new home.

These pieces of furniture were initially missing arms or legs, but she later repaired and painted them. They are all very ordinary, old goods that have been refurbished; the goal is usability. After all, in tumultuous times, even the best items can become worthless, so from the beginning, she never intended to use anything overly precious.

The repurposed furniture gave the house a bit more vibrancy; in truth, it was just the three rooms of the hall and the kitchen that gained furniture and cooking utensils. The other rooms remained empty.

An Yi had no intention of renting out the house, because these tenants might likely seize the property, making it hard to evict them, which is the so-called "easy to invite gods, hard to send them away."

Each room has a heated bed, the three rooms of the hall share a connected bed, and the heated bed in the living room is arranged right at the entrance, just like the one in the hometown, with a stove for cooking. However, the stove in the west room is set at the back of the house. Because the stove in the living room alone can’t extend warmth to the west, there’s a stove behind the west room too. If both stoves are fired together, the wall connecting to the living room becomes warm as well; in winter, these three rooms might even be warmer than those at the old home.

However, there is a severe shortage of firewood. Although she picks up firewood whenever she has a chance, it’s still far from enough for the long winter.

To achieve the ideal state, you not only need to chop solid, durable wood, but also store some coal.

During the wartime, she had stored a lot of coal, but she dared not use it too openly; it couldn’t be explained, as using coal inevitably produces cinders, which is obvious evidence. Thus, aside from collecting more firewood, there’s no other way.

Thankfully, compared to the common folk who carry small amounts home bit by bit, she can easily toss the firewood into the space, saving an unknown amount of time and effort.

Last year, with Qiuxia and her sister creating a diversion, they could ensure their family’s stock of firewood for a whole winter wouldn’t be suspected. This year, neither Qiuxia nor she is home, so after school each day, besides transferring firewood to the space, she also has to carry load after load back home herself. Carrying firewood on her back, with An Ran in front, truly exhausts her.

Now with a little baby to take care of, she feels the weight of responsibility on her shoulders has increased even more.

In early November, the temperature was nearing below zero, and each school began to have holidays, preparing for the arrival of the bitter winter.

Qiuxia and Caihua returned home as well, having achieved quite good grades this semester.

The village schools started holidays a week earlier than those in the city, and she spent nearly the entire week living at the county house.

With the temporary teaching over these months, accumulating a monthly income of 430,000 yuan, she briefly became one of the high-income earners.

However, judging by the outcome of the final exams, An Yi’s teaching level is quite excellent. Truly accumulating experience over many lifetimes, she is knowledgeable and well-received by students of any age group.

The result of being a likable teacher is that the children are willing to cooperate and learn, so how could their grades not be good?

For this village school’s top three students in the exams, she rewarded them with pencils and notebooks, treasured gifts that made all the classmates envious.

An Yi made an agreement with everyone that there would be a test every month, and as long as they were in the top three, there would be prizes. Of course, besides learning, there would be other rewards for things like drawing, singing, dancing, and being helpful; as long as they performed well, they could get the gifts they wanted.

This greatly inspired the children’s interest in learning.

With the school holidays, An Yi used the roses and osmanthus she planted in the space to make a lot of ash soap and transparent soap. After all, with daily cooking, you can accumulate a lot of plant ashes. If these are simply thrown away, it’s such a waste. Therefore, she always extracts the alkaline element through soaking, then spreads the leftover ashes on the ground as fertilizer.

She made around a hundred catties of this soap and transparent soap all together. To make the soaps look better, she created many cartoon patterns, and she has to admit, the molds she used made them look really nice.

She sold the ash soap for one thousand per piece, and the transparent soap for two thousand per piece, rounding it up to eight hundred yuan as a whole, with the transparent soap being US$ 300 and the ash soap as five hundred yuan. Then she left An Ran with the two sisters and started cycling around Hei Province.