She Only Cares About Cultivation

As for the taro below, she usually grinds it into paste, then uses the starch after sedimentation to make delicious food. The filtered residue can be steamed directly or fed to chickens and ducks, so it’s never wasted.

In situations like these, where she takes any spare moment to make reserve food, An Yi does it every day. The one thing her family never lacks is salt, and it’s the salt she makes herself. By the time this salt is consumed, she will likely be eighty years old.

After all, the amount of salt people intake each day is limited.

The salty water from washing pickled vegetables is also kept to soak other pickled vegetables—it isn’t thrown away. After all, after recycling its use, the livestock in the space can use it. Animals, like humans, can’t live without salt; they just ingest it differently.

Breakfast was taro porridge, sticky and very filling. She didn’t even eat eggs. The little one had a jug of milk in the middle of the night and some taro mash in the morning, and didn’t seem very hungry, so she didn’t force her to eat. However, she did place the taro porridge with just the right temperature in the space for when the little one got hungry at school.

Afterwards, she mixed chopped crab shells with taro residue to make a meal for their family nuts, adding husk skins, making it quite thick.

"You must finish this; don’t be picky with food. If I catch you wasting food, you’ll be left hungry. I won’t leave you food for tomorrow, try it if you don’t believe me!"

Dogs, as a species, are particularly picky eaters. They gnaw on bones often and may not see these as appeasing. To prevent nurturing this bad habit, she typically gives a good meal followed by successive unappealing ones. If the dog doesn’t eat, then it goes hungry; she doesn’t coddle it. If food spoils and becomes inedible, that’s the dog’s own responsibility.

Of course, to entice the dog to eat, she went out of her way to add spiritual spring water. Animals adore this water, so there’s a high probability it will finish its food.

Then, An Yi took her child to school but halfway there, felt uncomfortable beneath, a sinking feeling. Upon counting the days, she frowned.

She looked around, luck favored her with many groves in the Northeast. She snuck into one, entered the space, laid the child down on the bed, and found a secluded spot to change with soft toilet paper from Japan. Of course, there were sanitary pads too, but she typically only used them when the flow was heavy, using toilet paper as a liner when less.

These years, she managed this way. For comfort, surely not as good as in later generations, yet better than using plant ashes. In the first few years, she indeed used plant ashes sewn into long cloth strips. Though single-use, she always felt it was unclean, albeit psychological—because, despite thousands of years, women managed this way unless from notably wealthy families, who used cotton.

In the coming years, life will get increasingly difficult. Except for married people with children, most families will struggle to buy cotton.

Even if she could plant it in the space, she didn’t consider wasting it.

After handling personal hygiene, she quietly emerged from the grove, with students on the road already enthusiastically greeting her: "Teacher An."

An Yi joined the students in heading to school. During these times, schools didn’t have many rules; they focused primarily on production. How a teacher teaches was up to them, and meetings were scarce. As long as it wasn’t their class, as long as they stayed on the school grounds, generally the school wouldn’t interfere with what they did.

After all, every term end there’s an exam across the county. If students don’t perform well, it’s the teacher’s fault, and the school would reconfigure based on the results.

Suitable ones stay, the unsuitable are eliminated.

So outwardly there seems to be no pressure, but truly, only lazy people think being a teacher is easy.

An Yi minded only her own tasks; of course, if other teachers sought her advice, she was more than willing to share her knowledge.

After all, her abilities couldn’t be taken away, and there was no harm in sharing some methods and tips.

After about three days of school, Saturday arrived. Classes end at noon, with every class holding a meeting in the afternoon, helping children finish homework; then it was announced to enjoy the weekend.

Through these days of school life, children have also adapted, finishing cleaning with high spirits and running home happily.

"Mr. Zhang, why aren’t you home yet?"