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Published at 12th of June 2024 06:32:43 AM


Chapter 11

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Chapter 11


After getting home, Wen Qian put the yogurt in the fridge and then cooked lunch for herself.

Her roommates were not at home. There was a big window in the kitchen. Wen Qian listened to an audiobook while preparing food, with the sound of cars outside as background noise.

In city life, utilities like water, electricity and gas were very convenient, but you had to pay for them. If they were cut off, you would panic.

Wen Qian's thoughts had drifted to the scenario of her going back to her rural hometown and burning firewood.

As young people moved to the cities to work, those with children also brought their kids to the city for education. The countryside was really left with just the elderly.

As the elderly population gradually declined, the villages became more and more deserted.

When Wen Qian was under 10 years old, most families were still in the village. So there were always issues over the ownership of resources like water and cow dung.

At that time, conditions were poor. The fields and mountains collectively allocated to each household were important sources of income.

If they could be exchanged for money, they did. If not, keeping them for personal use was good too.

Now the deserted mountain villages, even during New Year when people returned home, they stayed in the village for a shorter time. After all, some had made a home in the city.

Those without a home in the city had to work. With a stable job, it was basically impossible to go back home on the 15th day of the 12th lunar month, and return to work on the 15th of the 1st lunar month.

Everyone lived busily.

The fruit trees in the village no longer had children coming to stealthily pick fruit. The fallen leaves on the mountain piled up layer upon layer, and there weren't many people raking them back as fire starter.

The small paths overgrown with weeds were difficult to traverse.

Without human intervention, the woods grew increasingly lush. Places you could previously walk through were now inaccessible.

Similarly, there were more wild chickens, rabbits, weasels and badgers compared to the past. Even wild boars roamed wider.Visjt novelbin(.)com for new updates

These were scenes she saw every year when she went back to check on the house.

After dinner, Wen Qian started working overtime again. The things she had ordered online successively arrived. Wen Qian had to move them from the delivery station back home, then disinfect them. After opening the packages and inspecting the items, she put them away.

Just the sanitary pads took up many boxes to move. In the end, she borrowed a small trolley from the delivery station.

She didn't know if she would have the chance to live an electrified life in future. And there wouldn't be market stalls to cube pork bones for her after a natural disaster.

She had to do these things herself, so she needed tools.

Some non-electric tools that could still save labor.

She ordered 10 cheap but durable cleavers online, 10 pots, totaling 700 yuan.

And manual meat grinders and blenders. Without electricity in future, if she wanted to mince lean meat into filling, she wouldn't have to keep chopping with a knife.

Wen Qian also ordered several small stone grinders and stainless steel hand-cranked grinders online.

She thought of the water boiling tools commonly used in her rural hometown. After an online search, she found the rural wood-burning water buckets for sale that she remembered. They were cylindrical sheet metal buckets with a hollow column in the middle. You put it on the ground and lit a fire with sticks in the column to boil water. Very convenient. Deciding they were practical, she bought 8.

Then on the related item page, Wen Qian saw a new stainless steel heating furnace for rural areas. It was like a mobile stove made of stainless steel, also functioning as a heater.

Placed indoors with a flue to vent smoke, it could burn wood or coal for heating. The metal rings on top could open to put pots for cooking. It could also boil water when not cooking.

There were matching stainless steel round tables, very sturdy and durable. The cheapest were just over 300 yuan each.

It was a multifunctional top choice. So Wen Qian placed an order for 4 furnaces, and also 5 extra linings as replacement. The total came to 2,000 yuan.

She could already envision herself spending winter in a cozy cottage in the countryside.

What a wonderful invention the internet was.

The delivery address she put was for an empty factory building in her company's industrial park.

Wen Qian now realized there was an unrented and unfurnished factory building next to her workplace. It was empty inside, and colleagues occasionally parked their cars in it when it rained.

Now she had a place to receive large deliveries. She could save on warehouse fees.

After that, Wen Qian bought a box of lighters. Considering the quality of cheap lighters, she subsequently bought a lot of fire starters and magnesium strips, as well as a batch of candles.

Having bought these, Wen Qian thought of other things she might need, and went to buy two tents and farm sheet plastic.

She then ordered several cheap fishing rods online. The rods themselves were secondary, there was plenty of bamboo that could substitute at her hometown. She was more focused on buying fishing line, hooks, floats and sinkers.

While she was at it with water related items, Wen Qian simply bought lifejackets and a small inflatable boat together, keeping it under 1,000 yuan.



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