Chapter 9: Chapter 9: The Suffering

With a touch of frustration, Lu Yuan turned his back on the Four Directions Trading House behind him.

Walking on the street with an empty bamboo basket on his back, the pelts he had just sold were all gone. The heavy pressure instantly dissipated, making his steps lighter.

He turned his attention to a shop on the street and, with the five hundred cents he had just received, Lu Yuan bought ten pounds of coarse salt.

Due to its location deep inland and in a mountainous area, Dayu County had high salt prices because bringing in salt from other places was a long journey.

He had once heard from merchants at the tea stand that in prefectures and counties with salt farms along the coast, a pound of salt could be purchased for just over a dozen cents.

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Compared to the fifty cents per pound here, their salt was basically given away for free.

“And yet they sell this coarse salt full of impurities, so full you can even see rocks. With such poor quality and so much fakes mixed in, how dare they charge this much?”

Lu Yuan looked at the coarse salt in the jar. The salt was both black and yellow and looked like large pieces of uneven sand.

It was really hard to imagine that a person who ate this kind of salt year after year wouldn’t suffer health issues.

However, thinking that this was ancient times where the average lifespan was probably only about thirty to forty years.

“With such a short lifespan, even if there were health issues from eating this, a person might die before they actually manifested,” he thought.

Having figured this out, Lu Yuan felt a bit relieved.

However, he had made up his mind that once back home, he would certainly filter these coarse salts again.

Whatever others did with their salt, he himself was an immortal, capable of living as long as heaven itself, and he was not one of those short-lived ordinary people.

If he died of disease caused by eating salt after having eternal life, it would be truly ridiculous.

What he set his mind to, he did.

In order to safeguard his life, Lu Yuan bought some filtering pottery and gauze in the market, as well as some axes, chisels, and hammers for craftsmen along the way.

Although he had been in this world for two months and had lived in the cave in the mountains for quite a while, he had to admit that it was truly unbearable to live in such a draughty, broken cave.

The former owner of his body was a wild child who grew up in the mountains and lived like a savage, eating raw meat and drinking blood, so he might not have felt anything wrong with living such a hard life in the cave.

However, Lu Yuan was a person who had crossed over from modern times.

Although his status before crossing over was merely that of an ordinary person.

So how did the material conditions in the modern era compare with those in ancient times?

Even ordinary people today enjoy a variety of material resources that would not be out of place in ancient times, or at least at the level of a wealthy landowner’s lifestyle.

For a pampered modern man to adapt to life in the wilderness might be bearable for a day or two, but who could stand it for a long time?

“I’m tired of sleeping on a hide mat on the ground every day. I want to sleep on a bed, a soft, cozy bed. I want a tea table, a chair, a cabinet, and all the other amenities that I can get,” Lu Yuan said, laughing as he thought about the life he had been leading these days, unable to stop tears from welling up in his eyes.

He really couldn’t understand what the original Lu was thinking.

Was it really so hard to make a bed to sleep on?

Was spending everyday laying a skin mat next to a fire and sleeping on the ground really so great?

Was he not afraid of catching cold, getting rheumatism, or feeling the chill in his bones?

Although it seemed from the past few days that his body was not affected by sleeping on the ground, and this habit did not seem to have any bad results.

But instinct, both psychologically and physiologically, made it impossible for Lu Yuan to accept this poor life condition.

So, now that he was in the city and had money in his pocket, he certainly wouldn’t deprive himself of anything.

However, the money he had was still a bit short, so he decided to buy tools and make his own furniture, such as beds and chairs. It was impossible to buy everything.

Even if he wanted to buy, he would need someone willing to deliver it.

Dayu Mountain was vast and filled with dangerous wild beasts, and ordinary people would not dare to venture into it.

So instead of spending money on impractical things, it was better to buy tools and do it himself.

Although there might be a shortage of other things in the mountains, there was an inexhaustible supply of wood.

After buying a pile of miscellaneous items, filling more than half of his basket, the two thousand cents Lu Yuan had just earned were almost half spent.

He had five hundred cents left and planned to save it, using it as a reserve fund just as his former self did.

Indeed, his former self had a small vault, the result of his two years as a hunter, amounting to a total of eight silver taels.

It took two years to save eight silver taels.

Thinking of his predecessor’s hard life in order to save money, Lu Yuan felt a pang of sympathy in his heart.

The life of a hunter was too hard.

The former Lu, in order to save money, even lived like a wild man, eating and dressing minimally. This wasn’t because he enjoyed being close to nature or had a high level of spiritual cultivation.

All of this behavior was based on a simple logic – save enough money, then buy a wife.

The occupation of a hunter was too dangerous, and one could be killed by a wild beast in the mountains at any time. Their average lifespan was quite short.

Moreover, because they did not have a registered status, they were unregistered residents, and there were very few channels to get an income.

For those with a proper status, even if they were laborers in the city, they could earn one or two silver taels a month. If they were frugal, they could save five or six taels a year.

But for a hunter, a steady income of half a silver tael a month was already a lot. Even if they were frugal all year round, they could at most save three or four taels.

With these conditions, naturally good families’ daughters would not look at them.

So wanting to find a wife for a hunter was just wishful thinking.

The idea of passing on the family lineage is deeply rooted in the genes of every living being and is an instinct.

Not to mention the influence of culture.

So the original Lu, in order to marry a wife, began preparing two years ago.

Since he couldn’t court a good family’s daughter and he wanted to find a wife, the only way was to buy one.

According to the current market situation, the purchase of a wife would cost at least sixty taels of silver. If it was a little more, over a hundred taels was not impossible.

Given the original saving speed of four taels a year, it would take at least fifteen years to save enough money to buy a wife.

By then, Lu would already be twenty-nine, fast approaching thirty.

In these times of low life expectancy, by the time one reached thirty, they might even be a grandfather already.

“Working hard for a whole lifetime, only to take a wife at the age of becoming a grandfather,” he said.

Remembering the life plan of his original body’s owner, a complex feeling welled up in Lu Yuan’s heart, and he didn’t know how to describe it. In the end, he just sighed and said, “How bitter.”