The girls were busy cleaning the new house, their enthusiasm running extraordinarily high.
Not wanting to dirty or tear their new clothes, they had changed back into their old ones and bustled about inside and out.
They worked all the way until dusk before Jinyi suddenly remembered that no one had eaten — the master was still hungry.
Only then did she call the others to wash up, change into proper clothes, and start cooking.
In honor of moving into their new home, the normally tight-fisted Jinyi treated herself to a rare moment of generosity.
She made four dishes and a soup, served alongside a pot of snow-white steamed rice, and Zhao Baihui ate with nothing but praise on his lips.
"Don't go yet — let's have a meeting. Our very first family meeting."
"Master, what is a family meeting?"
Like a magician producing a trick, Zhao Baihui pulled out five small notebooks and five ballpoint pens.
On the bottom-right corner of the first notebook, he carefully wrote three characters: Zhao Jinyi.
"Jinyi, this is your notebook and pen. Carry them with you wherever you go from now on."
Jinyi looked completely bewildered, accepting the notebook and pen with the utmost care, as though afraid of breaking them.
"Master, are those characters my name?" Jinyi could not read; she only recognized the simple numerals one through five.
And a handful of common units of measure — chi, dou, shi — that sort of thing.
Even then, she could recognize them but not write them.
"Master…" Jinyi's eyes reddened again. The master was simply too good to them. Sometimes she would think she didn't deserve such kindness.
And then she would remind herself once more that she had come into this world for the sole purpose of caring for the master and repaying his goodness.
Zhao Baihui carefully wrote each of the other three girls' names on their notebooks in turn and handed them over.
"Going forward, I will have a great deal to do — far more than I can handle alone. So you will all need to help."
"Master, rest easy. Jinyi will work hard and take good care of you and this household."
"That's not what I mean. I'm talking about business matters — the sort of things the shopkeepers in town do."
"Shopkeepers? Master, can we really be shopkeepers?" Jinwen asked curiously, her eyes full of longing.
She could already picture it in her mind: herself dressed in a merchant's robes and hat, sitting among a group of bearded old men, holding forth on grand affairs.
"Of course you can."
"But aren't all shopkeepers men?"
"Think bigger! You have to think bigger! Who says women are any less capable than men?"
Jinxiu muttered under her breath, "Everyone says so."
Zhao Baihui shot her a glare. Always undermining him, day after day.
"All right, we'll talk about that another time — we've gotten off track. Let's move to the first item. Jinyi, how much money do we have in the house?"
"Master, we've bought a great many things these past few days. We have four taels of silver left, and three hundred and twenty wen in copper."
"Mm. That's not much. We need to find ways to earn more, and quickly."
"Let me be straight with you — my current channels can reliably bring in five hundred wen a day."
The girls were unsurprised; they handled the daily income and expenses themselves, and a quick calculation told them all they needed to know.
They knew the master was a grain merchant and quite wealthy — at least by their standards.
"That's barely one tael every two days — just over a hundred taels a year. Far too little."
The girls were baffled. A hundred-something taels a year was too little? In all of Qingniu Town, there could scarcely be a handful of people who earned over a hundred taels in a year.
"Which is why I've arranged to have something remarkable brought from my hometown. From now on, we'll have a whole new main line of business."
"Selling liquor. Selling fine liquor."
The girls burst into a flurry of questions, but Zhao Baihui didn't say much, only that the goods would arrive in a few days.
"Next item: how we'll furnish and arrange the house going forward, and what we need to buy. We don't have enough money right now, so we'll need to plan and acquire things little by little."
The girls' enthusiasm surged even higher at this.
"Third item: going forward, I intend to set aside one or two shichen each day to teach you reading, writing, and arithmetic. You'll all be managing things one day, and you can't do that without these skills."
The moment Zhao Baihui finished speaking, the lively room fell silent. The girls stared at him as though they had turned to stone.
Jinwen stammered, "Master, is that true? You're really willing to teach us to read and write?"
In everyone's understanding, learning to read was something grand and lofty.
The cost of raising a scholar was terrifyingly heavy — at the very least, not something a farming family could dream of.
Put it this way: a scholar who did no other work required the labor of several people to sustain.
Even a student's annual schooling fees required the toil of several people to fund.
The books, brushes, paper, and ink-stones a scholar needed — not one of these was within the reach of common folk.
Without a hundred mu of good farmland and an annual income of thirty to fifty taels, it was not even worth contemplating.
An ordinary farming family might have two or three mu of land, barely enough to feed themselves.
A family with ten mu could be called well-off, and saving three to five taels a year would already be remarkable.
Qingniu Town had one school, where an old xiucai taught.
Tuition alone was five taels of silver a year!
A scholar's food, clothing, daily expenses, and writing materials combined came to at least twenty or thirty taels a year.
For ordinary people, that was an astronomical sum — many might not save twenty or thirty taels in an entire lifetime.
So one could understand it this way: a scholar represented an ongoing drain of twenty to thirty taels a year, for an indeterminate number of years.
When, if ever, the investment would break even — not even a ghost could tell you.
To ever recoup that investment through this path, your ancestors' graves would need to be positively blazing with fortune; a mere wisp of auspicious smoke simply wouldn't cut it.
After hearing out the girls' worries and questions, Zhao Baihui smiled and said, "I'm just teaching you some arithmetic and basic reading — enough to get by. It's not like you're planning to sit the imperial examinations."
"All right, there's one last item on the agenda."
"I intend to hire permanent laborers — people to clear wasteland in the surrounding area, or to work around the house."
"We need to think carefully about how many to hire and what wages to pay. We're not exactly flush with money at the moment."
"Master, how many mu of land are you planning to clear?"
"Mm, that's not yet decided. If we start by hiring around twenty people, how much would that cost in wages per day? Men, women, young, old — it doesn't matter."
All he cared about was the headcount. Men, women, young, old — it made no difference. Each person meant ten yuan a day in subsidy anyway.
Jinyi quickly ran the numbers in her head. "An ordinary farming family — five or six people, two or three mu of land. After paying taxes and keeping half the harvest to eat, they might sell what's left for perhaps one tael of silver a year."
"By year's end, there's essentially nothing left over."
"If you cleared some wasteland and charged low taxes, that should attract people to come."
"I don't intend to collect taxes, nor to divide up the land. I plan to grow certain special things on this land."
"I'll simply pay wages. What do you think would be a fair amount?"
Though they didn't quite understand the master's approach, what the master said was to be carried out.
If the master said wages, then wages it was.
Jinwen said, "If they have to buy their own grain, a household would probably spend a little over a tael of silver a year. Buying coarse grain and making flatbreads and porridge with wild vegetables — they should be able to get by."
Jinxiu nodded. "About right. When I was home, wild vegetables made up the bulk of our meals. A family of us got by on about one tael a year."
Using these figures as a reference, Zhao Baihui worked it out: an average household of five or six, with a husband and wife plus one or two half-grown children as the main workers. If a year's expenses came to around fifteen hundred wen, that was roughly a hundred and twenty-five wen a month.
That would just about cover the basics.
Double it to two hundred and fifty wen, and they wouldn't need to pad their meals with wild vegetables.
Two hundred and fifty didn't have a nice ring to it. Three hundred, then.
"Then let's set the wage at three hundred wen per household per month, and start by taking on a few families to see how it goes."
Hiring an entire family for just thirty yuan a month — was there cheaper labor to be found anywhere?
"What? Master? You're really paying that much?"
"Is it a lot? I think it's fair enough."
"Master, can it really be anyone — men, women, young, old? Can I bring my own parents?"
"Jinxiu!" Jinyi snapped. Jinxiu flinched, shrinking into herself, eyes welling with tears. "I'm sorry, Master."
"Don't be afraid, don't be afraid. Jinyi, don't shout at your sister. I need people regardless — what does it matter who they are?"
"Jinxiu, if your family is willing to come, bring them along. The same goes for the rest of you."
Jinxiu, Jinwen, and Jinyuan all burst into tears and dropped to their knees, kowtowing to him.
No sooner had Zhao Baihui pulled one to her feet than another went down again.
"Get up! All of you, get up! If you don't get up, I'll take back what I said about letting your families come!"