Chapter 202: Wanting to Study, Wanting to Read
It wasn’t that Old Lady Sun loved wild herb dumplings all that much; she was simply so starved that she would have chewed on rocks if she could get her hands on them.
The reason she decided to live with the Eldest Branch and eat from the Second Branch was because she was terrified. She had been tormented so badly by the Eldest Branch today that if the Second Branch’s Tao-ya hadn’t come along, she would have starved to death.
The Second Branch’s living conditions were even worse, so if she actually moved over there, she feared she would just end up dying at their hands instead.
Old Lady Sun did not believe there were any truly good people in this world.
The current arrangement was perfect. Having both branches take care of her meant they would keep each other in check. The Eldest Branch despised the Second Branch, and the Second Branch loathed the Eldest Branch, so wouldn’t she be the one to profit from the middle?
Old Lady Sun smiled, Sun Zhang-shi was secretly pleased in her heart, and Lin Sanniang’s family of four put on a show of tears while laughing merrily on the inside.
Only Sun Dade, listening to the ward chief ordering him to go to the ward office tomorrow to explain everything—and threat of bringing in an accountant to balance the books so he would have to spit back out every single grain of rice he had embezzled—felt a heartache so severe he nearly choked to death on the spot.
The neighbors of Jingtian Third Alley crowded around Lin Sanniang and her children to escort them out of the ward, expressing immense gratitude.
Many of them even wanted to ask Lin Sanniang to help review and calculate exactly how much rice and grain their own families had lost to Sun Dade’s greed.
Lin Sanniang was inclined to decline, but seeing the impoverished, distressed expressions of these fellow townsfolk, she was reminded of her own experiences of being bullied for so many years.
She gritted her teeth. “I still don’t recognize many characters right now. If you all trust me, wait until I have learned more, and then I will help everyone look over them.”
The neighbors agreed repeatedly, “Good, good! Lady Lin is a kind-hearted person, we trust you!”
……
After bidding farewell to the neighbors, the family of four walked down the quiet street. treading beneath the moonlight, their steps were light and brisk.
When they arrived home, the courtyard was empty. It wasn’t until they entered the house and lit the lamp that Xing-ya suddenly threw herself forward.
“Mother! Did we get our family’s land back?”
“We got it back!” Lin Sanniang pulled the land deed from her sleeve, her heart overflowing with joy.
These twelve mu of land held a completely different meaning for her.
After Sun Dayi passed away, the allotment land that belonged to him had been reclaimed by the government, leaving only these twelve mu of fields that he and Lin Sanniang had worked so hard to save up for.
Later, they were swindled away by Sun Dade. It was only because Eldest Aunt Lin and Escort Master Mu couldn’t bear to watch that they helped Lin Sanniang set up another two mu of land.
In the end, because she was illiterate, she could only rely on Sun Dade, and he had cheated her out of those as well.
Lin Sanniang held Xing-ya close, thinking to herself how foolish she had been in the past. How could she have trusted that kind of person?
But… thinking back to her past self, she could neither read nor manage accounts, and her physical strength was limited. She could only seek reliance from those closest to her.
Her only mistake was failing to see through Sun Dade’s true colors sooner. She had constantly kept in mind that, at the very least, they were Tao-ya, Xing-ya, and Shu-ger’s uncle and grandmother, sharing the same bloodline. In case something happened to her in the future, they might look upon the bond of blood and shield the children.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t see through it; she had simply forced herself to believe in the other party’s character.
But after experiencing so much, Lin Sanniang finally understood that relying on anyone was inferior to relying on oneself.
Rather than hoping for others to take care of Tao-ya, Xing-ya, and the rest, it was better to teach them how to protect themselves and how to survive.
Lin Sanniang immediately turned to look at the three children, who were holding the land deed and legal document, turning them over and over to examine them.
“Tao-ya, Xing-ya, Shu-ger, do you want to study and learn to read?”
“Yes!”
The three children answered in unison.
They had just witnessed with their own eyes how their mother, because she could read, had exposed their deceitful uncle’s black-hearted trap and won the respect of everyone.
This kind of feeling was truly the scene that children admired and yearned for most in their hearts.
Shu-ger shouted at the top of his lungs, “Mother, I want to study!”
Xing-ya hastily followed suit and shouted, but after she finished, she remembered something and asked Lin Sanniang in a small voice, “Mother, can I study and learn to read too?”
There were not many educated people in the Great Liang Dynasty, and educated girls were even fewer.
Tuition fees, books, brushes and ink, lamp oil… everything cost money. She watched her mother head out to the mountain villa to work early every morning, busy the entire day, and unable to rest even after returning home, having to deliver fabric and pick up embroidery pieces from Auntie Hehua, Auntie Yuxiang, and her maternal aunt’s house.
She wanted to study, but she was afraid of truly becoming a burden to her mother, just like her uncle and aunt always said they were.
While Xing-ya was worrying, Tao-ya, who had been to the mountain villa, reacted immediately.
“Mother, did the Villa Mistress Sister teach you how to read?”
Her eyes were bright. Yes, studying cost a fortune in the Great Liang Dynasty, but it was different inside the mountain villa. Everything in the villa had characters printed on it.
Although there were many characters she didn’t recognize, the guests who came and went were all literate—every single one of them could read!
With just one glance, they could state what an item was and ask Tao-ya to bring it to them.
Lin Sanniang tapped Tao-ya between her brows. “Correct, the young lady of the villa taught me to read. However, what she teaches are the characters from the villa’s side, which are a bit different from our characters.”
Saying this, she comforted Xing-ya: “Don’t be afraid, Xing-ya. Mother will definitely make sure you can study and learn to read.”
Lin Sanniang spoke of her plans: “Our family’s land has been recovered now. Once we sell the grain next month, the household will have money. When the time comes, we’ll see if there is a suitable private school and tutor. If it’s too expensive, we can also borrow books to copy down and learn by ourselves.”
If it were in the past, let alone speaking these words, even if Lin Sanniang had merely heard them, she would probably have been skeptical—no one could just teach themselves how to read and write.
But it was different now. She felt the young lady’s teaching method was excellent; those cards had both characters and pictures on them.
With one look at the picture, one would know what the character meant.
By tracing the character once, one would know how to write it.
Compared to passing by the schoolhouse and hearing the tongue-twisting, lengthy texts taught by the tutor, it was much simpler.
Look at her, Lin Sanniang had learned more than twenty characters in just a single afternoon.
Although they were all characters from the villa’s side, there were some that were exactly the same as those in the Great Liang Dynasty.
Thinking of this, Lin Sanniang went to the kitchen to fetch a piece of charcoal and began writing out the characters she had learned today from memory onto the wall.
However, she was cautious and did not write all of them, only inscribing the ones she had seen on the legal document and land deed.
These characters were identical to the ones used in Great Liang.
“One, two, three…”
“Well, field, person, male heir, mouth…”
Lin Sanniang chanted aloud as she wrote, and the three children stared intently, following along with every single word without missing a beat. Their tiny fingers also gestured in the air, mimicking the strokes to learn how to write.
A child’s mind was an incredible thing; clearly, there were times when they couldn’t grasp very simple things, but at other times, they learned things even faster than adults.
Before long, the three little ones had recognized the majority of the characters.
Lin Sanniang was both shocked and delighted. Testing them one by one, she discovered that they could actually write out more than half of them just by tracing.
This was truly going to save them the money needed to hire a tutor!
An idea instantly formed in Lin Sanniang’s mind—she would take the contract and the legal document to the mountain villa and let the young lady look at them too.
……
Meanwhile, on the other side, Jian Xingxia was still fast asleep, waiting for the delivery logistics of the literacy cards and the Traditional Chinese Kangxi Dictionary she had ordered online.
Unbeknownst to her, the progress for Villa Management Quest Five, issued by the system, was constantly ticking upward.
Progress +1, +2, +4, +3, +2…
After all, the system had never specified that the Villa Mistress herself had to be the one physically teaching the literacy of the current world.
