Transmigrated as A Farm Girl Making Her Family Rich

Chapter 50: Chapter 50 Mother’s Good Girl

“What are you two doing up instead of sleeping? Of course, Mother is here to look for something,” Mrs. Lai said, eyeing her two daughters defensively, feeling as though her daughters were rivals vying with her for possessions.

“Mother, I know your intentions well. We came out to search for things too,” Ye Shuzhen spoke out her true thoughts.

“You mustn’t compete with Mother. I need to sell the portrait to get some money.”

Mrs. Lai and her two daughters were scrambling to search, pushing and shoving each other. The two daughters almost caused their mother to fall over.

“Ah! Such good daughters you are! Do you wish to push your old mother down?”

Mrs. Lai glared at her two daughters, showing no concern for collisions while struggling with them for the upper hand.

...

“Where has the item been placed? Could it be that elder brother has taken it back to his room?”

Ye Shuzhi paid no mind to her mother’s scolding, muttering to herself as she headed towards elder brother’s room.

“Hmph, I’m sure elder brother has taken it back to his room. Let’s go search there.”

The two sisters hurried, taking quick steps until they reached the door to Hongji’s room, where he was about to go to sleep, and began knocking impatiently, “Bang Bang Bang!”

“Elder Brother, open the door.”

Hongji had just blown out the oil lamp and, hearing his sisters banging on the door so forcefully, he reached in the dark for a match to relight the lamp.

Ye Shiqi, the child, was prone to sleepiness. With her father working overtime so late, her elder sisters had already joined her, sleeping in the room.

October had brought cooler weather, and they were covered with a thin cotton quilt. This quilt wasn’t very warm, but it felt so comfortable to sleep in on a slightly chilly night.

The loud noise of banging on the door awakened Ye Shiqi. Hearing a slight movement in the room, she sensed it was her father and realized that her other sisters had not been woken.

Although Ye Shiqi was just a small child, her eyes were bright. She smelled a faint scent of paint. By the moonlight filtering through the gap under the door from outside, she saw two wooden objects in the room—her father’s carvings from today’s work.

After glancing at her two aunts, who were still vigorously knocking on the door, she quickly used the incantation “store” before her father could light the lamp. She stored the toy dolls into her space, then pretended to be asleep again.

She heard her father light the oil lamp and then get up to open the door, with a creak as he did so.

“Second Sister, Third Sister, why are you knocking on the door so late at night? You could disturb others in the dead of night.”

Hongji, the honest man, hadn’t realized for a moment that his two sisters were still fixated on the toy he had revealed earlier.

“Elder brother, where is the toy you made today?” Ye Shuzhi pushed past her brother, entering first and began scanning the room with her eyes.

“Elder brother, where did you put the toy?” Ye Shuzhen came in a step behind Second Sister. As she began to look around and talk, she saw no sign of the toy either.

“The toy, I put it over there…” Hongji pointed towards the table but faltered when he saw that there was nothing on it and looked puzzlingly at the table.

It somewhat felt like a dream. The lamp he had just extinguished seemed unlikely to have been taken away by his sisters, for it would be in their hands, and he would have seen it.

If it were his children who had taken the wooden toy from the table, they were asleep.

Furthermore, before he extinguished the lamp, he had seen his children sleeping in bed, and as he was sleeping outside, he would know if the children had gotten up.

Hongji’s puzzling question remained unanswered. The wooden toy had vanished suddenly, and it didn’t seem to have fallen to the floor. His room was small enough that he could see everything at a glance, and there was nothing on the floor.

“Brother, did you put it away? Right now, I can still smell paint in this room,” Ye Shuzhi said, after glancing under the bed. Her eyes then fell on her brother’s wooden chest for clothes.

“Brother, did you hide them? In this wooden box, right?” Ye Shuzhen also suspected; she and her sister opened the unlocked box and kept rummaging through the clothes inside.

Hongji, though confused, found his sisters’ actions quite offensive, as he and his wife never kept anything valuable in the house.

When his wife had just married into the family, he had seen silver bracelets on her wrists, but he hadn’t seen those silver bracelets in years, not even when taking clothes out of the wooden box.

This box originally had a lock, but one day it was pried open. As for whether anything was stolen?

He and his wife both knew very well that it must have been someone in the family who did it. Out of shame, they remained silent and didn’t speak out about it, nor did they question who had taken the things.

Sometimes, Hongji felt ashamed facing his wife, who was so hard-working yet treated poorly by his family; he would blame himself but was helpless to change his family members.

“Second Sister, Third Sister, what are you doing? This behavior is like that of robbers. It’s just wooden toys; is it necessary to turn everything upside down like this?”

“Elder Brother, you just said they are only wooden toys, so why don’t you give these two toys to us sisters.”

Ye Shuzhi couldn’t bear not finding them and felt a surge of anger in her heart after being spoken to like this by her elder brother.

“Hmph, I knew it, Elder Brother is the most biased. You must have hidden the wooden toys under the quilt.”

Ye Shuzhen rushed to the bedside, picked up the quilt covering the dolls, and the dolls, who had been fast asleep, suddenly had their quilt thrown off, their eyes closed, flailing their hands about.

“Third Sister, that’s too much. The kids were sleeping well; why did you disturb them? What if they catch a cold?”

Hongji said, coming over to snatch the quilt from Ye Shuzhen’s hands.

“Psh, how can they keep sleeping with all this noise? They’re like several pigs.”

Ye Shuzhen disdainfully threw the quilt back. She looked down on the tattered quilt patched many times, feeling smug at heart because the quilts on her and her Second Sister’s bed were new cotton quilts made by her elder sister-in-law’s family when she first married into their family.

The quilts on her and Second Sister’s bed, as well as some of the dowry items from their elder sister, were all taken from their elder sister-in-law’s belongings.

At first, the elder sister-in-law had resisted, and the brother had blamed, but they were suppressed by the combined force of several sisters and their mother.

Hongji covered the children properly with the quilt, took one sister by the hand, and led them both out the door.

“Elder Brother, you’re being rough, I won’t leave…”

“Elder Brother, you’re hurting me. I’ll tell father and mother about my wooden doll; I won’t leave…”

Hongji took Second Sister and Third Sister out of the house and then looked at them sternly and said:

“If you dare to make noise here again, I’ll put you both to sleep in the pigpen,” Hongji said angrily as he closed the door.

“Bang bang bang” @@novelbin@@

Ye Shuzhi kicked the door twice after it was closed, and Ye Shuzhen followed with two more kicks.

“Why are you making noise so late at night? If you’re not sleepy, is it because you’re too comfortable living at home? Tomorrow, go out to the fields with the kids to work.”

From the parents’ room, Hongji’s father’s scolding voice emerged. He didn’t agree with his son’s indulgence of the children and, persuaded by Mrs. Lai, thought of selling the toys to earn money, feeling that the children playing with valuable toys was a waste.

While he supported his daughters’ search, he didn’t express it openly, realizing that his son had recently been quite critical of them. As a father, he was somewhat concerned about his son’s opinions.

Between his daughters and son, Hongji’s father leaned a bit toward his son because the things the son received would always remain in the family, while what the daughters got might one day benefit someone else’s field.