"Why are you hiring them? What can they even do? Sir, hire me instead! I'm strong and I can work."
"Only you can work and no one else can? If you wanted to earn money, why didn't you sign up that day? Whoever signed up, I hire. Whether someone can do the work is for me to decide."
Li Yisheng spoke sternly, and the man stammered and dared not say another word.
The factory was built right in their village, yet in the end, it was outsiders who got the benefit.
Not that they could blame anyone—with no money in their pockets, the villagers rarely went to town. How were they supposed to know the new prefect was a good one?
Everyone envied Tieniu and his group. Even the men were bitter about it, kicking themselves for not signing up that day.
Li Yisheng cleared his throat.
"Everyone, don't argue. The factory isn't hiring right now. But in a few days, once the cement is made, we'll be building roads—and we'll hire more people then."
Huh?
Roads?
What roads? Aren't the village roads just fine?
Over in Hezhou, the area was poor—most villages didn't even have ox-carts. The paths leading out of the villages were mostly narrow trails, less than a meter wide, just barely wide enough for a person to walk through with a carrying pole over their shoulder.
For the main road from the village to town, considering that if things developed and villagers bought oxen, ox-carts and horse-carts were generally one to two meters wide. If pedestrians needed to walk alongside, they'd need a width of about two and a half meters.
If it were too narrow, when an ox-cart came through, what were pedestrians supposed to do—fly up into the air or get run over?
All these things had to be considered.
When Li Yisheng first heard the plan, he thought there was no need to make the village roads so wide. But after hearing the reasoning, he felt the planner had been far-sighted and thorough.
That being the case, widening and repairing the roads would require a huge amount of manpower.
When the time came, they'd definitely need to hire more workers.
"When the time comes, I'll send someone to the village to notify everyone."
Li Yisheng seemed patient. Someone asked, "Sir, how many days will the road work take? And will the pay be nine copper coins a day too?"
Li Yisheng looked at the man. "Summer has a lot of rain, so it's hard to set an exact timeline right now. But the pay will be nine copper coins a day. The factory also needs firewood—if anyone has dry firewood at home, you can sell it to us too."
For the first time, everyone felt a little bit of relief in their hearts.
In the last ten days of the seventh lunar month, four areas—Luoshan County, Anping County, Anhe County, and Shunan—all received official notice.
The roads were to be renovated under a unified plan, and all of them would be paved with cement.
Not a single one of them had any idea what cement was, none of them had ever even heard of it.
But the county magistrates didn't dare ask anything, nor did they dare say anything. Since the orders came from above, they had no choice but to carry them out.
The position of Anhe County's magistrate was vacant. Fang Zichen wanted to send Zhang Quan over, but Zhang Quan flatly refused. He was essentially a "military general"—he had no idea how to handle civil official work.
Fang Zichen showed him the planning documents. Zhang Quan stiffened his neck and said, "My lord, I can't understand it even if I look at it, and I can't learn it even if I try."
Fang Zichen: "······"
He really wanted to smack Zhang Quan with a brick.
He turned his head toward Shi Linjie. Shi Linjie let out an "Aiyo," claimed his old leg ailment was flaring up again, said he couldn't possibly go, and that he needed to go lie down in his room for two days.
Fang Zichen couldn't bear to leave Zhao Ger and the two children, so in the end he sent Zhang Jiayao instead, while he personally stayed behind to oversee Anping County.
The roads needed to be widened, which meant either cutting into mountains or taking over farmland.
The mountains belonged to the government, so taking them wasn't a problem. But the farmland belonged to the people—if they took it, they had to compensate, or else the common folk might rebel.
The procedure was the same as when they had dug the canal. Fang Zichen handed this task over to his subordinates, while he himself stayed at home fiddling with fertilizer.
But he had no patience. He could barely work seriously for a moment before Guaizai would call him, and then Fang Zichen didn't want to do anything else. He'd take Guaizai and dash outside to play, gone for the whole day, impossible to find. Nobody knew what they were up to, but every night they'd come back grinning, covered in dirt. Zhao Ger had no choice but to have Uncle Tang go supervise at the factory, have Xiao Feng look after the two children, and personally stay home to keep an eye on Fang Zichen.
He held a wooden stick in his hand. Fang Zichen and Guaizai didn't dare say a word—one scurried to the backyard to work on fertilizer, the other went inside to do his practice sheets, behaving as well as could be.
In the afternoon, Guaizai finished his homework. It was quiet outside. He didn't see Zhao Ger in the yard and didn't hear any sounds, so he thought he had left. He covered his mouth and giggled, then immediately ran to the backyard to find Fang Zichen. He rubbed his face affectionately against his before asking:
"Father, Father, Daddy's not home! Shall we go catch cicadas?"
Fang Zichen put down his work at once and was about to say "Sure!" when Zhao Ger appeared out of nowhere, leaning against the wall watching them.
Fang Zichen quickly sat back down. Guaizai also stood up straight and said nothing, then shuffled over to Zhao Ger and started acting cute.
In a sweet voice, he said, "Daddy, Guaizai..."
Zhao Ger didn't hit him this time. He patted his head, cutting him off, and said earnestly, "Your father is doing serious work. You can't disturb him."
"Ah?" Guaizai turned to look at the pile of things in the backyard. They looked like rocks, but not quite—there were also leaves and plant ash. Fang Zichen had had people dig a big pit and had been pounding on "rocks" every day, that was why Guaizai had assumed he was just playing. Now he realized that his father was actually doing serious work. That meant he must not disturb him.
Guaizai understood. He went inside, gathered up the whole family's dirty clothes, took a basin, and went to the river to wash them himself.
The village women who saw him blinked in disbelief.
The tiny, adorable young master of the prefect's household had actually come to wash clothes. They wondered whether he even knew how to do it.
Of course he knew. The way he scrubbed and rubbed was even more skilled than theirs.
Incredible!
Guaizai huffed and puffed as he scrubbed the clothes. When he saw someone else coming over with a basin, he said, "Auntie, you're here to wash clothes too."
The auntie responded, saying her two grandsons played outside all day and got terribly dirty, so she had to change their clothes every day. They didn't have many clothes, so if she didn't wash them, there'd be nothing to change into.
Guaizai said with the wisdom of an old hand: "Kids are all like that. When they grow up, it'll be better. You just have to work hard for these few years—once they're big, you'll be able to enjoy life."
"······"
This young master was even better at chatting than they were!
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