Chapter 60: The Sixtieth Day of Slacking
On her second day after officially moving into the mountain stronghold, Wen Ying began to put her plan to help Lin Ruge into action.
Long Live the Single Life, Tactic #1: Spend money like water!
Everyone knows that relationships are expensive.
A single person can save a fortune on expenses alone. What’s not to love about that?
“Little brother, what’s the financial situation like in your stronghold?” Wen Ying asked Lin Ruge.
Lin Ruge frowned, thought hard for a moment, and replied, “It should be… pretty good.”
“Pretty good?” Wen Ying pressed. “How good is ‘pretty good’?”
“We’ve never been short on spirit stones,” he answered honestly.
In Ping’an Town, the use of spirit stones as currency for all transactions was already strange. The fact that a mountain stronghold, which was rarely seen out raiding, had no shortage of them was even stranger.
“So where do all your spirit stones come from?” Wen Ying asked.
“Well…” Lin Ruge fell into another round of deep thought. “I haven’t really paid attention… I think they come from Mom and Dad…”
Wen Ying was speechless.
He was a bandit, and he was still a moocher living off his parents.
Not only did he have a heart condition, but he was also a freeloader. Such a man was even more unmarriageable!
But if they weren’t struggling financially, and with the limited goods available in Ping’an Town, trying to be extravagant probably wouldn’t have the desired effect.
“Let me ask you this, then. What is the most precious thing to your parents?” Wen Ying changed her approach.
If squandering money wouldn’t work, then she would squander whatever his parents cared about most.
“The most precious thing… would probably be the bottles and jars on the table by Mom’s bed…” Lin Ruge answered earnestly.
Bottles and jars in a woman’s room… Could they be cosmetics?
“Alright, then. Go get all the bottles and jars from your mother’s room for me. Just tell her that I want them.” Wen Ying narrowed her eyes, a hint of malice in her gaze.
An unbidden shiver went down Lin Ruge’s spine. He hesitated. “But…”
“Little brother, don’t forget your goal,” Wen Ying reminded him with a stern expression.
“Okay,” Lin Ruge said, his resolve hardening. He agreed.
That afternoon, he brought over all the bottles and jars from his mother’s room.
As he handed them to Wen Ying, he passed on a message with a complicated look on his face. “Miss Wen, my mother said… you should use them sparingly.”
Hearing this, Wen Ying couldn’t help but smirk.
Use them sparingly?
Heh. How can they know the joys of being single without first experiencing the harsh reality of having a daughter-in-law?
That one sentence from Lin Ruge’s young mother was all the reassurance Wen Ying needed.
She didn’t reply, simply taking the collection of bottles and jars from him.
Back in her room, Wen Ying picked up a bottle, poured a little out, and rubbed it between her fingers.
There was no color, but after rubbing it, her fingers felt a little… sticky.
Looking closely, the powder was made of tiny granules.
Looking even closer…
Isn’t this just granulated sugar?!
Wen Ying: “…”
What kind of legendary woman was Lin Ruge’s mother, to place a small bottle of white sugar by her bedside and guard it like a precious treasure?!
With the sugar as a precedent, Wen Ying opened the next few bottles.
After a thorough inspection, she confirmed that the other bottles contained, respectively: salt, MSG, soy sauce, cooking oil, and sesame oil.
Was Lin Ruge’s mother using her bedroom as a kitchen? Did she have a whole spice rack set up by her bed?
Not only was keeping seasonings by the bed bizarre, but the very existence of these seasonings was bizarre.
Of course, to Wen Ying, they were just common spices. She had a hefty stockpile of them in the pocket dimension up her sleeve.
But for this world, especially for a seemingly ordinary little town like this, they were highly unusual.
In this era, only crude salt was used for simple flavoring.
The seasonings in Wen Ying’s pocket dimension were all things she had refined herself to make her food taste better.
Even Wang Goudan had been utterly astonished the first time he saw them.
Thinking about it that way… maybe it made some sense that Lin Ruge’s mother would value these things so highly?
But no matter how much sense it made, it didn’t explain why she’d keep them by her bed like a shrine…
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