Chapter 7: Going into the mountains? Are you tired of living?

"Then let's break up," Li Long said. "I won't drag you down, and you can tell people we've broken up and have nothing to do with each other anymore."

Li Long's expression was very calm, which made Wu Shufen feel puzzled and surprised. A look of astonishment appeared on her face; this was so unlike Li Long's personality. Given his temper, shouldn't he be pestering her and begging her not to break up?

What was going on? Could it be that he had found someone new during his trip to Wucheng?

When they met last month after he returned, Wu Shufen remembered that she had only slightly expressed her dissatisfaction with him being away for so long, and Li Long had immediately taken his wages to the commune store to buy her a hair flower to coax her.

Why was he so indifferent this time?

However, Wu Shufen also had her pride. Although she couldn't wrap her head around it, she couldn't very well tell Li Long not to break up in front of Li Jianguo, Li Juan, and Li Qiang. So, suppressing the urge to look at the grouse, she said to Li Long with a serious face

"Then let's break up. Don't go around telling people you're my partner anymore!"

After saying this, she turned and walked away, taking large strides, and soon disappeared behind the house.

"Xiao Long, are you alright?" Li Jianguo looked at Li Long, feeling that his younger brother was a bit strange today.

"I'm fine, Big Brother. We need to put the grouse in the house. Once they thaw, we can pluck them."

"Alright." Li Jianguo didn't press him further and went into the house with Li Long, carrying the grouse.

Li Qiang and Li Juan's ears were frozen bright red, and they were rubbing them vigorously. They didn't feel anything about their uncle breaking up with someone; their eyes were just fixed on the grouse with excitement.

"There really are five of them," Liang Yuemei said, also very happy. The family pig had become a "superstitious pig," making this winter hard to get through. Now that her brother-in-law had caught these grouse, while it wouldn't solve all their problems, at least her son and daughter would be able to eat some meat.

In this day and age, being able to eat a meal of meat was truly a rare thing.

"Yeah, there were actually over a dozen. But after I caught five, the others got spooked," Li Long said. "It was too late, and once they were startled, they were hard to chase."

"Five is plenty," Li Jianguo said. "With snow this deep, grouse aren't easy to catch. Not many families in our brigade have ever eaten them. Let's cook them for lunch today."

"How many should we cook?" Liang Yuemei scooped the pickled vegetables out of the pot. After taking the pot off the stove, she used a warmed-up cornmeal pancake to wipe the inside of the pot clean.

She split the pancake, which was coated with vegetable oil and bits of pickled vegetables, into two halves, giving one to Li Juan and one to Li Qiang. The two children ate while holding the cornmeal crumbs in one hand, though their eyes remained fixed on the grouse.

Li Jianguo looked at Li Long. Li Long was the one who caught the grouse, so he had the final say.

"Let's cook two," Li Long thought for a moment and said. "We'll prepare two and take them to Juan's maternal grandfather's place, and keep the last one in reserve. Brother, Sister-in-law, what do you think?"

Li Jianguo and Liang Yuemei exchanged glances, both seeing the surprise and astonishment in each other's eyes.

Juan's maternal grandfather was Liang Yuemei's father, the family of Li Jianguo's father-in-law. In the past, whenever Li Long had something good, he would never think of the Liang family.

Had he truly grown up?

Connecting this to what Li Long had said to Wu Shufen earlier, Li Jianguo found it all too incredible.

"Let's do that then," he said. "We'll clean them after we eat."

When the meal was served, Li Long waited until Li Jianguo was seated and had picked up his chopsticks before he started eating.

He had been craving these pickled vegetables for a long time.

In his previous life, until his older brother Li Jianguo passed away unexpectedly, he had always eaten at his brother and sister-in-law's house, and winter pickled vegetables were a staple. Even after life became more prosperous, they would still pickle a vat of vegetables every winter.

But after Li Jianguo died because of Li Long, Liang Yuemei viewed Li Long as an enemy and no longer let him eat at their home. Li Long drifted until he was over forty before marrying a woman who was a divorcee with a child.

The two lived together, but although that woman also pickled vegetables, the taste was nowhere near as good as Liang Yuemei's.

Eating the pickled vegetables in big mouthfuls with steamed buns, Li Long felt a mix of emotions.

Living a second life, he was determined to make something of himself. He was also determined to prevent the tragedy of his previous life from repeating!

After the meal, Liang Yuemei boiled water to scald the chicken feathers, while Li Qiang and Li Juan picked out the pretty feathers from the grouse, preparing to collect them to make shuttlecocks—in this day and age, every household had some copper coins, and their main use was to make shuttlecocks.

Watching the two children pick out the pretty feathers, Li Long suddenly remembered his older brother saying that over a decade ago, while he was plowing the fields with the production team's tractor, he had plowed into a temple's coin vault and dug up a huge pile of copper coins, which he and the others sold for several hundred yuan.

That was several hundred yuan in the sixties! At that time, a kilogram of copper was only one yuan, and according to Li Jianguo, there were a lot of coins, though most had already rusted into slag.

When the weather warmed up, he would have to go take a look. Maybe he could find something valuable.

There were no cultural relic protection laws in this era, and these coin vaults that had already been plowed up weren't under protection, so it was worth a look.

But that was a matter for the future.

After all, having lived two lives, the current Li Long had a very broad perspective. There were plenty of treasures in the mountains: velvet antlers, deer horns, deer pizzle, fritillaria, and so on. Not only did state-run pharmacies buy them, but private individuals did too, and the prices were not low.

Moreover, in this era, the core militia underwent training for three to five months every year, and guns were issued directly to them. In the autumn, to protect the harvest, villages and towns near the mountains would organize the militia to go into the mountains for a wild boar hunt. With a gun in hand, wouldn't the good things in the mountains be easy to get?

In his previous life, Li Long had participated in the core militia training in earnest. Before the guns were turned over to the county armed forces department in the nineties, Li Long's shooting scores were among the best in the entire brigade during the annual winter militia competitions.

He wouldn't call himself a sharpshooter, but at the very least, hitting a wild boar was no problem.

His thoughts drifted until Li Jianguo called him to help clean the grouse, bringing him back to reality.

The grouse looked quite large, but after removing the feathers and internal organs, they were basically less than half a kilogram each. The gizzards were to be kept, as were the hearts and livers; these were the main ingredients for stir-fried chicken giblets.

Li Jianguo also specifically peeled out the chicken gizzard lining—grouse had that yellow skin too. After peeling it off, he placed it on the heated wall to dry; once collected and ground into powder, it was a good medicine for children with poor digestion.

The five birds were quickly cleaned. Liang Yuemei took two birds to the cutting board to chop them up. Li Jianguo wrapped two up and put them outside to freeze, planning to take them to the Liang family when he had time, and the last one was hung in the spare room for later.

After cleaning up, Li Long said to Li Jianguo

"Big Brother, I plan to borrow the brigade's horse-drawn cart tomorrow to go into the mountains and haul back some wood."

"Don't go!" Li Jianguo glared at him upon hearing this, very surprised and resistant to Li Long's words. "It's so cold right now, the mountain roads might not even be clear, and you're not familiar with the area. How are you going to go? What can you do if you go? It'll be trouble if you don't haul any wood back and end up getting lost in the mountains!"

Li Long said with confidence

"A colleague of mine at the food factory lives in Qingshuihe Commune. That's already at the edge of the mountains. He came back with me, and this time I'll go find him, and he'll take me into the mountains. I'll leave early and try to make it back the same day—"

Looking at Li Long's determined gaze, Li Jianguo hesitated.