Chapter 210

“Dad! Mom! Haven’t you been nagging about wanting a grandson? I brought your grandsons back to you! Mom, why are you hitting me?”

Wang Huaizhi shouted as he ran, feeling genuinely wronged.

His parents wanted grandsons, and he and his wife had been obedient. They were told to have grandsons, so they had them, five in total. He never expected that instead of praising them, his parents would actually try to beat him.

What exactly had he done wrong?

Grandma Wang was getting on in years, after all. After chasing him for a while without catching up, she leaned against her large broom, panting, and began to curse at her son’s retreating back.

“We told you to give us a grandson, we didn’t tell you to pop out five of them all at once!”

“Are you two a pair of brood hens? Five in one go?!”

“It’s one thing to have them, but you don’t even raise them! You leave me and your father to work ourselves to death at home serving three little ones. I told your wife already – stop having them! Stop having them! And yet you keep going? Two at once this time?”

“I’m telling you, Wang Huaizhi, from now on, whoever births them raises them! You two just dump them in the countryside the moment they’re born and go off to work and earn money for yourselves. You don’t send a single cent home, and you expect us two old folks to raise your kids? I suppose you’re counting on your older sisters to subsidize us two old things, aren’t you?”

“Your big sister and second sister are both married. They even used their bride prices to build you a house and get you a wife. They’ve done more than enough for a younger brother like you. You’re still not satisfied? Wang Huaizhi, you heartless brat! You little beast, may heaven strike you down!”

“They have their own in-laws to answer to now. You still want them to support your parents and raise your sons? Are you even going to let your sisters live their own lives?”

In all honesty, Grandma Wang and her husband weren’t particularly biased parents. Although they had used the bride prices from their two daughters to marry a wife for their son, the old couple truly cared for their daughters. They wouldn’t even eat the eggs their own chickens laid, saving them all so that when their daughters visited, they could send them back with a little something, sparing them from being looked down upon by their in-laws.

But their son and daughter-in-law would give birth to a child and dump it in the countryside, caring only about the birthing and not the raising. Grandma Wang and her husband loved their grandsons, yet they couldn’t bring themselves to siphon resources from their daughters’ families. They could only grit their teeth and work themselves to the bone to earn money.

In the countryside, there is no such thing as retirement for the elderly. As long as they can still move, it is common to see people in their seventies or eighties farming, raising pigs, and looking after grandchildren.

However, to end up like Wang Huaizhi’s father – working at such an advanced age to support three grandsons, no, five now – was extremely rare.

Wang Huaizhi was an oddity, but his wife was even more of one. She treated pregnancy and childbirth like a vacation. She didn’t want to work, so she wished she could be pregnant every year. Being pregnant gave her an excuse to lie around in their rented room playing on her phone while waiting to give birth. After all, once the baby was born, they just dumped it in the countryside. She didn’t have to raise it, so what was there to fear?

Seeing this, the audience collectively lost their minds.

What kind of bizarre mental logic did Wang Huaizhi and his wife have?

Sure, Grandma Wang and her husband could still farm and raise pigs now to keep three grandsons fed, but what about later? There would come a time when the two elders couldn’t do farm work anymore. At that point, with the elderly above them and five sons below them, wouldn’t the couple be worked to death?

“How could they be worked to death? People like this don’t consider the reality of raising children when they’re having them. As long as they don’t starve, it’s fine,” Wei Sheng sneered. “Besides, by the time Grandma Wang and her husband can’t work anymore, the oldest two grandsons will be about ready for middle school. When there’s no one left to farm the land, those two grandsons will just drop out of school to come home and earn money to support their grandparents and their younger brothers.”

Wei Sheng knew exactly how people like this calculated!

Their entire lives were spent either leeching off the old or leeching off the young. People might think they had children to carry on the family line or because they liked kids. That was a huge mistake.

To these people, children were equivalent to a living insurance policy. The more they had, the more would survive, and the more children there would be to support them in their old age.

If they had seven or eight children in one go, as long as one or two turned out to be filial, their later years would be secure. If they happened to produce one who was good at studying and became successful, they wouldn’t have to do anything at all, just wait for their children to change the family’s destiny.

As for whether they could afford to raise so many?

One could only say that the national poverty alleviation policies made these people, who spent their lives slacking off, feel completely emboldened.

After all, the state wouldn’t just stand by and watch such young children starve to death, would it? When the time came, they would get the family on welfare, the village would provide occasional relief, and the children could apply for poverty subsidies for school. If the state would help pay to raise the kids, why should they work themselves to death to earn money?

Hearing this, the young contestants were all incredibly angry.

They all came from rural backgrounds, and such situations weren’t uncommon in their villages. Many people would give birth and dump the child with the grandparents. The better ones would come back every Lunar New Year to see the kids and leave a few thousand yuan for their upbringing.

But if they encountered someone like Wang Huaizhi, who didn’t give a single cent, it was a disaster. Leeching off his parents was one thing, but forcing them to pay to raise his own children was truly hitting a new low.

Li Erni wore a bitter smile, because her parents were much like Wang Huaizhi. They had slacked off during the years they were young enough to work. While other parents in the village went to the city to earn money and came back to build new houses, buy motorcycles, TVs, refrigerators, and washing machines, her family lived in an old house made of mud bricks until her eldest sister got married. In this day and age, when city people had even stopped buying televisions, her family was still using a black-and-white set.

Li Erni’s parents had relied on her grandparents to get married, and they had relied on them to raise all the children. The little money the two of them earned wasn’t even enough for their own spending. Then, when the daughters grew up, they had the gall to treat them like livestock, wanting to sell them off to improve the family’s life. It was utterly shameless!

Compared to Li Erni, Yan Xingxing was much luckier. Her family was poor, but there wasn’t a single toxic person among them. Her grandparents adored them; even at their advanced age, they still helped others plant and pick tea leaves to earn money to help their son pay the mortgage and cover their grandchildren’s tuition.

Yan Xingxing’s parents were both hardworking and filial. Their reliance on the older generation was a forced, “passive” kind of dependency. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could give birth to children and not raise them, instead forcing their elderly parents to earn money to raise the kids for them.

Wen Zhuangcai thought of his own biased grandmother and then of his parents. His expression darkened as he said, “I think we shouldn’t just bring the herb cultivation technology to the village. We have to make those lazy men and women in the village work too. If they don’t work, their families shouldn’t be allowed to join the cooperative!”

With his own bizarre grandmother as a template, Wen Zhuangcai could guess with his toes that once the cooperative was established, there would definitely be a small group of people who wouldn’t want to work themselves. They would just let their aging fathers and mothers join the cooperative while they waited for the village to distribute the money. Wouldn’t that just be doing a favor for those bad people?

If those who slacked off got the same money as those who worked hard in the fields, who in the village would be willing to work in the future?

Not bad, kid! This level of awareness was worth nurturing. If he could pass the civil service exam after graduating from university, he might actually become a good grassroots official who did real work for the people.

Wei Sheng nodded secretly, making a mental note of Wen Zhuangcai’s name.

This was another talent worth cultivating!

Although they were forced to witness a family farce, the four contestants ended up staying at Grandma Wang’s house because they couldn’t find any other suitable spare rooms in the village.

The youngsters had initially thought Grandma Wang was a fierce and shrewish old lady, but after moving in, they discovered that Grandma Wang and Grandpa Wang were actually very kind and gentle elders. They usually lived frugally themselves, but when guests came to their home, they brought out the best things to entertain them.

During dinner, hearing that Wen Zhuangcai and the other three were going into the mountains to gather herbs, Grandma Wang immediately pointed at Grandpa Wang. “Why hire a guide? It’s a waste of money! Let my old man take you. There isn’t a single spot among these dozen or so mountain peaks that my old man hasn’t been to.”

Poor Grandpa Wang! His son and daughter-in-law only cared about giving birth and not about raising the children. To support his three grandsons, the old man had to go into the mountains during the agricultural off-season to gather herbs, pick wild vegetables, and raid wild beehives… In short, as long as it could make money, Grandpa Wang was willing to do it. Otherwise, where would the money come from to raise three grandsons?

“I knew these old folks must be NPCs arranged by the production crew!” Seeing this, the audience suddenly understood.

Sure enough, with Grandpa Wang, a local herb gatherer, leading the way, Wen Zhuangcai’s group successfully harvested wild Dendrobium^[1] and Panax notoginseng^[2] that met the required specifications in less than three days. They also collected more than twenty specimens of common local Traditional Chinese Medicinal Herbs, completing the task two days ahead of schedule.

At the same time, footage of the other groups was released one after another. Seeing the group of teenagers shuttling through the beautiful yet rugged mountain wilderness, struggling to find the specific herbs designated by the production crew among a pile of weeds and shrubs that looked almost identical, netizens shouted that it was miraculous.

In the past, everyone only knew that Y Province was a famous tourism province. They didn’t expect there to be so many miraculous Traditional Chinese Medicinal Herbs here, some with names they had never even heard of!

Moreover, like Li Erni’s group, many groups had local guides who often went into the mountains to gather herbs themselves. These guides knew exactly what herbs the area produced and which season each herb could be harvested, knowing them like the back of their hands. The production crew also constantly interspersed the process of searching for herbs with “Mentor” science popularization mini-classes, making netizens exclaim, “Holy cow.”

If they didn’t know better, they would have thought they were taking a correspondence course from some university of Chinese medicine.

Furthermore, those giving them lessons were all renowned heavyweights in the industry.

To put it this way, when other schools taught classes, they used textbooks. For every “Mentor Mini-Class” in “The Story of a Hundred Herbs,” those qualified to teach were basically the chief editors of those textbooks.

What? The teacher didn’t bring a book to class today? What’s the panic? I’m the chief editor of this book; do you think I don’t know what’s written inside?

The originally dry and dull scientific content was given a variety show treatment, and netizens couldn’t help but want to finish this episode on their knees in respect.

After all, not everyone had the courage to apply to a university of Chinese medicine. There were so many books to memorize; it was practically a death sentence, okay?

However, although they didn’t dare apply to medical school, it was quite nice to be able to listen to professional lectures from big-shot professors for free.

The funny thing was that as soon as the big shots’ science classes ended, Guagua Video seamlessly cut back to the footage of the contestants and the local guides.

Hearing the simple guides use local dialects to re-introduce the herbs the professors had just explained, the group of laymen then followed the professors’ instructions, crawling on the ground and sweating profusely as they searched inch by inch. That look was exactly like their expressions during a final exam when the teacher pointed out the key topics, only for them to open their books and look completely dazed.

Um, Teacher, could you speak a bit slower? The key points you marked… why does it feel like I’ve never heard of them before? Did I accidentally fall asleep during this class?

Wait! Maybe I slept through the next class too, or just skipped it entirely? Argh! Why is it that it’s already the final exam, but the professional textbook still looks as brand new as the day it was handed out? I can’t find the key points at all…

As they watched, the audience suddenly had a strange feeling. Could the director of this show have been a poor student back in the day? Otherwise, how could he accurately capture the various mental journeys of failing students?

After watching the hundred-minute program, the top students frantically absorbed the nutrients of knowledge, while the poor students felt guilty and silently added the show to their favorites.

Even though they were poor students themselves, seeing a group of top students being tormented to death by the old professors… why did that feel so satisfying?

(End of Chapter)