“Wow, buddy, you are a fire-starting genius!” guests from other teams exclaimed. “You have to come help me, I know your mom, and you must call me uncle, right?” Instantly, the hierarchy shifted in their banter.
With one helping another, by noon, Qi Shejiang was running around helping everyone start fires, and his own meal ended up being hurried. In his heart, Qi Shejiang thought, if they were using modern cookers, he would’ve wasted his efforts. But they just happened to use a dirt stove, which left him—a guy who previously only knew how to start a fire and boil water—suddenly becoming some kind of genius.
By the afternoon, it was time to get to work. There were several plots of land in front of the house that needed to be harvested. A few people stood by the field, and Zhou Dong asked, hands on his hips, “Are we starting now? Do you all know how to farm?” After a few seconds of silence, Qi Shejiang spoke up, “I looked up materials beforehand. Let’s divide the work. First, we’ll cut the rice. Use sickles to cut these down; those without much strength can cut the rice, while the stronger ones can thresh the rice and carry the rice buckets—ah, we need to find the rice buckets first before we can thresh the grains.”
“Sounds a bit tiring,” Zhou Dong murmured. Qi Shejiang thought for a moment, then replied, “Yeah, a bundle of rice weighs at least twenty to thirty pounds. You have to make sure to thresh all the ears clean…”
The members of the Guanshan Band, hearing him mention he did research and speaking so confidently, thought he might have gotten program materials through family connections, wondering if he seriously knew what he was talking about.
The director, Jingjing, turned pale at this; what was going on? Had Qi Shejiang’s research come from fifty years ago?! He spoke in such detail, but the thing is, this is the countryside, and since power was connected, there have been electric threshers for quite some time now.
If these guys were to do all the harvesting manually from dawn to dusk, just this one task would leave them unable to do anything else for five days.
