The road to wealth of a peasant widow

Chapter 231 Agreed

Changping was also in a state of confusion and anger at this time.

Although they have not returned home in recent years, they have never lost contact with their hometown.

The economic outlook in the past two years was not good. During the spring when there was a shortage of food, they bought grain and shipped it back. They asked Liu Youcai to oversee the road construction and recruited people from villages along the way to work.

The road being repaired was the one leading to the county town. Anyone who signed up would be provided with two meals a day and five cents of wages.

Those who can't make ends meet will naturally sign up. Even if they are not paid, they are willing to work just for the food.

Nowadays, food is expensive and hard to buy. At least you can get a full meal by working, and you can bring the extra food back to your family. This is simply a blessing from heaven.

As long as there are two people in a family working, the whole family will basically not starve to death.

In fact, everyone knew that this was the Jinshi master sending them food in disguise.

Thanks to this job, people in several villages safely got through the lean period, making other villages farther away extremely envious.

By the time the summer harvest began, the road construction was completed. The road surface was much smoother than before, making it more convenient for everyone to walk, and new grain was also harvested.

In fact, it doesn’t matter what the road looks like in the end. The purpose is to use work as a relief. Their family has the ability and food, but they can’t just give it to everyone for no reason and make them feel that it comes too easily.

They are willing to build bridges and roads to benefit the local people, but they cannot let the beneficiaries take it for granted.

Last spring, Changping found a teacher in his hometown through his classmates and opened a school in the village.

This school not only enrolls children from the village, but also children from other nearby villages. The annual tuition is only one or two taels of silver.

However, the school holds exams every month, and students with good grades will receive bonuses of varying amounts.

If your grades are good enough and you always get the top marks in every exam, then after one year of studying you can not only earn back your tuition fees, but you can also make some money to buy pens and ink.

In fact, even with such favorable conditions, most of the students who came to study were children from Liujiaping and Chenjiagou.

Because Changping and his people took over the land of the two villages and were exempt from taxes, they lived a better life than other villages, so they were able to send their children to school.

In fact, the tuition fee of one or two taels per person was not enough to pay the teacher's salary, and the rest was made up by the Liu family.

The tuition fee is only symbolic, in order to ensure that “the Dharma is not passed on lightly”, so that those who come to study here will cherish this opportunity and not ignore it just because it is free.

Changping thought that he had done his best for his hometown and had not let down his mother's teachings and the elders of his hometown. However, he did not expect that although everyone else knew how to be grateful, those so-called blood relatives stabbed him in the back.

He felt that Evergreen was simply grilling them brothers by causing this incident.

If he pleaded with Lord Zhuang and saved Changrong's life, he would probably have a lot of trouble in the future.

First of all, by doing this, he owed Lord Zhuang a huge favor, which he would definitely have to repay in the future.

Secondly, everything you do will leave traces, which is equivalent to handing a handle on yourself to others, and you never know when it will be used as evidence of your abuse of power.

Furthermore, if he could help Changrong get away with such a serious crime, it would set a very bad example for the Liu clan. In the future, the people in the clan would probably lose their respect for the law and think that they would not be afraid of committing any crime as long as they had a backer like him.

Moreover, if there is any lawsuit in the clan in the future, I will have to help clean up the mess, otherwise I will be regarded as a cold-hearted person who disregards family affection and stands idly by!

To be honest, he had very limited feelings for those tribesmen, and he would never forget how those tribesmen treated them when their family was in difficult times.

The reason why he has given more feedback to his tribesmen over the years is just to stop the gossips of the people. He is also afraid that their lives will be too difficult, which will tarnish his reputation and cause more trouble.

But if they really don't care about Changrong's affairs, outsiders will inevitably think that they are cold-hearted. After all, they are cousins. If they really watch him die, they are too hard-hearted!

But he really didn't want to spend the effort to save Changrong. Instead, he wanted to use this incident to teach the Liu clan a lesson.

Over the years, these brothers have only shown kindness to the clan, but never intimidated them, which seems to have given them the illusion that they can have whatever they want.

Changping made up his mind and told his mother and two younger brothers about his idea, and they all agreed with it.

Chen Cui said, "We have been away from home for a long time, and the news we know is all from the letters sent by the clan leader. No one knows what the clan is like. Maybe Changrong is not the only one who has committed illegal acts, but he just caused a death. We should take this opportunity to improve the clan rules and restrain the clan members to prevent the clan from committing crimes again in the future."

It’s not that Chen Cui has a mean heart, but that human hearts are hard to predict.

Originally, my family was just a family of scholars and juren, and the benefits they brought to the village were limited. But now, there are three juren serving as officials in Beijing. It is hard to say how the neighbors will behave in their hometown.

They have no way to go back to their hometown to check whether they are using their family's reputation to do anything illegal, and there is no way to supervise them, so the only thing they can do is to eliminate it at the root and let them know that their family will not support illegal activities.

Maybe it was this idea that Changrong had in mind from the beginning that made him go to the gambling house to borrow money again and again. He knew very well that his family’s house and land combined could not be sold for less than a hundred taels, but he still dared to borrow seven or eight hundred taels from others!

What did he rely on? Wasn't it his own family's influence? He relied on the fact that he was the cousin of the Jinshi master, so he dared to make such a big mess, and he was not afraid that no one would clean it up.

Didn't Liu Wende think so too? In his letter, he repeatedly urged Changping to plead with Lord Zhuang so that his son could be released from prison as soon as possible.

Chen Cui dared to guarantee that if Chang Rong was rescued this time, he would definitely commit the crime again in the future, and even become more rampant. In the end, who knows how much trouble he would cause!

Since the mother and her sons had already discussed a plan, Changping wrote back to each of them and had them sent to the post station for urgent delivery.

This matter should not be delayed for too long. If it is delayed for too long, who knows what trouble those people in my hometown will cause!

After seeing her sons off, Chen Cui went back to her room to rest. She just felt tired.

We spend so much money and stuff on those people in my hometown every year, but there are still ungrateful prodigals like Changrong.

Even though their family was not that close to Liu Wende's family, they could still rely on their family's name and gain a lot of benefits, both openly and secretly. It was just that they did not gain as much benefit as they expected.

Raising a son like Changrong, who committed such a disaster, was the retribution Liu Wende deserved for not educating his son strictly.