Chapter 1841 — Hard Days

Besides, Gu Pengzhan had already lost everything. What hidden clan would bother with something that offered neither profit nor advantage? Earth-tier experts entering the mundane world was taboo enough; to attack ordinary people was an even greater offense. No one wanted to push that boundary too far.

After hanging up, Gu Mengyao, Shen Yushu, and the old woman went to a nearby bank. They transferred the old woman's one hundred thousand yuan, together with the one hundred thousand yuan An Jianwen had given them earlier, to Uncle Qing.

"Li Fu?" When the old woman glanced at the name on the transfer slip, she murmured it instinctively.

"Yes, that's Uncle Qing's name. Have you heard it before, Granny?" Gu Mengyao asked with a nod.

"No..." The old woman shook her head. "It feels familiar somehow, but I don't know him..."

"So your surname is Sun, Granny. From now on, I'll call you Granny Sun." Gu Mengyao had only learned the old woman's surname after seeing the name in her passbook.

"I think it is Sun..." Granny Sun said. "It was so long ago that I can't quite remember. I was given this name when I registered my household here."

Gu Mengyao was taken aback. Granny Sun was always saying that something had happened too long ago for her to remember. Perhaps she had suffered some kind of misfortune in the past and lost her memories—or perhaps she simply did not want to speak of it.

But Gu Mengyao was not one to pry, so she naturally asked no further questions. Once they had transferred the money to Uncle Qing, the three of them left the bank and began another day's scavenging...

The autumn sun was vicious; this was precisely what people meant by an autumn heat wave.

Beneath the blazing sun, an old woman and two young girls threaded their way through the streets and alleys, turning over every trash can and searching every corner around the commercial district. It was a route the old woman had followed for years. Her daily haul was always about the same—not poor, but never much either.

A day's work might bring in two or three hundred yuan at best. Compared with the five thousand yuan Xiao Shu had estimated they needed, it was a world apart.

"General Mighty, other dogs have such sharp noses. Why don't you help us look?" Seeing that they could not go on like this, Gu Mengyao began urging General Mighty to join them in scavenging.

"Woof, woof..." General Mighty was rather depressed. It could discipline other dogs, and even people if necessary, but scavenging was another matter entirely. It had no idea what it was doing and had never done anything like this before. Still, it understood human speech and knew that Gu Mengyao was doing this for Wei Zhao, so it began threading through the various corners just as the others did.

With General Mighty's help, they found quite a lot of waste cardboard and empty drink bottles in places people were unlikely to notice. But even that increased their earnings by only a few dozen yuan. As for making a thousand, that was utterly impossible.

The day passed quickly. When Gu Mengyao and Shen Yushu counted their spoils that evening, they discovered, helplessly, that they had earned only five hundred yuan—barely a tenth of the five thousand they needed.

Yet Granny Sun was already delighted with those five hundred yuan. According to her, on ordinary days she sometimes earned only a few dozen yuan, while even during the holidays, when business was better, she made no more than three hundred. Five hundred in one day was already an exceptional haul.

Gu Mengyao and Shen Yushu fell silent. They knew perfectly well that scavenging was not some wildly lucrative trade. If it were, everyone would be out scavenging.

After boiling Wei Zhao's medicine and helping him take it, Gu Mengyao sat facing Xiao Shu, both of them troubled.

Troubles within and dangers without, with no hope ahead—that was the truest reflection of their state of mind at that moment.

Five hundred yuan was not even enough to buy Wei Zhao's medicine, let alone save up for Gu Pengzhan's medical expenses.

"Xiao Shu... how about we go to Yunyun's house tomorrow and borrow some money?" Gu Mengyao truly had no other choice. She knew that Mother Tang had quite a bit of money, and surely she would lend them enough to buy medicine for Wei Zhao.

"Yes. I suppose that's all we can do..." Shen Yushu nodded.

What they did not know was that Mother Tang had already been taken away by the people from Xue Valley. Tang Yun had done so partly because she was worried about her parents, who were far away in Songshan City, and partly because she was afraid they might say something to Wei Zhao and ruin all her efforts to make him drink the Forgetting Passion medicinal liquid.

Thus, when Gu Mengyao and Shen Yushu arrived at Tang Yun's home the next day, they were dismayed to find the entire Tang family gone without a trace. According to the neighbors, no one had been there for several days already.

By then, Gu Mengyao and Shen Yushu had more or less guessed what Tang Yun meant to do. The only trouble was that they had no way to contact Xue Valley. As far as Xue Valley was concerned, once Tang Yun remained there, she was as good as severing all ties with them for the rest of their lives. Naturally, no contact information had been left behind.

With Mother Tang unavailable and Yunyun and Xiaoxiao unreachable, the only person Gu Mengyao and Shen Yushu could count on was Old Man Wei.

However, although Old Man Wei had a small medicinal garden of his own and possessed most of the herbs listed in the prescription, his supplies were enough only to keep Wei Zhao in medicine. There was still no way to cover Gu Pengzhan's medical expenses.

Besides, there was no courier service in West Star Mountain Village, and Old Man Wei could not leave the village. Sending the herbs from the courier office in the nearest distant town was another major inconvenience. By the time the herbs were finally dispatched, the daylilies would have gone cold—the water from afar could not put out a fire nearby.

With no alternative, Gu Mengyao and Shen Yushu could only continue scavenging with Granny Sun. But after two days at it, they discovered that this trade had plenty of competition. Besides them, there were other scavengers everywhere, and success depended on sharp eyes and quick hands. It did not matter who spotted something first; what mattered was who got to it first.

According to Granny Sun, scavenging had its own rules in every city. Songshan City was no exception, and people had followed the same rules for years. That was why, even when her legs had once been inconvenient, she had trained herself to be quick-eyed and quick-handed.

Precisely because of that, once she had recovered, she scavenged even faster than before, far outstripping the other scavengers. Her daily haul was therefore quite substantial.

"Truth is, relying only on waste cardboard and empty drink bottles isn't the most profitable way to make money," Granny Sun said. "Sometimes you can find discarded furniture and appliances at the trash collection points in residential areas. Those are the real money-makers. And sometimes, in the discarded clothes people throw away in wealthy neighborhoods, you can even find loose change. It isn't usually much, but every now and then there can be several hundred yuan. Once, outside a villa, I found three thousand yuan inside a leather jacket. I went to the villa to return it, but the housekeeper only said, 'Thank you. You can keep the money,' and sent me on my way..."

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