The Only Favourite Ugly Husband

Chapter 89.1 – Settling and selling the goods

There were a lot of things they had to deal with on this side of the fleet. These people who came to pick up Zheng Yi actually just took him to a nearby house to settle down. The Zheng family had been doing business from north to south, so they bought a house near the dock.

The house was in the name of Zheng Yi, so he was the master, and he asked Jiang Zhen to take his men to live in the house with him.

It was actually quite troublesome for them to leave. Although the cargo on board didn’t need to be unloaded for the time being, finding someone to watch the silver was needed. Zheng Yi also took all the cards with him.

Originally, they had to hire porters to help with many things, but because Jiang Zhen saved many people from the pirates, they had enough manpower in the end.

After struggling for two hours, Zheng Yi and Jiang Zhen respectively organized the team and let their subordinates take the cargo and go to the Zheng family house.

Looking at the group walking, Zheng Yi called Jiang Zhen, “Jiang Zhen, there is a carriage here. Come with me.”

“Thank you, Master Zheng.” Jiang Zhen said, the sun outside was very bright so he didn’t want to let the pregnant Zhao Jinge walk outside.

The carriage was very delicate and expensive; it cost more money to keep a carriage than to raise a few servants. But, in truth, a carriage was not very comfortable.

After finding that the carriage was very bumpy, Jiang Zhen looked at Zhao Jinge anxiously. If he could not stand the jolting . . . Those people in TV dramas often had a miscarriage, so would it not be good for the road to be so bumpy?

Jiang Zhen was worried, but Zhao Jinge was totally indifferent.

He had a reaction as nausea before, but at the moment, he didn’t feel it at all. He always felt that having children was no different from the time he was not pregnant.

At the moment, Zhao Jinge was looking around carefully at her surroundings and was very curious about the carriage he was riding and the horses that were pulling it.

Horses were a rare sight at the south of the Yangtze River, and there were very few carriages in the entire Hecheng County, so he hadn’t seen many of them.

“Zhao Jinge, do you like carriages? You can ask Jiang Zhen to buy you one and take it back,” Zheng Yi said with a smile. “A carriage is much cheaper here than at the south of the Yangtze River.”

“No need . . . ,” Zhao Jinge hurriedly said.

Jiang Zhen, however, was moved in his heart; a carriage was fine, but a horse . . . he really wanted to have one.

In modern times, he would definitely not think of raising a horse but would want to buy a good car. But if there were no cars in these times, he could only think about horses.

Zhao Jinge was obviously very reserved. After Zheng Yi said a few words to him, he stopped chatting with him and talked about something else with Jiang Zhen.

“You don’t have to unload the goods from your ship. After you find the buyer, let them unload it. As for the silver, I’ll leave a warehouse on the bank for you. You can store the money there and find someone to watch over it,” Zheng Yi said.

Jiang Zhen nodded and thanked Zheng Yi. After all, without Zheng Yi lending him a warehouse, he really wouldn’t know what to do with the money.

He had always thought that in Daqi, silver could be deposited in the bank and then traded with bank notes, but this was not the case at all.

In this period, there were places similar to banks and these institutions issued silver tickets, but these could only be used locally. This means that if you wanted to go far away to do business, you must bring real money or goods with you.

It had to be said that it was because of this that commerce today was less developed, and there were fewer big merchants.

The silver that Jiang Zhen seized from the pirates was tens of thousands of silver, and it would take dozens of people to move it. On Zheng Yi’s side, there were even more people responsible for moving goods.

The carriages were slowly making their way ahead, and behind them, a huge team followed, many of them carrying silver as their load.

The silver was heavy and inconvenient to move, but it wasn’t without its benefits, at least . . . it wouldn’t be easy to steal away someone else’s large sum of silver.

Zheng Yi and Jiang Zhen talked about number of things, and Jiang Zhen wrote them down one by one. After over a half hour, they arrived at the Zheng family’s mansion.

The mansion was quite large with several entrances, and when Zheng Yi arrived, he pointed out one of the courtyards for Jiang Zhen to live in.

The courtyard wasn’t big, and the houses in it weren’t many, but both Jiang Zhen and the people under him were still very happy.

No matter how small the houses here were, living here was more comfortable than on the ship.

After living on the ship for so long, God only knew how much they missed life on land!

Jiang Zhen and Zhao Jinge had always had cabins to stay in when they were on the ship, but now they were very happy to live in a yard. When Zhao Jinge looked around and found that the yard had been cleaned up and a new mat had been laid out, he was even more eager to lie down and have a good sleep.

Of course, he didn’t do that, he was still hungry.

Zheng Yi asked people to send them some food, including pork, mutton, and fresh vegetables. Jiang Zhen sent some to the ships and cooked the rest, so everyone had a good meal before he took Zhao Jinge to take a rest.

No one bothered them, and Jiang Zhen slept until dawn the next day, but when he woke up, Zhao Jinge was still sleeping.

Thinking that Zhao Jinge was very tired along the way, Jiang Zhen did not wake him up but gently got out of bed and went outside.

He got up a little late, so the others were all awake and talked in twos and threes while the cook and Ruo’er were washing clothes in the courtyard.

“Li, is breakfast ready yet?” Jiang Zhen asked. The cook’s surname was Li, but he thought it would be not good to call her by her first name, so he kept calling her Li.

“Master, it’s already done,” Li hurriedly said and washed her hands in clean water. She needed to serve the meal while it was still hot, so she wouldn’t need to worry about it getting cold, so she prepared the food early.

Jiang Zhen stopped her. “I’ll just eat in the kitchen.”

Jiang Zhen only let Li be in charge of her own and Zhao Jinge’s meals. He also asked her to cook more food that was good for pregnant people, so recently, she often made soup. For example, what she prepared today was porridge made with chicken soup, scallion cake, cucumber salad, shredded chicken, and braised dried bean curd in soy sauce.

Jiang Zhen was a little unsatisfied with these things as he took a steamed bread bigger than his fist, ate a bowl of porridge, and ate three scallion pancakes before he finally felt better. Then he took the people out of the house.

Originally, he only needed to protect Zheng Yi, but now with a lot of goods, he became busy. Fortunately, when he arrived in the capital, Zheng Yi no longer needed protection.

After Jiang Zhen returned to the ship, the fat man named Luo Tianzhi came over, saying that his family had come to pick him up.

With someone coming to pick him up so soon, Jiang Zhen felt even more that this person was not simple, but he didn’t look into it.

Luo Tianzhi repeatedly thanked Jiang Zhen and gave him five hundred silver and gave Liu Qianqian and Zhao Lingxi, who had taken care of him for half a month, twenty silver each. He then left Liu Qianqian and Zhao Lingxi, who were a little dumbfounded.

They thought that this fatty Luo accepted them as concubines, but they didn’t expect to be only given twenty silver . . .

But they have been with him for more than half a month, and they could earn twenty silver, which was actually pretty good, but what will they do in the future?

No matter if they were sailors or rescued women and gers, they could go as long as they wanted to. Jiang Zhen did not restrain them, but almost all of them did not leave. Even Zhao Lingxi and Liu Qianqian had not left.

“You may stay, but you must listen to me. If you want to leave in the future, you should say it in advance,” Jiang Zhen said.

As soon as his words came out, those people didn’t want to leave even more. Only a woman stood up and said, “You . . . will you send us . . . to these dirty places?”

Gers and women all suffered like this, and the women who left their hometown when their husbands were killed by pirates couldn’t go back to their hometowns. They wanted to follow Jiang Zhen, but they were afraid of being sold into brothels.

In a brothel, a particularly beautiful woman may still be able to find a way out for herself, but most people here were already ruined. They often didn’t live to the age of thirty, and after death, they were mostly wrapped in straw mats and thrown away casually.

“Don’t worry about that. I won’t send you to a place like that, but you will have to work,” Jiang Zhen said.

Along the way, Jiang Zhen took care of these women and gers, firmly not allowing the men on the boat to violate them, but he also sent them work to do, such as giving them fabrics for sewing clothes.

Now hearing Jiang Zhen’s words and thinking about what happened before, those who wanted to live a good life in the future were relieved. But people like Liu Qianqian and Zhao Lingxi were hesitant.

They don’t want to work, but where could they go if they leave?

Maybe some people might covet their appearance and ask for them, but what if they would only play a few days and then they were thrown away? What were they going to do when they grow old?

Liu Qianqian pinched the twenty silver given by the fat man Luo in her hand and finally clenched his teeth and went with the women’s group.

Maybe something might happen to her if she were to go outside. She might as well follow Jiang Zhen first and then leave after she found a way out.

Liu Qianqian made a choice, and Zhao Lingxi made the same choice.

As a matter of fact, Jiang Zhen didn’t like these two people very much, but he didn’t go so far as to embarrass them, so he just said, “None of you should do less work in the future, and don’t have any crooked thoughts, or I won’t be polite to you.”

The men nodded when they heard his words.

They could see that Jiang Zhen would not be polite to them. When he said no work and no food, he really did not give food to people who did not work no matter how good-looking the person was.

His subordinates, of course, still listened to him . .