Chapter 1841 — Hard Days
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
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 Liwen 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.