After about ten days, a small green life sprouted out of the broom-filled furrow, and appeared in the eyes of its owner with shame and hypocrisy.

The people of Xiaowangzhuang didn't care about this, "Hmm! Like mustard, like rapeseed. "The metaphor of the farmer is always appropriate, and this seedling is almost the same as the seedling of the mustard that chokes on the nasal membrane.

If Mei Renhou said that it was "opium smoke". They're going to be so shocked that they're going to be in a fight, and they're never going to compare themselves to any thing again. In order to prevent freezing to death in winter, the second fool pulled a cart of wheat straw with an ox cart and scattered it into the ditch to cover the small seedlings.

In the spring of the following year, green and emerald green leaves sprang out from under the wheat straw that had been blackened by the rain and snow; After the Qingming Festival, it began to pull out the joints and stalks to separate branches, which is more like the shape of mustard or rapeseed; It was not until the flowering that the essential difference from the latter was revealed.

Rape and mustard are commonplace golden-like yellow flowers, while poppies produce red, white, pink, yellow, and purple flowers, which are colorful and gradually grow into a dark green oval fruit.

After a while, people saw the long-term workers of the Mei Renhou family come to the field together, pierce the dark green oval fruits with thick needles or triangular knives, and scrape off the viscous milk-like slurry that flows out of the cracks. They leave the village early in the morning and return to the house together when the sun rises, which seems to add to the mystery of this strange medicinal herb. No one could figure out what could be cured by taking that milky white slurry, but they just mysteriously repeated to each other: "That's medicine!" ”

At night, when Mei Renhou was refining and processing these slurries in a small iron pot according to Martin's instructions, a strange and faint aroma almost intoxicated him, Wang Shuping was also drunk on the kang in the back room, and the second fool who was sitting in the stove and pulling the bellows was also intoxicated.

The faint fragrance spreads from the courtyard.

In the gentle night breeze of April, it spread to most of Xiaowangzhuang, and adults and children were frowning their nostrils greedily sucking in the beautiful air, and they were all intoxicated. It is a smell that makes people unable to stop once they smell it, and when they smell it, they immediately get rid of all their thoughts and become fluttering.

Mei Renhou put the successfully refined opium into porcelain jars and took the car to the church.

Whether it is in the countryside or in the town, rich or poor, ordinary people or dignitaries, they are all looking for this kind of thing. Some people smoke, some people resell, not to mention how much they collect in the pharmacy, everyone knows the weight of this thing, and opium is as expensive as gold is.

Martin points out the technical problems with the poor quality of his refining and tells him that it is important to have a good grasp of the heat. Mei Renhou said that this is the first time to test the fire, and the next time it will definitely be better. When Mei Renhou went out, his heart fell unconsciously, and the silver dollar in the blanket was much heavier than the jar of opium that came to the fashion.

For three consecutive years, Mei Renhou planted more than 10 acres of water and land with opium poppies, and the huge benefits of poppy cultivation were more tempting than the aroma of opium.

The silver dollars he sold for the opium he harvested and refined in one acre of waterland could buy back the wheat that could be produced on the spot in more than 10 acres of Tianzihao waterland, and the value of the opium poppy planted in more than 100 acres of Tianzihao waterland was worth more than 100 acres of wheat and grain.

Of course, Mei Renhou would not be so stupid as to buy wheat with all those white flowers and famous silver dollars. He completely renovated the ancestral old-fashioned houses, removed the old tiles that had been mottled with moss, replaced them with new tiles in the kiln* of the village, and removed the front eaves wall of the adobe rampart, and installed screen-style carved doors and windows.

The renovation of the hall and wing rooms was completed in the spring, and the renovation and renovation of the gatehouse and gatehouse were carried out in the late autumn and early winter. The renovation of the gatehouse is the most thorough, it was originally made of green brick covered taxis, and now it is all built with green bricks, and the part above the lintel has been polished by hand. The craftsmen did their best to carve the patterns, and each side was painted with dragons and phoenixes.

The entire gatehouse retains only one of the original things, that is, a jade plaque engraved with the words "ploughing and reading heirlooms". It was the handwriting of his ancestors. After the renovation, a complete courtyard house is firmly entrenched in Xiaowangzhuang with its striking majesty.

The horse was expanded in the spring of the following year, and a row of adobe-tiled houses with spacious storage of wheat straw and dry soil were added; A fence was also built around the sunyard and the tethered horse yard, and many foals were born to spread joy in the newly enclosed ground.

The power of example is endless, and it has become a kingdom of poppies. Despite repeated orders banning the cultivation of opium poppy, the cultivation and reproduction of opium poppy continued.

The poppy occupies this ancient land, but the wheat has become a dot between the large poppies. People have long disdained to call opium poppy or opium again, these names are too elegant and tongue-twisting, and the croppers are more accustomed to calling it big tobacco or foreign smoke. The big smoke is relative to the dry tobacco in the past, and the foreign smoke is relative to the local one.

People used to call the opium imported from abroad and banned by Grandpa Lin as foreign tobacco, but now they call the opium harvested from their own land and smelted in their own iron pot as earth tobacco, and finally simplified it into a concise monophonic word - "soil". The criterion for judging the wealth of a peasant household is no longer how much grain is stored and how many bales of cotton are stored, but how much "soil" is!

On market days in Qinglong Town, the crowded tobacco market with two rows on one street replaces the former grain market and becomes the center of the town's trading.