Loss and fear were placed on either end of the scale, and the scale quickly tipped toward fear.
Not long after, Jasmine cracked open the wooden door and tossed out a decent piece of smoked meat almost as if she were throwing away trash. Lang stretched out his long arm and snatched it in his claws.
Seeing Lang’s sharp claws instinctively extend from his paw pads, Jasmine trembled even more violently. She blurted out in fear and trepidation, “O-Our family only has this much smoked meat left!” Then she tried to shut the door.
However, Ye Tang reacted faster than her. She wedged her foot, clad in wooden shoes, into the door crack of Jasmine’s house.
In Abe Village, leather shoes and boots counted as luxury items. Unless it was for an important festival or going to town to meet someone important, no one except the village chief’s family would bear to wear them. Some families passed down a single pair of leather shoes for generations—grandpa wore them, then dad, dad to son. If the son didn’t wear out the leather shoes, they might even pass to his son.
The wooden shoes on Ye Tang’s feet represented the original host’s family’s greatest source of income. Wooden shoes were durable and sturdy, the first choice for the vast majority of villagers. The original host’s husband could make a good pair in three evenings, but an oversupply drove the price down to nothing. So although the original host’s husband made many shoes, they were all locked in one room.
That room held wooden cabinets reaching to the ceiling. The cabinets were filled, sorted by category, with wooden shoes of all sizes and various measurements. When guests came to the original host or her husband to buy shoes, her husband would take the order and have the original host deliver the wooden shoes two or three days later.
When Ye Tang saw that room full of wooden shoes, she got an idea—wood rotted if left too long, and that whole room of wooden shoes would eventually turn into useless garbage. Since selling them in bulk would devalue the wooden shoes, she would barter them instead.
The wooden shoes were hard, so wedging them in the door crack didn’t hurt her foot. Ye Tang calmly pulled out a burlap sack and stuffed it into Jasmine’s arms, smiling. “Kind Jasmine, I know you’re just trying to help Mr. Lang’s family out of the goodness of your heart and have no intention of taking their money. So at least please accept this.”
This?
Lang behind Ye Tang terrified Jasmine. But the moment she touched what Ye Tang handed her, she recognized from the shape that it was a pair of wooden shoes.
“Isn’t your daughter Fen’s birthday next month? Give her a new pair of wooden shoes, and she’ll be thrilled.”
With that, Ye Tang withdrew her foot. This time, she didn’t stop Jasmine from closing the door.
Jasmine stood there stunned. In her panic earlier, she hadn’t really listened to what Mary said. So that beast really just wanted to buy meat, not coerce her into giving it for free?
But wasn’t the beast the one buying meat? Why did Mary take out the shoes to give her? …Whatever, what was the point of overthinking it? The key was she got a pair of shoes! A new pair!
Her eldest daughter Fen, who shuffled around in her old shoes, had been clamoring for a new pair for two years already. But kids grew fast, didn’t they? Specially commissioning Henry to make a pair for her daughter that she’d outgrow in a year would be a total waste.
But now, new shoes had flown right into her hands! And all she paid was a small piece of smoked meat! Heavens! Heavens! Could she go find Mary and ask if she could trade a bigger piece of smoked meat for a new pair for her husband too!?
…
Having witnessed how Ye Tang strong-armed the sale… oh no, how she bartered, the Lang family followed her as she went knocking on other village women’s doors.
At first, the Lang family didn’t understand what Ye Tang meant, but after three or four houses, the twins Mimi and Kiqi caught on quick—they started pulling scary faces the moment someone opened the door. They discovered that the scarier they acted, the more meat the humans inside gave.
Ben noticed this too, and at the next house, he joined his sisters in wrinkling his nose and making faces.
Lang was so amused by his siblings’ goofy faces that tears came to his eyes. He hooked a teardrop from the corner of his eye with a sharp claw, and when the next house cracked the door to peek out timidly, he deliberately opened his big mouth wide and licked his lips with his long tongue, putting on a ravenous bad-guy face.
The villagers, thoroughly scared by the Lang family, contributed ever-larger pieces of meat one after another. There was fresh meat, smoked meat, and jerky. Ye Tang accepted it all, stuffing a fitting new pair of wooden shoes to every villager who gave meat—the room storing the wooden shoes had a ledger that recorded every villager’s shoe sizes. The original host’s husband must have used that ledger to decide which sizes to make more of and which fewer.
“Jian—”
“Zhen—”
“Lina—”
“Nora—”
“Eluka—”
“…”
Ye Tang went around knocking on doors and gave away over a dozen pairs of wooden shoes. The meat she traded back piled up on the table like a small mountain.
Sniffing the varied yet all mouthwatering aromas of the meats, Ben and the twins’ eyes turned green—they hadn’t eaten meat in days. Xiu desperately didn’t want to show weakness in front of humans and be looked down on. But the more meat they got, the hungrier he felt. He held his breath to avoid the smell, but it still drilled into his nose, making him swallow again and again.
Glancing at the sun, Ye Tang wiped the sweat from her forehead. “That’s it for the morning. Let’s head back home now for lunch.”
““Lunch!!””
The twins’ eyes lit up as they raised both arms. The little gluttons Mimi and Kiqi didn’t need their brothers to carry them—they stuck to Ye Tang’s back, wagging their tails as they trotted along.
Back home, Ye Tang had the Lang family put the traded meat on the dining table, while she changed out of her mud-caked wooden shoes and into the original host’s husband’s slightly larger leather shoes.
Even with soft cloth stuffed inside, wooden shoes were still much harder than leather ones. Ye Tang had crossed mountains and run all over the village that morning; even though the original host was used to the hardness of wooden shoes, several blisters had formed on Ye Tang’s feet.
To pop blisters, she needed disinfectant on hand. Abe Village’s medical conditions weren’t just poor—they were practically nonexistent. Ye Tang had no clean needle, no alcohol or iodine, no bandages. To avoid infection, she could only leave the blisters as they were.
The moment Ye Tang changed shoes and returned to the dining area in front of the kitchen, she saw the twins sitting at the table, lifting up the newly acquired meat to eat it.
“No, you can’t. This meat isn’t yours.”
The two little wolf cubs went from excited to crestfallen, mouths agape. The tails behind them stopped wagging, and their perked-up ears drooped. Saliva had dripped from the corners of their mouths before; now tears welled up in Mimi and Kiqi’s eyes.
Seeing his sisters’ pitiful looks, Xiu, who had just wanted to stop them from eating the meat, suddenly felt a rebellious urge. He bared his fangs and roared at Ye Tang before saying in human tongue, “Why not!? This is meat we got!”
“You got it?”
Ye Tang wasn’t intimidated by the beastman’s roar. She walked to the table, arms crossed, and looking down at Xiu—who was about her height—felt somehow superior.
“Never mind Mr. Lang, who acted in concert with me the whole way. Your family’s three youngest all bared their teeth and claws to make scary faces, but you just trailed behind me and did nothing, didn’t you?”
“Besides, I traded every piece of meat here with wooden shoes. Do you think that just because your family followed me around, the meat I got with wooden shoes counts as yours?”
She was clearly a slender human woman who looked like a gust of wind could knock her over. Her thighs weren’t even as thick as his arms. Yet he just couldn’t raise his claws toward her, let alone swing them.
Xiu was still puzzling over why a human woman had overwhelmed him with sheer presence when his tail had already honestly drooped behind him.
“I…!”
“Xiu, enough.”
Ye Tang’s every word was irrefutable, but he had to admit that being used and getting nothing in return left Lang a bit disappointed in her.
Disappointed or not, rationally, Lang knew humans were like that—when dealing with anyone but their own, humans exploited if they could, kicked away if they couldn’t. It was human nature, instinct. He had only met this human woman twice; why should he feel disappointed that she showed her true nature?
He would just negotiate with her, see if he could get a better outcome…
“Although this meat isn’t your family’s, as your employer, I’ll pay you all lunch as compensation for hiring you.”
With that, Ye Tang picked up two large pieces of fresh meat and went into the kitchen.
Ye Tang cooked quickly.
The bread was dough she’d proofed that morning. She swiftly diced the fresh meat and had Lang come to the kitchen to help chop it into mince.
She heated the pan with butter; once melted, she added half the pork mince. After it rendered its fat, she added the other half of beef mince.
Pork mince was greasy but richly savory. Beef mince was flavorful but, with less fat, prone to drying out and getting tough when stir-fried.
Ye Tang used equal parts of both; the beef mince got lubrication from the pork fat, while the pork mince lost its excess grease to the beef. The aromas layered and intertwined, creating an indescribably wonderful scent. It peaked when Ye Tang sprinkled two large spoonfuls of brown sugar into the browned mince and stirred until fully dissolved.
“S-So fragrant… so good, so good…”
Ben’s drool was about to hit the floor. Mimi and Kiqi gnawed their nails, gazing at Ye Tang’s back with the devotion of worshippers beholding a saintess.
Xiu wanted to turn and leave, but his feet wouldn’t budge—his eyes couldn’t tear away from the pan!
Lang wanted to tease his brother, whose gaze had gone slack from the aroma, but he couldn’t open his mouth—he was afraid his saliva would spill out.
Besides sugar, mixed mince was best with a bit of oyster sauce or premium soy sauce. Ye Tang lacked those, so she made do with salt plus handfuls of thyme and sweet basil from the village edge. Before plating, she chopped in plenty of chilies.
The sweet-spicy, rich aroma mingled with the bread scent as Ye Tang brought it to the table. She wiped her hands and said to the five whose eyes had gone vacant from hunger, “You can stuff the mince into the bread to eat. Help yourselves.”