Chapter 308 - 157: Buy High, Sell High (Middle)

Chapter 308: Chapter 157: Buy High, Sell High (Middle)

The end of March passed in a flash.

Spring had arrived in Lingnan, with flowers blooming everywhere. As the Qingming Festival drew near, the outskirts of Shanmei grew especially lively, with locals heading to the mountains in groups of three and five to sweep the graves and honor their ancestors.

However, Magong Town, Red Grass Town, and Gongping Town were on high alert, as if facing a great enemy. They had deployed two to three times more personnel than in previous years to guard every intersection and had even sent out a large number of drones to patrol the mountainous areas.

The main reason for this tension was that Hailufeng Company’s Durian Plantation, spanning over fifty thousand mu, was in a critical season. If the silk floss trees used as rootstock were to be burned, it would affect the subsequent grafting and growth.

The farm workers of Hailufeng Company had also set up barbed wire fences along the farm borders, cleared firebreaks, and used stones from previous excavations and blasting to create a fifteen-meter-wide fire isolation belt made purely of rock.

Moreover, they had installed a fire-extinguishing sprinkler pipeline along the barbed wire fences of these isolation belts.

Coupled with the reservoirs built into the various terraced fields, even if a large fire were to spread nearby, it could be suppressed and contained within a small area.

Hailufeng Company placed such a high emphasis on fire prevention mainly due to recent environmental protection efforts over the past decade or so. Natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, and electricity had replaced traditional firewood as the main fuel in rural areas. This led to wild vegetation becoming increasingly lush, with a growing accumulation of dead branches and fallen leaves.

When Jiang Miao was a child, the mountains near Xinxiang had only sparsely growing Masson’s pines, along with hardy weeds and ferns.

Now, many of the mountains were covered in acacia and eucalyptus trees. With the thick accumulation of dead branches and leaves on the ground, a single spark on a dry day could ignite a wildfire.

The weather in Lingnan this year was somewhat abnormal.

In past years, the Qingming season was typically marked by constant drizzles.

This year, however, not a single drop of rain had fallen since the beginning of February. A typhoon that had formed near the Luzon Sea at the end of March ended up heading for East Japan instead.

This caused the mountainous areas of the Shanmei Region to become dry, making them even more prone to forest fires.

And this all coincided with the Qingming Festival, when many people go up the mountains to sweep graves and worship their ancestors.

In fact, it wasn’t just the main headquarters that placed a high priority on forest fire prevention. The Gannan Branch was equally vigilant. As an inland region, it was drier than the coast. Moreover, the Gannan Branch managed a tea-oil camellia plantation of over two hundred thousand mu, which could easily be affected by a wildfire from the surrounding mountains.

Fortunately, the company’s employees were very cooperative. After all, if the farm burned down, their performance bonuses for the year would definitely go up in smoke.

Jiang Miao was currently at a cemetery not far from Magong Town, paying respects to his ancestors.

This cemetery was located at the border of Yandun Mountain and Magong Mountain, across from the Salt Town Farm. The cemetery itself had just been completed at the end of last year, a project funded by Hailufeng Company as a grant to the town government.

Of course, this was also for Hailufeng Company’s own benefit.

After all, Hailufeng Company had contracted or requisitioned Yandun Mountain, Bamboo Mountain, Magong Mountain, and Chicken Cage Mountain within Magong Town’s borders, a process that inevitably involved the ancestral graves of the local villagers.

Therefore, these ancestral graves had to be relocated and centrally reinterred.

For this reason, Hailufeng Company had to foot the bill.

The cemetery on Magong Mountain was not small, covering an area of 200 mu, and there was also a columbarium under construction inside.

Although Jiang Miao didn’t believe in ghosts and spirits, it didn’t stop him from going through the motions.

In addition to his own family’s ancestral graves.

His father, Jiang Dahai, brought a roasted pig, a whole roasted lamb, a whole roasted ox, and a large quantity of sycee-shaped candles to the west side of the small cemetery plaza, where the unclaimed remains were temporarily stored. Piled up there were over a hundred earthenware jars of various sizes.

These earthenware jars contained unclaimed skeletal remains.

During the development of the surrounding mountains and factories, as well as the widening of Shanma Avenue, Hailufeng Company had unearthed a considerable number of remains during excavation work.

Some were dug up from unmarked graves, while others had no grave at all. As traditional and rather superstitious Hailufeng people, they certainly couldn’t dispose of these remains casually; they had to be reinterred properly.

Jiang Dahai handled this matter on behalf of the Jiang Family. Everything from hiring a Feng Shui Master to select an auspicious date, to having people collect the remains, to building the columbarium for their interment and arranging the annual worship, was all managed by Jiang Dahai himself.

Perhaps worried that this affair would be bad for Jiang Miao and Lin Shuya, Jiang Dahai did not allow him to pay respects to these unknown dead.

Standing on the mountainside of the cemetery.

His older cousin, Jiang Yao, cut off a large piece of roasted pig for him. "Ah Miao, this is your family’s share."

"Thanks," Jiang Miao said, taking the bag.

From not far away, his younger uncle, Jiang Dahe, walked over with his two sons.

"Ah Miao, I came back last month and was planning to look for you, but I didn’t expect you’d gone to the North."

"Brother Miao," the two cousins called out, a little awkwardly.

"Uncle!" Jiang Miao smiled and nodded, then turned to his two tall but still boyish-looking cousins. "It’s Ah Feng and Ah Hua! I haven’t seen you in years, I almost didn’t recognize you."

The year before last, when he went to Hong Kong, the brothers Jiang Feng and Jiang Hua were in school, and since Jiang Miao’s trip was rushed, they hadn’t met.

Jiang Feng and Jiang Hua were twins, around nineteen years old this year. Since they were born and raised in Hong Kong, Jiang Miao recalled that they had only come back three or four times in their entire lives, so they weren’t familiar with him or Jiang Yao.

Of course, this also had to do with their mother’s influence. His younger aunt wasn’t fond of her poor relatives from the mainland, and even felt a certain rejection and disdain for them.