The Delicate Darling with Her Rough Man

Chapter 47: Chapter 45: An Extra Month of Work Points

The brigade leader found a few nimble-fingered workers and brought them to Leng Yuan’s house.

”Leng Yuan, the weather’s turning bad, so I’ve brought a few more people over. If you can speed things up, I’ll give you an extra month’s worth of work points.”

Leng Yuan started to refuse.

”Brigade Leader, don’t—”

But before he could finish, the brigade leader cut him off. ”Say no more. The emergency harvest is our top priority.”

Grain was their lifeblood. If they could just get it all into the granary, Gu Jiaojiao and Leng Yuan would be hailed as heroes of the entire brigade, never mind an extra month of work points.

Leng Yuan said no more and immediately told the workers what he needed.

They were all experienced hands, so once they understood their tasks, they got right to work.

Gu Jiaojiao, watching from the side, couldn’t help but sigh.

’Leng Yuan just assigned the tasks according to the steps on the diagram. It’s already the prototype of an assembly line.’

With the extra hands, the work went much faster. Soon, two improved threshing machines were finished.

These new threshing machines were much larger than Gu Jiaojiao’s. While the inner wheels were still made of iron, the outer frames were now wooden. What they had built was a medium-sized thresher.

On the threshing ground, everyone gazed at the much larger machine as if it were their own flesh and blood.

The small thresher Gu Jiaojiao had used before could do in one hour what it took a single person an entire day to do, a fact that had left everyone both astonished and excited.

The machine before them was much larger than Gu Jiaojiao’s. It wasn’t just using small cogs, but an upgraded design. The width and length of the gears had been increased by a factor of over ten. This meant that this single thresher was at least a dozen times faster than Gu Jiaojiao’s original.

”It works the same as the small one. There’s a treadle at the bottom that requires ten people to pump simultaneously. You can feed in an entire armful of corn at once.”

Because of the urgent need, the thresher hadn’t been polished very well.

But no one cared about its appearance. As one person fed an armful of corn into it, ten people stomped down on the treadle at once.

WHOOSH! The kernels separated from the cobs.

An entire armful of corn was threshed in a single second.

The speed stunned even Chen Beiguo, who was standing to the side.

A woman working nearby cried out in amazement, ”Good heavens, it’s that fast?”

The brigade leader immediately broke into a wide grin.

”This thing is a real treasure! With this, we might actually be able to thresh all the corn before the rain starts. Come on, everyone, put your backs into it!”

The brigade leader, his heart pounding with both anxiety and excitement, urged them on again.

At a moment like this, even those who usually slacked off didn’t dare save their strength.

Ten people pumped the treadle, three fed corn into the machine, and one person was stationed on each side—one to collect the grain and the other to gather the cobs.

As the thresher got to work, their efficiency skyrocketed.

Seeing that there was now hope, the brigade leader had someone go and catch a few fish from the river, which he then personally delivered to Gu Jiaojiao.

”Gu Zhiqing, you’ve done a wonderful thing. I was wrong about you before. I never expected a young woman like you to have such a sharp mind. It’s truly remarkable.”

Having witnessed the machine’s speed with his own eyes, the brigade leader now saw Gu Jiaojiao in a completely new light.

’He used to look down on Gu Jiaojiao—a delicate doll from the city who couldn’t do anything, never went to the fields, and spent money like water. That was no way to live.’

’But today, he had to eat his words.’

’These educated young folks really are different. She might not have much physical strength, but hadn’t she gone and invented a machine that could do the work without it?’