Before industrialized production, salt was always a precious commodity, let alone in this primitive era.

However, Mr. Steward brought Henry Clark a whole leather sack full of salt all at once, and it was the finest refined salt, white as frost.

The autumn game was very fat, and Henry Clark rendered a lot of animal fat, mostly wild boar lard.

Stored in a jar half as tall as a person, it was enough for two people to eat for more than half a year.

Snowflakes drifted outside the stone house as Henry Clark carefully picked out the edible parts from a pile of moldy white rice.

This was a pile of old rice, which must have been stored for a long time. Next to it were some unhulled grains, but they had lost their golden color and turned somewhat yellowish. After Henry Clark rubbed them open, the rice inside was much better than the old rice outside.

Chapter 11: Restore Qin, Overthrow Han?

To Henry Clark, Mr. Steward was like a Doraemon-like figure.

There was only one downside: everything this guy brought was old, but all of it was good old stuff.

Henry Clark tried not to think about where these things came from, worried that if he figured it out, Mr. Steward might silence him.

Life in the mountains was abundant, thanks in no small part to Henry Clark's tireless efforts.

Dried mushrooms, dried wild vegetables, cured meat, spices—even a semi-porcelain plate had appeared on their table. Henry Clark had accidentally found some kaolin and experimented with firing it in a wood kiln.

When he first found the kaolin, Mr. Steward even said this kind of clay could be eaten...

Of course, Henry Clark knew this clay could be eaten, but anyone who ate it would eventually die. It had another tragic name: Guanyin clay.

Mr. Steward had even enthusiastically told Henry Clark stories of some masters who became immortals by eating Guanyin clay. It was clear he was quite envious.

Henry Clark thought that if he ever wanted to kill Mr. Steward, he wouldn't need to use poison—just grind the kaolin into powder and feed it to him.

By now, Mr. Steward had revealed so many secrets in front of Henry Clark that Henry Clark only needed to do a little simple summarizing to deduce most of the facts.

However, he wasn't ready to leave the mountains and meet others yet. This was a world different from the one he knew, with its own rules. Henry Clark was still too unfamiliar with the rules of survival here. For someone so out of place, being killed in this era would be a very bad outcome.

During the days when the mountains were sealed by heavy snow, sorting through the bamboo slips was actually a process of learning.

There was a mountain of bamboo slips here, each one covered front and back with writing.

Henry Clark found it very difficult to decipher; the small seal script characters all looked very similar, and if he wasn't careful, he'd misread them. Misreading even one character would throw off the reading order of the entire slip.

There was no faster way to learn small seal script than to immerse oneself in bamboo slips all day.

In fact, the content recorded on all the bamboo slips in the house wasn't more than what would fit in a half-inch-thick book.

But the information inside was far more extensive.

Writing on bamboo slips was hard. According to Mr. Steward, they used to carve the characters with knives, which was even harder.

So, to save time making bamboo slips, the writing was simplified as much as possible—sometimes so much that even the author couldn't figure it out.

Especially with one character used for many meanings, interpretation became subjective. The main reason why later generations had countless explanations for ancient knowledge was, fundamentally, poverty.

Mr. Steward was very satisfied with Henry Clark's rigorous scholarly spirit, especially after looking through the bamboo slips Henry Clark had organized according to the library classification system, which made it very convenient to find needed records.

As a Grand Minister of Qin, Mr. Steward even asked Henry Clark to write this convenient classification method on bamboo slips, so it could be passed down.

"With this classification method, if the First Emperor were still alive, I would advise him to appoint you as His Majesty's record-keeping officer."

"What rank is that?"

"Six hundred dan!"

"Is that enough to support a family?"

"A county magistrate of Qin, with the rank of gentleman, receives one dou of fine rice per meal, half a sheng of soy sauce, a portion of vegetable soup, a plate of meat, a fief of a hundred households, and five bolts of various silk. If you became His Majesty's record-keeping officer, your rations and salary would be doubled. As a close minister, you'd have far more chances for rewards than others. If you're lucky, you might even marry women presented by other states."

"If the Qin dynasty still existed, what about you?"

Mr. Steward's face glowed as he said, word by word, "If the First Emperor were still alive, the house of Mr. Steward would not be open to just anyone."

It was obvious that by "just anyone," Mr. Steward meant minor officials like Henry Clark who might serve as record-keeping officers.

Clearly, Mr. Steward was looking down on him, but that's how fallen aristocrats are—always talking about the glory of their ancestors.

"Who's the emperor outside now?"

"The usurper Liu Che!"

"Are we going to overthrow Han and restore Qin?" Henry Clark thought Mr. Steward wanting to overthrow Emperor Wu of Han was a tall order. If it were Emperor Xian of Han, he might have joined in, but as for Emperor Wu—forget it.