She really does resemble a worried and nagging wife in an ordinary family.
Yun Lie lowered his head, pursed his lips, touched his nose, and muttered with a pout, "Isn't it enough that people can live here? The wall won't collapse."
“Oh, and there are those messy, unresolved accounts,” Luo Cuiwei glanced at him sideways, her disdain mixed with a warning, “Once I’m done with what I’m doing, I’m going to thoroughly examine the household accounts.”
Yun Lie swallowed hard, feeling inexplicably guilty, and muttered under his breath, "Looking, so what? I haven't been indulging in debauchery or doing anything improper..."
God knows why I'm always short of money.
"Shut up! You can live like this without indulging in debauchery, and you still want to mess around?" Luo Cuiwei sneered coldly. "Even a beautiful girl would be starved into a grotesque state by you."
After listening to Yun Lie's general account of the manor's finances and glancing at a few pages of the ledgers, she could roughly estimate that the intermittent poverty of the Prince Zhao's manor, apart from the fact that he often paid for the delayed food and pay of the Linchuan army, was mainly due to the prince's overly generous nature and the chaotic state of the accounts.
He dislikes owing others and only cares about keeping track of the debts he owes to others, but he has no patience to keep track of the detailed debts others owe him. With so much going out and not coming in, it would be strange if he didn't become poor.
"I don't believe you can see the surplus money just by looking at the ledger." Yun Lie rolled his eyes at the sky, muttering unconvinced under his breath.
“I can actually find some extra money in that ledger,” Luo Cuiwei laughed angrily, reaching out to pinch his waist. “When you come back, I’ll throw all that silver in your face.”
Her slap made Yun Lie's face flush red. He quickly grabbed her hand, took two steps to the side, and glared at her angrily, "If you don't want to go back to your chambers, then don't, don't touch me!"
Now it was Luo Cuiwei's turn to blush.
2018/3/6 23:03:39|51700018
Chapter 38
During lunch, Luo Cuiwei looked at the dishes on the table and sighed pitifully, "Yun Lie."
"Hmm?" Yun Lie stopped eating and turned to look at her.
"I really want to hire two chefs from my Luo family's kitchen." Luo Cuiwei listlessly took a sip of soup.
Yesterday, seeing how busy she was, Steward Chen sent someone to deliver food to the side courtyard where she was reviewing the accounts. However, she only ate a few bites of pastries with hot tea, partly because she was too busy, and partly because…
The food at Prince Zhao's residence was really not to her liking.
In the past, when she came to Prince Zhao's residence, she usually brought her own chef from the Luo family and had never seriously tried the cooking skills of Prince Zhao's chef.
She used to see Xiong Xiaoyi and the others so hungry that their eyes would light up at the sight of meat, and she naively thought it was just because the Prince Zhao's mansion was short of money.
Only yesterday did she truly understand that no matter how rich or poor the Prince Zhao's mansion was, the chef's skills and taste would not change much.
It seems that Yun Lie was used to simple meals in the army, and as long as the food was cooked and hot, it was not bad for him.
Since the master of the Prince Zhao's mansion didn't have any demanding requirements, the chefs naturally didn't have the desire to improve their culinary skills.
“You mentioned before that your chef earns a high salary,” Yun Lie frankly stated his poverty first, then reconsidered and conceded, “Is it possible to hire only one?”
Luo Cuiwei slumped her shoulders. “Whether it’s one or two, if they want to take the head chef away from my mansion, they must get my father’s approval.”
Luo Huai is easygoing and open-minded. He can compromise, go with the flow, and not force things in many things, but he is very stubborn when it comes to food. Although he can only eat medicinal food in the past few years due to recuperation, his medicinal food is not ordinary, rough, or casual.
He was born with a gourmet palate and was extremely picky about food. Not only did he set aside an entire courtyard in his home as a kitchen, but he also personally hired chefs from all over the country at great expense.
Even though Luo Cuiwei was his most beloved daughter, it wasn't as simple as just being cute and saying a few nice words to "snatch the kitchen from his mouth."
"What should we do to get my father-in-law to agree?" Yun Lie frowned, looking at Luo Cuiwei, who couldn't eat, with heartache.
Luo Cuiwei wrinkled her nose regretfully: "Let's talk about it when you come back."
The day before yesterday, when she and Yun Lie went to the Imperial Clan Court to submit their marriage certificate, the officials from the Ministry of Rites present mentioned that due to the urgency of the matter, many rituals would be completed according to the established procedures after Yun Lie returned, and that they could not act haphazardly before then.
For example, she could not take Yun Lie to pay respects to her own parents before she paid her respects to the Emperor, Empress, and Yun Lie's birth mother.
From the perspective of ordinary people's etiquette, if the Prince Zhao's Mansion were to ask the Luo family for a cook before Yun Lie had even formally met her father, it would make Yun Lie appear impolite and arrogant.
In order to leave a good impression on her father, Luo Cuiwei could only hold her tongue and wait until he returned from Linchuan before saying anything.
"When you come back, go and meet my father..."
She was halfway through her sentence when she suddenly remembered that she had married a prince, so she gave him a quiet, amused glare.
Yun Lie looked completely innocent under the glare: "Does that look mean my father-in-law is dissatisfied with me?"
“Your father-in-law didn’t say anything, I’m the one who’s dissatisfied,” Luo Cuiwei snorted and picked up her chopsticks again. “So, according to the rules set by the Ministry of Rites, my father should be the one to pay his respects to you, right?”
Sigh, she must have been a bad person for ten lifetimes to fall in love with a prince.
Not only did it prevent her elderly father from recovering in peace, but it also forced him to pay respects to his son-in-law... Her impulsive nature was truly unacceptable; she hadn't considered all of this when she agreed to Yun Lie's request.
"If that's the case, then I can only..." Luo Cuiwei absentmindedly shoveled a few grains of rice into her mouth, then paused.
Originally, she intended to jokingly say, "Then I'll just have to dump you and marry someone else," but she immediately thought that Yun Lie was about to go to war. If he took her joke seriously and kept it in his mind, it wouldn't be a good thing for him.
So he quickly shut up.
Yun Lie seemed to guess what was troubling her and firmly replied, "What ordinary people do is the same here. Naturally, I will go to pay my respects to my father-in-law."
"But if we do that, won't the people from the Ministry of Rites cause trouble for you?"
Recalling the rigid and serious expressions of the two Ministry of Rites officials the day before, Luo Cuiwei immediately felt worried for Yun Lie.
Yun Lie raised an eyebrow: "There are plenty of people who want to pick a fight with me. What is the Ministry of Rites? They like to reason with me, but I don't."
****