I Can Fish Up Everything!

Chapter 167: Chapter 126: Eating This Fish Grants Longevity?

”I just got lucky. I spent an extra morning out on the water before I ran into this big fella,” Gu Nan said humbly. When he saw the man finish his cigarette, he offered him another.

This time, the fisherman didn’t smoke it, instead tucking the cigarette behind his ear.

”These things don’t go for a high price, but one this big is a rare catch!”

As a fisherman, besides making money, his only other hobby was catching big fish.

Seeing someone else land a fish this big was almost more painful than losing one himself.

If he had known this guy had a lingcod this huge, he might not have helped, even if it cost him a prized catch of his own.

Gu Nan thanked him again and rode his tricycle back to the shop.

Recently, Yi Chen hadn’t really been closing up the shop in the afternoons. Even if she felt sleepy, she would just take a short nap in the store.

The business used to rely on foot traffic from the seafood market, but now they had built up a base of regular customers. Some of them were vloggers who came at unpredictable times, so she stayed in the shop most of the time.

As for her videos, she hadn’t been able to make them lately. The shop’s business was booming, and she no longer had enough free time.

Besides, Gu Nan was often nowhere to be found, so he couldn’t help her film.

So, she had resorted to filming short daily-life vlogs. Shorter videos were much easier to edit, dub, and add subtitles to than her previous ones.

As a result, her follower count was still growing steadily. At this rate, there was no need for her to film long videos at all.

But she had no time to work on videos today. For some reason, an unusual number of fishermen had come in to buy sardines.

They only wanted the small ones, but at ten yuan a pound, the sardines sold incredibly fast. She sold roughly three hundred pounds in a single morning, and that alone brought in three thousand yuan in revenue.

The larger ones, however, weren’t selling well, because the entire seafood market was flooded with them.

Everyone had set a uniform price of twenty yuan a pound, so whether they sold or not was purely up to the customers.

In any case, hers weren’t moving. She had only sold forty or fifty pounds all morning, and more than half her stock was still left.

Worried the fish would spoil if left out too long, Yi Chen had to rearrange the freezer to see if she could cram some more sardines in, even though it was already stuffed full.

Fortunately, a lot of the yellowtail that had previously filled the freezer had been sold. A few restaurants had come by in the morning and bought up the larger ones, freeing up a good amount of space.

After a busy morning and a quick lunch, the workers who were supposed to work on the fish tank arrived. Now she had to move all the fish from the iced display area again.

Luckily, there wasn’t anything living in the tank at the moment, or it would have been even more of a hassle.

Gu Nan heard the THUD THUD sounds before he even reached the shop’s entrance. It was the sound of a sledgehammer knocking down the display counter.

The display counter was a concrete platform tiled with marble. There were holes in the four corners, allowing melted ice water to flow down into a channel underneath, which then led to the main drainpipe outside.

Now that the tank was going to be built higher, the entire display counter had to be demolished and rebuilt. Gu Nan was clearly going to a lot of trouble.

Yi Chen was surprised to see Gu Nan back at this hour.

But when she saw all the boxes on his tricycle, she instantly realized he was here to make a delivery.

The huge fish tied to the very top, in particular, once again attracted the attention of several nearby shop owners.

The abalone shop owner pointed to the big fish on top. ”Ah Nan, is that a lingcod? A big one like this... don’t tell me you caught it yourself again?”

”You know it,” Gu Nan said with a grin. ”I heard a school of mackerel showed up offshore, so I headed out at two in the morning. I caught a ton of mackerel and managed to land this big fella too. Just as they say, the fish are always biting after a typhoon!”

At his words, the crowd of shop owners turned their attention to the stacked styrofoam boxes.

One of the owners asked, his voice trembling slightly, ”Don’t tell me... all of these boxes are full of mackerel?”

”Every last one of them. And I was fishing alone, so this is considered a small haul. The other boats had at least four or five people each. Now *that’s* what you call a lot of fish.”

”But even with so many people fishing, the school of mackerel didn’t look any smaller when it moved on.”

When Gu Nan said this, the owners of shops that sold things like oysters and abalone were fine; they were just purely envious.

But as for the owners who also sold fish, it started to give them ideas.

The yellowtail before, the mackerel this time... even if they didn’t know about the deals he made at the docks, they could see that Gu Nan had caught at least several tens of thousands of yuan worth of fish on these two trips.

How much could it possibly cost to go out to sea? There wasn’t a single owner who wasn’t green with envy.

At that moment, many of the owners started getting ideas. They wanted to follow Gu Nan’s example: leave someone to watch the shop while they went out to sea to fish.

There were some level-headed ones among them, though. The abalone shop owner clapped Gu Nan on the shoulder and said with a sigh, ”Ah Nan, your luck is incredible, and you’re willing to work hard for it. Whether you’re angling or netting, working at sea is tough. It’s nothing like sitting in an air-conditioned shop.”

Yi Chen, standing nearby, knew this better than anyone.

She knew that Gu Nan often fished until his back ached, that sometimes the exhaustion was written all over his face, and that he even had trouble sleeping.

There were some things she couldn’t help him with, so she could only pour all her energy into the shop, doing her best to look after it.

The abalone shop owner’s words immediately served as a reality check for some of the other owners whose businesses were doing reasonably well.

It wasn’t as if they were completely ignorant of a fisherman’s life. Most fishermen didn’t actually earn as much as they did, and the work was genuinely grueling, out in the wind and sun.

Gu Nan had just gotten lucky these last two times. If fishing were really that profitable, why would he be dealing in imported seafood? And more to the point, why would his shop have been on the verge of bankruptcy before?

As the crowd dispersed, Gu Nan smiled and offered a cigarette to the abalone shop owner.