Outside the city of Nanpu, the town of Linzhou, the master of the town, wants to buy some land to build a grain-collecting granary. He asks his brother-in-law, the village chief, to take him to the market place and sell the land to him. The village chief says that the land that the master is buying is for farming, not for grain storage, and that the sale price is too high for the grain to be sold for. The master-lieutenant tells the chief that he will buy all four acres of land in the village for twenty silvers, and he will hire someone else to manage the additional land.