Although it was Top's first time drinking wine, he didn't resist it at all, perhaps because the wine tasted sweet.

We ate and drank together. Top seemed to enjoy it too, grinning the whole time; it seemed to be having a great time.

I only fermented this wine for half a month, so the alcohol content is not high, and you don't need to worry too much about getting drunk.

Top and I don't know how long we ate, but quite a few monkeys came back for more food. As usual, I gave them a little of everything until all the monkeys were full and left.

At this moment, Top the monkey was already quite drunk. It was quite impressive that it could drink so much, considering it had never drunk alcohol before.

Top had almost finished eating, so it lay down on the stone platform and continued peeling chestnuts. Top really liked them; in its opinion, they were even tastier than rabbit meat.

I raised my glass, gazed at the cunning moon in the night sky, sighed, and silently murmured, "May all be well, then it will be a sunny day."

…………

The next day passed as usual. Fishing, gathering firewood, setting traps, and cultivating wasteland.

However, I couldn't bear to eat those wild eggs. I planned to hatch them and these pheasant chicks would become my first batch of poultry. Pheasant meat is also a good food and can enrich my granary.

As for hatching, I'll have to do it myself. You might think that a person can hatch chicks?

The answer is yes, humans and chickens are both warm-blooded animals. A constant body temperature is a prerequisite for incubating these eggs; as long as the temperature can reach 36 or 37 degrees Celsius, there will be no problem incubating the chicks.

The average human body temperature is around 36 degrees Celsius, so as long as you turn the eggs over twice a day, it's only a matter of time before chicks hatch.

To hatch these pheasant chicks, I reluctantly cut off a piece of jackal skin. I used the furry side to wrap the eggs, and then sewed the skin together with fine hemp thread.

I made this into the shape of a belt and tied it around my abdomen. That way, even when I sleep at night, I can keep incubating these wild eggs on my stomach.

I marked the wooden spear that I use to record time with an X. Starting today, these chicks will hatch in a maximum of twenty-one days. I just need to remove the string and take out the chicks inside when the time is right.

When I have time, I also start weaving a larger cage to raise these pheasants.

Although they look like domestic chickens when they are young, once the wild chickens have fully grown their wings, their wild nature will return, and these chicks are very likely to fly away.

However, I have a lot to do, so the weaving is progressing slowly. Anyway, it will take a long time for the chicks to hatch and be able to take off, so weaving one cage should be enough.

After autumn arrives, when I go to the lake to cut bamboo, I often find some soft-shelled turtles basking on the rocks. But these creatures are very alert; they will immediately flee back into the water at the slightest sound.

I tried throwing stones at them, but my stone-throwing skills were really bad. I tried several times but missed, which made me think of another ancient method to deal with them.

However, it was precisely when I went to that area to collect stones and throw turtles that I made a new discovery, which broke my long-standing predicament of not having any iron tools.

I discovered that some of the stones I picked up had fine black particles attached to them.

At first, I didn't pay attention to this detail, thinking it was just some mud or sand stuck to it.

But when I threw the turtle, I picked up the stone from the water. The water was mostly pebbles and sand, so nothing would stick to the stone.

I touched those things with my hand, and they were stuck to me like iron filings on a magnet, not a single one falling off.

This discovery made me incredibly happy; it was like finding a needle in a haystack.

The fact that these stones are magnetic confirms one thing: only iron-containing ores can be magnetized; other types of metals do not have this property.

Logically, all I need to do is collect a large number of these stones, crush them, and then use the charcoal reduction method to extract the iron from them.

But now that I have a magnet, I'm going to use a more direct and efficient method to smelt iron, which even skips the process of reducing iron with charcoal.

My method was used a thousand years ago, and it was even used by Ou Yezi, a master swordsmith from the Spring and Autumn Period, to forge precious swords.

In order to obtain the ironware, I temporarily stopped all the work I was doing.

I made a pouch out of bamboo strips, and then made a handle out of two pieces of bamboo. The whole thing looks like a bamboo net bag for holding fire tongs.

I went to the lakeside where I found the magnets and selected some small, magnetic stones to put in a bamboo bag.

Larger magnets were not chosen for two reasons: first, their weight would make them difficult to handle; second, smaller magnets have a smaller contact area. Given the same amount of time and weight, smaller magnets can collect more black material.

These black substances are important materials used in iron smelting. These black substances, which can be directly attracted by magnets, have an extremely high iron content and require almost no reduction. As long as the temperature is right, they can be directly melted into molten iron.

Collecting this black substance with a high iron content is not easy, but fortunately Top also helped me collect it using a magnet.

Even so, it still took us four or five days to collect what we estimated to be five or six kilograms of black powder.

The previous crucible wasn't very good, so I re-fired two more crucibles with hanging holes at both ends.

This time, I let these pottery pieces air dry completely before firing them, so both of them are in very good condition. They can even make a crisp sound when you tap them with a wooden stick.

I poured all the black powder into a crucible. This time, I was only going to refine this one batch of molten iron, and I was willing to use charcoal to cover almost the entire rim of the crucible.

The temperature required for smelting iron is higher than that for smelting gold and copper; it generally needs to reach at least 1,600 degrees Celsius to melt the iron.

To achieve higher temperatures, I not only drew air into my ventilation system to promote combustion, but I also made a makeshift bow-drill blower out of tree bark to increase airflow.

Under the intensely high temperature, almost blindingly white, the black substances gradually turned from red to white, eventually becoming a hot liquid like water.