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After all the fun, life returned to normal.
In autumn, the weather gets cooler and people start storing food in preparation for winter.
Nowadays, people have houses to live in, and each house has a kang or chimney, and there are plenty of furs, so all they need to prepare is food.
Now each member of the hunting team has an iron spear, so hunting is very easy. Wu Yue is afraid that they will hunt too aggressively and kill all the animals around or scare them away, so he has asked them to go out hunting once every two days.
The surplus labor force continued to make bricks and build city walls.
Some people also made room to build a barn next to the stable. Now that he had the rope, Wu Yue planned to raise animals, such as cows, sheep, and deer, as long as they were docile and honest.
If you plan to raise animals, you naturally need to store animal food. Moreover, the tribe has so many horses that they need to graze in winter. Fortunately, they now have iron. Wu Yue had the ironmaking team make sickles and assigned some people to cut grass, dry it, and store it.
According to his request, the hunting team began to bring back some injured animals to the tribe one after another, tied them up with ropes and kept them in the shed. However, most wild animals had fierce temperaments and most of them refused to stay still, so they were eventually slaughtered and made into sausages.
There was one sensible jumping sheep, however, which, seeing it couldn't break free, stayed put. Not long after, it even gave birth to two lambs. Wu Yue was delighted and had the hunting team keep an eye on the jumping sheep and capture a few more. While the meat was small, feeding them more grass would eventually fatten them up.
After those jungle fowls hatched several times, there are now nearly thirty of them, big and small. The more chickens there are, the stronger the smell. So Wu Yue took the opportunity to build a chicken coop next to the animal shed and moved all the chickens there. From now on, this area will be planned as a breeding area.
There is more and more work to be done in the tribe now, and it is inevitable that some people will be concerned about the distribution. After all, we all eat the same food and drink the same water. Why should I do the heavy work while you do the easy work?
Moreover, many products of work, such as the small amount of eggs and chicken obtained from raising chickens, cannot be fairly distributed to the more than 300 people in the entire tribe. Even if you work hard to raise chickens, what does it have to do with me? I don’t get to eat the eggs or chicken.
Wu Yue kept these contradictions that emerged from time to time in mind and began to consider whether currency should be issued.
Can we solve this problem by paying everyone wages according to their different labor intensities and then letting them use their wages to purchase various supplies?
However, this matter still needs to be discussed with Xiao, and cannot be decided on a whim.
That night, after eating, Wu Yue called Xiao back to the house. Xiao followed him happily, thinking that something good would happen next. Wu Yue then expressed his thoughts.
Afraid Xiao didn't understand the significance of this, Wu Yue broke it down and explained it to him clearly: "...If we issue currency, firstly, everyone will be paid according to their work, which can encourage everyone to work harder. Secondly, those who work more won't feel resentful towards those who work less, because they don't have as much money anyway. Thirdly, we won't have to worry about how to fairly distribute some of the scarcer supplies. Those with money can buy them, and those without can just ignore them."
Xiao thought it made sense and nodded, but then asked, "What are you going to use as currency?"
This is a difficult problem. He does not have natural currencies such as gold and silver. Iron ore is actually a good choice, but he keeps it as a secret, fearing that if it is circulated, people from other tribes will learn how to smelt iron and make enemies for him.
Salt and linen? Both were essential for daily life and were valuable, making them suitable for use as currency. However, linen was too slow to produce, and salt was needed to exchange for supplies with other tribes.
It would be nice if there was something that wasn't inherently practical, that was available in controlled quantities, couldn't be counterfeited, and was easy to carry.
Unfortunately, it was difficult to find anything that met these requirements in this primitive tribe. Wu Yue thought for a long time but couldn't come up with any good ideas. He simply gave up and lay down on the kang: "Forget it, I'm going to sleep. We'll talk about it tomorrow."
Xiao came up to him and kissed him, advising him, "You're going to sleep right after eating. You'll feel uncomfortable later."
Wu Yue let him kiss him but refused to move.
Xiao then gave up and climbed onto the kang, hugging the man tightly in his arms. To prevent him from falling asleep, he tried to find something to talk about: "It doesn't matter if you can't think of it. The ice and snow season is coming anyway, and there won't be much work for everyone by then."
"Yeah..." Wu Yue agreed and hugged the warm body of the person next to him. With such a human-shaped stove, he would definitely not be cold when sleeping during the ice and snow season.
Snow season...
He sat up suddenly and began to search in the space.
"What's wrong?" Xiao also stood up and came over to look at the big box he had dug out from the space. "What is this?"
It was a type of building block called Snowflakes, and the delivery destination was a kindergarten, so the quantity purchased was quite considerable, perhaps seven thousand pieces.
Wu Yue laughed heartily, turned around, cupped Xiao's face, and gave him a fierce kiss: "We have currency now!"
He had always thought that this thing was useless and had kept it in a corner of the space until now. He never expected that it would be of such great use.
It is not practical in itself, but there is enough of it, and it is a unique plastic product in the world. It is small in size and can be strung together with a rope to carry around. It comes in different colors and can be used as different denominations. It is simply a perfect currency.
Although it is not as durable as metal products, it feels quite thick and can be used for ten or twenty years without any problem. During this time, he can slowly look for other currencies.
After thinking about some corresponding rules, Wu Yue proposed the concept of currency in the evening of the next day when everyone was eating together.
After telling everyone about the benefits, everyone will vote as usual to decide whether to accept them.
To be honest, most primitive people did not fully understand the benefits of currency, but they were all quite convinced of Wu Yue, so naturally whatever he said was what they believed, so everyone accepted it.
Wu Yue also knew that they were still confused at the moment, but it didn't matter. As time went by, they would gradually understand the benefits of currency.
He set the wages for each job on the spot. For example, hunting, which was dangerous and tiring, had the highest wages. One could get one white snowflake a day, which was the salary for weaving one piece of cloth, making salt for two days, and making bricks for 200 yuan.
One white snowflake can buy ten kilograms of meat or staple foods such as ground eggs and sweet potatoes of equal value, or even radishes, pumpkins and chayote grown by Wu Yue. You can pick whatever is available.
The daily pay for other jobs is also enough to make a living, but the choice is not as wide. If you feel that the salary earned from your main job is not enough, you can use your free time to make bricks or create new things. If you create something good that is recognized by the gods, you will receive a reward.
There are still some elderly people and children in the tribe who can't do much work and have no family to share food with. Wu Yue naturally won't require them to use their salary to buy food. Food will still be distributed every day, and furs will be distributed in winter and linen clothes in summer.
Having come up with the concept of "jin," Wu Yue naturally went back to the drawing board. Luckily, he'd seen an old-fashioned hanging scale before, so he figured it out. He remembered the powerful magnet weighed 2.5 kilograms, so he used that as a standard and fashioned a weight out of iron.
He was the only one person, and he could not be relied upon alone to pay wages and exchange goods every day, so he started a literacy campaign, teaching everyone Arabic numerals and simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and then selected a few smart and clever people to be responsible for these tasks, of course, with wages.
Of course, it was a mess at first. Some people sat by the fire with snowflakes and ended up melting them and getting burned. Some people were tempted by the colorful snowflakes and bit them. Some people were terrible at math and accused others of making mistakes. Some people lost their snowflakes because they didn't take good care of them and complained that their roommates had stolen them...
This made Wu Yue very troubled.
However, as time went by, such mistakes became less frequent, and the people of the Sharp Fang Tribe gradually discovered the benefits of currency.
The most obvious thing is that in the past, the tribe would hunt and bring back a lot of prey before the snow season and distribute it to everyone. Some people processed and preserved the prey very well, and it still tasted like meat during the snow season, but some people did not preserve it well, and by the time the snow season came, it was often moldy and smelly. Not only did it taste bad, it also made people uncomfortable.
Now that we have currency, we don’t have to worry too much. Every time we buy food with a white coin, we can eat it up in two or three days. The extra prey brought back by the hunting team will be made into delicious sausages and jerky by someone specially assigned to do so. In winter, we can buy them directly. It’s so convenient.
If you have extra currency, you can occasionally change your taste and eat the fresh things grown by the gods. If you are afraid of the cold, you can exchange it for furs, and if you are afraid of the heat, you can exchange it for linen clothes.
After tasting the benefits of currency, everyone began to find ways to make money, and among them, the simple job of making bricks was naturally the most popular. So the walls on the east and west sides of the Sharp Tooth Tribe began to be built slowly.
During this period, several other tribes came to exchange salt. They were envious of the Sharp Tooth Tribe's city walls, houses, linen clothes, horses, and pottery. Unfortunately, they were all poor tribes, and the supplies they brought were only enough to exchange for salt.
After seeing off the tribes that had exchanged for salt, Wu Yue looked at the furs and dried meat they had obtained and sighed silently.
The Sharpfang Tribe had no shortage of furs and food, but he wanted something better. Thinking of the legendary great tribe by the river, he decided to go there when winter came.
Winter has arrived as soon as it was spoken.
The weather turned gloomy, with a few cold winds followed by occasional rain and snow. The Sharp Fang tribe members changed out of their linen clothes and straw sandals and donned warm animal skins and thick boots, coping comfortably in their warm homes.
The city wall was still half finished, but Wu Yue asked everyone to stop working. In this weather, even if the mud bricks were made, they would not be able to dry and they would be left outside in the cold for nothing.
Without animals, the plants withered, hunting, gathering, and salt-making stopped, and weaving also stopped because the raw material hemp was used up. Only the easy work of raising animals continued. Most people lazily nestled in the warm houses, waiting for the spring flowers to bloom next year.
Wu Yue was not idle. He asked his iron smelting buddies to get him nails and hammers, and he was now making a carriage.
He didn't want to reveal his identity when he went out this time, so he couldn't take things directly from the space. He needed a carriage to hide his identity.
Of course, he wouldn't make the kind of horse-drawn carriages that the princes and nobles used in ancient costume dramas. He just made a simple cart.
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