Light dispelled the fear of the night, and clean water liberated us from heavy labor.
The quality of life in the shelters has undergone a dramatic transformation. People's mental outlook has been completely renewed, and their faces radiate an unprecedented sense of security and happiness.
However, food remains a Damocles' sword hanging over the heads of all survivors.
The shelter's food sources mainly consist of four parts: Lin Feng's hunting team, with the assistance of the Horned Wolf Legion, is extremely efficient and can provide a continuous supply of meat.
Sheep pens and chicken coops can provide a large amount of meat.
The women gathered from the surrounding area to supplement their diet with plants similar to vegetables and fruits.
The most important source of staple food is cultivation.
Under Lin Feng's guidance, the shelter opened up large tracts of farmland to grow the alien crop "Golden Fox Rice".
This crop is highly adaptable to the environment and has a considerable yield. The flour it is ground into is made into flatbread, which is a major source of carbohydrates for everyone.
The problem arose after the harvest.
Processing Golden Fox Rice is an extremely arduous, tedious, and inefficient physical labor process.
The golden fox rice was harvested and piled up in the central square of the shelter, resembling golden hills.
Then, the annual "threshing hell" began.
Everyone who wasn't out on missions, including Li Xiangbin who had just returned from hunting and should have been resting, had to pick up a heavy, primitive farm tool made of hardwood called a "flail."
In the square, a dozen people stood in a row, their expressions numb and mechanical, raising their flails high and then lashing them down hard against the ears of wheat on the ground.
"Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!..."
The dull, arrhythmic pounding continued from dawn till dusk, day after day.
Golden wheat husks and choking dust filled the air above the square, forming a long-lasting golden haze.
Everyone covered their mouths and noses with animal hides, but they were still choked and coughing incessantly. Sweat soaked through their clothes, mixing with the dust and leaving muddy streaks on their faces.
By the end of the day, everyone was exhausted, with aching backs, numb arms, and difficulty even raising their hands.
Their hard work for a whole day only resulted in turning a small pile of wheat ears into a mixture of wheat grains and straw.
This isn't over yet.
After threshing, the next step is wind separation. People need to stand on high ground, facing the wind, holding a winnowing basket full of the mixture, and carefully pour the contents of the basket down.
Using wind power, the lighter chaff and stalks are blown away, leaving the heavier grains. This process is not only inefficient but also highly dependent on the weather.
If there is no wind, or the wind direction is wrong, the work cannot be carried out.
This extremely low productivity, like an invisible rope, tightly strangled the development of the shelter.
A large and valuable workforce is tied to this repetitive and inefficient initial grain processing stage for a long time and cannot be freed up at all.
They could have built more greenhouses, reinforced the walls higher, developed more sophisticated weapons, and explored a wider world...
But now, they have to exhaust all their energy day after day just to fill their stomachs.
Lin Feng stood at the edge of the square, quietly watching everything.
His brows furrowed tightly.
This can't go on any longer.
His men should not be like a herd of livestock, toiling all day for the most basic sustenance.
They are human beings, the sparks of civilization, possessing wisdom and creativity. They should look up at the stars, not forever look down at the ears of wheat and the millstone at their feet.
It's time to let the power of electricity roar once again.
Last time, electricity brought light.
This time, electricity will bring power.
What he wanted to do was not simply replace manual grinding with an electric motor.
What he wanted to do was a complete and subversive revolution.
He wants to build a fully automated, assembly-line-style integrated grain processing plant that combines threshing, air separation, and grinding!
This idea is hundreds of times more complex than the previous light bulbs and water pumps.
It is no longer a single-function device, but a coordinated, small-scale, automated production line.
It requires a more sophisticated mechanical transmission system, a more complex mechanical structure, and a more powerful power core.
That night, Lin Feng locked himself in his research room.
Since the power system was built, this has become the brightest place in the entire shelter.
Several bright electric lights illuminated the room, which had been converted from a room in the main building and was filled with various animal hide drawings, mineral specimens, and rudimentary experimental equipment, leaving no shadows.
Lin Feng stood in front of a huge, newly erected blackboard.
This blackboard is made of several black stone slabs that have been polished to an extremely smooth finish, with a surface as smooth as a mirror.
He held a white lime pen in his hand and closed his eyes.
In his mind, a divine torrent of knowledge began to surge once more. Countless drawings, data, and 3D models concerning agricultural machinery, transmission systems, and materials mechanics collided, combined, and optimized deep within his consciousness, like a cosmic Big Bang.
From ancient water-powered mills to medieval windmills, to modern steam-powered combine harvesters, and finally to modern computer-controlled fully automated grain processing lines…
The wisdom that humanity has accumulated in agricultural production over thousands of years flashed before his eyes like a documentary film sped up a billion times.
What he needs to do is to sift through this endless ocean of wisdom to find the most suitable and optimized design for the current technological level and resource conditions of the shelter.
Finally, he opened his eyes. Those deep eyes were no longer filled with confusion, only a clear, creative light remained.
The lime pen in his hand began to move rapidly across the black slate.
"Shh..."
The crisp, rhythmic friction sound was exceptionally clear in the quiet night.
An unprecedented and extremely complex mechanical blueprint is gradually taking shape under his hands, bit by bit, from nothing to something.
This blueprint is full of ingenious, simplified, violent aesthetics and pragmatic ideas.
It is a large, interconnected system driven by a single core power.
Lin Feng named the entire system "Thunder Mill".
At the heart of "Thunder Mill" is a super-powerful motor that he redesigned, capable of providing enormous torque.
This "heart" will precisely distribute power to the three functional modules through an extremely complex transmission system consisting of dozens of gears of varying sizes and several tough animal hide conveyor belts.
The first module is the "Storm Threshing Drum".
He designed a massive wooden cylinder, over one meter in diameter and two meters long. The surface of the cylinder would be inlaid with hundreds of the hardest fangs of the alien beasts stored in the sanctuary, arranged in a spiral pattern.
This enormous cylinder, covered in sharp teeth, will spin wildly at hundreds of revolutions per minute within a semi-enclosed cavity also made of hardwood and sheet metal.
When the entire Golden Fox Rice stalk is fed in through a huge feeding port, the high-speed rotating beast teeth, like countless ferocious hands, instantly tear the fragile wheat stalks into pieces, while brutally and mercilessly scraping every single grain of wheat off the ear of wheat.
The second module is the "Cyclone Wind Selection Channel".
The mixture of wheat grains, bran, and chopped straw that comes out of the threshing drum passes through a special channel and falls onto a huge screen made of finely woven metal wires that vibrates at a high frequency.
Below the screen, Lin Feng designed a huge centrifugal fan, like an airplane turbine.
This fan, also driven by the main motor via a transmission belt, generates a strong and stable upward airflow from below, blowing across the entire screen.
Based on the most basic principles of physics, lightweight wheat bran and straw with a large surface area exposed to the wind will be relentlessly blown up by this powerful airflow and discharged out of the machine through a specially designed, top-mounted outlet, piling up in a heap.
Heavier, smaller, and plumper wheat grains, due to their own weight, resist the wind and pass through the mesh of the vibrating screen, falling into a large, funnel-shaped collection box below.
This design ingeniously utilizes aerodynamics to transform the previously luck-dependent wind separation process into a 100% controllable, efficient, and automated separation process.
The third module, which is also the end point of the entire system, is the "Titan Electric Stone Mill".
He designed an extremely complex, multi-stage reduction gear transmission system. This system can be considered the soul of the entire blueprint, a masterpiece of mechanical transmission.
It consists of a large driving gear and several driven gears of different sizes. The powerful motor is first transmitted to a small gear that rotates at high speed, and then transmitted step by step through the meshing of the gears. In this process, the speed is reduced step by step, while the torque is amplified geometrically step by step.
Finally, when the power is transmitted to the last main shaft connected to the upper millstone, the originally high-speed, violent electrical energy has been tamed into a slow, steady, but unparalleled force capable of moving massive boulders.
The clean wheat grains collected from the air separation channel will be automatically and at a constant speed fed into the central hole of the electric stone mill via a small conveyor belt.
Below the stone mill is a specially designed flour outlet, from which fine, white flour flows out continuously like a stream.
This design is intricately linked, seamlessly integrated, and exquisitely crafted.
It integrates the arduous labor that originally required dozens of people, several days, and numerous processes into a roaring, automatically operating steel behemoth.
All humans need to do is feed bundles of Golden Fox Rice into the machine's "mouth," and then wait at the other end of the machine to receive the separated, usable straw, wheat bran, and the purest flour.
As Lin Feng drew the last line, the eastern sky was already beginning to lighten with the first hint of dawn.
He looked at the blueprint that filled the entire blackboard, filled with intricate lines and precise annotations, and let out a long sigh of relief. His eyes were bloodshot, but his spirits were unusually high.
This is more than just a blueprint.
This is a manifesto for the shelter's transition to the industrial age.
This is the prelude to an exponential explosion in productivity.
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