Chapter 99 Chapter 99 The Lives of Many Baby Girls
The clay used to make honeycomb briquettes had to be filtered through an iron sieve. Qi Jianmin worked meticulously, not only filtering the clay finely but also meticulously crushing the crushed coal he bought from the coal mine. After Lin Xinghuo's interruption, Cai Weihong's impulsive anger subsided. Instead, she remembered Qi Jianmin's kindness and said to Lin Xinghuo, "Okay, don't worry. I'll have Qi Jianmin prepare the record sheet for you. He works with numbers, and he's very particular about accuracy and clarity."
"He's very meticulous and even calculated that our briquettes last 10 percent longer than our neighbors'."
Qi Jianmin, smearing charcoal dust on his apron, was too embarrassed to shake Wu Nian's hand. After hearing what Cai Weihong said, the talented scholar quickly corrected him: "It's 9.2 percent."
Cai Weihong sighed and smiled helplessly: "Look, he's the most competitive about things like this."
Originally, she just wanted to resolve the awkwardness and casually suggested to roughly test the fire power and burning resistance of Beiyuan Bamboo charcoal on an ordinary stove in an ordinary household. But now Lin Xinghuo really regarded this data as a serious reference for research. Isn't this closer to her intention of taking out Beiyuan Bamboo than the specific values obtained under perfect conditions in the laboratory?
Lin Xinghuo directly pulled out five large unity notes from his pocket and handed them over: "You can write up the materials later. This is the first step of research funding. While there is still time today, thank you for your help..."
This kind of everyday fuel testing requires different control groups to determine the strengths and weaknesses of new fuels. Since this is to be done, various common stoves, as well as other common fuels like coal briquettes, kerosene, and firewood, will be required. However, Lin Xinghuo was frank: "Professor Li's laboratory focuses on pharmaceuticals. This work you're doing is for me. I believe the development prospects of bamboo and other materials extend beyond medicine and food, and into many other areas."
This is especially true in the daily lives of ordinary people. Originally, Lin Xinghuo cultivated Beiyuan bamboo from Baizhang bamboo to create a substitute for chemical fertilizers, with bamboo charcoal being just an intermediate step. However, as she explored this semi-spiritual plant more deeply, she discovered more and more uses.
She explained to Cai Weihong and his wife: "I am about to open a bamboo charcoal workshop, and I really need data to promote it." The workshop is naturally still affiliated with a public institution, but Lin Xinghuo wants to promote it not for bamboo charcoal orders, but to promote the cultivation of Beiyuan bamboo.
Beiyuan bamboo is a semi-spiritual plant. While not truly spiritual, it requires spiritual energy to thrive. It grows faster in areas with higher spiritual energy concentrations, while those in areas with lower spiritual energy levels will compete for spiritual energy, much like plants in a forest competing for sunlight. However, this repulsive nature is also a positive factor. It ensures that once Beiyuan bamboo's benefits are fully understood and publicized, it won't be over-planted. Even if someone were to cultivate Beiyuan bamboo as a vegetable, the spiritual energy concentration in ordinary fields would simply wipe it out. At least in the short term, Beiyuan bamboo won't suffer the fate of a plant with diminished medicinal properties, like ginseng and carrots. Nor will it threaten the survival of other bamboo species.
But this doesn't limit the application of Beiyuan bamboo. While it can't be cultivated on a large scale, it can be distributed to thousands of households, like a drop of water, truly integrating into the lives of ordinary people: A single plant in front of or behind a house, a sparse planting in the flower beds between buildings in a residential compound, private plots, public fields... With a willing heart, anywhere can it be planted?
This "intention" is based on the practical benefits that Beiyuan bamboo brings to people.
Bamboo leaves, bamboo shavings, bamboo juice, and bamboo clothing can all be used as medicine. After Professor Li's lab's results, with Beiyuan bamboo unable to be cultivated on a large scale, pharmaceutical companies will inevitably have to collect them from the public, just like the small vendors who quietly collect cicada shells from street vendors in the summer, often for a small snack, and many children are willing to help collect them. As long as the lab can produce a specific drug, this prospect is foreseeable. But this is what Lin Xinghuo is least worried about: bamboo itself can be used as medicine, and there are countless traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions using bamboo medicine. The medicinal properties of semi-spiritual plants are far beyond the reach of ordinary bamboo. With the right combination of auxiliary drugs, the effectiveness of these prescriptions is undoubtedly no less than that of specific medicines for similar ailments.
Besides being a great way to earn pocket money, Beiyuan bamboo also has other uses. It can also be used to make charcoal! Nowadays, stoves are needed in both the city and the countryside. Even workers living in dormitories and cafeterias need a small stove to boil water. The charcoal made from Beiyuan bamboo is durable and powerful, and the ash from the burnt bamboo is a fertilizer comparable to chemical fertilizer!
Most importantly, Beiyuan bamboo grows quickly. While it may not be as tall as Baizhang bamboo, which can reach ten feet overnight, it still grows remarkably quickly under normal conditions, no slower than the fastest-growing moso bamboo, which grows a meter a day. Once Beiyuan bamboo reaches a hundred feet, it faces extinction or death. However, ordinary Beiyuan bamboo doesn't need to grow that tall, and cutting it down too high is a hassle. In fact, it can't be allowed to grow that tall, so it's cut down every ten days or two. The cut bamboo can be harvested and used, carefully sorted for parts that can be sold to a purchasing outlet, and the rest, when it reaches a certain size, is sent to Lin Xinghuo's bamboo charcoal workshop for processing into charcoal.
Generally, high-quality bamboo fired in an earthen kiln yields about 20% charcoal. Wu Nian's modified boiler, with its high temperature, produces a higher yield and faster, requiring only two days to fire a single furnace. Semi-spiritual plants are inherently heavy. Lin Xinghuo calculated that a single Beiyuan bamboo can produce approximately 300 to 400 kilograms of charcoal in a year. Don't underestimate this; with the power of Beiyuan bamboo charcoal, it's more than enough for a city family's daily cooking needs. In the countryside, however, each household has more space for planting in the fields.
If you find it too much trouble, you can use Beiyuan bamboo itself as firewood. However, Beiyuan bamboo dries very slowly, and even after drying for a year or two, it's not as moist. It's also difficult to ignite, and it can easily burn out without other fuel. However, you can treat it like a large hardwood log, stacked with other firewood. A piece of Beiyuan bamboo, the length of an arm, can take two days to burn, showing its exceptional durability.
In contrast to common plant ash used for fertilizer, the white ash from fully burned bamboo charcoal is more fertilizing than the black ash from burning it directly as firewood. However, black ash is particularly beneficial when used in rural areas for burning manure. Ash fertilizer is much more readily available than chemical fertilizers, favored by farmers and even useful for city dwellers tending to potted plants or small vegetable gardens. While the price may be prohibitive, anyone with a discerning eye can see that this material has greater potential than chemical fertilizers. Perhaps there will even be businesses selling bamboo charcoal ash from door to door.
Anyway, as long as the follow-up is followed up, Beiyuan Bamboo can be used thoroughly. It is also more in line with the self-sufficient sentiment hidden in the bones of most Chinese people...
While the building hadn't yet been erected, the foundation was being laid. Lin Xinghuo had already expanded the farm and workshop, and had even decisively recruited men. Cai Weihong and Qi Jianmin had already unwittingly picked up their shovels and added to her chores. It had to be said that Master Fang's "use what you can" (the young master's "lazy man's theory") had truly ingrained itself into his beloved apprentice's head.
Cai Weihong, however, took her time entering Professor Li's lab. After Lin Xinghuo and his family left, the couple began working with full enthusiasm. Cai Weihong began making a list. Qi Jianmin called his son and father to hurry up and get his honeycomb briquettes ready. His honeycomb briquettes would also serve as a reference fuel. Qi Jianmin, who was nearly thirty years old, was confident in his briquettes.
Lin Xinghuo, completely unaware that he had ruined someone else's leisurely weekend, got into the car with Wu Nian after leaving Cai Weihong's family compound and closed the doors and windows.
Wu Nian gathered spiritual energy at his fingertips and knocked on a certain place in the carriage. The spacious but empty carriage immediately changed drastically. The bottom of the padded folding compartment silently expanded and retracted, and it was equipped with tables, chair backs, drawers and cabinets. A spiritual vine also stretched out from the side, growing and entangled, and soon formed a round bird's nest.
Lin Beiguo cheered. After Wu Nian covered it with a soft blanket woven from fine feathers, Dabao quickly transformed into a fox cub, bounding into the nest and curling up to continue sleeping. This spiritual vine was the same Schisandra chinensis vine from a few years ago. Back then, it was the first time the fox cubs had slept in this kind of nest, and they loved it. Even though Lin Xinghuo later made them many different nests, the fox cubs still loved the Schisandra chinensis vine the most. However, in the past few years, the fox cubs had grown in size, not much larger, but much heavier. The spiritual vine gradually became unable to bear the true weight of the three fat cubs, and it was less and less willing to weave a web, often hiding from the fox cubs.
The Schisandra chinensis vine was willing to weave a nest this time because Wu Nian had just given it a "bribe" of pure wood spirit energy.
Where did Wu Nian get his wood spiritual energy? It was naturally stored in the green gourds that had grown from the gourd vines. Gourds can store a certain amount of spiritual energy, and Lin Xinghuo and Wu Nian often stored the pure wood spiritual energy, earth spiritual energy, and thunder spiritual energy they cultivated in them. However, they exchanged gourds with each other. Lin Xinghuo's treasure bag contained the purple gourd that stored thunder, while Wu Nian's was the green gourd, allowing the other to use some of his own magical powers.
What on earth had Wu Nian taken from those two thugs? Was it something big? Why had he even taken the green gourd out of its storage box? What big item could those two have hidden on them? It couldn't be their bicycles, right? Wu Nian wouldn't be interested in that.
Lin Xinghuo was just wondering, so he took the chestnut-scented green gourd that Ah Nian had hidden in a paper bag and habitually stored wood spirit energy in it. Ah Nian then made a macaque claw-like grab, and a lightning net appeared out of thin air, forming an open square box.
"It's not that it's big, it's that it's too dirty." Wu Nian said disdainfully: "Let go of this thing, the storage box can't hold anything else."
He took out a green wine bottle, the cheapest kind sold at the supply and marketing cooperative, a palm-sized bottle that held about three taels of wine. But the wine in this bottle couldn't be original. The dark color inside was even more pronounced through the green glass, and the texture seemed quite sticky.
Wu Nian's lightning net covered the entire bottle, but the hand condensed by the lightning net could not touch the bottle body. Lin Xinghuo tapped the table, and a tender sprout quickly sprouted from the node on the wooden table. The tender sprout stretched out several branches, rolled up the bottle, opened it, and poured a drop of wine into the lid.
The thick liquor was dark red, like dirty blood squeezed from a poisonous sore. As the lightning net opened a little, Lin Xinghuo immediately smelled the strong odor of alcohol, and underneath that, a strange, sweet, and fishy taste.
The Luofu cloth embroidered with strange patterns hanging on the car window suddenly lit up, and the spiritual energy circulated in the exorcism talisman, and the smell immediately dissipated.
"The 'red wine' Xiao Lanqin offered the female guests during her toast?" Lin Xinghuo understood immediately. She was an alchemist, and while her nose wasn't as sharp as Ah Nian's, she had the original solution right in front of her. If she couldn't detect something, her entire life would be wasted. Xiao Lanqin's wine must have been diluted many times over, so Lin Xinghuo only sensed something strange in it, but couldn't determine its effects.
Her face turned ugly. "This wine has aphrodisiac and bewitching effects, and it's also poisonous. It's not fatal, but the toxicity is strange and seems to affect the mind?" Moreover, this poison is like a cancer attached to the bone. Once infected, it is difficult to cure. It's a bit like opium and can be addictive, but it is more troublesome than opium.
Wu Nian nodded. "There were indeed only two people in the alley, but one of them had a bottle of this stuff in his pocket. I pinned one of them down and drank two sips of it. That person... I thought something was wrong, so I knocked them both unconscious and used the 'Confusing Heart Grass' to get some information out of the one who hadn't drunk this stuff..."
The man at the table certainly wanted to steal Cai Weihong's gold ring, but he also intended to be a thug. He wasn't just targeting Cai Weihong; he was also planning to take down Tan Yuemei and the others. The man, dazed and spitting nonsense, said, "They haven't even tasted college students yet. They're definitely better than the thugs in the women's circle... This time they'll have a good taste and even get their kids from the college students." In broad daylight, the two young women's screams and struggles looked like they were completely beyond the control of two men, but the reason these men only came out to stake out these two was because of the bottle of "wine" they held.
Just open the lid and let a woman smell it, and the wine will make the first-time user's hands and feet go limp, making it easy to control. Give them another sip, and they'll be completely at the mercy of anyone... And once the excitement wears off, the wine can even make women addicted, without worrying about them turning the tables and reporting the drug. Best of all, the wine offers a way out for these victims: if they drink it, have sex, and conceive, their addiction will cease, as the wine's medicinal properties will be absorbed by the fetus. Once the "poisoned" child is born, the woman herself will be free.
Perhaps it was because female college students were so rare, and the two people who came to stake out the two were the leaders of the gang, so they knew a lot. Wu Nian also got a lot of information out of them, which made Uncle Mao very sick.
It turns out this group all came from the same village. Their village was small, with a unique geographical location, resulting in little arable land, and the villagers were reluctant to farm. While others relied on the mountains and the water for their livelihood, they relied on their location for their livelihood. Before liberation, this village was a notorious bandit village, plagued by bandits and highway robbers for centuries. The villagers changed generations, but the business never ceased. After liberation, the fight against banditry almost completely replaced the villagers, but the place seemed to be under a spell. The later relocated people were quickly assimilated into the original villagers, and the entire village began to engage in the cost-free business of highway robbery.
During the campaign, road robberies were rampant everywhere. When people were starving, it was no surprise that they resorted to all sorts of methods. Therefore, their village wasn't particularly well-known among long-distance trucking operators. However, since the restoration of order from top to bottom, followed by the return of a large number of educated youth to the cities, policies have been relatively relaxed, leading to a gradual improvement in farmers' lives in various aspects. Rural security is actually much better than before. The unrest caused by the return of educated youth, primarily in the cities, has led to unrest among unemployed youth. Consequently, the vicious robberies in their village have become more prevalent. Unlike other places, where goods are primarily transported by large trucks, they often injure people, with even fatalities occurring in the past few years. Therefore, many truck drivers would rather take the longer route than their shortcut.
Life on the freight road, like a scabies, was becoming unbearable. Perhaps they would face the same fate of being hunted down and captured as they did more than 20 years ago. Some people in the village suggested hiding in the mountains, while others suggested just going all out to make a few big bucks, and then live elsewhere under an assumed name... At this time, Lin Qiyun came to them.
The bandits in the village were ruthless, and Lin Qiyun's methods were even more vicious. He used several lives to erase the past, and used the methods he used on these people to scare the people in the entire village... In this way, he not only tamed a group of "evil dogs", but also picked some and brought them to the capital.
This bottle of wine is just one of the sweet rewards that Lin Qiyun gets from controlling this group of vicious dogs.
"What does Lin Qiyun want to do?"
Lin Xinghuo asked himself and answered: "He needs baby girls, many, many baby girls." The hospital can't intervene now, and even if it did, it would be difficult to get so many children. If they are not careful, it may attract the attention of an investigation.
So he set his sights on women who could be mothers, using the alcohol to harm them. Then, if the harmed women wanted to return to their normal lives, they 'only had to' abort the poisonous babies when they were seven or eight months old.
It sounded so easy to say that when Wu Nian heard it, he almost couldn't resist the urge to beat those two scums to death.
"They just arrived in Jing City in May this year, but they have already harmed quite a few people, almost more than twenty people..." Wu Nian said with difficulty. Although he would not take the consequences of this on himself, he knew that Xinghuo would definitely blame himself when he knew about it. If they had dealt with Lin Qiyun earlier, perhaps so many innocent women would not have suffered.
"Xinghuo, don't overthink it." Wu Nian said in a deep voice, "Lin Qiyun is very cautious. He seems to be on guard against someone seeking revenge on him. He has taken many innocent lives on his own. Even if we want to take action, we can't just kill him directly."
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