Chapter 54 It could be oil!
But for a long time afterwards, Su Zhizhi did not pull Xue Che to the back mountain.
Because she is too busy!
It is the autumn harvest season, and this year is indeed another year of great harvest.
All kinds of crops in the fields were bent under the weight of the plump fruits, and the granaries were almost full to the point of being unable to hold more.
Crops such as peppers, sugarcane, and cotton newly planted this spring have also matured one after another.
The sugarcane trees were thick and tall, much taller than Kong Wu. Su Zhizhi almost got lost while walking in the dense sugarcane forest.
It was the first time for Su Zhizhi and Xue Che to see ripe sugarcane in the field. It actually looked like a green and purple bamboo forest.
Hua Erniang brought a few people to pick sugarcane and first tried to boil a pot of brown sugar with the sugarcane.
"Ache, pull me from behind."
Su Zhizhi grabbed a piece of sugarcane as thick as her wrist and dragged it to pull it out by the roots.
Xue Che walked behind Su Zhizhi, grabbed the clothes on Su Zhizhi's waist and pulled them back, helping her to pull them out.
"Hey yo ba——Hey yo ba——"
"Hey yo ba——Hey yo ba——"
The two little men shouted slogans and worked together to pull.
With a click, the sugarcane was pulled out, and Xue Che and Su Zhizhi fell backwards at the same time.
"Hahahahahaha..." Hua Er Niang and the other aunts all laughed.
Grandma Qiu cut off a small piece of sugarcane, cut it into several small pieces, and gave them to Su Zhizhi and Xue Che to eat.
The sweet and refreshing juice passed over the tip of her tongue, and Su Zhizhi narrowed her eyes in sweetness:
"So sweet."
Xue Che chewed the sugar cane, his forehead was sweating, and his face was flushed:
"Fortunately, we came to Xunzhou."
I used to only hear about the poor mountains and bad waters of Lingnan, but now I am more and more grateful that I came to Xunzhou.
Otherwise, at this time of year in previous years he would still be sitting in the lonely yard counting the yellow fallen leaves.
This batch of sugarcane grew very well, and almost every piece was sweet and juicy.
Kong Wu pulled the stone mill and squeezed out all the sugarcane juice.
Grandma Qiu boiled sugarcane juice into brown sugar, then cut some of the brown sugar into small pieces and put them in a jar to serve as snacks for the children.
The sugarcane has been made into sugar, but the cotton in the field has not been used yet.
Everyone had prepared themselves mentally that the harvest might not be satisfactory since this was the first time cotton was planted this year.
But when the autumn wind blows, all the cotton plants are covered with heavy bolls, which burst open and spit out white fluffy cotton wool.
Everyone picked the cotton and stored it in large bags in the empty houses in the village.
"If this continues, there won't be enough empty houses in the village. Should we build a few more houses?" Bai Xun mentioned this to Hao Ren.
"That's what I was thinking. I'll draw up a blueprint and discuss it with everyone."
Hao Ren has been busy with two things recently.
The first is to redesign the layout of the village.
In the future, the village will have more and more property and materials, and perhaps there will be new population, so the original circular small village will not have enough space.
He planned to divide the area into breeding areas, residential areas, warehouse areas, martial arts training areas, workshop areas, etc. After the planning was completed, construction could begin during the winter farming off-season.
"Village Chief Hao, Brother Dao."
A man with a face blackened by smoke walked in and called out to Hao Ren and Bai Xun.
The dark-skinned man picked up a towel at hand and wiped his face, revealing a face that looked a bit like Song Yu but not quite like Song Yu.
Bai Xun nodded: "Xiao Song is here."
Everyone in the village now calls Song Yu Xiao Song.
The day Song Yu woke up, she hugged Hao Ren's thighs and cried for a long time. She couldn't believe that she was still alive, and even more so, she couldn't believe that Pei Lingyun was still alive.
After he calmed down, he thought that the great grandfather in heaven had sobered up and at least blessed him to reach the land of his old friends.
Song Yu had nowhere to go, so he stayed in Heifei Mountain and became a new villager of Liangmin Village.
Everyone could see that Xiao Song and Hao Ren knew each other before, and guessed that Xiao Song had some secret background.
But which villager on this mountain didn’t go over?
No one cared and just called him "Xiao Song".
At Hao Ren's request, Grandma Qiu made Xiao Song a pair of extremely realistic fake eyebrows and a turned-up nose using some unknown material. After they were applied, Xiao Song's appearance changed a lot in an instant.
Hao Ren: "Xiao Song, how was your test today?"
Song Yu shook his head: "I tried several types of wood, but the ink effect was not very good."
Another thing Hao Ren was busy with was developing new ink with Song Yu.
The Song family once made their fortune by making ink, and now Song Yu wants to use this method to revive their family.
Now a problem arises -
There are not many pine trees in the area near Black Bandit Mountain.
The best pine soot ink requires burning pine wood that is at least twenty years old. The black smoke produced by the burning wood can be collected and then processed into ink sticks.
Song Yu tried to make ash from other woods, intending to find the most suitable substitute, but unfortunately, after trying for a while, there was no result.
Song Yu had just arrived in the village and didn't have his own place to live, so he first lived in the empty room of Hao Ren's house.
When it was late at night and everyone was asleep, he thought about his family members who were all on their way to exile and couldn't sleep at all. He got up and read, and continued to think about how to make ink to get rid of his anxious mood.
Not long after he lit the lamp, there was a knock on the door.
Boom boom boom!
"Little Brother Song!" Su Zhizhi's clear and childish voice sounded outside.
The autumn wind is bleak at night, the clouds are light and the stars are bright.
When Song Yu opened the door, he saw Su Zhizhi holding a pen and paper in one hand and a tung oil lamp in the other, looking up with bright eyes.
"Zhizhi?"
"Brother Song, let me read with you. Two lamps are brighter when we're together. My father always said that we should make the best use of things."
Song Yu rubbed his brows and said, "That's fine, but you can't make any noise when you come in."
"Don't worry, I'm going to concentrate on my homework."
Su Zhizhi came in with her short legs and moved a small stool to the table.
She lit the tung oil lamp and placed it together with the lamp in Song Yu's room, and the room instantly became much brighter.
After Su Zhizhi flattened the paper, she actually wrote quietly and attentively.
There was no way, the holiday passed too quickly, and she would have to go back to the academy soon. She hadn’t finished the homework assigned by Master Qiu yet, so she could only study late into the night!
In the dancing firelight, Su Zhizhi's round cheeks were stained with a warm golden color, carrying the innocence and gentleness of a child.
Song Yu looked at Su Zhizhi's serious profile, as if a green leaf had floated down leisurely on his heart, extinguishing all the burning flames.
He only knew that Su Zhizhi was Hao Ren's adopted daughter, the apple of the village's eye, and lively and noisy. Every time she saw him, she would call him "Little Brother Song, Little Brother Song".
When he was on the verge of death that day, it was thanks to Su Zhizhi and Xue Che who appeared and pulled him out of the pile of fallen leaves.
From this perspective, this little guy can be considered his savior.
The room was bright and the words on the paper were clearly visible.
Su Zhizhi was writing quietly, and Song Yu was reading quietly.
Su Zhizhi's tung oil lamp was covered with a beautiful, transparent glass lampshade.
I don’t remember which bandit it was looted from, but the villagers thought it was translucent and beautiful, so they gave it to Su Zhizhi.
Over time, if the lampshade is not cleaned, the top of the lampshade will become darker and darker.
When Su Zhizhi wrote the last character and only had one stroke left, the last drop of ink in the inkstone had been used up.
"Brother Song, where is the water?" Su Zhizhi turned around and asked.
Song Yu thought Su Zhizhi was thirsty, so he put down his book and poured her a small glass of water.
"Drink it."
But Su Zhizhi took the water but did not drink it. Instead, under Song Yu's puzzled gaze, she took off the glass lampshade and poured a little water into it to melt the black ash.
At that moment, an inspiration came into Song Yu's mind, which was pressed under the towering rocks and almost broke out of the ground.
"Zhizhi, what are you doing?" Song Yu asked knowingly.
Su Zhizhi dipped the tip of her pen into the ash water and muttered to herself:
"I'm only a few strokes away from finishing it. It's all black anyway, so I'll just make do with it."
Whenever she ran out of ink but was only one or two strokes short, she would dip her pen into the black smoke on the lampshade to make do.
Su Zhizhi put the last stroke on the paper. The color was very light, but it was indeed written.
Song Yu looked at the light handwriting and wiped the ash from the tung oil lamp with his hand.
Suddenly there was a roar in my ears, like a landslide and cracking of rocks.
It was like standing in front of a stone door that you had been trying to open for days but couldn't, and then seeing it collapse, your view opened up.
It was such a simple answer, yet he had never thought of it!
Song Yu excitedly lifted Su Zhizhi up and spun her around several times:
“Found it! Found it!”
"Oil! It could be tung oil!"
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