It's a new day again.
The young couple got up one after the other, one practicing martial arts and the other practicing standing meditation.
Through daily martial arts practice and physical labor, Shi Guang has developed muscles that feel firm to the touch, but not as exaggerated as those of bodybuilders who deliberately build muscle; they look quite comfortable.
His physical endurance and explosive power are also very strong; he can easily lift Lin Momo up with one hand.
Lin Momo's persistent morning exercise has begun to show results.
After more than a month of practice, she can now stand for half an hour straight, and she can clearly feel that her legs are stronger than before.
In particular, he has grown taller, now reaching the height of his chin, and his previous pants look like cropped pants when he wears them.
Lin Momo was quite happy about growing taller.
After their morning exercise, the young couple had breakfast together.
Time then began to process the various prey caught yesterday, starting with the pheasants, which were the most numerous.
During the meal, Lin Momo filled the two large pots in the kitchen and the two iron pots (one large and one small) in the kitchen outside with water, lit the fire, and placed large pieces of firewood on top.
The hot water in the four large tanks in the space is about to run out and needs to be replenished.
Furthermore, preparing the prey also requires a lot of hot water.
So, Lin Momo's task for today was to boil water and finish wrapping the remaining dumpling wrappers and fillings.
After washing the dishes, she busied herself adding fuel to the two stoves and then started making dumplings in the space.
In a small courtyard in the valley.
Time throws the pheasants, their throats slit, into a wooden tub the size of a bathtub. Once the water is hot, it's poured into the tub to scald the pheasants' feathers.
They were busy until the afternoon before they had finished plucking the feathers of nearly 50 pheasants, and then they had to gut them.
By the time Shi Guang had dealt with all the wild animals, four days had already passed.
The meat is stored in the space and will be cooked into a cooked food later.
The deer hides, roe deer hides, goat hides, rabbit hides, etc., that were skinned were all hung on the courtyard wall to dry. Since neither of them knew how to tan the fur, they could only go down the mountain the following year to find someone to process it.
After several busy days, the young couple finally had some free time and enjoyed a delicious meal of charcoal-grilled venison in the warm pavilion, along with sweet fermented rice wine and freshly squeezed orange juice made by Lin Momo.
*
Days slipped through our fingers like that.
Every day, Lin Momo would use a marker to cross out one day on the almanac, just like playing with the Nine-Nine Cold-Dispelling Chart.
The Nine-Nine Cold-Dispelling Chart, also known as the "Cold-Dispelling Chart" or "Nine-Nine Chart," is a Chinese seasonal custom. It was an ancient game played by people to keep track of the days during the cold winter.
The practice of counting the nine periods of winter was recorded as early as the Liang Dynasty, while the "Winter Dispelling Chart" originated in the Ming Dynasty. It consists of eighty-one units, hence the name.
Starting from the winter solstice, each nine-day period is considered a unit. Counting nine nine-day periods in total, for a total of eighty-one days, winter will then be over.
As the ancients said, "In the mountains, there is no calendar; when the cold ends, one does not know the year."
To avoid such a situation, Lin Momo specially bought a copy of the almanac from that year at a bookstore before going into the mountains.
With this almanac in hand, she and Time wouldn't let the days pass by in a daze.
After the winter solstice, the coldest period of winter begins, and the temperature in the mountains suddenly drops a few degrees, reaching as low as minus seventeen or eighteen degrees Celsius.
The young couple spent most of their day indoors around the fireplace, and to save charcoal, they moved their study desk into the bedroom.
After entering the coldest period of the year, known as the "Sanjiu" period, rivers usually freeze over and their flow becomes blocked.
Life in the mountains wasn't easy either, as several more heavy snowfalls followed.
The snow outside the courtyard had piled up quite high, reaching up to knee-deep.
The snow inside the fenced yard and on the roof was cleared by Lin Momo using her spatial abilities and placed into the two cultivated fields, leaving only a shallow layer.
As for the ice, Lin Momo continued to freeze it.
The cellar, about eighty square meters, partitioned off from the basement, was only half-filled; she planned to fill it completely.
These ices are all frozen with clean mountain spring water. Even if they don't need this much to cool off, they can melt it and drink it directly when there is no water available in the following year, which can be regarded as storing solid water.
The spring in the valley never freezes in winter, but we don't know if it will dry up when drought strikes, so we should store more water in advance.
Spring water is great for brewing tea and cooking.
Lin Momo would feel very uncomfortable if food was cut off.
*
The New Year is just around the corner, which also means that the days of hibernation are coming to an end.
Another piece of good news is that the dozen or so pheasants kept in the space have started laying eggs one after another.
I can collect at least ten wild eggs every day.
Once she had collected enough for a basketful, Lin Momo cooked them all.
This time I'll make boiled eggs, next time I'll make them all tea eggs, and the time after that I'll make them all fried eggs.
They even made a batch of salted eggs.
The tender corn I planted in the front yard is ready to eat.
Lin Momo planted not the sweet corn of later generations, but the old variety from before. It was tender and delicious, with the fragrance of sweet corn and the soft and glutinous texture of sticky corn. The taste was quite good.
Leave one row as seed, and peel off the rest, leaving only the innermost layer of corn husks. Put them into a large pot, add water, and cook until done. Then arrange them neatly in a bamboo basket and store them in the cooked food section.
The strawberries had already formed plump, bright red fruits. Lin Momo waited until they were fully ripe before picking them. She washed some and kept them to eat as fruit, made some into strawberry jam, and preserved the rest with sugar.
The sweet potatoes and potatoes in the backyard probably won't ripen until spring.
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