Building a Civilization and Raising Cubs in the Beast World – Chapter 52

Chapter 52

No one knew how much honey the little wolves had eaten, but the honey in Bai Tu’s hands was increasing at a speed visible to the naked eye. After a few days, three wooden barrels containing honey were full. As these little wolves grow older, their appetites grow bigger and bigger. They can never get enough food if there are fewer of them. Over the years, they have turned over all the beehives in the territory.

Bai Tu’s way of collecting honey is different from the wolves who rush forward with a long pole to poke the beehive. He first prepares plants such as mugwort and lights them next to the beehive. He then takes the honeycomb down after the bees have flown out. After that, he moves the queen bee, bee pupae and some honey to the prepared beehive. This makes it convenient to collect honey next time, and the beehive can be moved indoors to keep warm in winter.

Every time Bai Tu collected honey, Lang Qi would look at his stupid brother.

Langze felt the wound on his face hurt even more.

There was a lot of honey, and Bai Tu was reluctant to use it all up at once. Anyway, the shelf life of honey was long enough.

Honey grapefruit tea has received unanimous praise. In the hot summer, people are already short of water, so drinking a bowl of cool grapefruit tea is so comfortable. Bai Tu just arranges it and makes it every one or two days. In addition to grapefruit, other fruits are sometimes added. Anyway, the raw materials are simple and pollution-free, so you can drink it at will.

However, as the use of tools increased, Bai Tu gradually discovered a problem: the tools were not enough, and the wooden barrels used to be easy to break, which was a waste of wood.

The wooden barrels used by the tribe now are all dug by the Rabbit Tribe. They cut out trees of suitable size and hollow out the middle. Because there is no coating, the barrels are not completely waterproof. People just pour water into the stone pot before it leaks too much. The barrels mainly serve a transportation purpose.

Now that the number of tea and beverages produced has increased, stone pots have to be used for cooking, so for the time being we can only use wooden barrels. However, wooden barrels are soaked in water for a long time, and the more water seeps into them, the easier it is for the barrels to break. In addition, they are often carried back and forth, so the barrels will become completely wet after two days of use. If they are then dried, they will easily crack, and cracked barrels are basically unusable.

In this situation, the only option is to make new ones, but so many wooden barrels require a lot of wood, and the utilization rate of making wooden barrels is very low. The middle part must be completely hollowed out, and because it is dug with bare claws, all that is dug out are wood chips, which cannot be reused and can only be used to ignite them.

The wooden barrels were made from tall, thick and straight trees, which was a bit of a waste of wood. Moreover, as the number of times the soup was cooked increased, the damage rate of the wooden bowls also increased sharply. Bai Tu thought about what he had been considering recently.

It is not a good idea to keep using stone and wooden tools. We need to improve the types of tools, such as pottery.

To fire pottery, you first need to build a pottery kiln. There is still a lot of lime left from the Leopard Tribe, but it was not used much in silkworm breeding. Now it can be mixed with sand to make an adhesive. The other raw material needs to be made by yourself.

Bai Tu brought back the wolves with nothing to do with mud from the hunting trip to make bricks. This job was very popular among the wolves because Bai Tu only needed seven or eight people. The wolves fought every day for these few spots.

The rabbits and cats who wanted to follow were shocked.

Bai Tu was helpless and simply waved his hand: “Do all of it.” The rabbit tribe had recently dug out a lot of clay from the trenches, all of which could be used. He wanted to make pottery only after seeing the clay. After all, no matter how many ideas he had, they would not work without tools.

While the clay was being made into bricks and drying, Bai Tu led everyone in making pottery. The clay without other impurities is made into adobe bricks, which are repeatedly pounded until there are no bubbles inside. Then they are shaped into the desired shape and placed in the cave to dry.

After the bricks were dried, lime and other adhesives were added to build a pottery kiln. In order to increase the temperature inside the kiln, Bai Tu made a bellows according to his previous memory. There were many bricks. In addition to building the pottery kiln, Bai Tu also tried to build two stoves. Before, cooking was basically done by finding suitable stones to build a support for the stone pot. They were of different sizes and shapes, but the common point was that they leaked air. It was okay when there was no wind, but when the wind blew, there was fire in all directions.

The stove built with bricks is better than the previous stone one in terms of both appearance and practicality.

After the ceramic kiln was built, it was fired once. After the kiln body changed color, Bai Tu began to place the dried pottery blanks into it for firing. In addition to the practical courses, this was Bai Tu’s first time operating it and he could only decide the temperature changes based on his feeling. He fired for a whole night and stopped the firing the next day.

After the temperature in the kiln dropped to normal temperature, Bai Tu used tools to take out the pottery in the kiln one by one.

The temperature was not controlled well enough, and half of the ten pottery pieces were cracked. Two of them were not fired through on one side because they were placed too close to the edge. The remaining three were the pottery that Bai Tu needed. The firing success rate is 30%, and Bai Tu is very satisfied with this ratio.

When making the pottery blanks at the beginning, more than 20 were made. Many of them had cracks during the drying process, but the second batch had fewer cracks. I will keep an eye on it after lighting the fire next time. Bai Tu recorded the color change process of the flame on a bamboo slip. The color of the flame is closely related to the temperature. There is no tool to measure the temperature. Bai Tu can only rely on this method to judge the temperature and decide whether to add firewood.

The remaining intact pottery blanks were put in for the second round of firing. The success rate of the second round was a little higher. It might also be luck. Three out of the seven pottery blanks were fired, and the success rate was greater than 40%. Whether it was a coincidence or not, it was a happy thing to fire a total of six pottery pieces in two times. One of the six clay pots was leaking, but the remaining five were perfect and could be used to hold water or cook soup.

After all, at the beginning, the pottery jar he made was made according to the size of the wooden bowls in the tribe, but the bowls here were about the same size as a modern single-person pot. Bai Tu built a small stove with bricks and tried to heat it.

Even though they knew that Bai Tu could always make some novel items, others did not expect it to be something like this. It looked similar to a wooden bowl, but it was more practical than a wooden bowl. After filling it with water, it did not leak at all! Like a stone bowl, but thinner and much lighter.

If Bai Tu hadn’t said that the ceramic bowl was easily broken and shouldn’t be touched, the group of people would have wanted to pick it up and take a closer look.

The orcs were looking at this strange object in amazement when the water in the clay pot placed by Bai Tu on the stove suddenly boiled, and everyone’s mood changed from surprise to shock.

Due to technical reasons, the stone pots and stone bowls made by the orcs are relatively thick and heavy, especially the stone pot, which is thick and large. It takes a long time to heat the stone pot in the early stage of cooking. Recently, the tribe’s water consumption has increased, and several orcs who cook are almost in front of the stove all day long. The situation has improved after Bai Tu taught everyone how to make an earthen brick stove. At least they don’t have to face the flames at any time, but boiling water is still a heavy task.

In this short while, the stone pot hasn’t even finished preheating, but the water boiled by Bai Tu has already boiled. Who wouldn’t be shocked?

Bai An couldn’t hide the excitement in his eyes and instantly thought of the use: “Can we make more of this tool?” Such an easy-to-heat and lightweight tool will definitely be snapped up at the market! Even if they don’t take the pottery to the market to exchange for supplies, they can use it in their own tribe. With this lightweight and convenient pottery jar, everyone doesn’t have to eat together all the time. In winter, everyone can cook soup alone in the cave.

Stone pots heat up slowly, are large in size and few in number, so it is impossible for every orc to have one. If you want to drink hot water in winter, several orcs basically have to boil it together, which is very troublesome.

Pottery is for everyone to use, so of course we can make more. Bai Tu nodded and said, “Okay, I’ll teach you how to beat the pottery. I plan to make some bigger ones for cooking or holding water.” There’s no need to worry about the raw materials. Bai Tu also wants to make more, and it would be best if he could replace all the tools in the tribe.

“That one is burnt. You can use it to hold some food that doesn’t worry about leaking, such as fruit and salt. If you want to hold salt, remember to put a dry leaf on it.” The cracked pottery jar was not completely broken, but it couldn’t hold water or cook rice. It was okay to put some other things in it. After all, it was still a precious item. It wasn’t so extravagant that you had to throw it away just because of a crack. You could just put something to pad it and use it.

“Take it and add salt.” Bai An agreed immediately.

When he was kneading the pottery again, Bai Tu came up with a few more ideas: “I’ll make another batch for measuring, and add handles, so that everyone can use the new tools to distribute salt in the future.” The standards for distributing materials are not strict now. For example, for salt, ten points can be exchanged for a handful of salt, but the size of this handful is entirely determined by the size of the captain’s palm, and it is not hygienic to grab it directly with your hands. If you don’t want to grab it, use a spoon. The sizes of spoons in the tribe are also different, which depends entirely on the coarseness of the raw materials.

Bai Tu plans to unify the standards. When distributing supplies within his own tribe, it is still okay. Most orcs will not care if there is a little more or less. However, there will be more and more opportunities to cooperate with other tribes in the future, and unifying the standards will save a lot of conflicts.

The pottery firing work was carried out vigorously, and soon the second pottery kiln was built. These kilns can do more than just firing pottery, they can also be used for smelting iron and firing bricks in the future, so they will never be idle. If the tribe had run out of lime, he would have even wanted to build a third one.

The success rate of the pottery fired later was about 50%. Bai Tu was very satisfied because he started trying larger pottery jars from the third time. Large pottery jars had more uses, so it was already good to achieve this success rate.

And this is the success rate of firing. The proportion of cracks in the pottery is getting smaller and smaller, which is an overall improvement.

Knowing that Bai Tu needed lime to build a kiln, Lang Qi directly led a team of wolves to the place that Bao Duo had mentioned before to dig lime.

It takes three or four days to get from their tribe to the brown monkey tribe. The wolves didn’t get much rest in between and it took them five days to return. However, Lang Qi didn’t look very happy.

When Bai Tu saw this expression, he was startled. Didn’t he find anything? Or have they all been dug out?

“There are only ten backpacks.” Lang Qi was not satisfied with the number. He brought thirty wolves with him, intending to dig enough for Bai Tu’s needs at one time.

“Ten backpacks are enough. Let’s use them first.” Bai Tu said. He would think of a way to get some substitutes next time.

Lang Qi brought over another backpack: “There are more stones like this nearby.” He didn’t know whether Bai Tu could be used, so he simply brought it back together.

Stone… Bai Tu was stunned for a second, picked up a stone and looked at it carefully. Limestone?

Now that we have limestone, are we still worried that we won’t have enough lime?

Bai Tu held his breath: “Are there many of these stones?”

Lang Qi nodded: “A lot, the whole mountain is full of them.”

“A mountain full of limestone.” Bai Tu repeated in a low voice. What’s the difference between this and a mountain full of lime!

Bai Tu found it difficult to describe his feelings in words: “You are so reliable!” This assistant is awesome!