Chapter 96: Hui, I’m Hungry, Grill Some Meat Quick!
Just preparing the building materials needed for constructing the house took Su Ran a full month.
After digging out all the internal organs from those captured blue worms, Su Ran finally spent another four days firing the seashells.
The method for firing seashells is very simple.
Su Ran and Gray dug two large pits in the ground together.
After digging, Su Ran dug diagonally toward the bottom of the pit from the open spaces on both sides, essentially opening several smoke channels at the pit bottom, which also made it convenient for her to light the fire at the bottom.
Then she first laid a layer of firewood in the pit.
After laying it, she laid a layer of seashells on top of the firewood, then another layer of firewood on top of the seashells, repeating this until the pit was full.
Then she lit the firewood from the bottom through several side passages, letting the firewood burn upward from the bottommost layer.
Actually, the best way to fire seashells is for her to build an earthen kiln and fire the seashells inside it.
But Su Ran had far too many seashells to fire; if she wanted to fire them all, the earthen kiln she built would need to be very, very large.
By the time she finished building the earthen kiln, it would probably be another month, or even two months later.
So she could only use this crude method and fire the seashells a bit longer.
For this, Su Ran used all the unwanted branches cleared during previous firewood processing to fire the seashells.
She piled the firewood between each layer of seashells very thickly, hoping that even after the bottom firewood burned out, there would be enough residual heat to finish firing the seashells.
During the firing process, Su Ran took turns firing the two dug pits.
This way, while firing the second pit, the seashells just finished firing in the first pit could cool on their own.
And when the seashells in the first pit were fired, cooled, taken out, and new ones were fired, the seashells in the second pit could cool at the same time.
Firing these seashells took Su Ran a total of more than four days.
The fired seashells were all piled up by the edges of the two large pits where fires were lit.
To quickly crush these fired seashells, Su Ran specially made one large and one small stone roller out of stones, one for her and one for Gray.
Then, while waiting for the seashell firing to complete, she and Gray pushed their respective stone rollers back and forth over the fired seashells laid on the ground, rolling and crushing them.
After the last pit of seashells finished firing, Su Ran cleared out the seashells and the ash from the burned firewood in the pit.
Then she used her homemade shovel to push all the crushed seashell fragments into the pit.
Su Ran’s homemade shovel was somewhat similar to the large plastic shovels used for snow removal in the North during winter.
It was made by directly attaching a wooden board to one end of a wooden stick.
It looked just like a large capital T.
After using this shovel to get all the seashells into the pit, Su Ran began adding water to the pit bucket by bucket with a wooden bucket.
The seashells fired at high temperature immediately steamed up a mist of water upon contact with water.
There were a lot of seashells, and the weather was hot; in no time, the air over the river beach was filled with white smoke.
The white smoke carried heat; Su Ran felt like she had broken into a sweat all over her body in just a few short minutes.
Gray was even more so.
It wasn’t heat-tolerant to begin with, and now it was directly overheated in the misty white fog, rushing out quickly and plunging headfirst into the river water.
It stayed completely submerged in the river for a good long while, only surfacing from underwater with bubbles at Su Ran’s worried shouts.
After surfacing, it let out a long breath.
After processing the seashells, it was time to officially start building the house.
The next morning, when Gray got up to prepare for hunting, Su Ran also got up early right away.
After a full month of continuous busyness, she was actually somewhat tired.
But thinking that she was just one last step away from living in a comfortable and convenient bricks and stones house, that bit of fatigue immediately fled from her body.
Moreover, the current situation didn’t allow her to slack off.
As long as the house wasn’t built in a day, Su Ran always felt like there was something weighing on her mind!
Without a house, her ideas of farming and raising livestock always felt impossible to implement.
So finishing the construction a day earlier would let her carry out other ideas in her life sooner.
After Gray flew away, Su Ran also climbed down from the bird’s nest tree.
Carrying the backpack filled with tools, she took a shortcut along the small path she had discovered while bathing on that river beach at the river bend before, heading over there.
It was around six in the morning; the woods were completely quiet, and most of the beastmen hadn’t gotten up to hunt yet.
The commotion Su Ran and Gray had made on the river beach side during this time wasn’t small, and many beastmen had curiously come to watch.
Then, from Gray’s explanation, after understanding what Su Ran was doing, although they were curious, most didn’t want to follow and learn.
Su Ran guessed it was because the beastmen all had places to live and could build their own dwellings, so while they were curious about what her “nest” would look like, it was just curiosity.
After all, the beastmen all had dwellings and had no need to go to great lengths to follow her and build a new nest.
Looking at the building materials spread out all over the ground before her, Su Ran let out a deep sigh.
She also wanted to have a strong and robust body like the beastmen; that way, she wouldn’t have to become a profession she had never imagined doing in her life because of her fear of winter’s harsh cold—
Bricklayer…
And one with no experience, who had only been a construction site onlooker.
Although Su Ran had never built a house herself, she had seen house construction many times growing up in the village at Grandmother’s house.
So she knew the house-building process fairly well.
After arriving at the place, Su Ran first went to the riverside to wash her face, then used a willow branch to hold mint leaves, stuck on some salt powder, and brushed her teeth.
After washing up, she walked back to the foundation area marked with sheep wool yarn, pulled out the entrenching tool from the other side of the entrenching pickaxe, and began digging the foundation.
As time passed, the sun rose, and the temperature began to rise.
When Gray returned carrying the white-headed sheep, Su Ran was already drenched in sweat.
She was slumped under a tree, breathing heavily, holding a small peach fruit with a bite taken out of it.
Gray landed straight in front of Su Ran carrying the lifeless white-headed sheep; upon seeing Su Ran’s somewhat disheveled appearance, it hurriedly dropped the prey in its hand and moved toward her.
Then it was stopped by Su Ran reaching out: “Don’t, I’m covered in dirt.”
Before Gray could put on a grievance expression, Su Ran looked up with a pitiful expression: “Gray, I’m hungry, roast meat quick!”
