Chapter 153: Like A Big Stove
That night after finishing dinner, Su Ran and Hui got into the nest early.
Su Ran had slept all afternoon during the daytime, so she actually wasn’t sleepy now.
But because of the cold, she still felt uncomfortable all over, and the room was very cold, so she still felt it was more comfortable to nest inside the nest.
Tonight Hui also followed her and covered with the cotton quilt, but before covering with the quilt, it first took off all the clothes on its body.
Even so, when covering with the quilt, it still left the outer thigh and arm exposed outside.
And inside the quilt, Su Ran rested her head on Hui’s other arm, her whole body curled up in its embrace.
The warm temperature from Hui’s body, pressed against her, was like a large stove that could permanently maintain a constant temperature, feeling especially comfortable in such a cold night.
However, thinking of the stove, Su Ran felt that tomorrow she needed to build a stove in the room.
The current weather had already turned cold, and just burning the heated brick bed in the mornings and evenings was no longer enough to maintain the temperature inside the room.
Previously when building the heated brick beds in the two rooms, she had left heated brick bed holes at the ends of the heated brick beds in both rooms, convenient for building a stove later.
It was just that they hadn’t been needed before, so they had all been blocked with mud.
Now with the weather this cold, it was exactly the time to use them.
The next day early in the morning, when Su Ran woke up, she felt her body was a bit better than yesterday.
At least her head didn’t hurt anymore, and she wasn’t dizzy.
It was just that the stuffy nose and sore throat felt a bit more severe.
After getting up, she took medicine again, then continued lying back in the nest.
Today’s breakfast was still made by Hui.
After eating together, Hui told Su Ran and went to the seaside with a bag.
Su Ran lay inside the room, without propping up the window board.
Probably because of being sick, plus having just eaten, with blood circulation slowing in her stomach, she started to feel sleepy again.
She lay there and unknowingly fell asleep again.
When she woke up, the time was already ten in the morning.
She lay in the nest dazed for a while, then got up, folded the quilt neatly, put on shoes, and first went to the window side to prop up the window board.
The moment the window board was propped up, bright sunlight passed through the thin animal hide, instantly illuminating the entire room.
Su Ran’s eyes lit up, instantly feeling much more spirited.
She walked to the house doorway; when Hui went out, it had closed the room’s window board.
She took down the window board and hung it to the side, sunlight shining in from outside, and the cold air instantly warmed up a lot.
Today’s sunlight was very strong, there was no wind outside, and the temperature had clearly risen several degrees.
Now the scenery in front of the house had completely changed.
The leaves in the woods had almost all fallen, making the inside of the woods seem much emptier.
Su Ran could even clearly see the scenes inside the woods on the opposite bank of the river.
At this moment, several beastmen by the riverside were processing prey.
These beastmen who had successfully joined the settlement through combat had been getting along very harmoniously with the original beastmen in the settlement since the day they joined.
And the few beastman families living near Su Ran’s house were naturally among the newcomers the ones who had spent the longest time with Su Ran and Hui, and were the most familiar.
At the same time, under Su Ran’s intentional display, some living methods and techniques she found very convenient were naturally quickly mastered proficiently by these beastmen.
The most intuitive point was that these beastmen also learned from Su Ran and started raising live small animals.
There were even a few beastmen who specially ran over to ask Su Ran how to keep these small animals from running away.
And among the several beastman families living nearby, the one most familiar with Su Ran was a beastman family where the whole family were leopard beastmen.
This family had a just-adult female leopard beastman, about the same size as Bai Bai, who liked to run over to play with Su Ran and conveniently get some food.
Over time, her relationship with Su Ran became more and more intimate.
This little female’s name was Xiao Guai.
Although her beast form features were leopard, her personality was very obedient, even softer and cuter than Xiao Ju the cat beastman.
Su Ran stood outside for a while, her black sheep wool sweater warmed by the sun.
Then she went to the vegetable patch behind the house and the small animal room for a tour.
The green vegetables in the vegetable patch had been cut in half by Su Ran, sun-dried on the ground waiting to be put into the vegetable cellar.
Another portion, she wanted to see if they would eventually seed.
If they could seed, she would collect them all, and when spring came next year, directly plant them in the ground, saving the trouble of transplanting them one by one.
The four-legged animals and birds in the small animal room had also been fed by Hui in the morning.
Su Ran toured around and saw there was nothing urgent to do, so she remembered the decision from yesterday to build the stove.
So she went to the tool room, took a backpack, first went to the place behind the house where broken bricks were piled, loaded half a backpack of stone bricks into the room.
The west bedroom was currently unoccupied, and Su Ran had always been using it as a storage room, so there was no need to build a stove there for now.
She carried three half-backpacks of stone bricks, then made some homemade cement outside and carried it in, finally carrying in some soil and dry grass.
She first used tools to scrape off all the mud pasted over the stove hole at the end of the heated brick bed.
After scraping off the mud, several broken bricks stuffed in the stove opening were exposed.
Su Ran reached in and took out these broken bricks too, then started piling up the shape of the stove on the ground using stone bricks.
The shape of the stove wasn’t hard to build.
In the middle of the stone bricks, homemade cement was still used to bond them.
But after building it, to prevent smoke from leaking out through the brick seams when burning the stove, Su Ran mixed soil and dry grass into mud and plastered a layer of black mud inside the stove.
Finally, she found the only remaining bit of black-flowered Malan grass with some green leaves at home and mashed it into mud.
Then she found a stone of appropriate thinness, grinding out a grill to be installed inside the stove, and a lid to be placed over the stove opening.
The function of this grill was to separate the burning firewood above from the ashes that fell down after burning.
Then she took some dry grass and firewood, lit a fire inside the stove, and dried the mud inside.
She also used stone bricks to build a small circle about twenty centimeters outward under the stove to block the ash and sparks falling from above the grill, to prevent fire in the room.
After finishing these, Su Ran threw two slightly larger pieces of wood into the stove, letting it burn directly first.
Then she cleared out the remaining stone bricks and soil from inside the room, and swept the ground clean.
By the time all this was done, Su Ran had a thin layer of sweat on her body.
And at this time, the sound of heavy objects landing came from outside the room.
