Chapter 180: Covering The Black Reef Group, Turning It Into A Blue Beach
The stunning impression that Gray’s new hairstyle brought to Su Ran lasted for several days before gradually fading.
And this “stunning” effect on Su Ran was that she always couldn’t hold back her excited and greedy heart, and in Gray’s “response,” she felt both pain and pleasure!
The forest officially entered summer.
Recently, Gray hasn’t gone out hunting much.
Actually, there was no need for him to hunt, because recently every day someone would come to deliver fresh prey to him and Su Ran.
The ones delivering the prey were naturally the beastmen from the settlement.
The stone bricks that the beastmen needed for building houses were all prepared, but now they encountered a new problem.
That was how to make homemade cement.
Moreover, it wasn’t just homemade cement; it also included the subsequent roof beams, doors and windows, as well as the construction of the foundation, all of which needed Su Ran to teach them step by step in detail.
After continuously eating the prey sent by the beastmen for several days as payment in exchange for the method of making homemade cement, Su Ran felt that she couldn’t continue teaching them the house-building methods in this way.
The method for homemade cement was something she hadn’t hidden from the beastmen when she built her house last year.
Besides Xiao Ju, Yao Yao, and the others—those beastmen who kept coming to help her at that time—there were actually other beastmen who occasionally came over out of curiosity to take a look.
So teaching the beastmen the method of making cement wasn’t difficult.
But after this step, there were many more steps to implement one by one.
However, she had no way and no time to teach each of those steps to every single beastman individually.
So Su Ran thought she needed to find a way to teach all these house-building steps to the beastmen all at once.
Or twice would also work, but at least not having to teach each family once.
Just in time, it was still early summer now; the newly planted vegetables hadn’t grown yet, there was no need to stockpile food, and the seaside seafood wasn’t in season yet, so she and Gray still had some spare time.
Thinking this, Su Ran called Gray to her side and had him go to the settlement first to tell the beastmen who were building houses that she was going to do a house-building teaching session.
Then she went to find Xiao Ju, told Xiao Ju and A Jin her idea, and finally set Xiao Ju’s house as the teaching house.
What Su Ran wanted to do was to gather the beastmen who wanted to build houses and build Xiao Ju’s house together with them.
This way, the beastmen could all participate in the house-building process.
Even if they couldn’t learn it in one go, she could still gather the beastmen to pick another house and do it again; two or three times, they would surely learn.
And with more beastmen participating in building the house together, the speed of the teaching wouldn’t be slow either.
At the same time, it could also help Xiao Ju and A Jin finish building their house.
Because Xiao Ju had just given birth to Baby, although the beastmen seemed to have no concept of postpartum confinement, Xiao Ju needed to stay by Baby’s side at all times—Baby who couldn’t run yet but was already crawling everywhere.
So their house could only be built entirely by A Jin himself.
Now that there was a perfect opportunity, Su Ran naturally wanted to help A Jin out.
However, before that, they still needed to solve the beastmen’s homemade cement problem.
Previously, when Su Ran fired seashells, she directly used branches and seashells to light a fire and fire them right on the river beach outside.
But at that time, it was because only she herself needed seashell ash, so she could fire them little by little slowly.
Now, if dozens of beastman families in the settlement all needed seashell ash, Su Ran absolutely couldn’t let the beastmen fire seashells directly like she did before.
Because large-scale open fires like that, if even one beastman was careless, could potentially burn down the entire forest.
While the beastmen were collecting seashells, she thought about it for a few days and finally decided to fire the seashells using the most ancient method.
She planned to build a few earthen kilns.
The more seashell ash needed to build a house, the larger the earthen kilns would be built, striving to produce all the seashell ash needed for a house in two or three firings.
When Su Ran and Gray were digging the kiln pits, beastmen had already come to help.
She set the location of the earthen kilns at the gravel pile upstream of the river beach.
That area had relatively open space and was some distance from the living area in the settlement, so firing the kilns later wouldn’t affect everyone’s lives.
The first kiln pit was dug quickly.
The kiln pit was round, with an area of about ten square meters. After digging the kiln pit, Su Ran dug a sunken fire mouth in front of the kiln pit, and also opened a smoke vent at the back of the kiln pit.
Once all that was done, they began the first seashell firing test.
The method for firing seashells was still layering seashells and firewood.
After filling the earthen kiln with layers of seashells and firewood, some flexible branches were interlaced and placed over the kiln top, then mud was spread over the interlaced branches to seal the kiln top.
Then they began firing the kiln.
Seashells fire well under high temperature; about an hour and a half later, Su Ran stopped adding firewood and used a wooden stick to pry open the kiln top.
Actually, under normal circumstances, they should wait a while before opening the kiln, because it had just finished firing and the temperature inside was still very high.
But now it was during the teaching period, with no time to continue waiting, so Su Ran pried it open directly.
After prying it open, she used rope to tie another section of wooden stick to the handle of the bone shovel, then held the long wooden stick, picked up the bone shovel, shoveled a shovelful of the surface-blackened seashells from the still-smoking earthen kiln, placed it on the ground, smashed it, and poured river water on it.
The instant the river water was poured on, a large amount of white smoke and steam rose from the smashed seashells.
This meant it was successful.
After Su Ran demonstrated once, the beastmen quickly learned the entire process she had shown.
Including the remaining three earthen kilns that hadn’t been built yet, they had already been constructed by the beastmen themselves while firing the first kiln of seashells.
It was just that the one Su Ran had built herself didn’t look very good, while the ones the beastmen built,
looked even worse!
After solving the seashell ash problem, the subsequent work became much easier.
After Su Ran changed out of her clothes into a small tank top, summer gourmet food: blue worms, began reappearing at the seaside.
And this year, those targeting these blue worms weren’t just Su Ran; almost the entire beastmen settlement had their eyes on these little blue guys!
In the first few days when the beastmen went crazy stockpiling blue worms, Su Ran was even a bit worried whether this scene—where almost every beastman family could pile up a mountain of blue worms at their doorstep every day—would eat the blue worms to extinction?
Until Gray found out and took her flying northward along the coastline toward the seaside.
After flying for nearly twenty minutes, from far away in the air, Su Ran saw a vast expanse of reef group stretching nearly a kilometer in the distance, and at this moment, these reefs were completely covered with a layer of light blue blue worms.
The number of these blue worms was so great that covering the reefs almost turned this entire black rocky beach into a blue beach!
