Chapter 95: “homemade Cement”
Thinking like this, Su Ran’s interest in the blue worm immediately grew a lot.
Using glue for construction wasn’t her wild imagination.
Su Ran remembered seeing it in a book before, it seemed to be in some ancient village where they used seashells to build houses,
but she couldn’t remember the specifics, she just remembered that the ancestors in those places would use seashells to replace bricks and stones, then extract some sticky substance from certain marine creatures to stick those seashells together and build houses.
Also, some ancient buildings in certain places would mix glutinous rice or rice cakes into the substance used to bind bricks and stones.
Then mix it into the building materials to make the constructed houses more sturdy.
And regardless of the method, the added thing was to serve as a binder.
Su Ran tried it, and after the blue worm internal organs turned into gel, the stickiness was indeed very strong.
She stuck two stones together with blue worm glue, and after it dried, even Hui using all his strength couldn’t separate them.
Actually, if it was just to stick stones together, the glue made from blue worm internal organs alone would suffice.
But after Su Ran finished building the house, she still wanted to apply another layer of this “substitute cement” on the outer stone bricks, to make the house better insulated, sturdier, and also look nicer.
So she still decided to make substitute cement.
And at this time, the appearance of the blue worm gave Su Ran, who wanted to make substitute cement, another usable material.
The substitute cement that Su Ran wanted to make originally consisted of just two materials at the beginning: lime and clay.
Lime could be made from seashells, and for clay, there was a large patch near the gravel beach upstream of the river beach.
Now Su Ran had collected more than enough seashells.
These seashells included not only those she and Hui carried back themselves in backpacks.
But also those sent to Su Ran by other beastmen after they discovered she was collecting seashells.
Of course, Su Ran thought the bigger reason was probably that Hui had told these beastmen about collecting seashells.
So the beastmen would save up the seashells left from their food every few days and send them to Su Ran.
However, it wasn’t given for free; when Su Ran received the seashells sent by the beastmen, she naturally had to exchange some things back with the beastmen.
But now, the things the beastmen exchanged with Su Ran were no longer limited to food.
They started to take interest in Su Ran’s weaving products.
Things like the bottles and jars Su Ran made, the beastmen could dig out barehanded themselves.
Only those woven things were simply impossibly difficult for the beastmen!
So Su Ran’s backpacks, winnowing baskets, and wooden baskets became bestsellers.
After a long time, Su Ran felt that the beastmen’s bartering practices were becoming more and more skilled.
Although when she first arrived here, the beastmen had always had some habit of bartering.
But Su Ran felt that back then, the exchanges among the beastmen were more about sharing.
Now it was gradually taking on the meaning of exchange and trading.
Su Ran had once seen in the bird’s nest a beastman exchanging a red-skinned pig’s hide with Xiao Ju for a few fish.
At that time, she thought maybe that beastman hadn’t learned the method to make animal hide, or was too lazy to do it, so just directly exchanged with others.
Thinking about it now, wasn’t that just a very obvious transaction?
.
The seashells collected by Su Ran needed to go through firing, crushing, and dissolving before becoming lime.
This was the last major project in her preparation of building materials.
And now there was the additional task of skinning the blue worms.
After some hesitation, Su Ran first chose to skin the blue worms and extract the internal organs, and after obtaining enough blue worm internal organs, then go burn the seashells.
Because she didn’t know how long the active season of these blue worms lasted; what if it was only a few days, and by the time she finished with the seashells, the blue worms had disappeared.
She couldn’t wait another year for that!
The number of blue worms Su Ran collected didn’t need to be as many as the seashells.
The stickiness of the blue worm internal organs was strong enough; she estimated that about one-third to one-quarter the amount of the seashells in blue worm internal organs would suffice for building this house.
And while collecting blue worm internal organs, Su Ran tried making “substitute cement” once while making fire to cook.
Blue worm internal organs could be directly roasted into gel, while seashells needed to be thrown into the fire first to be calcined.
After burning for about two hours, Su Ran pulled out the already blackened seashells and smashed them with stones.
After the hot seashell fragments cooled, she put them into a large wooden basin, then poured a small amount of river water into the wooden basin.
When the river water touched the seashell fragments, a large amount of white steam immediately sizzled up in the wooden basin.
Hui on the side even silly tried to lean close to the wooden basin to look, but Su Ran pulled him away.
Joking aside, this hot steam could scald people if not careful!
Because Su Ran had smashed the seashells very finely, they quickly dissolved into a paste.
At this time, Su Ran added clay and about one-third the amount of seashell fragments in blue worm internal organ gel.
After mixing and stirring, Su Ran took a few small stones, placed them on the ground, and stacked the stones together using this just-made homemade cement.
After more than half an hour, when she checked again, the stones were tightly stuck together.
Seeing this, Su Ran felt a huge sigh of relief.
No matter how much she had imagined and planned before, it was just imagination.
Now that she had actually seen the real effect, she finally breathed a sigh of relief.
Deep down, she was still very afraid that this homemade cement wouldn’t work.
Now with a solid foundation, Su Ran’s motivation to collect blue worms grew even stronger.
For a full five days, Hui was responsible for taking A Jin and Qing Yu to the seaside to claw blue worms and bring them back.
Su Ran, along with Xiao Ju and Yao Yao, dug out all the internal organs of the caught blue worms on the river beach side.
Su Ran dug a big pit next to the house foundation she had drawn, then directly threw the dug-out blue worm internal organs into the pit to let the sunlight melt them.
The blue worm bodies with internal organs removed were all cleaned by Su Ran and dried in the sunlight.
Unlike jellyfish that would liquefy after a long time, blue worms, which were similar to jellyfish in taste and texture, would only have their internal organs melt after death when left in the sun for a long time, while the bodies would quickly dry out.
Even those half-meter-long blue worms would completely shrink and dry in just a few hours.
Su Ran tasted some of this dried blue worm plain.
Faint salty flavor with a bit of aftersweetness; the texture when chewed was a bit like cowhide candy, quite fun to eat.
And it wasn’t just her; Hui also liked it a lot.
Nearly ten pounds of dried blue worm in a large winnowing basket, this wolf actually ate it all in just four or five days.
But seeing him like this, Su Ran wasn’t worried about collecting too much blue worm meat and not being able to finish it, leading to waste!
