Riding the wind of rebirth

Zhou Zhi wasn't sure if he'd ever seen the salamander A Zi was talking about before, but the name itself was terrifying: "For treating what?"

"It seems to be able to treat skin diseases, but I don't know anything else," Azi said.

After this brief interlude, Zhou Zhi took Xiao Shunzi from Feng Xueshan, and everyone remounted and continued on their way.

Many shrubs and trees along the roadside are bearing fruit, including chestnuts, walnuts, oaks, acorns, and oak berries.

Besides chestnuts and walnuts, the remaining fruits are also edible. However, they are rich in tannic acid and slightly toxic organic matter, so they need to undergo relatively complex processing. Generally, this involves soaking, grinding, settling, changing the water, stirring, changing the water, and repeating this process many times to obtain relatively pure starch. Then, alkaline water is added to neutralize the tannic acid produced during the processing, and finally, a milk tea-colored starch is obtained.

This starch actually tastes pretty good and can be made into "acorn jelly". In the past, many villagers in Lianhe Township used to harvest nuts and dig up fern roots, but in the last two years, almost no one eats it anymore, resulting in the mountains being covered with fruit, which ultimately benefited wild animals.

As a result, there are a lot of animals in the back mountain this year. Since the salamander was discovered, they have kept popping up along the way, including red squirrels, great tits, crows, peregrine falcons, owls, hares, and pheasants. It is obviously much more lively than last year.

Along the way, we also saw two relatively rare bird species: the paradise flycatcher and the woodpecker, which is more common in the north but rarely seen in the south.

Woodpeckers are very interesting animals. The reason they are interesting is that almost everyone learned about them when they were young from the text "The Forest Doctor". However, apart from people in the north, very few people in the south have actually seen them.

Even fewer people have ever heard the sound of a woodpecker foraging for food.

The sound Yan Xiao first heard was a dense, rapid tapping sound. In Yan Xiao's words, "Who's randomly banging the wooden fish in the mountains?"

"You can tap at that frequency?" Zhou Zhi laughed. "That's the sound of a woodpecker."

The sounds were incredibly dense, about fifteen or sixteen times per second, a speed that is simply impossible for a human hand to achieve.

Then everyone started searching in the direction of the sound. After searching for a long time, Yan Xiao, who had the sharpest eyes, said: "Is that it? The green one with a tuft of yellow hair on its head! It's pecking at the tree trunk."

Following Yan Xiao's finger, everyone gradually spotted the bird. He Shiqing asked doubtfully, "Could it be this? It looks completely different from the woodpecker in the book."

“I only learned about this after I got here. I didn’t know there were so many kinds of woodpeckers,” Zhou Zhi said. “The kind that I used to see in books is a foreign woodpecker called the oak woodpecker. That kind of woodpecker doesn’t actually eat insects. Instead, it likes to peck holes in trees and then bury acorns in the holes. Its distinguishing features are its black body, a red head, and a white belly.”

"The bird we see now is called the Great Yellow-crowned Woodpecker. Its most distinctive feature is its large size, green feathers, and a yellow crest on its head."

"This bird, well, it's not exactly ugly, but I can't quite put my finger on what's wrong with it. It's just not pretty." Liang Hong said with a hint of disdain, "But the sound of it pecking at the tree is quite amusing. It's so fast, doesn't it get a headache?"

"The main problem is that the beak is disproportionate to the head," Zhou Zhi said. "Compared to the head, the beak is too big and too long, making the bird look too thin." "That seems to be true," Feng Xueshan agreed. "It's much uglier than the paradise flycatcher we just saw."

As they chatted, they soon made their way along the winding mountain road, passing through the colorful forest to the reservoir.

The reservoir isn't very large; it doesn't even rank among the top reservoirs in Sichuan province. However, the scenery is exceptionally beautiful.

This is a standard mountain reservoir, formed by building a dam between two mountain peaks to close off the water.

However, this is an old project from the 1950s or 60s. Due to inadequate preliminary investigations and landslides causing the stream to change course, the runoff volume has decreased, leaving the project in a semi-abandoned state, unable to even reach the water level required for power generation.

After the construction of the agricultural university base in Zhouzhi, the agricultural university, after investigation, felt that the reservoir could be used as a water source and the existing channels could be used to provide irrigation for the base at the foot of the mountain.

To solve this problem, we need to dig a new canal from the back of the mountain and bring back the diverted stream.

This project was quite large, so Zhouzhi proposed another solution: to solve about half of the problem through a green energy recycling project. This way, there would be no need to dig a large canal in the back mountain, and the remaining runoff problem could be solved by using buried pipe engineering, which would greatly save on the amount of work and the time required.

The hydroelectric generators started generating electricity back then, solving the electricity problem for the agricultural university's base.

This year, the town has money, and the canal-digging project has been put back on the agenda. The reason is simple: the town has been hampered by water shortages for too long, which has become a source of resentment for Tu Liangzhi. He feels that relying on drawing water from the river to such a high place for storage is not safe, and he would only feel at ease if more water could be diverted here.

Zhou Zhi did not stop Tu Liangzhi's idea. The reason was simple: once more water came in, the hydroelectric generators could be expanded to provide more power to Lianhe Town. If viewed from a developmental perspective, opening a canal did have this benefit. At the same time, it also had another benefit: it added an extra layer of insurance for the town's energy and irrigation.

While chatting about these topics and admiring the scenery of the lake and mountains, the horse team passed over the dam and turned onto a small path paved with pebbles along the edge of the reservoir, heading towards the end of the reservoir.

Without the asphalt road, the scenery seemed to transform from a "park view" to a "primeval forest" in an instant, instantly evoking a sense of wildness.

"Won't some wild beasts appear?" Yan Xiao looked worriedly at the dense forest on both sides of the gravel road, fearing that some big creature might suddenly jump out and attack him.

"Don't worry, if there are any, the black dragon and the horse will spot them before you and give you a warning in advance," Zhou Zhi said with a smile. "When a team like ours travels on this kind of road, large creatures usually stay as far away as possible. For them, this is the safest thing to do."

"Also, look closely, the area around the reservoir is mostly man-made forest. The tree species in these forests are relatively limited, which means food is scarce. Therefore, animals primarily forage in the native forests; this area doesn't hold much appeal for them." (End of Chapter)