From Robinson Crusoe

Chapter 133 Entering June
During this 55-day period, Chen Zhou harvested a new batch of rice.

The first few times the rice matured, he never ate most of the rice grains as food, but used them to germinate and sow again.

At this terrifying rate of exponential growth, his fields were soon filled with dense crops of rice and wheat.

After processing, the new crop of grain filled several large pottery jars, and the sense of urgency caused by food had basically disappeared by this time.

……

The pepper seeds given as rewards are not as good as the hybrid seeds in the vegetable planting base. The plants do not grow tall, and even with fertilizer, the flowers are not so dense.

It is like the northern green peppers in Chen Zhou’s grandmother’s vegetable garden. It looks ordinary, but it is not susceptible to diseases and does not mind the poor soil. It keeps growing silently until it sets fruit and withers.

The same is true for garlic grown in the fields.

As time goes by, the unique green color of garlic sprouts has expanded to become more eye-catching.

Now when cooking, Chen Zhou no longer has to worry about not having enough garlic. He can add as much as he wants.

Occasionally, I would cook a pot of thick noodles, steaming hot, stir-fry a bowl of diced meat sauce, pour it on the noodles, and eat the noodles while slurping them with garlic.

The humidity is heavy in the rainy season, and when you eat this, there are only two words to describe it - comfortable!
……

The development of animal husbandry has also been smooth. After the wild goats were domesticated, except that their range of activities was restricted, they still ate grass as usual without any interruption.

Due to the sufficient supply of salt, the quality of life of the sheep has not declined but has improved.

As an introduced species, wild goats have probably only been on the island for less than ten years.

Although they are destructive to vegetation, in addition to eating fresh grass, they will also chew tree bark, causing the death of trees.

However, due to the limited number of goats, the damage to the ecology caused by goats is actually very limited.

Besides, even if they pose a threat to the island's ecology, Chen Zhou will not sit idly by. Who would refuse a meal of mutton?

……

Except for the lamb that died from the snake bite, toxins and inflammation of the wound, all the other lambs grew up successfully.

As the lambs grow up, the mother goats are gradually weaned.

Fortunately, things are different now. Chen Zhou not only has a refrigerator, but also a cellar, which can greatly extend the storage time of fresh milk.

Now, not only can he drink iced milk tea during the dry season, but he can also lie comfortably on an ergonomic chair with a plate of grapes and a few melons beside him, close his eyes and enjoy the rare coolness.

……

The expansion of the cave dwelling is mainly concentrated in the kitchen and storage room. Although the bedroom space is not enough, the demand for space is far less urgent than that of the storage room.

Because the size of the bedroom mainly improves the quality of life, the size of the storage room is the real practical space.

The supplies in the camp at the foot of the mountain had been stored there for almost two years.

When Chen Zhou went to check a while ago, he discovered that some of the unmaintained shacks had their bottoms soaked by rain and eaten by insects, and were about to break.

To avoid unnecessary losses, he had to use a cart to transfer the supplies from the shacks to the cabin on the mountain.

After digging out the rat-breeding room in the storage room, he expanded the area of the storage room by more than 20 square meters, and then transferred the more important materials in the camp at the foot of the mountain to the mountain.

By now, most of the camp at the foot of the mountain had been emptied. Except for the large house in the center of the camp that had been renovated once, the rest of the small houses were filled with goods of little use, such as glass balls and ceramic dolls.

It is worth mentioning that all of Chen Zhou’s fishing gear is stored in the big house in the camp at the foot of the mountain.

This is to make it easier for him to fish.

The distance from the camp at the foot of the mountain to the small lake is very close, and the round trip takes less than 40 minutes. It is very convenient whether starting from there or returning to the camp to rest.

……

As other tasks were completed, Chen Zhou, who gradually became freer, felt that it was necessary to select a piece of higher ground near the camp at the foot of the mountain that was not easily flooded by rain and build a semi-permanent house.

After all, the cave is too far from the beach. Sometimes when I go out to catch pigeons or collect saltpeter, it is already dark before I know it.

It's okay in the dry season, but walking home at night with an oil lamp just adds a little more risk.

During the rainy season, there are often heavy rainstorms at night. We cannot go home overnight, nor can we sleep outdoors. Living in the big house in the camp is very uncomfortable and inconvenient.

If there was a house at the foot of the mountain, it would not only be convenient for repairs, but he would also not have to get out of bed in the middle of the night when going to the beach.

If you arrive at the beach in time, the dead fish you pick up will be fresh, and you won't have to pick up the leftovers from seabirds.

And living on the mountainside all the time, sometimes it is inevitable to get tired of the sight, so changing the location can also change the mood.

There was a mountain of building materials piled up on the beach, and some of the wooden boards at the bottom even showed signs of rotting, so it would be better to use them as soon as possible.

It is best to build a few shelters in the building materials yard near the beach to provide the wood with a small home to shelter from wind and rain.

Otherwise, not only would he feel sorry for the trees that were cut down, but he would also feel sorry for the effort and time he put into the wood.

……

Of course, the top priority in Chen Zhou’s mind now is to capture, or rescue the indigenous people.

To this end, he spent a lot of time making guns, rattan armor, shields and bows and arrows.

Starting from May 5, he also developed a training plan to improve his physical fitness and practice his skills in using cold weapons.

He designated the training ground as the beach northeast of the mountain.

That beach was where the natives held their cannibal feast. Every morning and evening, he would set out from the beach and rush up the mountain with all his might to reach the top.

After more than a year of physical labor, Chen Zhou has become very strong.

His diet was sufficient in fat, protein and vitamins. Although he was on an isolated island in the 17th century, he showed no signs of becoming skinny. Instead, he gained some weight.

It is usually easy to run more than ten kilometers on flat ground.

But running up the mountain is much more strenuous than running on flat ground, especially the road near the top of the mountain, where the slope is extremely steep and the feet always slip on the gravel. In addition, I always worry about rolling down the mountain while running, which puts me under tremendous psychological pressure.

A few days before training, as he approached the last section of the road, Chen Zhou would always subconsciously slow down his pace and reach the top in an almost climbing manner.

He knew that this habit was not good, so in future training he forced himself not to use his arms to grasp the protruding rocks, but only to rely on his body and solid legs to maintain balance.

There were several times when he was too complacent and his feet slipped, rolling down the mountain along the gravel.

Fortunately, he had deliberately worn the thickest set of rattan armor and rabbit leather gloves that he had sewn himself. Before training, he also moved away rocks on the mountain that were easy to hit his head. He rolled down safely, and apart from being covered in dust, he didn't even get his skin scratched.

……

The rewards of a serious attitude are also huge.

He persisted for half a month, and except for going to the beach on May 5 to claim the 23th mysterious reward, Chen Zhou never stopped climbing.

He became more and more familiar with the terrain from the beach at the foot of the mountain to the top of the mountain, and his climbing speed became faster and faster. Even the steep top of the mountain could not stop him for too long.

But considering that the natives were fighting lightly and without the restriction of armor, Chen Zhou did not dare to be careless.

As the saying goes, think about defeat before thinking about victory.

He cannot just think about how the plan can succeed, he must also think clearly about the consequences of failure.

If you can't beat them, you must be able to outrun them.

After all, the improved flintlock is not a fully automatic rifle, so it is not surprising that any accidents may occur during use.

The morale of the natives may not be that low.

You know, these natives are all people of faith.

If their priests were present, and had given them some encouragement by saying something like "after you die you will be able to enter Valhalla, your souls will be immortal, and you will enjoy a happy heaven", who knows, they might really have rushed up the mountain despite the gunfire and huge damage.

The great leader once said that while we should underestimate the enemy overall and strategically, we must never underestimate the enemy in every part and on every specific issue.

Chen Zhou felt that although he could look down on the natives in terms of ideology and scientific knowledge, he could not look down on them in actual combat.

After all, he was outnumbered thirty people. If he was captured alive by the natives, he would be neither able to live nor to die.

……

Running training, familiarizing himself with the terrain, and studying good locations for setting traps took up a lot of Chen Zhou's time.

He also made arrangements for the rest of the time.

In order to prevent the natives from following all the way home and attacking the cave, he began to reinforce the slope and the edge of the platform, and built a wall along the edge of the platform.

At the same time, he did not forget the trouble of rainy season - puddles.

In addition to building the wall, he also had to lay stone bricks on the ground and fill the seams with white mud.

……

The reason why Chen Zhou dared to take time out of his busy schedule to build the wall and lay floor tiles was not because he was arrogant and thought he only needed to use part of his energy to deal with the natives.

This was all thanks to the 4th mysterious reward he received on April 23 - a set of bricklayer tools.

These include a ruler for leveling, a putty knife for scraping putty, and a putty board for supporting the putty when plastering the wall.

There are also tools such as tile trowels, shovels, steel chisels, plumb bobs, trowels, angle planers, sandpaper stands, sandpaper, hand saws and ink fountains, which are very helpful for his bricklayer work.

Of course, this kind of good luck doesn't always happen.

After receiving the three gifts on March 3, he received five more rewards by the end of May.

Of these rewards, Bricklayer's Tools are undoubtedly the most useful.

Among the other items, there is a clothing reward that appears for the first time, and it is an expensive piece of clothing - a wedding dress.

Chen Zhou later disassembled it into large amounts of cloth and stored them, preparing to use them to bandage wounds in the event of an accidental injury or to filter out impurities in the process of squeezing sugarcane juice.

There is also a set of exquisite purple clay tea sets, which includes more than 30 pieces including teapots and teacups. It is now placed on Chen Zhou's desk and is used to hold boiled water.

If these three items can still be found to have some use value, then the last two are just "expensive waste".

One of them is a wooden precision metronome, which is used to help instrumentalists keep the beat.

To be honest, if there weren't instructions on the packaging, Chen Zhou might not have known what this strange wooden box, which was shaped like a desk clock and filled with various numbers, was used for.

He had no idea how this metronome could help him.

The other reward is even more bizarre, it’s an “umbrella dewatering device”.

This was the first time Chen Zhou had seen this thing since he was a child, and it was even the first time he had heard of such a thing as an umbrella dewatering device.

It is like a narrow giant single-volume bookshelf, more than half a person's height.

It is equipped with four rollers at the bottom for easy movement. There are metal plates on both sides, and a large area of absorbent cotton is attached to the inside of the gap in the middle of the metal plate.

This umbrella dewatering device is made of stainless steel and a small amount of plastic, and it has a friendly message on the side: Please put the umbrella into the dewatering device and shake it left and right three to five times.

Of all the rewards, it is hard to find an object that is so large, made of such useful materials, but is actually useless.

Not to mention that there are no umbrellas on the island, even if there are umbrellas, there is no need to prepare a dewatering device for them. You can just hang them at the kitchen door.

However, Chen Zhou has always known how to recycle waste. He plans to remove the absorbent cotton stuck on the inside of the gap in the dewatering device and make it into a mop to mop the floor.

These absorbent cottons are very thick, look strong and durable, and have a large area. After cutting them, they are enough for at least seven or eight mops.

Pay more attention to maintenance and don't press it too hard on the ground. It can be used for at least four to five years.

As for the solid stainless steel plates on both sides, he wanted to dismantle them directly and put them on the beach for cutting when needed. Even if they were used to make a table top or a small bench, it would be more useful than installing them here.

(End of this chapter)