From Robinson Crusoe

On the evening of August 8, Chen Zhou and Lai Fu returned to the cave with their fully packed backpacks.

After arriving home, he immediately unloaded several saplings that had been transplanted into clay pots from his backpack and placed them next to the nursery at the door to prevent them from dying from the heat and bumps.

……

As early as when he obtained the autumn white apricots, he had the idea of planting a fruit forest near his home.

Those gradually growing strong autumn white apricot seedlings were planted on the sunny slope closest to the cave. In order to prevent the trees from being eaten by goats or rabbits before they grew up, Chen Zhou also set up a circle of wooden fences outside the apricot forest.

Below the almond grove, he transplanted many orange and lemon trees.

You can always see relatively thriving plants near these fruit trees that are more common in the forest. Carefully dig them out, trying not to damage the roots of the small trees, and transplant them elsewhere. The survival rate is actually not low.

However, as one of the most widely distributed fruit trees on the island, lemons and oranges are not as valued as apricot trees. There are no fences outside them, and whether they can grow successfully depends entirely on luck.

In addition to the fruit forest on the sunny slope, Chen Zhou also plans to build a small vegetable garden in his own yard and plant a few more trees.

When laying the floor tiles on the platform, he deliberately left several spaces with bare soil in consideration of future needs.

Among them are small vegetable plots for growing spices such as chili peppers, garlic, mint, and fennel.

There are also grape fields used for growing grapes, with wooden racks built in advance, and several vacant lots that are now planted with orange trees and autumn white apricots.

After the cocoa and citron seedlings brought back this time have recovered, Chen Zhou will plant them in the yard.

Although we won’t be able to eat their fruits in the short term, there is a saying that goes—

“The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The second best time is now.”

Considering his future happy life, Chen Zhou felt it necessary to plant a few trees in the yard in advance.

After all, trees are different from crops. As long as you pay attention to and take care of them when they are young, it will be difficult for them to die due to climate or other reasons when they grow up, so you don't have to worry about it.

……

I had a comfortable sleep at home.

On August 8, Chen Zhou got up in high spirits. After tidying up the room and taking care of the household chores, he couldn't wait to make some hot chocolate to try.

At present, his cooking tools are relatively complete. He has basically all the pots, pans, and utensils in the kitchen. Although some of them have strange shapes, they can all be used.

……

It was already afternoon when we started making chocolate.

The cats at home are taking a nap outside the kitchen door. They seem to prefer the heat of the dry season.

Especially little Huihui, who always falls to the ground, exposing his light gray belly, sniffing the smell of food in the kitchen and enjoying a good life.

When camping outdoors, Lai Fu always takes the initiative to take on the task of keeping watch, and only after returning home does he relax again.

However, unlike cats, it does not like to rest in the kitchen during the day. It prefers to lie in the yard or in the corner.

The room was too narrow; the tables, chairs, benches and shelves limited its activity area.

The yard is much more spacious, and as long as it doesn't run away, Chen Zhou will not restrain it.

After a good sleep, I got up and walked around the courtyard wall. The courtyard is not big, but it is big enough for me to run around.

If you want to feel the breeze, you can walk up the wall along the reserved steps in the yard, look into the distance, and be surrounded by the mountain breeze. Although it is not as free as running freely outside, it is much more comfortable than staying in the house.

……

The fire in the furnace was burning fiercely, and the surging heat waves made the house even hotter.

The doors and windows of the kitchen were open. On the low windowsill were three pots of blooming flowers. A butterfly that had flown from nowhere landed on the flowers and flapped its wings.

Little Huihui opened his eyelids lazily, glanced at the butterfly, and continued to sleep.

Gray Ball ran over from the storage room, snuggled up to his father's big belly, licked his fur, and made a purring sound.

On the stove, Chen Zhou filled a ceramic drying rack made of white clay with cocoa beans.

They are rapidly losing moisture under high temperature baking and become extremely dry.

Next to the hot fire, Chen Zhou sat on a low stool, weaving a comb with processed hay strips - he was sitting idle anyway, so he might as well find something to do.

After this batch of cocoa beans was dried, he hurriedly used rabbit skins to pad the handles of the drying rack, took them down layer by layer, poured out the hot cocoa beans, and put a new batch on.

Dried cocoa beans are ground into fine powder and become the raw material for making coarse chocolate.

However, it is much larger than wheat. If you want to put it into the millstone that Chen Zhou made specifically for grinding wheat, you have to break it with a hammer first.

I happened to have a few pieces of slightly concave metal at home. After wiping them clean, I just put the cocoa beans in them and tap them.

Before processing the second batch of cocoa beans, Chen Zhou smashed all the first batch of cocoa beans into small pieces, and then poured them into the grinding wheel for grinding.

He didn't have spices like cinnamon and vanilla, so he prepared some sugar and a little butter, hoping that they would enhance the taste of the chocolate.

After modern chocolate is ground, it needs to be "refined" when it enters the heating step.

The so-called refining is the process of putting the cocoa pulp into a large container and constantly rotating and stirring it to make the cocoa particles in it finer.

Refined chocolate has a smoother taste, finer texture and more luster than rough chocolate.

Chen Zhou learned that high-end chocolate, such as Swiss chocolate, often takes up to 72 hours to refine, which makes Swiss chocolate taste silky and smooth.

Naturally, he doesn't have the conditions for refining here.

And even if the structure of the cocoa bean refiner was not complicated, he would not be able to make it.

This kind of machine needs to work for a long time and must be driven by water power, as wind power is not stable enough.

The pure wooden structure could not withstand long working hours and would be damaged due to excessive wear and tear after just a few uses. He didn't think that he particularly needed a piece of silky chocolate in his life. It would be a waste of time.

……

After grinding the cocoa bean powder, Chen Zhou added sugar into it and took out a few empty cans.

There is no stove specially prepared for small pots in the kitchen. If you want to use pots to make chocolate, you need to build a bonfire in the yard before you can continue.

I was so busy that before I knew it, the sun had set.

A bonfire was lit in the yard, and a jar containing a mixture of cocoa bean powder and sugar was placed on the fire. While heating it, Chen Zhou stirred it with chopsticks.

The cocoa bean powder in the can is affected by the high temperature and gradually melts, forming a slightly rough cocoa pulp.

A fragrant aroma emanated, attracting cats and dogs left at home to come and watch.

Fearing that they would steal the chocolate, Chen Zhou quickly stopped stirring, and while scolding them, he hit them on the head one by one, and only then did he drive these greedy ghosts away.

After about two hours of boiling water, when Chen Zhou was almost roasted to sleep by the fire, he finally boiled the cocoa bean powder into a brown, sticky paste.

The unique aroma of chocolate made him almost drool.

Perhaps because these cocoa beans come from wild cocoa trees, the chocolate made from them is not only fragrant, but also has other indescribable rich aromas that make people intoxicated just by smelling it.

After waiting for a whole afternoon and even not having dinner, Chen Zhou couldn't wait to pick up the spoon and start tasting.

The first batch of cocoa bean powder was processed into four cans of chocolate in total, but each can was only filled one-third, not full - Chen Zhou was afraid that if it was filled too full, the chocolate would overflow when stirring. It was not easy to make a trip to the Fruit Valley, and that would be too wasteful.

……

The freshly brewed chocolate was hot and sticky. Before eating it, Chen Zhou added a small piece of butter to it to make the already fragrant chocolate aroma even more fragrant.

At the same time, he also hopes that butter can make the rougher cocoa pulp ground by hand become more delicate and improve the taste.

Call ~
Before using the spoon to stir the chocolate, he first took out the chopsticks used to stir the chocolate, blew on the hot steam on it, and then held it in his mouth and sucked it.

"Um!

fragrant!"

The richness of the taste of the freshest chocolate paste almost overturned Chen Zhou's perception of chocolate as a food. He had never imagined that chocolate could taste like this.

The aroma is mellow with a slight aftertaste, and the burnt aroma of natural cocoa beans is permeated with the plant's unique bitterness and freshness, like roasted walnuts or fried red dates. It also vaguely reminds Chen Zhou of the smell of high-end cigarettes or cigars.

As a person who has little knowledge of food and feels that his taste buds are not sensitive enough, he can only utter a simple sigh -

"Mmm, it's fucking delicious!"

After eating the chocolate, while immersed in the joy brought by the long-lost dessert, Chen Zhou summarized the shortcomings of this chocolate making.

The addition of butter was undoubtedly a stroke of genius, but there was still not enough sugar, resulting in the hot cocoa not being as sweet as he had imagined, but having a stronger aroma.

But it's not his fault.

Although he planted more and more sugarcane, he always had things to do in the past few months and had no time to squeeze the sugarcane and make sugar. This resulted in the family's sugar reserves becoming less and less, so he dared not use it recklessly.

……

"It seems that if we want to eat chocolate with better texture and more delicious taste, we have to make a sugar-making machine as soon as possible..."

Regardless of the scalding heat, Chen Zhou was thinking as he blew on the chocolate in the spoon.

After enjoying this sweetness, he really wanted to have a can of chocolate every day, but unfortunately there was no cocoa tree near the cave.

If he brought the chocolates back in a mountaineering bag, the food and tools he needed to carry would take up a lot of space. After a round trip, if he ate sparingly, he would only have enough for a month at most, which was not enough to satisfy his needs at all.

“If I succeed in taming the natives this time, I can train a trustworthy helper to look after the crops for me.

When I have some free time, I will definitely build a house in Fruit Valley. If nothing else, the chocolate freedom alone is enough to attract people."

With a beautiful vision of the future, Chen Zhou ate up a small can of chocolate.

The overly fragrant hot cocoa can make people feel full enough, so much so that he doesn't want to eat at all after eating the chocolate.

The remaining three cans of hot cocoa naturally could not be kept heated on the campfire, so Chen Zhou put them in the refrigerator to cool down.

This crude cocoa pulp will solidify into rough chocolate blocks after cooling. It can be eaten directly, but the taste is far less delicate than hot cocoa. It is more portable.

Of course, you can also heat it again and eat it after it melts. The taste is basically the same as hot cocoa.

……

On the night of the 5th, Chen Zhou, who had eaten the chocolate, worked until the early morning of the 6th. He dried all the cocoa beans, put them into wooden boxes, and placed them on the fire wall together with the crucible to prevent moisture.

Although I was exhausted, the dream that night was extremely sweet.

On the morning of the 6th, when Chen Zhou woke up in bed in a daze, he suddenly remembered that it was time to claim the th mysterious reward.

After quickly washing and eating breakfast, he called Lai Fu who was lying in the yard and headed straight for the beach.

……

Before I knew it, I had received the mysterious reward once every 15 days for the th time.

Thinking about the past two years, I have never slacked off.

With hard work and wisdom, and of course, the help provided by the reward from the Space-Time Administration, Chen Zhou built a safe and warm shelter on this isolated island and planted enough crops to eat, even enough to feed sheep. He couldn't help but feel proud of himself.

He arrived at the beach with ease, and almost instinctively stepped over the wooden and stone wall, and saw the reward.

The reward packaging is not too big and looks ordinary, but after opening the corrugated paper, it turns out to be an extremely exquisite box packaging made of metal and plastic.

After opening the box, a large red telescope with a metallic luster appeared in Chen Zhou's eyes from inside the thick velvet package.

"What a good thing!"

Not realizing that the shape of this monocular telescope was very different from that of an ordinary telescope, Chen Zhou quickly picked it up, removed the dust cover, closed one eye, and tried to look at the sea through the telescope.

As December approached, he needed to climb to the top of the mountain frequently to observe whether the natives had landed on the island.

The captain's telescope obtained from the ship could also observe the beach, but it was impossible to see as clearly as a modern telescope.

It would undoubtedly be a good thing to have better telescopes, so that one can more accurately count the number of natives, see the number of captives, the weapons they carry, their status, and the changes in their expressions.

As the saying goes, knowing yourself and your enemy ensures victory in a hundred battles. The more information you have, the more chances you have of winning.

This telescope is much thicker than a normal telescope, and it feels heavy in the hand, which does not seem like the design that a portable telescope should have.

Using it to look far away, Chen Zhou felt even more strange.

The image of this telescope is actually inverted, and the magnification is extremely high. When looking at the waves in the distance, the scene is very blurry. The actual effect is not as good as the monocular telescope of the 17th century.

"Something's wrong. What kind of telescope is this?"

Realizing that this reward was not the ordinary telescope he had imagined, Chen Zhou put the telescope back in its place and hurriedly looked for the instruction manual in the packaging box.

There are quite a few things in the box, including various interchangeable lenses and strange small parts, as well as several brackets, various poles, and some equipment suitable for photographers.

Chen Zhou went all the way to the bottom of the box before he found the instruction manual.

The instruction manual was more than two hundred pages long, and contained a large number of color illustrations and professional introductions, which left him completely confused.

But there was one thing he figured out: it turned out that this was not an ordinary telescope at all, but an astronomical telescope called a five-element refracting telescope.

This thing is used by astronomy enthusiasts to photograph and observe stars. Theoretically, it can also be used as an ordinary telescope, but it is very difficult.

If the distance is not far enough, the scene it sees will be very blurry, and if the hand is slightly unsteady, the picture will shift strongly and it is unknown where it will go.

It can be said that this is a reward that seems useful but is actually useless - Chen Zhou doesn't want to look up at the stars now, he just wants to keep his feet on the ground.

At the same time, as a reward from the Administration in the new year, it still maintains its expensive characteristics.

The last few pages of the manual listed other astronomical telescopes of the same brand. Among them, Chen Zhou found the telescope he had in his hand and discovered that it cost as much as 20,000 yuan.

In this regard, he could only sigh: "Astronomy is really a hobby for rich people."

As for the telescope, it could only be put back into the box and taken back to Hyundai to be sold.

If it has any other uses, maybe it can be used to fool the natives.

If the natives could use this thing to clearly observe the untouchable stars in the sky, they would most likely regard it as a sacred artifact and might even develop a worship mentality towards the owner of the artifact.

From this perspective, it may work wonders and produce unexpected effects. (End of this chapter)