From Robinson Crusoe

The rainy season is getting closer.

The workload of the two natives is also increasing.

After obtaining the gun barrel, Chen Zhou showed unprecedented enthusiasm for forging a rifle with superior performance. He wished he could split himself into two halves, one half to build the forge and the other half to burn charcoal.

Less than two days after the charcoal kiln was built, it started working for the first time.

……

Large quantities of carefully selected hardwood sections are placed in the kiln and stacked into an arch shape.

As a handful of dry firewood at the bottom of the fire pit ignited, the hardwood in the kiln was gradually ignited.

The kiln door opening to the air vent continuously supplies oxygen into the kiln, and billowing white smoke pours out of the chimney, like a giant python rising into the sky.

According to the experience gained from Chen Zhou's previous experiments, the wood in this kiln must burn for at least five hours in the initial stage of oxygen control.

He waited patiently beside the charcoal kiln, observing the smoke coming out of the chimney from time to time, or checking the fire through the vents.

The waiting process is extremely long.

After the wood is fully burned, the smoke turns from white to green. Upon observing this change in the smoke, Chen Zhou immediately closed the kiln door to reduce oxygen and allow it to enter the oxygen-free carbonization stage.

This process takes longer than the burning stage and requires more than ten hours.

Chen Zhou specially brought his sleeping bag to the charcoal kiln, where there was a wooden water room built in advance for fire prevention, where he could rest at night.

After a night of oxygen-free carbonization, the green smoke turned into a light blue smoke.

Although it was the first time that Chen Zhou used a large charcoal kiln to make charcoal, relying on the experience gained from the experiment, he did not make any mistakes whether it was handling the stacking of wood or ignition and oxygen control.

The ignition and carbonization stage, which lasts for nearly a day and a night, enters the final step after the carbonization period - completely sealing the kiln door.

There is almost no oxygen in the kiln at this time, and only half-finished charcoal is formed in the high temperature.

At this stage, Chen Zhou no longer had to stay by the charcoal kiln all day.

After the carbonization is completed, all he can do is wait, waiting for the closed kiln body to slowly release the temperature until it is completely cooled.

This process often lasts for 24 hours or even 48 hours. Slow cooling is conducive to the integrity of the charcoal shape, while rapid cooling will cause the charcoal to break.

……

With his heart set on forging, Chen Zhou dared not waste his time.

After the charcoal kiln entered the cooling stage, he immediately returned to the cave, summoned two natives, and worked together to open up the cave.

The door of the "forge room" or "blacksmith shop" is on the left side of the kitchen, more than 3 meters away from the kitchen, but still within the courtyard.

If there were enough stone, Chen Zhou might choose to build a studio with stone bricks.

But the amount of wood cut for the wood and stone wall has always been far greater than the amount of stone. In addition, after laying floor tiles in the courtyard and building toilets and walls inside the cave in the past few months, the reserves of stone bricks have been running out.

There may be several large facilities built in the forging room to store a lot of materials. If the space is small, it will inevitably be stretched. Chen Zhou has long been fed up with the troubles caused by the small storage room, and this time he will never repeat the same mistake.

……

The three of them worked together to dig inside, and then used a cart to dump sand and soil outside. The progress of their work was incomparable to that of Chen Zhou working alone.

By the time the first batch of charcoal had cooled down, a dozen square meters of space had been opened up in the forging room. This was because the two natives needed to take care of the farmland and sheep, as well as learn the language and writing, otherwise they could have dug more.

……

Chen Zhou opened the kiln door, tested the temperature, and when he felt it was cool enough, he carefully took out the charcoal from the kiln.

Although the process went smoothly during the first production, the temperature was not controlled accurately enough.

A whole batch of high-quality hardwood only produced about 200 kilograms of high-quality charcoal, and the remaining charcoal was almost all broken, especially the charcoal at the front, which had been broken into small pieces the size of a palm.

Fortunately, Chen Zhou does not pursue the integrity of the charcoal. In order to increase the temperature during forging, he will even smash large pieces of charcoal into small pieces or even grind them into charcoal powder to increase the area exposed to oxygen and improve combustion efficiency.

Large pieces of high-quality charcoal were loaded directly onto carts and transported to the yard for stacking. Some charcoal pieces that were not seriously broken were also sent there.

The remaining small pieces of charcoal were sorted out, leaving only the high-quality charcoal with smooth cross-section and crisp sound when knocked. The rest of the low-quality charcoal was put into rattan baskets and given to the two natives.

When the rainy season comes, they can burn charcoal indoors to cook without being choked by smoke.

Finally, Chen Zhou also has to remove the ashes and uncarbonized wood blocks left at the bottom of the kiln.

These ashes are not much different from wood ash, and he plans to mix them with feces in the compost yard to ferment and use them as fertilizer when opening up new fields.

……

After the first kiln of charcoal was burned, Chen Zhou immediately put the remaining wood into the kiln.

The rainy season is long, so the more charcoal the better.

A similar process was repeated. After the charcoal entered the cooling stage, Chen Zhou returned to the cave and opened a forging room together with two natives.

……

time flies.

By the time the clear sky was gone and dark clouds covered the island with a drizzle of rain, Chen Zhou had already burned two kilns of charcoal and opened up an area of nearly 100 square meters in the forging room.

During this half month, apart from burning charcoal and digging and transporting earth, the only work he had time to do was to build toilets for the two natives.

Before obtaining the gun barrel, he had planned to use this half month to build a large wooden house with a kitchen for the two natives.

But plans cannot keep up with changes, and guns are still too attractive to Chen Zhou.

He was so busy preparing for the forging work that he even squeezed out time to build this toilet. If the toilet was not so important, he might have saved even this little time.

……

After the rainy season, the two natives were no longer able to cook outdoors.

In order to make their lives more convenient, Chen Zhou renovated the unused cabin on the other side of the field and built a fireplace inside for making fire and cooking.

In this way, the natives only need to walk more than 100 meters to the other end of the field every day to cook.

And there is another advantage of an independent "kitchen" -

They could store food, fuel and tableware in the kitchen, which gave them a lot more space in their own cabins, allowing them to put in more white clay tablet teaching materials and even put out two small stools so they could read by candlelight at night.

……

He devoted himself to the design and construction of the forge, and only set aside a small part of his time every day to teach the two natives, and seldom checked on their learning progress.

Chen Zhou did not notice that the learning abilities of both Sunday and Saturday were much better than he had expected.

Without paper and pen, they practiced writing on square wooden boards filled with sand.

Without a teacher, they would check the pinyin table over and over again, look at the phonetic symbols and diagrams in the textbooks, and supervise and correct each other's pronunciation.

There are many things they have never had, but once an opportunity arises, even if it is only a one in ten thousand chance, they are willing to give everything to fight for it.

Now, the communication between the two natives and Chen Zhou has become more and more fluent. They even know how to combine multiple learned words to describe things that they have not learned but have witnessed with their own eyes.

Sometimes after digging the forging room and finishing a day's work, Chen Zhou would invite the two to have a meal in the cave. During this process, through occasional questions and answers, he could truly feel everything that happened on that primitive and barbaric island from the words of the two teenagers.

……

Unlike this independent large island, the scattered small islands are not far from each other. If there is no wind or waves, it will take less than an hour to go back and forth by canoe.

There is more than one tribe on the island.

According to the two teenagers, they knew of as many as six tribes that had conflicts with their tribe.

The cannibalistic natives who landed on the island last time were the largest and most powerful group.

Sunday said that the tribe had a hundred warriors, and Saturday corrected his statement, saying that the tribe had at least a hundred and fifty warriors.

They learn mathematics by playing with pebbles and have a clearer concept of numbers.

But when people are afraid, they will always subconsciously magnify the enemy's power, thereby further creating fear for themselves.

After careful consideration, Chen Zhou felt that Sunday's statement was more credible.

A primitive tribe with one hundred strong men is not small.

Including women, children and the elderly, there were at least seven or eight hundred people in that tribe.

If it were on the rich continent, a tribe of 800 people would certainly not be a big deal, but this is an isolated island overseas, and with the natural resources here, it is not easy to feed 700 or 800 people.

Moreover, Chen Zhou also found out that these natives are still in the ignorant stage about planting and have no idea what animal husbandry is.

They already know that by burying a seed in the soil they will get a new plant, but they don't know how to keep the plant alive. Watering it or fertilizing it are all beyond their knowledge.

Therefore, these natives can only grow some food by chance, but the probability is so low that they cannot feed themselves through farming at all.

According to the "Fishing Master" on Saturday, most people in his previous tribe and the tribe after he was captured were in a state of hunger.

Cannibalism is not new among these tribes, especially during the stormy rainy season.

Due to the difficulty in going out to sea to fish, the low temperature during the rainy season means a greater demand for heat than usual, and a higher rate of damage to houses. As soon as the rainy season arrives, conflicts between tribes begin to break out frequently over food or labor.

Many bloody wars took place in the drizzle.

Although Saturday is not very old, he has personally experienced three large-scale conflicts.

Out of curiosity, Chen Zhou also asked the two if they had ever eaten human flesh.

The answer is yes.

Even without sacrifices, people in the tribe often died of hunger or disease.

For this kind of corpses, the priests would often find a high-sounding excuse, light a bonfire, lead the tribesmen in singing and dancing, and then share the corpses and eat them.

The higher the status of a person, the higher the part he or she gets in this cannibal feast. Boys like them, who are at the bottom of the tribe, can often only get a few toes.

……

To be honest, Chen Zhou still felt a little uncomfortable after hearing with his own ears that the two natives he had lived with day and night had both eaten humans.

As a modern man, he finds it difficult to accept cannibalism.

But things had already happened, and he had no ability to change the past. He could only restrain the two natives and tell them not to think about cannibalism again.

……

In addition to the cannibalism incident, Chen Zhou also inquired about the date and location of the cannibalistic feast held by the indigenous tribe.

According to Sunday, the cannibal feasts were mostly held in their own archipelago, and only tribes large enough could afford to cross the ocean and come to this big island to hold sacrifices.

However, there is no fixed date for the cannibal feast.

As long as it is the dry season, there are no strong winds and waves, and the tribe wins the war and captures warriors from the enemy tribe, they may bring the captives to the big island at any time to slaughter them as long as the priests and leaders agree.

As for the venue, it is determined by the location where each tribe first landed on the island.

When Saturday and his tribe were at their peak, they once came to the Big Island to hold a cannibal feast, but Saturday and Sunday were very young at that time and didn't know where the feast was held.

……

“Since there is so little food, so many people, and constant wars on your own island, why don’t you move to the Big Island?
The environment here is much better than your island, and it is enough to support hundreds of people."

Chen Zhou once asked this question after listening to two natives talk about the situation of their tribe.

Saturday and Sunday gave different responses.

Saturday was obviously one of the most brainwashed ones. He said that the Big Island was inhabited by demons and gods and that huge black smoke had once come out.

The old man said that a long time ago, there was a huge tribe on the big island, but later they were all burned to death by black smoke and fire from the sky.

The survivors of that tribe fled to the surrounding islands, which became the predecessors of some small tribes today.

Sunday, however, had a mind of its own.

He believed that the root cause was that the leaders of the tribe were short-sighted, too stubborn, unwilling to make progress, and complacent and lacked the courage to change.

The tribal leaders would rather let the laborers risk their lives to plunder other tribes or go fishing at sea than allow them to spare the time to build a canoe large enough to lead the entire tribe to move to another place away from those terrible neighbors.

……

"The chief is afraid of this place. He heard from the priest that there are demons here. He is afraid of dying, so he dare not come."

Sunday spoke in a halting manner about his knowledge of the tribal leader, with a look of contempt on his face.

……

Chen Zhou was quite shocked by the boy's insights.

He never thought that just two months of study could make these indigenous people who had never been exposed to modern ideas have such awareness.

The leader who once was highly respected in their hearts has now become someone they despise.

Is this self-confidence brought to them by knowledge or by a new life of freedom and non-oppression?

As for the black smoke and sky fire on the island mentioned on Saturday, as well as the rumors that there was once a large tribe on the island but later disappeared, Chen Zhou felt that it was most likely because of the volcano.

The large tribe might be located under the volcano. When the volcano erupted, most of the people in the tribe were buried in volcanic ash and were wiped out in an instant.

The few survivors who happened to be far away from the volcano were terrified and fled to surrounding islands in canoes, causing these rumors to spread.

Ultimately, this is all caused by lack of culture.

……

As the topic was coming to an end, Chen Zhou had already formed a different opinion about the two Aboriginal teenagers on Sunday and Saturday.

He felt that although Sunday was younger, his behavior and thinking ability seemed more mature, so he asked him a question.

"If the big tribe that defeated you can't wait for the priests and warriors who performed the cannibalistic ritual to return, will they gather a large number of people and go to the island to investigate?"

After hearing this, Zhou Ri was silent for a moment, as if he was thinking about how to answer Chen Zhou. (End of this chapter)