Volume 4: How big is the heart, how vast is the earth Chapter 93 Education Upgrade
This is Xiao Yun's fourth winter in the other world. The biggest difference from last winter is that sweet potatoes and potatoes can be consumed as much as they want.
The potatoes and sweet potatoes that Xiao Yun tried to plant last year are growing well. With proper field drainage and sufficient fertilizer, the tubers produced, although not as high as the tens of thousands on Earth, the yield per mu can be maintained at around 3,000 kilograms. However, due to the need to select seeds and expand the cultivated area, Xiao Yun stored these two crops in the cellar, and only gave them to everyone for a change every ten days or half a month, instead of supplying them openly.
The potatoes and sweet potatoes planted this year were a little bolder than last year... Xiao Yun planted two rounds of them.
The first round of spring potatoes and spring sweet potatoes were planted at the same time as alfalfa and harvested before the third crop of alfalfa. The yield of this round of spring potatoes and spring sweet potatoes was quite good, with an average yield of 3,000 to 3,500 jin per mu. The second round was autumn potatoes and autumn sweet potatoes harvested together with soybeans. Due to the shorter growth cycle, the yield of this round was lower, with an average yield of only about 2,000 jin per mu.
The yield per mu is not high but we have a lot of land. The large and flat land is used to grow potatoes and sweet potatoes, and we plant two rounds a year. The combined annual output is naturally quite amazing... I was too busy to deal with this before, but now that winter has come, the work intensity is not so high, and the potatoes and sweet potatoes that are filled in the warehouse and cellar are naturally ready to show their charm.
The first snow of this winter was heavier than those in previous years. After waking up from a sleepless night, the lower half of the wooden board blocking the door was blocked by snow, and the heavy snow was still falling. In such weather, no matter how cruel Xiao Yun was, he could not drive people out to work, so naturally he gave them a "heavy snow holiday". The tribesmen who finally got a day off cheered, wrapped themselves in cotton clothes, sweaters, trousers, and a layer of animal skins, and rushed out to sweep the snow for fun. Xiao Yun shook his head, turned around and... summoned the canteen chef team and Dashui's work team to come over and start processing sweet potato flour.
Generally speaking, homemade sweet potato flour is best made around the time of frost in autumn, but then you are busy... It won't be too late to make it after the snow:
First, you need to grind the sweet potato stems. Take some ready-made snow, melt it, wash the sweet potatoes, cut them into pieces, and grind them in a stone mill.
There are about 600 mouths to feed in the tribe, so everything has to be produced in large quantities. They say that they have to consume their own output, and even the sweet potato flour they make at one time has to be calculated at 10,000 jin... Fortunately, the yield per mu of this stuff is very good. Even if only 300 mu of land is planted, the annual output is still several million jin, so they can use it as they please.
Grinding so many sweet potatoes is not an easy job. Running in and out made everyone sweat, and it was not until dark that we finished the job.
The next step is to filter out the starch from the ground sweet potatoes. The easiest way is to use gauze to rinse with water, and then cook the remaining sweet potato pieces with sweet potato, rice and wheat porridge that night...
Put the starch water into a container and let it sit overnight to settle to the bottom. Pour out the water on the surface, scoop out the starch and put it in a basket or dustpan and place it on the kang in each room to dry. When it is almost dry, you can start making sweet potato flour.
Well... during this period, Xiao Yun intercepted a portion of the dried sweet potato starch and put it aside to make sugar.
Add water to sweet potato starch and mix it into a paste. Put it into a ladle-shaped container with a round hole on the bottom. Stand next to a large stove with boiling water and hold the container. Hold the ladle in one hand and beat it with the other. The starch paste in the ladle will slide down through the holes like a line and fall into the boiling water, where it will be cooked and turn deep red. Then take out the cooked vermicelli, put it into snow water with ice cubes (clear water is also fine) to cool it, and hang it up to dry...done.
Of course, they can't be hung outside to dry as it's still snowing, nor can they be left in the room with a heated kang, otherwise the vermicelli will stick together and become a ball. After thinking it over, Xiao Yun simply pushed the vermicelli drying rack to a sheltered place at the back of the house until each root was frozen distinctly. He then moved it to a room without a heated kang, opened the door to let the air dry in the shade... It didn't matter if they occasionally stuck together, as long as they were roughly the same.
The first snow had not stopped falling for a week, and Xiao Yun and his men had consumed more than 100,000 kilograms of sweet potatoes and made more than 20,000 kilograms of sweet potato vermicelli... The vermicelli was still drying and no one had eaten it yet. The porridge made of chopped sweet potatoes made everyone sick of it, but they were reluctant to feed it to pigs, so the canteen had to develop ways to consume it, such as wrapping it in dough and frying it, pressing it into cakes, or baking or frying it...
Before the sweet potato flour was dried, Xiao Yun also quickly made the sweet potato flour sugar... The production method is the same as malt sugar. The fresh two-leaf malt from the greenhouse is chopped, the sweet potato starch is diluted with water in a ratio of 1:1.5, and then the chopped fresh malt is added in a ratio of ten to one, and then poured into four to five times the amount of water and cooked thoroughly.
After the cooked potato starch malt milk is annealed and cooled to about 50 degrees Celsius, fresh malt crumbs in the same proportion as when blending are added. After standing for two hours, clear water will appear on the surface. Then boil it over a fire and filter it with cloth. The filtrate is the sugar solution. Boil the sugar solution over high heat and dry the water in about four hours to get extremely sweet sugar.
One advantage of maltose made from sweet potato starch is that it can be shaped into a semi-solid after the water is dried, rather than a liquid that is easily spoiled; and it can be processed again based on the original sugar. For example, after boiling the sugar liquid and cooling it until it is not hot to the touch, add cooked bean powder or tangerine peel powder, use a round stick to pick it up and pull it, pull the sugar into white like ramen noodles, and cut it with a knife to get white sugar blocks; pull the sugar into threads to get sugar threads.
You can also add fried popcorn, fried soybeans, fried pine nuts, dried fruits, etc. of the same weight as the sugar solution, flatten them with a wooden board and cut them into pieces, that is, cut... uh... um...
"Qie gao shouldn't be made like this. It should be called Qie tang." Xiao Yun looked at the palm-sized Qie tang in his hand, was shocked by the name that just popped up in his mind, and handed the Qie tang to Niu Jiao who was waiting beside him with saliva dripping.
Niu Jiao took the chopped sugar with pine nut fried beans, fried popcorn, and dried fruit in both hands, swallowed his saliva, put the sugar on the chopping board, cut off a corner with a knife and put it into his mouth, holding it deliciously, and put the big piece of sugar into the bark pocket on his belt.
"Save it for later?" Xiao Yun was amused by his expression.
"Leave some for Qiuqiu." Niu Jiao puffed his cheeks happily, very naturally.
"..." Xiao Yun stared at Niu Jiao's brotherly physique seriously, "Qiu Qiu, as I remember , is a male. Even if he is not a male, your size is not suitable."
Niu Jiao: “???”
"Ayun~ the vermicelli is completely dry, can we eat it now?" Dahe rushed in. As soon as he entered the room, he smelled the sweet smell in the house. When he saw the large piece of candy on the table that had not been cut, he pointed angrily and said, "Ah, you made delicious food behind my back!"
"How can you talk like that? What do you mean by carrying you on my back? I just asked someone to help me, so who can escape the fastest?!" Xiao Yun was unhappy.
"You didn't tell me you were going to make candy again!" Dahao was still very confident and rushed to the counter to grab the candy.
"Get your hands off!" Xiao Yun slapped Da He's paw away. "This candy is to be given as a reward. You don't get any."
"What about him?!" Dahe pointed at Niu Jiao with puffed cheeks angrily.
"Bull horns." Xiao Yun tilted his head.
"Hmm!" Niu Jiao snorted and said righteously, "Dahe, those who don't work don't eat. If you run away, you won't eat either."
Dahe was so angry that his mouth was crooked...
Let Niu Jiao carry Dahe out, Xiao Yun picked up the square kitchen knife specially made by the gray dwarves, which gave Chinese people a feeling of +5 combat power when they held it, and quickly cut the pressed sugar into pieces.
As I said, in the absence of currency circulation inside, snacks are the best incentive mechanism. The stretched sugar and white sugar cubes are good performance awards, and the cut sugar with complex workmanship and rich flavor is excellent award. Although Niu Jiao is stupid, he is willing to work hard, so it is not excessive to give him an excellent score. As for Dahe, just give him two candies and send him off. So what if he is handsome? He doesn't get any special treatment here with Xiao Yun~!
"Come on, Qiuqiu, this is your portion."
Nearly 600 people were divided into 30 study groups, learning arithmetic and literacy under the guidance of the elders in the groups. Qiu Zheng was leading a group of newcomers in a room with a heated kang, reciting words and sentences with great effort. Xiao Yun came in carrying a basket and grabbed a palm-sized piece of cut candy and stuffed it into his hand.
"Hey, is this new candy?" Qiu turned the cut candy over and over with curiosity. The palm of the snow wolf was as big as his hand, and this was the first time that such a large piece of candy was distributed in the tribe.
"Yes, it's called Cut Candy, and the taste has been verified by Niu Jiao, it's excellent." Xiao Yun looked around Qiu's study group with a smile, found the target, walked over and handed over the candy, "You are Xiaohua, right, you also have this Excellence Award."
"Oh, thank you." Xiaohua was flattered and took the candy happily.
Xiao Yun found two more people to give candies to, namely the gray dwarf Sally and a cheetah. After giving candies to four people, he took out the list and took a look... and walked out under the eager gazes of others.
"Wait, Ayun? Have you sent all the messages?" Qiu was shocked.
"Yes, it's the Excellence Award, it's only for those who perform well." Xiao Yun smiled very kindly, "Others, don't worry, the Good Performance Award will be given out by the cafeteria staff after dinner, and it's also candy."
The four people who received the candies felt happy immediately... but the majority of people didn't receive any, so they were embarrassed to be too happy and quickly put the candies away and continued studying.
Only sixty-two people out of more than six hundred people received the Excellence Award, and this was because Xiao Yun relaxed the excellence standard: those who work diligently and conscientiously in normal times, have a good attitude towards learning and make significant progress after the snow are all eligible. The emphasis is on the correct attitude towards learning, and those who listen to stories attentively, and those who cough loudly or are distracted when learning arithmetic and reading are absolutely not acceptable.
The study group Rosemary was in struggled to learn how to read for an entire afternoon. When it was time for lunch, Qingyan, the group leader, just asked everyone to sweep the snow off the roads and roofs before dinner, and Rosemary immediately ran out of the house - he really loved doing the work rather than painfully repeating last year's study hell!
Then... after sweeping the snow, when they went to the cafeteria to get the food distributed according to the groups, Dahe, who was distributing the food, handed them a plate with twenty finger-sized white candies with an expressionless face, and waved his hand to send them away.
"Wait, where's the sugar? Where's such a big piece of sugar?! I saw Qingyan had some!" Rosemary anxiously made a square gesture with her hands.
"Are you asking me?" Dahe glanced at him.
"What else?" Rosemary was stubborn.
"I don't have any! And you're asking me for it!" Da He immediately went berserk, took out a small piece of white candy from his waist bag, pinched it with his fingers and shoved it into Rosemary's face, "Look, this is all I got! This!"
Niu Jiao stretched out his arms to lock Da He's neck and dragged him back. Qing Yan also came up with a shameful look on his face to pull Rosemary: "Alright, alright, don't embarrass yourself. People from other groups are watching us..."
The lunch of the day was sweet potato noodles. Each study group received a large bucket of vermicelli, a ceramic bowl as big as a head, half a ceramic pot of chili oil, chopped pork, and two ceramic pots of vegetable soup.
The hot sweet potato noodles were scooped with a spoonful of chili oil and two spoonfuls of vegetable soup. It was so pleasant to slurp it. Rosemary, who was indignant, forgot everything else for a moment and was addicted to slurping the noodles.
In the afternoon, the snow was a little lighter, and the groups that had been studying in the house all morning were able to go out. Some did snow removal, and some did daily affairs. Rosemary cleaned the pig pen and changed the feed in the sheep trough. She wiped the sweat off her face, and suddenly remembered something. She rushed to Qingyan and stretched out her hands tremblingly: "Qingyan, such a big piece of candy, so big..."
Qingyan: “…” He didn’t want to strangle the snow leopard to death at this moment, he just wanted to strangle the leopard Yu Gu who gave Rosemary to him to take care of.
A few days passed in the united, tense, serious and lively learning atmosphere. The first snow, which was amazing in terms of both the amount of snowfall and the duration, finally stopped. The snow layer outside the sheep pen was so high that it could block the wind for the sheep... If there were not enough people to clean it up from time to time, this year's first snow might have buried all the sheep.
Leopard Xia returned to the position of team leader after the labor force in the tribe increased. After studying for a morning, he led the people in the work team to climb up and down to clear the snow on the roof of the glass shed to allow the crops in the greenhouse to receive sunlight. This job can only be done by the cat tribe, as they are light-footed and agile, and can better avoid damage to the roof when removing snow. If the glass on the roof is frozen and cracked, they can also replace it in time.
After a year of training in the Snow Wolf Tribe, Xia's temperament has changed a lot. At least he no longer reveals his scheming out loud like before. When leading a team to work, he knows to prioritize the matters he is responsible for over his personal emotions and positions. This does not mean that the selfish part of Xia's character has been worn away. A person's character is not so easy to change. Instead, he knows very clearly that if he wants to be respected in the tribe, he must have the ability and attitude to take the lead.
Compared with ability and attitude, "identity" is nothing - there are already seven "clan leaders" in the tribe, and warriors are so plentiful and cheap. Xia has neither the conditions nor the psychological advantage to continue clinging to his past status.
It is true that he is the strongest among the cat clan, but there are too many snow wolves who are stronger than him... It is really impossible to establish this psychological advantage.
As the saying goes, there is no construction without destruction. After his original ideas were shattered, Xia adapted to the life in the tribe. After receiving education, he realized that ambition would be a joke if it was not matched by ability, so he learned to hide his ambition.
After cleaning up more than ten vegetable greenhouses arranged in two large rows, Xia's team also has to look after the growth of crops in the greenhouses... The vegetable fields are originally under the management of the second-level labor force, and Xia is also an expert at watering, fertilizing, pest control and weeding.
The entire afternoon was spent in the greenhouse area. When it was getting dark, Xia's team returned to the living area tiredly. Everyone went back to their rooms to get hot water to wash their hands and feet, changed their shoes that were frozen like ice, and sat on the kang to catch their breath. The temperature in the greenhouse was about 20 degrees Celsius, which was not too cold, but the walk from the greenhouse back to the living area was enough to freeze people's faces. The temperature at night on the grassland is lower than during the day, and pouring water to turn into ice is no joke.
"We have noodles tonight too!"
The person who went to get food came in with hot breath and happily placed the big bucket of sweet potato flour next to the big stove: "Come and get a bowl. Add as much as you want."
"Today's snack is still candy? No big candy like last time?"
"Excellence awards are not given out every day, and you're not good enough to begin with!"
"Xia has a share! Yes, Xia, Ayun gave you the big candy last time."
Xia turned his head and smiled, but said nothing… Of course, he felt a little smug in his heart, after all, among the more than 20 cats in the same room, only he and another golden cat received that special large piece of cut candy.
The cats' appetite was only one-third to one-quarter of that of the snow wolves. A room full of cats of all sizes could be fed with just one bucket of powder. After drinking the hot and fragrant sugar at the bottom of the bowl, the cats would lazily lie on the kang and rub their bellies.
"Xia, you know the most words, read a story to us." A newly-adult snow leopard rolled lazily on the kang, came close to Xia, and licked Xia's face with its tongue in a flattering manner.
"Okay, what do you want to read?" Xia imitated Ayun's usual smiling face and said kindly.
"I want to hear a ghost story. Where is the bark paper for ghost stories kept?"
"Oh, no, I want to listen to the Little Mermaid~"
"It's a ghost story, a ghost story!"
"It's all right. Just read one first and then the other." Xia smiled and took a stack of bark paper from the roommate, turned to a page of ghost stories, and began to read, "In the west of the human kingdom, a traveler passed by a small town..."
Xia read two stories, and the cats in the same room had almost digested them. They all got up and went to the stove to get salt water to rinse their mouths, and then went to sleep with blankets. Xia gave the head of the kang to the cubs and slept at the end of the kang. Just as he dragged the blankets over, someone knocked on the door.
"Xia, you didn't sleep?" Hongye moved the door open, lifted the animal skin curtain and walked in, waving at Xia, "Put on your clothes and come to the activity room."
"Hongye, is there something wrong?" Xia quickly lifted the blanket and sat up.
"You'll know when you come." Hongye winked at him.
Xia put on the sweater and trousers he had just taken off, wrapped himself in animal skins, put on his shoes, got off the kang, and followed Hongye all the way to the activity room. As soon as he entered the room, he found that there were already quite a few people sitting in the room.
"Working meeting?" Xia's heart moved, and he followed Hongye in and sat down while looking around calmly. However, he found that it was not a working meeting, because not all the seven clan leaders including him were there, and only a small half of the warriors from each clan were there.
"Could it be that I didn't know that the tribe had actually organized many such meetings that were not open to the public?" Xia didn't seem to be unusual on the surface, but when he sat cross-legged, his hands on his knees clenched unconsciously... The fact that he chose to hide himself did not mean that he could accept being excluded from the decision-making level of the tribe. Being able to control himself and not show anger was a result of the education he had received in the past year.
"Hongye, why did you call us here so late?"
Xia was secretly annoyed when he heard Qiu's question. He was stunned. He knew that the caracals had a special "status" in the tribe. The most obvious thing was that Qiu was the only leader of a tribe other than the Snow Wolf Clan in the "tribal common enterprise". Even Qiu asked this question. Could it be that he had misunderstood?
"Everyone is here."
Xia was still in doubt, and Ayun smiled and lifted the heavy door curtain, walked in, took off his shoes on the rattan mat at the door, and sat down on the carpet.
"I asked Hongye and Maomao to call everyone here. The main purpose of calling everyone here is to give everyone a night class." Xiao Yun placed a stack of bark paper with words written on it in front of him, and looked at everyone with a friendly look, explaining patiently, "The daytime learning is a literacy course for everyone, and the night class is a further upgrade of education. For now, it is only for those who can keep up with the learning progress, and it will be expanded in the future when conditions permit."
"This level of education is divided into three parts: social economy, ideology and politics, and elementary arithmetic. There is a class for each every night. Each class is divided into three sections, and one class teaches a major category..."
"Ayun, don't we all know how to count?" Qiu had already discovered that those who were summoned were all good students from each group, so he asked curiously.
"Hehe...that's just basic math at the literacy level. As for being able to do arithmetic problems, I wouldn't dare say I can do all of them. The elementary arithmetic we are going to learn next is the level that Balke learned in the first half of the year..." Xiao Yun explained with a smile.
Lan Guo, Hong Ye, Cao Gen and others who knew the extent of Balke's training changed their expressions slightly.
"In the first class, we will learn social economy. This is the simplest and easiest to understand in primary education, and it also gives everyone some time to adapt to the primary course. For teaching cases, we will take the business between our tribe and the forest elves and the Saint Bridge Merchants Group as an example. Why is a certain product sold at a certain price? What does the circulation of a certain product mean to both parties of the transaction and what benefits does it have? Starting today, we will learn about it little by little."
"The first product we are going to learn about is the canned fruit we make."
"To do business, we must first calculate the cost. What is the cost of canned fruit? It is the fruit and the glass can. The fruit comes from two sources. We exchange it with the forest elves, and we collect it ourselves on the grassland and the edge of the forest. The source of canned fruit is quartz stones dug by the goblins. The raw materials and coal consumed in the firing process are self-produced. The time taken for the glass bottle from the kiln firing to the glass liquid mold molding is..."
"All in all, the workload of firing, shaping is equivalent to the workload of collecting, washing, adding sugar and soaking the fruits, and the labor cost is..."
"The first batch of canned fruit produced will be exchanged with the forest elves. Canned fruit with a total weight of three kilograms and no less than 50% of the contents will be exchanged for ten kilograms of fresh fruit. We will not be responsible for transportation. The gross profit of this transaction is..."
"The second batch of canned fruit was traded with the merchant group at a price of... gross profit of... net profit of... Overall, the profit from canned fruit was..."
The people in this room can be said to be the best of the grassland people - people like Dahe who have intelligence but lack perseverance can't get in - none of them have a flawed IQ; although Ayun said that the first class "Social Economy" is the easiest, this group of people did not take it lightly and listened very carefully. After all, Ayun has set traps for everyone more than once or twice...
But even with such mental preparation, within a few minutes of Ayun starting to lecture, everyone still showed sad and angry expressions - you call this the simplest and easiest to understand? !
