Chapter 23: You Will Be Safe Here
There is no salt-producing place near the Panther Tribe, rather there is no salt-producing place on this side of Changfeng Mountain. Therefore, with regards to stone salt, they can only take advantage of the gap between the human-faced birds hatching their younglings and take the risk every three years to go over Changfeng Mountain and go to the remote Liger tribe to exchange for salt.
Therefore, Luo Zhen was not worried about telling A-Xue the method of refining stone salt, because even if he told them, the stone salt refined by the Black Panther Tribe would only be enough for them to digest internally.
The method of refining rock salt is very simple. The rock salt is completely melted into salt water and then strained for a period of precipitation. There is no cloth or filter here, and the mud in the rock salt cannot be completely filtered out, only some of it is fairly obvious. He’ll manually pick out the sand and gravel, and then boil the separated brine until it is dry so that the preliminary refined salt can be obtained.
To save firewood, Luo Zhen only refined it once, and it was barely able to remove the bitterness and astringency in the stone salt but it was still much better than the original taste of stone salt.
Yesterday Luo Zhen only refined half of it. Before the current fire was to be extinguished, Luo Zhen planned to refine the other half of the stone salt and let A-Xue see the method of refining stone salt with her own eyes.
“Is the amount of refined stone salt reduced?” A-Xue stared at Luo Zhen’s movements without blinking, until the water slowly turned into white salt grains, and then softly asked her question, fearing the blow of her exhaled breath would blow away those tiny salt particles.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
“Well, yes, after all the impurities in it have been filtered out.”
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Therefore, even though Luo Zhen’s refined stone salt tastes better than the original, A-Xue still felt distressed with the fact that one-fifth of the stone salt was gone, and she couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed with this method of refining stone salt.
Luo Zhen didn’t explain much. He could guess A-Xue’s worries. He could only cool down the precipitated salt particles and collect them into animal skins for stone salt, and then share them with A-Xue and A-Shui. He gave them some food and took the rest back to the tent and shared it with Lu Zhan.
The temperature is still a bit hot now, and the beef has a rotting smell to it after being left for a long time. Although Luo Zhen marinated it in some green pear juice for a while, and then mixed it with cassava so the taste of old meat was not very obvious.
Before A-Xue came, she heard Jiao Zhu report to her father about the food made by Luo Zhen. Even with the psychological preparation, she couldn’t help but show a surprised expression when she ate this special taste for the first time.
The roots and stems of the cassava plant were things A-Xue also found when she was picking wild fruits in the small forest. At that time, she was picking a kind of wild fruit that grew close to the ground. The rhizomes that were exposed through most of the soil and the ones that Luo Zhen just cooked were the same, but at that time she only thought it was just ordinary tree roots. She never thought cutting these tree roots, steaming them, and stir-frying them with beef would be so delicious.
It is soft, waxy, and smells of beef. It is more delicious than the bark of the grassroots dug out under the thick snow when they were without food in winter.
A-Xue didn’t even have time to follow up in the tent to see what the two of them were doing inside. Sitting on both sides of the firepit with A-Shui, grabbing the cassava and beef with her hands without caring about how she looked, she couldn’t wait to stuff her mouth.
After eating breakfast, Luo Zhen was about to start preparing for the work of farming because Lu Zhan planned to leave for a while while they were out collecting seeds, he also said that he would pick some insecticides for Luo Zhen to come back. Once he put down the tableware, Luo Zhen couldn’t wait to open the door and let Lu Zhan out so that he could find the insect-repellent plants that he was in desperate need of.
He is fed up with the mosquitoes here at night. If it hadn’t been for the insect repellent plant growing at the junction of the southern foot plain wherein it would take a day to get to that place at Luo Zhen’s speed then maybe Luo Zhen would have run ahead by himself to go and get those insect repellent plants back.
Of course, this time he did not forget to let Lu Zhan dig two of these plants with the soil and roots intact and bring them back. If he can plant them here successfully, he will no longer have to worry about the mosquitoes at night. The smell of insect-repellent plants here is comparable to the previous mosquito coils, the effect of repelling mosquitoes is also even better.
Wild lettuce grows on the outskirts of the tribe, not far from where they were separated from the warriors who threw guts and bones to feed the hyenas the last time they went to the small forest.
Along the way, Luo Zhen met many women and children who looked at him curiously. Because some women were feeding babies with their upper bodies naked, Luo Zhen was too embarrassed to look back one by one, but just nodded to those people in a hurry. He simply said hello, and then rushed to his destination with the two other people behind him.
“Luo Zhen, do people in your tribe also grow vegetables? Then do you not get hungry in winter?” A-Xue is a girl who talks a lot, and after only getting along for a short period, she asks about anything and everything she can think of about Luo Zhen.
However, her temperament is also straightforward, and she will ask directly if she has any questions, she had never thought that her questions could be troublesome for Luo Zhen. Luo Zhen knows that the other party is the daughter of Da Wu, and he still needs to stay in this tribe. In this period of time, even though he knew that the other party was the daughter of Da Wu, he could only give some false answers to A-Xue.
“Well, there are too many ordinary people in our tribe, and there are not so many warriors who can go out hunting, so we can only try to get more food by ourselves.”
A-Xue glanced at him sympathetically, “Then you must have had a hard time?”
Tribes with too few warriors can develop safely as long as they get enough food. The various beasts in winter and some nearby tribes will set their sights on such a tribe with insufficient strength. A-Xue has heard some old people say that their Panther tribe was driven to this side of Changfeng Mountain in this way, and they had to rely on the acceptance of foreign talents to make the tribe grow to its current size.
“It was okay.” Luo Zhen smiled perfunctorily.
“Don’t worry, our tribe has enough warriors. Even human-faced birds don’t dare to rush into our tribe easily. You will be safe to stay here.” A-Xue comforted him, “And our tribe is still one with a fertility tree, even if you are a man, you can give birth to your offspring.”
Luo Zhen felt a cramp in his abdomen as soon as he heard the son and mother tree. No, he didn’t want to give birth to offspring by himself.
Sometimes these novels motivate me to make my own food, but then I remember that I barely even know how to cook 😔
Thank you for the chapter!