Outside the city is a large wasteland, which looks particularly bleak in the depths of winter. There is an official road that stretches to the east, and from here you go all the way to the direction of Dongli. Instead of taking the official road, they chose a small road, which is closer to the pier, but it is not easy to walk, especially if there are other means of transportation such as horses or carriages.

The four of them ran like a fro, and only then slowed down a little when the noise in the city grew quieter. Because there were too many people running out of the city, and everyone was walking in all directions, there were too many targets, and the officers and soldiers did not know who to chase. Moreover, the officers and soldiers who arrived later did not know what they had done, and it was impossible for them to recognize them as the criminals wanted by the whole city last night. Therefore, there were not many soldiers chasing after them, and they were quickly thrown off by them.

Thanks to the man who smuggled the smuggled salt, if it weren't for him, they would probably be in the gloomy dungeon of Beiyi right now. It's just that what she can't figure out is that smuggling and selling illicit salt was a big crime in ancient times, and they still dared to do this, were they really carried away by money?

In order to hide people's eyes, hiding salt in the wine is really going to great lengths!

There were thrills along the way, and after running sleeplessly, the four finally arrived at the pier near sunset.

In front of them was a very wide river, and there was a thin layer of mist on the surface of the river, and from time to time there were waves like broken jade. The big river in winter does not have the gentle lingering of the slow flow and delicate flow that it usually has, but it is not as stiff and plain as imagined, and it has a different scenery.

Green Hui was busy running along the way, and had no time to enjoy the scenery along the way, but now I suddenly stopped to take a look, and realized that the scenery here is really good. The river is surrounded by faint mountains, which are hidden under the cover of mist, making people feel like they are in a fairyland. Large and small boats are docked on the riverbank, adding a lot of life to the river. In winter, because there are few thunderstorms, the sky is almost all blue, and the water and sky are one color, which makes people feel that they are a lot broader.

Suddenly I remembered a poem, where the rain passes through the sky and the clouds break, such colors will be the future! With such a scenery, who is willing to give up it to contaminate the turbid world.

It turns out that nature is the most sensational, and when it is revealed, it can make people feel a lot of emotion.

This river is called Lihe, it is the dividing line between Beiyi and Dongli, and it is also the north-south dividing line of Chongye Dynasty, which originates from the northwest river valley of the Suyou Mountains at the border of Beiyi City and Yuliang, flows through Yuliang, Beiyi, Dongli three places, and finally flows into the Manhai on the northeast side of Dongli, which is one of the few rivers in Chongye that flows into the sea alone.

To put it simply, crossing this river will lead to Dongli on the other side.

Suddenly a little excited, Beiyi gave her too much depression in this place, and now she can finally leave.

When there is still some money left to take off the belt, it should be enough for them to cross the river. After Chao Yan, who was familiar with the way, asked the boatmen about the price, the four of them picked a boat that looked relatively ordinary.

After boarding the ship, several people can finally take off their precautions for the past few days and take a good rest, what has happened these days is almost like a dream, plausible.

By this time night had begun to fall, and most of the ships had ceased to operate and were resting on the shore. The wide river suddenly seemed a little deserted. The cold wind hits, the hazy moonlight pours on the river, the scenery is extremely beautiful, but it is intertwined with a feeling of confusion and cold loneliness. Lu Hui remembered Du Mu's poem "Bo Qinhuai", the smoke cage cold water and moon cage sand, how accurately and appropriately this sentence describes what she sees now. She even seemed to feel the song and dance of the merchant girls on the riverside.

Different backgrounds, the same bleak and downland.

The next day, as soon as it was dawn, they were told that they had arrived. As the ship approached, the flat and vast tidal flats came into view, and the tidal flats were large and small boxy salt pans. In some salt pans, the high pile of sea salt can still be faintly seen, white as frost and snow. There are also some simple sheds around the salt pans, as well as various stoves made of bricks and mud.

Clusters of salted artemisia grass swayed in the cold wind, faded their tender green, put on fiery red coats, and continued to live on the reckless earth, so beautiful that people's hearts trembled.

"Wow, is that making salt?" Green Hui couldn't help but cheer.

"That's alkali, not salt, alkali in winter, salt in summer!" The boatman kindly corrected the mistake of the Green Club.

The other three couldn't help laughing, and Lu Hui also smiled embarrassedly, feeling that he suddenly looked like a rural baby who had just entered the big city. I learned this principle when I was in school before, and it is caused by the difference in solubility with temperature.

The wisdom of ancient people has never been worse than that of modern people, and they understand many principles, but they have not summarized them systematically and orderly. In Dongli, this is already a topic that has been studied many years ago, and it can be regarded as the study of buoyancy, and this knowledge has long been popularized among the people. It's just that such a spectacular alkali making scene really amazed her, and she didn't react for a while.

This place is close to the mouth of the river, and the sunshine is abundant, it is very suitable for boiling salt from the sea, and it is one of the largest salt farms in the Chongye Dynasty, and the salt tax it produces even accounts for a large part of the financial revenue of the entire Chongye Dynasty. At this time, salt was monopolized by the government as in ancient China, and only salt merchants authorized by the government could sell salt, and no one else convicted, otherwise they would be convicted of selling illicit salt.

Under the explanation of the boatman, Green Hui has a better understanding of this place. For Dongli, she is becoming more and more curious, the west is radical, Yu Liang is tolerant, and Beiyi is charming, so what kind of place will Dongli be? She seems to have forgotten that she was only here to transition to Dongli, and Nanzhu was her destination.

The boat slowly approached, and Green Hui and the others boarded the dock. Although it was still early, the hard-working people had already started a busy day's work, the river was faintly sailing, and on the shore were the salt farmers who were fishing for alkali (salt making and alkali fishing were the work of salt farmers), a peaceful scene. There are still two or three days before the Spring Festival, and I didn't expect that people at this time were still working hard, and this was not a society with more work and more rewards.

Out of curiosity, they still walked to the salt pans not far away. The cold wind blew, and suddenly there was a feeling that the wind was astringent.

The process of salt production and alkali production is partly the same, for example, the beginning of the process is seawater brine production (specifically to introduce seawater into the salt field to water sand, dry it and then pour it, so that the cycle, and then gather the sand to the filter pool, pour salt with seawater, so as to filter out the salt on the sand), and then use the stove to cook salt, the water evaporates, and the coarse salt crystals precipitate, and the alkali production only needs to wait for the temperature to drop and poison a certain degree, and the brine in the pool will naturally precipitate soda ash crystals. As if visiting, Luhui and others watched the operation of each process of the salt households, and they could generally understand it, but there was one link that they didn't understand.

Every time the brine is made, there will always be other relevant people (non-salt households) who use a bamboo tube to hold a part of the brine, and then put lotus seeds into the brine, and after observing for a while, they will record it in the notebook they carry.

If you are not mistaken, you should be estimating the concentration of the brine. Green Hui has heard of the method of measuring the concentration of the ancients before, which can be measured with duck eggs, the eggs float to be thick, and the eggs sink to be light. The method is simple, but it gives you a rough idea of the concentration of the liquid to be tested.

So is it the same with lotus seeds used to measure halogen here? After repeated viewing and comparison, it turns out that they are more accurate to judge the concentration of brine according to the shape of the lotus seeds in the brine, if the lotus seeds are lying horizontally in the brine, then the brine concentration is very high, if the lotus seeds are vertical, then the brine is second concentrated, if the lotus seeds sink but do not float, then the brine is thin and poor. This method has become the latest method for salt testing in Dongli, and it has been simplified and improved compared with the previous test with multiple lotus seeds. It's all the result of step-by-step research. I heard that Dongli is still planning to manufacture an instrument that can accurately calculate the brine concentration in recent years, which will be a new milestone in Monopai!

Green Hui thought of modern density meters, but I didn't expect that the pace of Dongli, which had been backward for hundreds of years in civilization, would be so fast, and if it was really manufactured, it would be an infinite achievement. Dongli is really a god-like country.

The more Green Hui thought about it, the more radiant he became, while the salt farmers on the side were worried. After the person who tested the halogen left, Luhui gossiped and asked the salt farmers about the origin of these people.

It turned out that these were "overseers" sent by the government to prevent cheating by salt merchants or salt farmers. Here, the sale of salt is controlled by the state, and the salt tax collected by the state from the sale of salt accounts for a large part of the fiscal revenue. The government authorized salt merchants to monopolize the sale of salt. Originally, salt merchants could get rich by selling official salt, but who would be afraid of having more money? Salt merchants tried all kinds of methods to cheat, evade taxes, and use shoddy goods, and false reporting of salt production has also become an important form of cheating, and some even collude with local officials to make huge profits. Therefore, the government will send special personnel to "supervise" every link of salt production, especially with this latest halogen testing method, salt merchants are even more at a loss, if the high concentration of salt brine in the end produces very little salt, this is unreasonable.

If the salt merchants can't hide it, they can only be bullied. Salt merchants had to spend money to buy a salt trading permit from the government, and then spend money to buy salt from the salt farmers before they could sell it at the places designated by the government. At this time, the salt merchants came up with the idea of lowering the price of salt from salt farmers in unlimited quantities on the one hand, and raising the price of selling it to the common people on the other hand, and the difference in the price was enough to make them rich. Therefore, going around and around, the ultimate victims are still salt farmers and ordinary people.

Salt farmers could not stand the fact that they were selling their labor so cheaply, and some refused to make salt again, while others tried to sell illicit salt at the risk of it. The dog jumps over the wall in a hurry is nothing more than this truth. That's why when they went out of the city that day, they encountered the scene of someone selling illicit salt. Of course, it cannot be ruled out that some black-hearted businessmen want to make huge profits by selling illicit salt.

After listening to these words, LVHUI really felt a lot of emotion. It has once again proved that the development of science and technology is a double-edged sword, and if it is used well, it will benefit the people, and if it is not used well, it will harm the world. Here, it should be a commendable approach, but because of a series of intricate interests, it did not really realize its meaning in the end.

Although they still wanted to know more, after all, they had to do something, and Luhui and the others finally reluctantly left the salt farm. (To be continued.) )