Chapter Twenty-Three: Sinking the Shaft

"Enough. The girl said that the people lowered their buckets and built another shelf with bamboo next to the so-called salt well, which is still a pit filled with water. Some of the Yi people who had gone out to plunder recognized: "Isn't this a super large spinning wheel", and some of the Yi people who had never been out of the mountains and forests thought: "This is the rotor used by the priest to beat the drum, so big, it must be to summon a powerful god that has never been seen before to help dig the well" , and like the ruler housekeeper, who was originally a foreigner from the mountain, who had lived in Yishan for many years and was accustomed to the customs of the Yi people and was considered by other Yi people to be Yi people, at first he was not without contempt and was ready to speak: "Have you not even seen a waterwheel, this is a ......" Then, vaguely as if remembering the village where he lived in his childhood, the waterwheel outside the village, and his parents who had long forgotten their faces, so they were silent.

The first batch of bamboos transported to the Yanjing construction site is the tiniest batch, they are almost the preferred target of any Yiren who want to be lazy and save effort, once they are transported, they are quickly processed into bamboo strips and bamboo pots, Hualin to those who pick up small bamboo to cut down so the fastest to complete the task of the Yiren to give the reward is to let them bear the follow-up handling work and all kinds of labor on the construction site, so that the rest of the people in the eyes, dare not do this kind of slippery thing. In the face of such a reasonable labor remuneration, the second batch of cut bamboo is obviously a lot thicker, can be used to build a variety of shelves needed on the construction site, and when the third batch is reached, it is selected by Hua Lin himself, the degree of pickiness he selected, so that the Yi people are more than tongue sticking out, slightly bent do not, length and thickness, all have to be of general size, after cutting down more than a dozen, placed on the construction site, it is not like cutting from a whole mountain, but it is born of a mother.

The people soon knew the usefulness of these bamboos, and they were hung on the spinning wheel-like thing, and with the rotation of the "spinning wheel" sank into the newly dug salt well, and when they sank to a certain depth, with the girl's command, the people turned the cart and lifted the bamboo from the salt well.

When the bamboo tube was lifted, Pai Gang Tusi happened to stand next to it, seeing that the bamboo tube was turned to the side, someone carefully uncovered the cowhide on the bamboo tube, and a lot of sediment flowed down to the shallow pit dug in advance next to it, and was picked up by other Yi people, it turned out that this car was used to get under the bamboo pipe and clean up the sediment of the well, and the previous irrigation also made the gravel and mud chips dug down can flow into the bamboo tube with the water, and the bamboo tube was raised.

"Just let a child go down and touch the mud and sand, why bother so much effort?" Paigang Toast was about to show his new master his ingenuity in using slaves, when he suddenly thought of something again, and did not dare to move: "When this bamboo tube is brought up, it is full of water and mud and sand, how heavy it is, and what is the support of the cowhide at the bottom to paste on it, so that it will not leak halfway? If the cowhide is mushy and solid, isn't this a solid thing, put it down, and don't turn around, how did you lift the sand from the bottom, could it be that this girl used a spell?"

So when he put the bamboo tube down again, he deliberately stayed by the side for a while, and looked carefully, and there was no one who pasted anything on the bamboo tube, so he watched the cowhide hanging on the bamboo tube and sinking into the well.

After a while, the car turned, and another bamboo tube with cement and sand came up, dumped in a shallow pit, and was picked up by other Yiren.

This time, Paigang Toast looked at it carefully, and when he brought it up, the cowhide was well covered at the bottom of the bamboo tube, until the Yiren of Inoue put the bamboo tube down, uncovered the cowhide, and poured out the mud and sand.

"She must have summoned an invisible oracle to put the mud and sand into the bamboo tube under the well, and covered it with cowhides. Pagang Toast thought with great certainty that his daughter had a treasure from the High Priest who could summon invisible divine envoys to perform many miracles on the battlefield, and that this girl must have a similar treasure, and that it was stronger than his daughter's. Ujida's oracle must shake the bell and use spells to make a simple action, which is like this girl's oracle, who can dig up mud, paste seals, and work hard in the well to do such slave work - it is obviously impossible to send Gang Tusi to change the concept of "work is a slave" since childhood, he will only judge from this that the girl has a more advanced "warrior oracle" in order to abuse this powerful oracle like this - to regard work as abuse, which is also a very standard Yiren thinking.

Hua Lin naturally did not give Pai Gang Tusi a physics class, teaching him what a one-way valve, what is "the upward tension of the muddy water in the well pushes open the skin valve into the bamboo tube" what is "once the bamboo tube is lifted, the downward pressure of the muddy water in the cylinder suppresses the skin valve from leaking", he is busy assigning one task after another to his subordinates, after cleaning up the sediment at the bottom of the well, sinking into the well into the thick bamboo tube close to the wall of the well to isolate the seepage and strengthen the wall of the well, and the drill bit is digging deeper.

If there are wells on all sides, the place where the brine is dug all the year round, it is common for a salt well to open for ten years, but the well opened by Hualin, not only is there no salt well nearby, but there is not even a well, and he is not digging at will, he chooses the place where the salt brine seeps out on the ground, and digs it straight down, so after a few days, the bamboo tube is loaded with turbid brine and poured into the pre-dug deep pit on the other side.

"Now it's time to make salt. "The people of the vicinity of the salt well think so, they have never seen salt making, and it must be worth seeing, if not at all...... Day after day, they have been tired of digging the earth, cutting bamboo, and stepping on seesaws, and if they were to be replaced by a second person, although they did not necessarily rebel, they would have fled into the mountains and forests in the dark night and shouted tightly—how could they have worked so hard since they were born! The conscience of heaven and earth, even their slaves have never worked so hard!

It's not that these slave owners are so kind to their slaves, but that in their minds, farm work is just a few things: turning the soil, sowing seeds, harvesting, hoeing grass every day, etc., which is not in their dictionary at all, and they can't think of forcing slaves to do it. The only way they could think of exploitation was for the slaves to plow as much land as they could in the spring, and the work was heavy, but the spring would come a long time, when the lazy people would already celebrate that they had finally been freed from the hard work of overseers, and had begun to anticipate wine-making, feasting, and plundering their neighbors.

To their surprise, Hua Lin's new order was for them to sink the prepared bamboo pot into the brine and soak!

Of course, they did not dare to object, because their other question was finally answered at this time—they were going to build a new stove and a hut to cover the stove by the salt well!