Chapter 41: Excavator Driving Techniques

To ensure those boiled vegetables would not spoil, Mali traveled day and night, taking only a day and a half to drive back to the city.

The moment he saw the highway, his entire body relaxed.

Luoyang had hardly changed since he left; vehicles were parked motionless all along the roads, and while the doors of shopping malls and office buildings stood wide open, not a single person was in sight.

Mali first went to Red Star Macalline to get two freezers, hauled them to the auto repair shop, connected the power, and dumped all those boiled vegetables inside.

Afterward, he went to the supermarket next door to pick up a few barrels of mineral water, turned right out the door, and arrived at the curb, where a bathtub and a snack stall were set up.

This was his temporary bathhouse.

Actually, Mali used to bathe at home earlier on, but after the electricity was lost, the water pumps at the water plant could not work, and the city's water supply was cut off.

His domestic water relied entirely on bottled water from the supermarket, but carrying it up required climbing stairs, so later he simply resolved the matter right by the curb; in any case, there were no other people in the city.

The bathtub was also something he had hauled back from the furniture mall, while the original owners of the snack stall were a young couple from the Northeast who used to sell sweet and sour pork nearby.

Their tricycle not only had a pot and a gas stove but also carried a large tank of liquefied gas.

Mali boiled the mineral water on the stove, poured it into the bathtub, added cold water to adjust it to a suitable temperature, then took off his clothes and jumped in.

He had such a habit when he worked before; if he worked overtime until very late or was away on a business trip, he would take a hot bath once he returned to where he was staying.

In this way, the fatigue on his body would be steamed away by the hot water vapor, and every pore on his body would relax.

Mali even prepared a bottle of iced cola, drinking it while soaking to double the happiness.

After finishing his bath, he changed into clean clothes and went straight to bed to sleep.

This sleep lasted a full twelve hours, and after waking up, he was not in a hurry to work, but instead played "Baldur's Gate 3" for another two days.

Praise Larian; they did not force the game to require an internet connection to play.

Once his spirit and body had been rested, Mali only rode his bicycle to the outside of the city library on the morning of the third day.

He grew up in an auto repair shop and had a certain foundation in circuits, mechanics, and vehicle engineering, so his hands-on ability was stronger than the average person's, but civil engineering was still a very unfamiliar field to him.

He found a few reference books related to road engineering on the shelves, sat at the long table in the library, turned on a camping lamp, and began to read, incidentally finishing his breakfast as well.

This certainly would not have been allowed in the past, but nowadays, there was no one left to stop him.

Mali read until noon and discovered that he had still thought too simply about the matter of road construction.

Especially considering he was currently alone, the time it would take to build a reliable road leading out of the Red Mist would likely have to be measured in decades.

Taking the most common asphalt road as an example, the design phase alone could stump him; it required first researching and selecting the route, determining the alignment by combining geology and hydrology; performing horizontal and vertical design; then structural design (specific to turning routes and climbing heights); and finally, performing optimization and adjustments.

And once entering formal construction, the workload would be even greater.

Modern road surfaces have multi-layered structures that require the use of different materials, and collecting and transporting these materials to the construction site would take a massive amount of time.

Furthermore, one must be able to skillfully operate various types of mechanical equipment, which also requires a large amount of learning and trial-and-error costs.

But this did not mean the road construction plan could not proceed.

In fact, after finishing these professional books, Mali thought about his own needs again and discovered that he did not actually need a very "reliable" road.

Thanks to the special conditions within the Red Mist, there were no plants, no rain, and not even Wind existed here.

This meant he did not need to consider drainage, wind erosion, and other such issues, and the road he built was only for his own passage; there were no other traffic participants, so there were no such high requirements for strength and stability.

Additionally, the riverbed of Black Stone Canyon was actually a natural gravel layer; the tightly packed small stones possessed excellent load-bearing capacity and could be used as a high-quality natural roadbed.

What he actually needed to do was find a way to move those large boulders blocking the way, and in sections where the pebble layer was loose, he could dig it out and backfill it with sand and gravel to compact it.

When he had time later, he could pave a layer of cement or asphalt on top as a surface layer, but if he didn't have time, leaving it as is would also be fine.

In this way, the workload was much smaller, and there was not that much mechanical equipment that needed to be used.

Mali made a rough calculation; in the early stages, he only needed to learn how to drive an excavator, a dump truck, a bulldozer, and a road roller, which greatly reduced the workload.

Moreover, these things were readily available in the city; Mali remembered that on the way to the hospital before, he had passed by a construction hoarding where an excavator was working away vigorously inside.

After eating lunch, he went there and drove it out.

There were not many buttons and levers on the excavator, and even without a manual, trying them a few more times would reveal their functions.

Mali only spent less than a quarter of an hour mastering the basic operations, but achieving proficiency was difficult.

In fact, he spent nearly half an hour just figuring out how to cross a ditch; fortunately, the library also had books specifically introducing excavator operation, and for the next week, Mali spent most of his time with the excavator.

Besides this excavator equipped with a bucket, Mali later found another excavator in a construction site in the city that possessed a hydraulic breaker, and he drove both excavators into the canyon.

When encountering large rocks that could not be dug, he would first use the hydraulic breaker to smash them, then use the bucket to move the rubble to the side of the road.

After a week, his excavator driving skills improved by leaps and bounds; if this were a game, a skill upgrade notification should have already popped up above his head.

By comparison, the dump truck was much easier to drive.

There were quite a few sand quarries along the Luo He, and Mali found one relatively close by to haul sand from there to the sections needing construction.

He would unload the sand, use the bulldozer to level it, and finally use the road roller to compact it.

The operation procedures for these vehicles were relatively simple and easier to pick up; after trying them a few times, he could basically perform normal operations.

His daily paving progress accelerated from only a few dozen meters at the beginning to several hundred meters; of course, this mainly depended on the difficulty of the project, and it was very normal to get stuck for two or three days when encountering tricky sections.

In fact, as long as it was a section the dump truck could pass through, Mali tended to leave it alone for now and deal with it when he had time later.

Besides road construction, he did not fall behind in his studies; the courses he had recorded on his phone came in handy, and he could listen while working when operating the excavator, and he would flip through those literacy picture books when he was resting.

In short, Mali spent the next two months very fruitfully, and as the road was built further and further, to save time, he simply drove a recreational vehicle over and ate and lived in it, so he did not have to waste time on commuting.