Chapter 1010

Therefore, Wang An now views the Three-Lash Wine and Tiger Bone Wine as his private treasures, and they have been directly hidden away by Wang An.

Besides these two, the most precious is none other than the Leopard Bone Wine; it is said that the bones of the Northeast leopard are second only to tiger bones.

Furthermore, although leopards are easier to obtain than tigers, this is only relative to tigers; if compared to other animals, the leopard is not often seen. Some mountain people have never even seen a live one in their entire lives.

However, ever since moving into the new house, the Leopard Bone Wine has been kept in the house where Wang Dazhu and the others live, and Wang An hasn't paid any attention to it.

Below the Leopard Bone Wine are the Ginseng Deer Lash Wine and Deer Bone Wine, but these two wines are also in the house where Wang Dazhu and the others live, and are basically managed by Wang Dazhu.

Although Wang An's family is currently raising sika deer, these sika deer are currently considered breeding stock, and it is absolutely impossible to slaughter them in the short term.

Therefore, these two types of medicinal wine seem somewhat precious.

Besides the wines mentioned above, the most precious wine might be the Deer Blood Wine; however, although Deer Blood Wine is precious, in Wang An's home, it is only slightly more precious than the wine just bought back.

After all, drawing blood from the deer in Wang An's family two or three times a year, or even three or four times, is no problem at all.

And this time, Wang An intends to soak all the fake tiger bones in the house—that is, the bear knee caps—as well as those broken ginseng roots, in wine, to save himself the trouble of having to soak them when he needs them later.

After finishing the medicinal wine, Wang An built a small stove in the backyard and embedded a crucible into it.

The reason for doing this is that Wang An wants to melt down the 12 jin of gold dust he obtained when panning for gold.

In addition, he also wants to melt down the 6 jin of scattered gold fragments obtained from everyone picking the pockets of the dead, and then make them into 10 pieces of jewelry.

After all, these 6-plus jin of scattered gold fragments belong to the ten people who went panning for gold together; it's not really appropriate to keep them at Wang An's place all the time.

Although the others who went panning for gold defaulted to these scattered gold pieces belonging to Wang An, and everyone didn't even mention it, Wang An truly didn't want to take advantage of them.

Putting the gold dust into the crucible and using the charcoal accumulated from burning fire for every meal in the past, Wang An pulled the bellows and began to refine the gold.

In fact, whether it's gold dust or those gold nuggets, they cannot be called pure gold; there are many impurities in them. However, whether they are pure or not is just how it is; how could folk gold refining be that pure?

Under the blowing of the bellows, the temperature of the charcoal fire was very high, and soon the gold dust turned into molten gold.

After the molten gold cooled, Wang An obtained a gold lump weighing more than 11 jin.

Immediately after, Wang An also put those scattered small gold pieces into the crucible.

After the same operation, these small gold pieces melted into one large piece.

Using a hammer to beat this piece of gold into a long strip, he then used a knife to divide the gold bar into ten uniform small pieces, each weighing about 6 liang.

Immediately after, Wang An melted all these small gold pieces into round cakes separately, and after hammering them again, these gold pieces became 10 veritable gold cakes.

The 6-liang gold cakes had a diameter of a little over 5 centimeters and a thickness of only about 1 centimeter.

It was only then that the preparatory work was considered completely finished.

But it must be said that even without carving, these gold cakes actually looked quite beautiful. Anyway, holding these gold cakes, Wang An immediately had a feeling of not being able to put them down.

It's just that if they were distributed to the other 9 people like this, it is estimated that they would absolutely not want them.

Finding the various carving knives and small files of various shapes bought at the supply and marketing cooperative earlier, Wang An began the carving work.

Perhaps because most things in this era required manual completion, the supply and marketing cooperative sold things like carving knives, files, and other various tools.

Actually, carving gold is quite simple, because gold is very soft—harder than aluminum, but not as hard as lead.

Even though the gold in Wang An's hands had impurities, its hardness was still quite ordinary, so Wang An's carving speed was also very fast.

Of course, the reason for the fast carving was also because the things Wang An carved were not complicated, and Wang An's family had these things—not only did they have them, they had 4 of them.

That's right, it was eagles; Wang An was carving eagles.

One side of the gold cake was an eagle about to spread its wings and fly, and the other side was an eagle soaring freely in the sky.

The reason for carving eagles instead of dragons, tigers, or other animals is that during these days, besides practicing the Scorpion Crawling Technique and the Eighteen Capture Hands, Wang An had been training the four eagles in his family.

Therefore, the various postures of the eagles had long been deeply imprinted in Wang An's mind. Now, carving eagles on the gold cakes was simply a matter of ease; he didn't even need to draw a draft before normal carving.

Just like that, Wang An immersed himself in the carving.

For the next few days, Wang An didn't leave the room, focusing entirely on the carving.

When Wang An finished carving all 10 gold cakes and left the room, those who had signed up to string the power lines had already begun to bury utility poles in the courtyards of every household.

I have to say, these people worked quite fast.

The reason why the utility poles had to be buried in the courtyards is that at this time in the local area, every household's courtyard was very large; courtyards of two or three mu or three or four mu could only be called small courtyards.

An average family's courtyard was about five or six mu, and some families bordering barren land or woods had courtyards seven or eight mu or even more than ten mu in size.

Of course, this is also because at this time, living in the deep mountains and old forests, no one cared; whoever occupied how much space, it belonged to them.

It is also because of this that Wang An's courtyard was made so large, enclosing an entire small hill into Wang An's courtyard.

The utility poles in this era were made of pine trunks; compared to the later cement poles, such utility poles were much lighter in weight.

Because of the distance, Wang An's old courtyard and new courtyard each had a utility pole erected.

Fortunately, the engineers who came down knew the danger of using electricity, so the utility poles were all erected in the courtyards near the walls.

Wang An followed and watched for a while, feeling that erecting utility poles was not very interesting, so he took a gold cake and strolled towards Wang Li's house.

When Wang An arrived at Wang Li's house, Wang Li and Li Xiuyu were drying mushrooms.

To be honest, being able to see Li Xiuyu at Wang Li's house made Wang An feel quite surprised.

The main thing is that although these two were engaged, before they were married, the woman ran to the man's house—isn't this a bit inappropriate?

(End of chapter)