Chapter 744: The Meaning of Their Existence

Here, this kind of grass that spreads everywhere, in cluster after cluster, is found all over; it is low-growing, with needle-shaped leaves, bearing strange fruits. Some have already split open, but the entire plant still bears small white flowers. Smelled up close, it even has a bit of a stench. No animals would like to eat it, and perhaps that is the very reason why this kind of grass can grow so vigorously here.

However, no one cares about it, and they do not know what this thing is. Perhaps Changle has already taken a census of it, or perhaps he has never even seen it. Everyone will not think about what such an inconspicuous plant could bring to Huaxia, what changes it could produce, let alone these women who have nothing to do with Huaxia.

They only push away this stinking plant with disgust, avoiding the brown-red, foul-smelling bugs with dense, numerous legs hiding underneath. The stench of these bugs is even more repulsive than the grass they hide in, so they do not even have the desire to step on it; in fact, because its appearance is too disgusting and creepy, it even makes people want to run away and stay far away immediately.

Baifeng would never know that the land here, besides the wild vegetables he loves so much, has even more of a kind of grass that could make something he likes even more, something he could eat every day without getting tired of, and could even create the representative food of his hometown.

What he is thinking about right now is just whether or not he can have a small dish of vinegar to dip his ground-soft steamed buns in when he eats them?

He has already stopped thinking about chili peppers, but he could think about garlic. If he could have someone follow the path Zhang Qian once traveled in the future, they might be able to bring back more vegetables and such that he is familiar with. There are fruits he likes, and countless types of vegetables, and garlic is among them.

Soy sauce is still under research, but unfortunately, there hasn't been much progress so far. Fortunately, Huaxia has plenty of soybeans, so they can be left to tinker with them. Even if every vat turns foul and can only be poured into the fields as fertilizer, he still believes that as long as one is willing to spend the time, it will always be possible to research and create soy sauce.

To want to rely on the weather and accidentally create some kind of food, one needs both human effort and luck; if one is missing, it won't work. This luck might even have to wait until thousands of years later, and by that time, his grandson's grandson would not be able to taste the soy sauce recorded in his books.

However, the progress on vinegar has been quite significant. At the beginning, making vinegar was because of a few vats of failed Wine. Baifeng did know that the difference between brewing wine and vinegar is not very large, but unfortunately, he could not determine which kind of starter culture vinegar uses, so he kept putting this matter aside.

But one day, after being attracted by an extremely strong sour smell, he discovered that Huaxia might have accidentally created vinegar. The person brewing the wine was very afraid of being punished by Baifeng because of their mistake, but Baifeng took one look at the familiar color and that familiar smell, and felt that this was probably vinegar.

After he had a Slave carefully try it and discovered that it was not poisonous and would not kill anyone, then it was probably vinegar. He also tasted a little bit himself; it was indeed vinegar, just exceptionally terrible to eat.

It was even worse than the blended vinegar he had used in a certain province in later generations. He also could not understand why such terrible blended vinegar could be brazenly placed on the dining tables of all the noodle shops. Even if it wasn't blended, but brewed, it was just as terrible.

He had never tasted authentic vinegar from Jin Land, but he had eaten the kind made in factories and sold; the taste was not bad. However, Baifeng still preferred the wheat bran vinegar from his own hometown, which wouldn't even burn his stomach if he drank it straight.

Huaxia has plenty of wheat bran, so he let those few Workers who made the mistake use their own set of procedures to brew this sour stuff with wheat bran. Now, it cannot be said that Huaxia has no vinegar, it is just that it is far from meeting Baifeng's requirements for consumption. Perhaps it is still a problem with the craft, so he can only let the Workers improve it.

Looking at Xiao Town again, the female Laborers are gathering, or helping the men dig earth.

The male Laborers are divided into several groups by the vehicles. One group, under the protection of Soldiers, goes into the forest to select timber for felling. Building a town of such scale requires a very high quantity of timber. The timber also needs to be dried before it can be used, so they need to go and fell it now, then remove the branches, strip the bark, and throw it in the wilderness to air-dry.

Wood that is not suitable for building houses can also be cut down and used to build city walls. The location of Xiao Town is too remote; wanting to build city walls with Cement is an impossible task. First of all, just transporting Cement to them is an extremely costly project.

Huaxia's Cement is mostly packed in wooden barrels now. There isn't enough Hemp Cloth to sew into bags to hold Cement; it's not even enough for holding grain. Only in unavoidable situations will they use hemp sacks to hold Cement.

The planting area of hemp in Huaxia is extremely large. Places that cannot grow grain are all planted with hemp. One doesn't need to worry about whether it is a drought or a flood, or how many seeds it bears; as long as it can grow tall enough, that is all that matters. The Agricultural Department's requirement for the selection and breeding of hemp is also only one: the taller the better, the thicker the better. Hemp is even divided into male and female plants, and no one considers the yield of hemp seeds.

Perhaps only Baifeng and a few others in Huaxia would take hemp seeds as a snack to crack open, because there is no such thing as sunflower seeds. They plant industrial hemp for Weaving, which cannot be used to refine drugs; it is a completely different kind from the Sanmiao Tribe's hemp, it just looks a bit similar.

Cracking hemp seeds also does not lead to addiction, but that thing is too small, about the size of rice, round and with a shell. Not to mention that it requires long-term practice to crack them, the meager energy in the hemp seed kernel is not even as much as what is consumed while cracking them, so most people will not do this thankless, boring task.

Of course, hemp seed kernels are not completely useless; they are even a medicinal material used in large quantities in Huaxia because they are a laxative. Because of the dietary structure of the people in Huaxia, constipation is a very common thing. It's just that at first, no one cared about this matter; if you couldn't pass stool, you just held it for a few more days, and if it really didn't work, you used your hands to dig it out, or used a branch to dig it out. Later, they realized that this was actually a type of illness.

Similarly, hemp seed kernels are also a veterinary medicine, and their function is also to treat constipation. If cattle, sheep, or horses are constipated, feeding them some hemp seed oil guarantees they will pass stool smoothly and comfortably.

In Nature, there is nothing that exists without any meaning; you can always discover some of its strange uses. This concept is reflected even more clearly in the Sanmiao Tribe.

The only difference is that Huaxia and the Xuanyuan Tribe, which is the Traditional Chinese Medicine system, believe that medicinal materials need to be processed and prepared first, but the Miao doctors believe that medicinal materials must be used fresh. The number and variety of herbs they use are not small at all, so much so that after they failed in the Battle of Zhuolu and fled to the southwest in later generations, a saying was passed down in the southwest: "Yelang has no idle grass; Qian Land has many spiritual medicines."