She Only Cares About Cultivation-Chapter 734: 【728】Beast World Farming 38 (1 more)
When she saw the first precious egg laid by the Gugu Chicken at their home, Tangtang laughed from the bottom of her heart. However, their attack power and reflexes were stronger than those of ordinary chickens, so collecting eggs in the future would still be left to the little leopard cub Jimmy, who always wandered near the chicken coop, because the chickens were more frightened of him than they were of themselves.
Now she wasn’t afraid anymore. As long as the chickens had started, the rest would be easy to handle. After all, catching chickens was nothing but a simple task for the Beastmen.
Moreover, the three-year-old Jimmy was now joining them on hunts to catch some small animals, something Beastmen would experience from a young age.
In the future, their home wouldn’t be short of either chickens or eggs.
The only thing they lacked was a variety of farm animals to raise, like pigs, cattle, and the like.
Speaking of sheep, the cubs were currently growing up drinking sheep’s milk. Although sheep milk had a strong flavor, they didn’t understand that and still drank it with gusto.
When there was an abundance of sheep milk, she would make it into cheese sticks as snacks for the cubs.
A week later, Pan Lin and Lang Sen carried back a male and a female wild boar, which delighted Tangtang immensely.
The cubs thought they were going to be killed for meat, but she warned them, "No one is to touch them. I’m going to raise them. Let’s rear them until they have piglets. That way, even if we don’t go out in the winter, we’ll have meat to eat. Or what did you think was the reason behind building such a big pigsty? There’s a reason for everything, okay?"
The wild nature of the boars was difficult to tame until they realized they weren’t going to be slaughtered and even started receiving food. Only then did they stop attacking.
With the four Beastmen at home confined within these stone walls, no matter how hard they rammed, they couldn’t break out. After hitting the walls enough times, they lost the will to continue.
Within ten days, they had captured two wild oxen, a male and a female, at Tangtang’s request. With this addition, the enclosures for pigs, cattle, sheep, and chickens now all had occupants. What came next was to see how she would manage them.
After all, the appetite of Beastmen couldn’t be compared to that of ordinary humans. Ordinary humans could go without eating meat, but could Beastmen?
Naturally not, so the livestock she was raising could only provide an occasional feast. To have meat every day would require large-scale farming, but their current situation didn’t allow for that, so they had to take it slow.
Before the rainy season arrived, one day Lang Sen went out with Jimmy and Black Falcon, and when they returned, they brought back something black that looked like a stick. At a distance, she didn’t realize what it was, but as they entered the home, she immediately stood up, ran over excitedly, "Isn’t this sugarcane? Where did you get it?"
Seeing that Tangtang truly recognized it, Lang Sen hurriedly said, "We saw some bamboo rats gnawing on this, and once Jimmy got a taste, he wouldn’t let go. I tried it and found it quite delicious, so I brought it back to see if it was useful. Actually, only females like this, and it leaves a mouthful of residue and is hard to digest. They just wanted to try something new. You like it? Then I’ll go chop some more."
In the Beast World, the sugarcane grew much longer and thicker than in the previous world, each stalk as lengthy as an adult’s arm, and their outer skins were exceptionally tough—frankly speaking, a perfect match for the biting force of the Beastmen.
"Is there a lot?"
Lang Sen nodded, "There’s a whole patch of forestland covered with it. Plenty—why, do you want it all?"
She did indeed want it all. But to extract the juice from the sugarcane, appropriate tools were required—no, she couldn’t let so much of it go to waste. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to make brown sugar?
So, she joined Lang Sen, and by dusk, they chopped as much sugarcane as they could. During the process, she had almost formulated the rudimentary method for a juice extractor in her mind. However, she didn’t rush into action, opting instead to spend a week cutting down the entire patch of sugarcane. Afterward, they left the roots in the ground, leaving them to sprout on their own the following year.
If she wanted to plant it in her yard, she could have saved the roots as seeds. But she didn’t plan to cultivate it since her garden was primarily for vegetables and fruits. The sugarcane was neither a staple food nor a vegetable, merely a seasoning, unworthy of garden space.
Once the sugarcane was brought home, she shared her ideas with the Beastmen. She needed several pieces of round and smooth ink-dark stones, as the sugarcane was rather thick—wood might not withstand the pressure, she feared, and these stones also required grooves to be drilled into them.
In simple terms, the method involved stacking two stone rods—one turned forward, the other backward—with the sugarcane placed in between to be squeezed. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞
They fashioned handholds at the ends of the stones to facilitate the exertion of force, and the stone pillars used to secure everything also needed some grinding. This then was the most rudimentary juice extractor, but even the initial preparation work would demand considerable effort from them.
Grinding the stones, constructing a stable frame, creating troughs to hold the liquid—these all needed consideration. In the end, it took nearly a week to get everything in order.
Next came the juicing process. Despite utilizing the Beastmen’s formidable strength, squeezing juice from several hundred sugarcane stalks proved laborious. Their hands blistered from the effort, prompting her guilt. However, their anticipation of what she would make with the juice was palpable.
The sugarcane juice was poured into a large stone pot in the courtyard to boil. Stirred continuously, the liquid showed no change at first. But after about an hour, it began to thicken and foam. Once the froth subsided, stirring felt like churning sand; when it reached this consistency, they withdrew the fire. She then had the Beastmen continue stirring until it became difficult to do so before pouring the mixture into a prepared stone trough to be compressed into cakes and set aside to cool.
At last, the sugarcane juice transformed into brown sugar. Without white sugar available, not only could this brown sugar be dissolved in water for drinking and used in cooking, the uses were broad, and it could also be stored in her space.
From the abundant sugarcane, she managed to produce about ten jin of brown sugar, enough to last a year—as long as they didn’t consume it daily, of course. If they encountered more sugarcane in the future, they could bring it back for further sugar-making. After all, in an era without treats, the cubs were quite fond of sugarcane sugar. They were amazed by the transformation from liquid to solid, pronouncing it magical, and her indispensable role within the family became increasingly evident.
After all, not everyone was so ingeniously minded. Evolving from a juice extractor to brown sugar, even ten heads together might not have conceived of it.
After the brown sugar was made, Jin Han took her out to forage for food. Unexpectedly, on the grasslands to the north, she discovered a large spread of millet mixed among the grasses. However, it wasn’t yet the harvest season, and the plants were still lush and green. If not for their conspicuously drooping heads, she might not have noticed them from low-altitude flight—nearly mistaking the millet for tree-grown plants. Aside from their larger size compared to her previous world, there didn’t seem to be much difference in the millet here.
