Chapter 622, In Search of Salt

The cattle and sheep of the nomads were like the cultivated land of the Central Plains, they were never eaten whenever they wanted.

It was just that after Yan Liu Yuan’s arrival, Hassan had been killing sheep for Yan Liu Yuan in order to show his respect, while the rest of the tribe, only the young and strong laborers were able to eat the meat, or the livestock that died in the blizzard.

Little girls like Qiqige, even if she was Hassan’s daughter, did not receive any preferential treatment.

It was probably Hassan’s character of being fair in the world that made him the head of this tribe.

Because Yan Liuyuan was in the most honorable status as soon as he arrived here, he had never experienced the hardships of the nomads at all. He and Sister Xiaoyu saw that these people owned their own cattle, sheep and horses, and thought to themselves that they were quite rich, but they didn’t know that cattle and sheep couldn’t be slaughtered at will, and for such a large tribe, if they only ate cattle and sheep, I’m afraid that they would need several heads a day.

Their tribe can’t afford to go through this kind of trouble.

When Yan Liuyuan heard this, he began to carefully ask Qiqige about the tribe’s situation, and only then did he realize that not only could the tribesmen not eat meat from time to time, even salt was rarely eaten.

Salt is scarce on the grasslands, nomads have always supplemented salt from mutton, beef and goat’s milk and cow’s milk, and the meat they usually eat has little flavor, only the meat that Yan Liu Yuan gets to eat will have some salt put into it.

And now, because meat is also not allowed to eat, without salt supplementation, many women and old people will experience dizziness, muscle spasms, and nausea.

When such things happened to the tribesmen, because of their lack of knowledge, they all thought that they might have gotten sick, so they all prayed together for the blessing of the gods beside the fire pit, hoping that the gods would cure them of their illnesses.

There was no salt or medicine here, and the sheep were killed only when they were really too hungry to stand.

“Yes, they are all poor people in these times, how could I have thought that you guys were doing well,” Yan Liuyuan smiled bitterly, “It’s my fault.”

Yan Liu Yuan asked Qi Qi Ge to call for Hassan, Hassan glared at his daughter on the road before respectfully asking Yan Liu Yuan, “Master, don’t listen to Qi Qi Ge’s nonsense, the tribe isn’t in that tough of a place.”

“Alright listen to me,” Yan Liu Yuan calmly said, “The symptoms of nausea in the women and the elderly are caused by the fact that they can’t eat meat anymore so they can’t replenish the salt, we need salt.”

Hassan wondered, “Salt is very scarce, only the big tribes have it, we must pay tribute to the cattle and sheep every year to get that precious salt.”

Yan Liu Yuan suddenly realized, this is very much like one of the consortium’s means of controlling the stragglers, isn’t Hassan and his tribe like the stragglers outside the barriers, being controlled by others at every turn.

But thinking about this, Yan Liuyuan instead became more interested, he wanted to bring these people to live a good life.

Yan Liuyuan curiously said, ”Don’t you guys have the ability to find salt on your own? This grassland is so big, you should be able to find some, although it’s little, it’s not so little that there’s nothing at all.”

“The salt ponds are all controlled in the hands of the big tribes, and there aren’t many salt ponds in this grassland to begin with,” Hassan explained, “I heard that the big tribes don’t even have enough salt of their own.”

Yan Liu Yuan carefully recalled some of the wilderness survival knowledge that Ren Xiaosu had given him, he did not like to learn, but what Ren Xiaosu had said to him, he had always kept in mind.

Yan Liuyuan suddenly said to Hassan, “Gather all the herders and ask them if they remember where the cows licked when they used to herd them.”

He remembered that Ren Xiaosu had told him that as long as mammals had to ingest salt, humans had long since lost the instinct to survive in the wilderness, but humans relied on their intelligence, and if you couldn’t find the salt yourself, let the livestock do the searching for you.

How do livestock on the grasslands replenish their own salt? Some cattle farms in the central plains would put some coarse salt in the barn for the cattle to lick, while on the grasslands there were salt licks, and the cattle themselves would find such places to replenish their own salt.

Sure enough, Hassan went and asked a few of his people for the answer.

After all, when they were herding cattle, there were only a few places where the cattle liked to lick, so how could people not know?

Yan Liuyuan instantly moved off, taking Hassan and the others all the way to that grassland.

What happened then was simple, he led a group of people to peel back the snow and bring back to the tribe much of the soil under the turf.

Yan Liuyuan didn’t know how to operate in order to extract the salt, he only knew that there must be in these soils.

He could only use a stupid method, mixing water with the soil, and then filtering it again and again with a cotton cloth until the water was clear before placing it on the fire to distill it!

Just a moment’s work, gathered around the side of Hassan saw the bottom of the pot a layer of light yellowish-white crystals, very few very few, because of this extraction process is not qualified, so the sale is also very poor.

Hassan couldn’t wait to rub a bit of it into his mouth with his finger, then looked at Yan Liuyuan in surprise: “Master, it’s really salt!”

Regardless of how it looked on sale, it was salt!

Yan Liu Yuan sighed in relief, in the past, Ren Xiaosu would go to the wilderness to find the roots of the walnut tree to boil water, the water boiled was with salt, back then, finding food was all Ren Xiaosu’s business, but now it was his turn.

He explained to Hassan, “Scrape these off and you guys go back to the salt licks, just like I just did, got it?”

“Okay, okay,” Hassan said excitedly, it really was a god, to be able to extract salt from barren soil, it was too powerful!

In fact, the nomadic people had long mastered similar abilities before the Calamity, it’s just that later on, after civilization had developed to a certain extent, there was no shortage of salt in the grasslands at all, they were in the north, and they could even eat salt from thousands of miles away.

And the pre-cataclysmic prairie people, when they went to school, what they learned was already all standardized education, no teacher ever told them how to find salt on the prairie.

Therefore, when the moment of calamity came, some people may still know that there is such a thing as Tengwangge Preface, but how to survive in the grassland, on the contrary, it is not clear.

Slowly, the pressure of survival hangs over everyone’s head, and they forget even the Tengwanggexue.

The rest, just instinct, and then a lord rose, began to integrate the power of the steppe, wanting to use the Central Plains as their own granary.

Only cognitively made a mistake, went to the Central Plains they realized that after the original disaster they are the most miserable, the Central Plains has long established barriers, and guns ……

The nomads on the grassland now don’t even quite understand what the south is really like, only Yan Liuyuan and Sister Xiaoyu are the most clear.

Yan Liuyuan sat in his tent, next to him Sister Xiaoyu kept smiling at him, he asked, “Sister Xiaoyu what are you smiling at?”

“I’m laughing, you’re very much like your brother now,” Sister Xiaoyu said gently, “He must be very proud of you, right?”

As a result, Sister Xiaoyu realized that Yan Liuyuan was suddenly silent and looked downcast.

Yan Liuyuan whispered, “Sister, I kind of miss my brother.”