Chapter 493: Chapter 490: There is only one truth!


    “The Stone Age began about 2.5 million years ago andsted until approximately 7000 to 2000 years ago.”


    “From monkeys, we learned to throw stones, and by the time of the apemen, we were already using stone axes.”


    “The Bronze Age first started in the Mesopotamian civilization in the 4th millennium BC.”


    “In Huaxia, the earliest unearthed bronze artifacts are the small bronze knives from the Gan-Su Majiayao culture, which date back to around 2800 BC. My history isn’t great, but that was probably the early Shang Dynasty, right?”


    “In Ancient Egypt, bronze vessels appeared during the Second Dynasty, ushering in the Bronze Age.”


    “The Aegean civilization existed during the same period.”


    “And then, we have the Iron Age, which continues to this day.”


    “The ancient Egyptians and Sumerians were the first known to use iron tools, as early as 4000 BC, but mostly they obtained iron from meteorites rather than extracting it from iron ore, which made it many times more expensive than gold.”


    “It wasn’t until between 3000 BC and 2000 BC that Anatolia, Egypt, and Mesopotamia increasingly extracted iron from meteoritic iron.”


    “In Huaxia, 5 iron-ded bronze ‘ge’ from the Shang Dynasty of the 14th century BC have been excavated, which we call ‘Sky Metal’.”


    “It was probably the Hittite Empire that first mass-produced iron and applied it, mastering iron smelting technology around 1400 BC. By 1200 BC, iron was widely used in the Middle East, but it hadn’t reced bronze.”


    “From the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, and now the Iron Age, humans have used millions of years. This represents the progress of civilization and the progress of humanity.”


    “This is the famed Three-Age System, dividing the development of human civilization into three stages based on materials.”


    In Bi Fang’s description, the audience seemed to witness, beneath the long river of history, the piles and piles of burning charcoal, the blocks of ck ore being put into the furnace that, under intense heat, transformed into dazzling red molten iron, pouring forth.


    [Of the Four Ancient Civilizations, only we remain, ah, I’m proud!]


    [Old Fang has really started to understand history, cover face, the pretentiousness reaches a new level]


    [The progress of human civilization seemsplicated, but in fact, it’s the change of materials. Ah.]


    [Huaxia, impressive!]


    Quite a few foreignizens also expressed their admiration.


    Ever since the discovery of iron, people began adding differentponents to it, changing its properties using different temperature processes, and achieving different microstructures through various techniques.


    This seemingly limitless ck metal became the most important pir supporting the entire’s industrial civilization.


    At the moment, Bi Fang nned to leap across millions of years of history, refining this indefinitely useful ck metal in the most primitive wilderness.


    [If human civilization were lost, Boss Fang’s live stream should be preserved]


    [You might be able to restart a civilization]


    [Epic]


    Seeing suchments, Bi Fang joked while holding y, “I guess I’m standing on the shoulders of giants now, with enough knowledge in physics, chemistry, biology, and the environment to achieve this goal. It looks like wilderness, but in fact, it’s a representation of the totality of human civilization.”


    Afterying a base with y, Bi Fang applied more y around the sides, making it look overall like a toilet.


    The surroundings were all encased in y, leaving only an opening nearly four square decimeters in size.


    Once the structure was even with the ground level, Bi Fang added a protruding U-shaped mouth and said, “This is the chimney; it will handle all the gas exchangeter.”


    Having created a passageway, the construction now looked even more like a toilet.


    Not far away, a water monitor that had returned to its cave peeked out its head once again, seemingly puzzled by what the towering creature in front of it was doing.


    In its mind, hunting, eating, resting, and reproducing were the sole purposes of life.


    Unable to grasp the situation, the water monitor scratched its skin with its ws, thinking about heading to the dock… to the water hole to catch a fish for lunch.


    [It’s so simr, really too simr]


    [Alright, now our dry toilet ispleted,e and give it a try]


    [Use it and burn at the same time]


    [Others clean with water, Boss Fang’s has a drying function, the boss is just extraordinary]


    Bi Fangughed heartily; there was no denying that the stove did have an intriguing shape.


    Seen from above, it indeed resembled a toilet, a squat one, but with a square fire mouth at the front.


    After finishing, Bi Fang rolled the y into long strips and baked them with fire. Once they had slightly dried and hardened, he ced them inside the furnace.


    There was a slightly protruding tform underneath, left deliberately, perfect for cing the strips on.


    “This is the furnace bridge. In the past, when burning coal, there was something called a furnace bridge in the stove. There was a saying, ‘the fire must be hollow,’ meaning coal needs oxygen to burn.”


    “If the coal is tightly packed together without oxygen, it won’t ignite. You need to elevate the coal to facilitate air cirction forbustion, and that’s the job of the furnace bridge.”


    “Normally, the furnace bridge is cast from pig iron, like an iron fence. ced in the middle of the furnace, coal is put on top, and there’s a furnace door below for adjusting the fire by opening or closing it. We don’t have that feature here; it’s just to help with air cirction.”


    After constructing the furnace bridge, Bi Fang promptly broke small branches,id them on the “toilet,” and stered them with more y.


    “This is the venttion hole. We can’t let the y block it. Ayer of branches will secure it, preventing copse. When it dries, it will take shape, and the branches don’t need to be removed; they will burn to ash.”@@novelbin@@


    [To be honest, this stove is more advanced than those from the Great Leap Forward era.]


    [High-Temperature Toilet: You can only use the toilet within a certain period of time, otherwise there’s a risk of roasting your behind.]


    [Capitalist: Install these in mypany! Rece all with these!]


    [That’s impossible. Doesn’t fuel cost money? It might be more reasonable to charge for using nted and timed toilets.]


    The section Bi Fang smeared on served to separate the fire mouth from the “toilet”, and then he made a stone te out of y, based on the size of the fire mouth.


    “The size of the stone te must berger than the fire mouth, to keep the heat away.”


    After finishing the stone te and letting it dry and harden naturally, Bi Fang patted his ck-gray palms and sighed with relief, “Alright, spent the whole morning on this. Let’s have lunch then go to the river for more y, and continue making chimneys and charcoal.”


    Returning to the shelter, Bi Fang approached the water hole, ready to catch fish, but discovered that the remaining two fish had disappeared.


    ncing at the nearby mound, a fish bone was spat out not far away.


    Bi Fang: “…”


    …


    At noon, Bi Fang once again reached the stream, and after catching three big fish, he strengthened the fishing grounds, increased their size, and threw the rotting fish guts into them. He also constructed another fishing ground further downstream.


    “Normally, one fishing ground supplying two or three big fish and four or five small fish each day would be enough, but now that I have a thieving neighbor, one fishing ground just doesn’t suffice. Hence, I need to build another one, and ce them far enough apart, preferably over two hundred meters.”


    “Now let’s dig some more y, pour in some clear water, and while we’re at it, gather some sugarcane and fishy grass.”


    The benefits of returning to the camp site were evident at this moment, not only providing a stable supply of vegetables, but also a fixed supply of sweet fruits, which, though not overly sweet, were a rare delicacy.


    Bi Fang shoveled y into the form, it took three trips back and forth to fill the pit, then he lit the wood in the halfpleted fire pit to speed up the drying process.


    To his surprise, he found a paw print in the nearby y…


    [Hahaha, I can’t, I’m going to dieughing.]


    [Can’t hit it, it’s not good to chase it away, what can I do? I can only keep it.]


    [This is the first time I’ve seen a problem that even Old Fang can’t solve.]


    Bi Fang massaged his temples. He had wanted to pour some water here to boil it for sterilization, but now it seemed he couldn’t leave it unattended for a second.


    He sure didn’t want to drink water that water monitors had drunk from.


    It had not been long since he left, but if he were away longer, wouldn’t he risk losing his spot to an opportunist?


    [Old Fang: You dare to take over my territory?]


    [Water Monitors: Clearly, you took over mine first!]


    The audience burst into a frenzy of mockery.


    Bi Fang shook his head, cleaned the fish, mixed them with fishy grass for a meal, and then, armed with arge amount of firewood, he went to another clearing.


    “To smelt iron, even though we have a st furnace, simply burning wood is not sufficient—we need arge amount of charcoal.”


    [Honestly, I don’t really understand the difference…]


    [Isn’t charcoal just wood burned? Does charcoal burn hotter than wood?]


    [Blind spot in knowledge]


    [It’s actually a physical chemistry fact that…]


    “Indeed, it is a physical chemistry fact, but exining it in detail would be tooplicated, needing a lot of equations. Let me put it in simpler terms.”


    Bi Fang built another suitable small structure on the ground using y.


    “Charcoal is a processed product of wood, but not something that you can burn in a regr stove; it’s produced in a high-temperature, oxygen-poor environment.


    By then, the moisture in the wood has evaporated, and the structure itself has changed, internalbusting to a honeb-like structure, which ignites more easily, burns more efficiently, and produces little smoke.”


    “When this honeb structure is burned, it generates a more intensebustion reaction, reaching higher temperatures.”


    [I want to see theplicated exnation, haha]


    “Theplicated exnation would be, if we consider wood’s main chemicalponent ‘cellulose’ – which is basicallyposed of glucose, a ‘carbohydrate’.”


    “Comparing glucose with charcoal you would be using ‘1mol of C6H12O6’ contrasted with pure carbon consisting of 6mol of carbon atoms.”


    “Thus, the 6 water molecules in ‘C6H12O6’ remain water afterbustion and do not produce much heat. Thebustion heat mainlyes from the 6 carbon atoms.”


    With this in mind, thebustion heat of wood and charcoal won’t be much different. You can check chemical handbooks to see the difference inbustion heat between the two.”


    [Thebustion heat of glucose is 2800kj/mol, while the equivalent amount of Cbustion heat is 2361kj/mol. It’s confusing; the difference isn’t very big indeed.]


    Bi Fangughed, “So, after burning wood, you not only produce 6 molecules of carbon dioxide, but also 6 water molecules that need to be heated.”


    “But with charcoal, you only have CO2 molecules!”


    “Charcoal doesn’t have to take into ount the heating of water molecules. Afterbustion, charcoal has fewer types and numbers of substances to heat.”


    “That is the fundamental reason why the highest temperature of charcoalbustion is higher than that of wood!”