mijobooks Chapter 141 141
Chapter 141 141
It was firm and hard underfoot; walking barefoot, you could feel the coolness of the soil rising from your feet. Various materials were piled nearby—two neat stacks of red bricks, a bag of firebricks leaning against the corner, and several bags of clay piled together. The clay, dug from the hill behind the village a few days ago, was deep red in color, fine in texture, and felt like cool, oily clay in your hand. Next to it was a pile of fine sand, uniform in size, bought from a building materials store in town and sifted twice with a bamboo sieve to remove all the small stones and coarse particles. A bundle of chopped straw sat beside the sand pile, each piece only as long as a finger joint. It was leftover straw from last autumn's threshing floor, chopped and sun-dried, dry and fluffy, with a distinctive rice fragrance when you grabbed a handful. Two old wooden buckets lay upside down on the ground, a shovel leaned against a persimmon tree, and a trowel and level sat on a low stool nearby. The morning light filtered through the branches of the persimmon tree, shining on the pile of materials. The red bricks glowed warm in the light, and the fine sand shimmered.
Su Peixue emerged from the storage room, a shovel slung over her shoulder. She walked to the open space, slammed the shovel into the ground with a sharp crack, startling a dozing sparrow in the persimmon tree. She stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the open space and the pile of materials beside it, mentally reviewing the kiln's location and orientation. The kiln opening should face south, preventing the cold winter winds from entering while allowing the summer southerly winds to help draw in the fire. The kiln should be close to the courtyard wall for easy access to firewood, dough, and tools, but not too close, as the heat would burn the wall. The base should be raised slightly above the ground, so she wouldn't have to bend over too deeply to place bread and to easily remove charcoal when the fire was extinguished. She squatted down, removed a few red bricks from the stack, and laid them dry on the level ground—not applying mud yet, just stacking the bricks one by one to define the base's outline. The bricks clinked softly, and she pressed her palm against each one to check its stability. She arranged them into a rectangle, stood up, took two steps back, and examined it—the long side facing the courtyard wall, the short side facing south. She squatted down and moved the short side outward by the width of one brick, stood up again, and walked around the base, looking at it from every direction before finally nodding.
After finalizing the base outline, she began mixing the clay. She picked up a bucket of clay from beside the wooden trough and poured it in—the clay lumps piled up into a small hill in the trough. She broke up the large lumps by hand and spread them at the bottom of the trough. Then she poured in fine sand. The fine sand poured out of the bamboo sieve like an hourglass, making a rustling sound as it fell on the clay fragments. Finally, she added chopped straw, scooping up a handful and evenly scattering it over the sand-soil mixture. The ratio of these three ingredients was a combination of over a dozen bread kiln tutorials she researched online—three parts clay, one part fine sand, and a handful of chopped straw. This ratio ensured the clay's stickiness while preventing cracking due to thermal expansion and contraction during firing. The straw fibers in the clay acted like the reinforcing steel in concrete.
She lifted the bucket and poured water into the wooden trough. Water poured down the bucket, splashing a small patch of mud onto her canvas shoes. She took off her shoes, rolled up her trousers to her knees, and stepped barefoot into the trough. As her feet sank in, mud squeezed out from between her toes.