Take a boat from the narrower part of the Goddess Ocean to the other shore, and then move for two days to reach the key city in the region, Sour Lake.
There are more than ten kilometers of road between Suanhu Lake as a lake and Suanhu Lake as a city.
The distance doesn't sound close, but the whole area of Suanhu City can't hide the pungent smell that gets stronger from time to time.
Li Xiang and the students wanted to visit Sour Lake, but Wang Qi had better arrange the business handover first.
When I left Huguang City, I reached a cooperation with the local chamber of commerce and asked them to bring a box to Suanhu City.
It's a valuable box, and it probably contains a bunch of colorful scale pearls and some magic crystals. It can only be done with the guarantee provided by the guarantor who has been following my group of people, and the reputation of the Fountain of Youth Academy.
There was no income from this delivery mission, so the Sour Lake Chamber of Commerce helped replace a batch of cold-land horses.
It's just that changing horses is not worth the escort fee. Sour Lake will also provide horse storage services for 100 days. The horses that are exchanged will be put into storage. Of course, some work will be done to reduce storage costs.
After a lot of trouble, when we were looking for accommodation in a big hotel, we got some simple gas masks for the students. As for our own people, we brought serious chemical protective masks.
The next day we went to visit Sour Lake.
With the attributes of Wang Qi and others, without masks, the damage rate will not be higher than the self-recovery ability. However, the smell of sulfur dioxide is really very irritating. The more sensitive the sense of smell, the more uncomfortable it will be. It is better to be protected.
Acid Lake, without too much explanation, is obviously the product of an active volcanic crater and is a sulfur-rich area.
There are workers collecting sulfur here, which is also the main specialty product of Suanhu City.
The local sulfur status is quite different from that of the north Phoenix area back then.
When Phoenix City was founded, there was still flowing lava in the North District. In this environment, sulfur could not exist on the surface at all and could only maintain its form in hot springs like boiling water. There was water flowing there, so the acidity of the hot springs was limited.
The side of Sour Lake is relatively "cooler", otherwise no workers would be able to get close.
Coolness is relative. The lowest temperature in the entire oversized basin-shaped terrain is over 30 degrees.
One-third of it is the body of the acid lake. Looking down from the mouth of the "washbasin", you can see the yellow color at the bottom of the shallow water area, which gradually transitions from yellow-green to blue-green from the outside to the inside, and there is water mist on the lake. Transpiration is occurring, but the scale is not very large. Compared with the average temperature in the basin, the water temperature is about 60 degrees.
No one has salvaged the sulfur from it, and it can be seen that it is very deadly and may have turned into a lake of dilute sulfuric acid.
When workers collect sulfur, they naturally don’t have masks or masks. A wet cloth is enough.
They will gather around several three-dimensional structures that look like they were created by magic.
They look a bit like a perfectly unfolded octopus, except that the proportions of height and horizontal length are a little different.
These structures function as cooling towers. High-sulfur vapor condenses and flows along the "arms", and finally drops to the ground near the tips of the arms to complete the final cooling and form solid sulfur.
It can be confirmed that the carrier is steam, because these octopuses have ditches that lead part of the condensed water to the acid lake. However, it is called a ditch, but it is actually a depression in the terrain that is less than half a meter deep.
The area where solid sulfur is formed has a very high temperature, and it is necessary to use an iron hook to move the solid sulfur away and cool it down for a while before touching it.
Wang Qi and his group visited first, then returned to the top of the crater and waited for a worker who looked to be in the worst physical condition to climb up and conduct interviews... Naturally, they had to pay for delaying people's work, and both parties were very happy.
The guarantor will do the preliminary communication and leave it to the students to ask questions.
"how old are you?"
"Thirty-eight years old...probably?"
From the outside, workers who are less than forty years old are already very close to death.
The trapezius muscles on his shoulders were abnormally developed due to long-term lifting of heavy objects for climbing mountains, but their surfaces were mostly purple-black, and there were some scars left by ulcers. The skin on the chest, which is relatively thinner on the front, also has uneven and abnormal color patches, and there are also symptoms of blue knuckles.
After all, the students had already seen dead people, so they did not lose their ability to think and quickly started asking questions.
"How old were you when you started doing this?"
"Sixteen...maybe fifteen."
"Have you considered changing your job?"
"Yes, but it's too difficult. My body is broken and I have less money to do other things."
"Does this cost a lot?"
"It should be okay. At least I can support my wife and children."
Wherever Wang Qi goes, the first thing he pays attention to is the income level of the people at the bottom, and he often talks about these things with the students. This time they responded quickly.
"You only have one laborer in your family?"
"Yeah."
"how many kids?"
"Three, the older one is an apprentice in the city." The apprentices don't get paid, and they even have to give something to the master during the holidays, but they don't have to eat at home.
"where's your wife?"
"Take care of the kids and grow some vegetables."
"Is she in good health?"
"That's much better than me."
For a woman's health, even if the soil here is severely acidified, growing vegetables can probably subsidize the expenses of most adults, at least it's not completely useless.
After learning about the personal situation, I started to turn to the sulfur collection workers as a whole.
Most of the workers in Sour Lake started working when they were fifteen to eighteen years old. On average, only one out of four apprentices can survive in this kind of working environment. Among those who were able to carry on, very few could sustain themselves to the level of the person in front of me. Many of them fell and died while carrying sulfur while climbing the mountain.
Even if he survives to this level, his life is overdrawn and his body functions are severely degraded. He can either choose to work until he falls down one day, or retire and go home and lie in bed for a few years before dying.
In short, for people in this industry, their lives have reached their limit in their forties.
The students not only asked questions, but also thought of solutions, but unfortunately the solutions they proposed did not solve the problem.
In this environment, even on the first day of visiting, it is easy to realize that the pungent gas is what accelerates the loss of workers' lives.
Wang Qi also took out spare protective masks and gave them to the students. They took it for granted that masks can effectively improve the working conditions of workers.
However, the worker being interviewed just wore a mask and carried his today's results for less than a hundred meters.
The students didn’t understand, so Wang Qi helped explain: “Because protective masks conflict with heavy manual labor, wearing them requires breathing harder, which will affect the workers’ weight-bearing capacity and endurance.”
Needless to say, the carbon dioxide concentration in the mask is relatively high. A short breath will determine that this road will not work.
When using a protective mask to perform heavy physical work, you must ensure adequate rest. For work that requires certain physical strength, it is generally not advisable to work continuously for more than fifteen minutes. If a single working time is forcibly extended, the total working time will be shortened.
Obviously, for the income level of sulfur collectors, more frequent breaks are the enemy that is closely linked to income. If the computing load capacity is reduced while also bearing the cost of updating protective masks, workers' incomes will plummet.
"Yes, yes, it's too laborious to carry this thing." The worker has never gone to school, but he can understand and respond.
"Isn't there some other less painful way to get brimstone?"
Wang Qi did not answer this question.
Of course there is an answer, but it makes no sense to talk about it in the main world.
The sulfur industry in our small kingdom survived for a while after the comet collision and then was wiped out. After all, the threshold for picking up sulfur from cold pools was too low. After the overall temperature dropped, there was a lack of new sulfur production. Within a few days, it was Picked clean.
Later, the kingdom's own sulfur was mainly obtained from pyrite. The technical threshold for this thing was a bit high. You must at least understand steel refining before you can think about it. Moreover, the cost was too high to be exported as a product.
In addition, the petroleum industry chain can also produce sulfuric acid by-products, but the proportion of that production capacity is smaller. After deducting what is consumed by the petroleum chain itself, only a small amount can be provided to other manufacturers.
As for using magic puppets to collect sulfur... given Wang Qi's current understanding of the creation system, it doesn't seem feasible.
The way the acid lake is mined, after the magic puppet goes down, sulfur will gradually condense in the joints and various gaps left for mobility, without even considering the corrosion problems caused by the acidified environment, and it won't take long.
There is also a relatively feasible path to the main world, which is to open mountains.
For Sour Lake workers, the sulfur content in their workplace is not the biggest problem, but that they spend too much time climbing and descending the mountain. If the mountain can be opened, operations can be changed to flat ground, supplemented by less uncomfortable With wooden tracks affected by sulfur vapor, workers can significantly reduce their working hours in high-sulfur areas, at the expense of a certain proportion of workers becoming unemployed due to natural limitations in sulfur production.
but!
This is an active volcano that has been spewing out sulfur steam. Who can guarantee that there will be no problems when opening the mountain? The Seventh Ring is not good, and the engineering power of the Phoenix Kingdom cannot make any guarantees. If something goes wrong, it will not be helpful, but will directly destroy the entire Suanhu City.
In short, the conclusion is that it is hopeless and there is almost no possibility of change.
Changing the direction, after Li Xiang painted the Sour Lake on the paper, it was quite beautiful. Several workers climbing the mountain brought the conflict of "death is approaching" to the picture, which gave it a natural sense of theme.
