Am I the old man who's always by my apprentices' side?

Chapter 102 New Oxen and Horses
After setting up the main hall, Zhang Chengdao arranged the academy, teahouse, and kitchen buildings one by one, thus concluding the task.

Many exquisite buildings appeared out of thin air. The craftsmen working on the mountain and the disciples of the Sword Forging Manor were all stunned and speechless by the various "immortal techniques."

But Zhang Chengdao paid no attention to the shock of others, because he was pulling the cook along to start studying the promise he had made to Xiaoli a few days ago—fried chicken.

This cook is one of the five purple cards in the entire sect!

If you're wondering why the sect suddenly has five purple cards in such a short time...

This story begins a few days ago.

A few days ago, after Xiao Li and Ye Shuyun returned from Kyoto, Ye Shuyun mentioned that she wanted to hire a few cooks and embroiderers for the sect.

Zhang Chengdao thought about it and agreed. It was inappropriate to always have a young girl like An Chehexiang running around cooking for the whole family, so he nodded.

Unexpectedly, Ye Shuyun immediately gathered a team of forty people, and their average quality was very high!
These cooks and embroiderers were specially selected by the Ye family through a letter from Ye Shuyun. Most of them were martial arts practitioners with decent aptitude and comprehension. In other sects, they would probably have become proper disciples, but in the Ye family, they were just doing manual labor.

However, the rules of the Ye family are slightly different from those of other sects. Just like Zhang Chengdao's design, the Ye family does not prohibit its servants, laborers, or maids from practicing martial arts. All basic martial arts manuals can be borrowed from the sect or purchased with some money. Of course, these basic martial arts manuals are not Ye family heirlooms, but rather common items in the martial arts world. They are practical, popular, and easy to learn.

If someone has exceptional talent, the Ye family will recruit their former servants, laborers, or maids as formal disciples, and then teach them the true Ye family's inherited techniques.

Of the cooks and embroiderers sent by the Ye family, four had already become true disciples of the Ye family and were no longer just cooks and embroiderers. However, since Ye Shuyun rarely wrote to ask the Ye family to send people, Old Master Ye wished he could pack up the entire Ye family and send them over, so why would he be stingy with a few low-level disciples? In fact, even an inner disciple who only knew a little about cooking was brought along to make up the numbers!

So when Zhang Chengdao saw the "gift package" of forty cooks and embroiderers, he was quite upset.

The third apprentice is being a little too considerate!
However, not all of these forty people were cooks or embroiderers.

When Old Master Ye received Ye Shuyun's letter, he not only exceeded Ye Shuyun's expectations, but also took full advantage of his initiative by adding two butchers, two blacksmiths, two grooms, and two pig farmers to the team. It is said that one of the pig farmers was a well-known pig castrator in the area. This was because Ye Shuyun mentioned in her letter that her master, Immortal Baishi, intended to raise some livestock, so Ye Lingying specially added them to the team just in case.

This carefully selected team truly lived up to the expectations of Mr. Ye Lingying, as it included four people with purple names: two cooks, a butcher, and an embroiderer.

After decisively keeping the four people, Zhang Chengdao selected three more blue cards: an embroiderer, a blacksmith, and the famous pig castrator. He actually planned to raise some piglets sold in the mall to provide a stable supply of spirit-infused meat and hides—the former could be used to synthesize spirit-infused food, and the latter for sewing, both of which were quite important spiritual materials.

He originally wanted to keep one of the grooms, but unfortunately both of them had grayed-out names. After much hesitation, Zhang Chengdao gave up.

After deciding who would stay, Ye Shuyun wrote another letter, instructing the Ye family to escort the families of these individuals northward—but that's a story for another time. With many more people joining the sect, Zhang Chengdao needed to build more houses.

The lowest-grade thatched huts and thatched houses are definitely not acceptable, but the high-grade stone-tiled houses are too expensive to build – the tiles required for stone-tiled houses are also very resource-intensive!
Even for a mid-range wooden house, the materials used for so many people would be considerable!

So, Zhang Chengdao fiddled with the panel for a long time and finally found a building he had overlooked for a long time: [Guest Room].

In the original game, this building was used to accommodate refugees. Once you had built up enough goodwill with the refugees, you could invite them to become part of the village and have them work like cattle.

The guest rooms are houses built with a mixture of bamboo, wood, and stone. They are much nicer than the thatched houses, but require far fewer materials: only 80 bamboo strips, 60 planks, 40 stones, and 40 weeds. Even if you build more, it won't be a big problem.

After building four guest rooms and letting these people stay in pairs, Zhang Chengdao finally breathed a sigh of relief.

When Zhang Chengdao rearranged the rooms today, he specifically placed these guest rooms near the teahouse and the kitchen as temporary residences, because they would definitely be converted into single rooms in the future—since everyone is cultivating immortality, the treatment of cattle and horses can't be worse than that of modern cattle and horses tightening screws, right?
Zhang Chengdao isn't some heartless capitalist who hangs streetlights!

After all the buildings were completely set up, Zhang Chengdao finally had a moment to free his hands and chatter with the two cooks about how to make fried chicken.

The cooks originally thought that if cost wasn't a concern, they could use lard.

The problem is that, for some reason, Zhang Chengdao had eaten dishes made with lard from this era a few times and found them too fishy, ​​so he was afraid that frying chicken with lard would backfire and rejected the idea.

Commercial fried chicken typically uses palm oil, but putting aside whether it's healthy or not, where do you get palm oil in a place like Baishishan?
After much thought, Zhang Chengdao decided to use soybean oil instead, since the mall had soybean seeds. He had planted quite a few to make tofu, and during his month-long seclusion, the two disciples of Linggeng Peak had diligently used up most of the seeds and harvested several baskets of soybeans, which was more than enough to make some oil.

However, the real challenge lies in how to turn soybeans into oil.

Is this knowledge that a modern-day lazy bum should know?
Zhang Chengdao racked his brains and, based on his years of experience as a salted fish, came up with a solution: first crush it, then soak it in boiling water, skim off the oil after it floats to the surface, then heat it to evaporate the water until only oil remains.

This idea came to him after he noticed the oil floating in the soup every time he drank it.

If Zhang Chengdao had been even slightly more knowledgeable, he would have known that this method was actually called the "water substitution method." Unfortunately, he knew nothing about it and it was purely a lucky guess.

After briefly describing the method to the cooks, Zhang Chengdao became a hands-off manager, leaving the cooks to handle the oil issue while he went to the county to buy a few chickens.

(End of this chapter)