Chapter 10: If you have money, you can still get it if you squeeze it
On the small balcony of the seaside villa in Jihadist Manor, Levi Knight, who had just taken a nap, was bathing in the warm sunshine, admiring the undulating Mediterranean scenery while sitting on a specially made wooden toilet to relieve himself. .
In medieval Europe where there was no papermaking technology, this was originally a rather painful thing. However, after receiving a small pack of toilet paper generously donated by Miss Ma Tong, he finally no longer had to wipe his butt with rough dried tree leaves. ——It feels like using sandpaper to rub your skin!
Um? Why not wipe your butt with a cloth? Do you know what linen cost in the Middle Ages before cotton was introduced to Europe? Many trainee knight squires only have two changes of linen shirts! And the softness and smoothness of that linen cloth is not much better than that of dry leaves.
The next step after squatting on the toilet is to squeeze out the milky white paste from the plastic hose, pile it evenly on the toothbrush, and start cleaning your teeth in front of the mirror. A small thing that he was so familiar with in the past, Levi did it extremely sacredly and seriously at this moment.
Brush your teeth, rinse your mouth, roar a few times in front of the bright sun, and exercise your throat. Then, Knight Levi spread the soap evenly on his face and hands, rubbed it for a while, and rinsed away the foam with water poured from a clay pot.
Next, he couldn't help but smell the back of his hand. The fragrance of matcha on it was really refreshing.
It seems like several years have passed since the last time I smelled this scent! ! !
——It feels so good to return to modern civilization!
After being indulged in this for several minutes, he finished washing and returned to the room. And his wife Zhao Na, who was seven months pregnant, had already boiled water with a small charcoal stove. So, Knight Levi sat down at the table leisurely, first took out a gleaming gold wine bowl, and then took out a package of spicy beef-flavored Master Kong instant noodles, tore open the package and put the noodles in Cake, add seasonings, and it’s all done in one go.
——Hey, use a real gold bowl to make instant noodles... This is just like the legendary "emperor plowing the fields with a gold hoe"!
But Knight Levi didn't feel the slightest bit ashamed of wasting his natural resources. He just poured boiling water calmly... and then, a very familiar strong spicy smell unique to cheap instant noodles suddenly filled his nostrils.
In the old days when I was an Internet writer who stayed up late coding and had no time to cook and no money to order takeout, the smell of instant noodles that once made Li Wei want to vomit when I smell it is now more precious than any other delicacy. The delicious aroma is even more tempting. Especially after taking a sip of the fragrant spicy soup, the spicy feeling from the mouth to the throat left him with endless aftertaste, and he was even moved to the point of tears.
After peeling off another ham sausage and stuffing it into his mouth to chew, Knight Levi finally let out a deep sigh: This is the life of modern civilization!
At the same time, his wife Zhao Na, although still not interested in instant noodles, also opened a large bag of small packages of honey cake, red bean cake and vanilla cake, as well as chocolate-flavored boxed breakfast milk, and enjoyed them happily stand up.
It’s a well-known fact that women can always fit dessert into the other stomach. However, in ancient times when productivity was underdeveloped, the price of sweets was much more expensive than in later generations. For example, in medieval Europe, sugar was not sold as food, but as a luxury tonic sold in pharmacies, similar to the ginseng and deer antlers sold in later generations in China. kind. Even honey is expensive. Except for fruits, other sweet foods rarely appeared on medieval tables.
Therefore, after living a boring life without sweets for several consecutive years, this noble lady was already very uncomfortable.
Now she finally had a chance to feast. She turned into a chipmunk in an instant, stuffing cakes into her mouth and puffing up her cheeks, which made Levi laugh. But at the same time, I also felt a touch of warmth and sweetness.
However, in this dark era, relaxation and joy are short-lived, and only heavy death and destruction are the eternal theme...
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After finishing their breakfast, which some of them either couldn't eat or had endless aftertaste, everyone once again gathered in Lord Levi's study to discuss the current response to the Black Death and how to make money from this disaster. get enough money.
——It is said to be a study room, but in fact there are not many volumes of books in the room. Most of the books piled on the shelves are contracts and account books. After all, papermaking technology had just been introduced to the West through Arab traders these days, and most scribes were still using parchment, which was staggeringly expensive. The only valuable maps of France, Provence and Europe are the remnants of veterans of the Main God Space.
At this moment, Doraemon has already launched a [Mini Reconnaissance Satellite] using a [Household Rocket], and through the surveillance screen, he has a bird's eye view of the tragic outbreak of the Black Death in various epidemic areas - corpse collection trucks piled with corpses, Trenches and ponds filled with dead bodies, huge pyres for burning corpses, empty streets and markets... while the rest of the people were scribbling on the map of Europe with red pencils, marking the latest areas where the plague was spreading.
"...According to Mr. Livy, today is February 14, 1348, although it has been almost four months since the 'death fleet' that brought the plague bacteria from the Crimea Peninsula arrived in Sicily But at this point in time, the spread of the Black Death in Europe is not particularly serious. It is only limited to a few cities along the Mediterranean coast, and the population affected is not too large..."
Wang Qiu pointed at the map of Europe with a small stick, which was dotted with red patches, "... Genoa, Pisa, Naples, Brindisi and Sicily in Italy, Marseille and Sicily in France. Toulon, Barcelona in Spain - Of course, Spain is not yet unified, and it is difficult to say whether Barcelona is part of Spain. Next there are Athens and Constantinople in Eastern Europe, which are all the Black Death epidemic areas in Europe. In addition, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt in the Near East are the territories of the East. The Crusaders’ last stronghold in Asia, Rhode Island, was also devastated by the Black Death..."
"...Looking from the map, the plague situation doesn't seem too bad!"
Teacher Marikawa Shizuka, a doctor, frowned and said, "...the top European cities such as Rome, Paris, and London are still intact, and most of the outbreaks are in second-tier cities. And according to Mr. Levi, this The warning of the plague has spread from Italy to the European continent, and it seems that all countries have begun to take precautions! How did it end up spreading throughout Europe and killing 35 million people?”
"...Because with the pathetic medical standards of this era, even if the official was warned in advance, it would be useless in the face of the plague!"
Wang Qiu shrugged and replied, "...In a sense, the Black Death is as scary to medieval Europeans as the zombie crisis is to modern people. The zombie crisis is scary not only because it has no cure. Save, because sick people (zombie) will get up and attack and infect healthy people. The Black Death was also an incurable and terminal disease for medieval Europeans. Although Black Death patients could not run around and bite people, rats and fleas carrying the germs could easily spread from one room to another. Fleeing from room to room, from village to village..."
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——In the world where we humans live, there are actually two food chains. One is where wolves eat sheep and sheep eat grass. The big ones prey on the small ones, and the strong ones prey on the weak ones. This is the food chain recorded in textbooks. But in nature, there is actually another hidden and special food chain, which is often more common and important to many organisms. In this special food chain, the small ones prey on the big ones, and the weak ones prey on the strong ones. In other words, the grass eats the sheep, and the sheep eat the wolves... And the Yersinia pestis that caused the Black Death in the Middle Ages happened to be in this food chain. One of the top predators.
As the Black Death spread, Yersinia pestis first infected certain blood-sucking bugs - fleas and lice. These fleas and ticks then become accustomed to living on rodents - mice, marmots, prairie dogs, etc. Finally, these rats broke into cities and villages and brought Yersinia pestis to humans, triggering an outbreak of the Black Death.
In fact, many bacteria in humans are transmitted through this method, but most of them are not as terrifying and destructive as the plague - most bacteria in the world will try their best to coexist peacefully with their hosts. Countless bacteria live within each of us, but they rarely kill us. These bacteria may take advantage of us, harass us, and exploit us, but they rarely kill us quickly, just as we usually don't burn down our houses if we are fine. Even HIV can coexist with its human host for a long time.
But Yersinia pestis acts quite violently, and it often kills patients within a few days, just like the much-talked-about Ebola virus in later generations - for a germ that needs to spread widely, this is very difficult. In a sense, it is also a kind of suicide. Therefore, in the modern world, plague has become a relatively rare thing. Once it appears in a certain place, it often causes sensation and panic.
Unfortunately, or perhaps by chance, in the year of the Black Death, a group of rats from the East, as well as the fleas and lice on their bodies, as well as the Yersinia pestis bacteria in the fleas and lice, finally arrived in Europe. However, European cities these days are horribly dirty. Everywhere is so rancid and damp, and filled with domestic garbage. It is easy for rats to obtain food, and it is also convenient to make nests: in the words of a historian It is said that construction projects in medieval Europe seemed to be approved by the Rat Parliament, which perfectly protected the welfare and safety of the rats... As a result, these rats from the East happily settled in European cities - together with the plague bacilli together!
What's even more unfortunate is that the Europeans who wanted to die just recently personally killed all the natural enemies of rats - cats...
So, at this point, even God could not prevent the plague from breaking out in European cities. To make matters worse, when the plague broke out in some cities, even those Europeans outside the epidemic area were lucky enough to get a period of advance warning, but they had no suitable way to fight the disease - their hometowns were different from those who had already been infected. The cities where the plague broke out were just as dirty. Even if they rushed to dig sewers and improve environmental sanitation, it was already too late. Not to mention that they have no idea why the plague started, so they have no such awareness of hygiene.
What’s even more frightening is that Yersinia pestis can not only cause an alarming mortality rate to humans, but also has multiple ways of spreading diseases - Yersinia pestis is also the vector of bubonic plague, pneumonic plague and septicemic plague. In the absence of symptomatic treatment, 75% of patients infected with bubonic plague will die, and more than 95% of patients infected with pneumonic plague will die. Septicemic plague is a variant of the first two, and 100% of patients infected with it will definitely die. Will die!
Among them, when the plague spread from rats to humans, humans were infected with bubonic plague, and tumors grew in the groin and armpits. The patients would have fever, headache, and vomiting, and most of them died within a week. Those with particularly strong constitutions Maybe I can survive half a month.
If this were the case, then the Black Death would be as harmful as bird flu at best. The real problem is that when humans contract bubonic plague from rats (specifically, fleas that live on rats), the bacterium Yersinia pestis attacks the lungs, creating pneumonic plague—which is more serious than bubonic plague. It is so severe that patients will have terrible black spots on their body, have a high fever, cough violently, endure unimaginable pain, and finally vomit blood and die. Usually they will not survive more than three days. If it further develops into septicemic plague, the patient will feel like suffering from radiation sickness, with skin all over his body sores, peeling off and bleeding, and it will be difficult for him to survive even a day after the onset of the disease.
Of course, all these tragedies are not the point. The real point is that pneumonic plague can be transmitted from person to person. And just like influenza, it is spread through droplets... In other words, there is no need to touch people at all, the plague can be transmitted just through breathing! Not to mention that this kind of plague still has an incubation period of several days. By the time someone is discovered to be sick, they have often infected countless people!
Even if the authorities managed to isolate every patient, it wouldn't be enough, because rats perform their duties as germ couriers perfectly.
In addition, unlike diseases such as smallpox, which only require one infection to provide lifelong immunity, the plague, like the flu, can recur many times...
The mixture of these three horrific plagues is the Black Death that is currently sweeping across Europe.
Please imagine, when there is no cure: the mortality rate of Ebola + the contagiousness of influenza + multiple recurrences =? ! ! !
This almost means that the human settlement where the epidemic broke out is destined to collapse! !
Therefore, even if they had been warned in advance, the kings and bishops could only watch their territories being devoured by the Black Death, and their relatives and servants falling one after another. In the end, they might not even be able to save their own lives. Live...
(During the Black Death era, Poland was the only major country in Europe that survived. No one has figured out the specific reason yet. So when all countries fell into decline and collapse, Poland, the future European doormat, thrived. Soon we will enter a golden age of prosperity)
——After hearing the above-mentioned terrible inside stories about the epidemic, Mr. and Mrs. Levi’s faces were pale and their legs were shaking.
Don't forget, the hospital next to their manor houses hundreds of patients, making it an excellent source of infection. Not to mention that his cheap uncle, Chevalier Diderot, who had just died of the Black Death, died in this house. There was only one wall between the bedroom of the couple... even though they had used everything from vinegar to incense to Wearing masks and other disinfection methods imaginable, but who knows whether it will be effective?
When they think that they may have been infected with the Black Death, but it's still in the incubation period... Do you think they can stop trembling?
Fortunately, seeing how they were trembling like chaff, Doraemon was kind enough to use the [Automatic Medical Kit] to check them over, and then gave Mr. Levi good news: They are currently in good health and everything is normal.
At the same time, the female school doctor Marikawa Shizuka gave the Levis another good news: Although the plague is so terrible, it is not that dangerous in the modern world. First of all, there is actually a vaccine available. Although it cannot provide lifelong immunity like the smallpox vaccine, it can at least achieve an effect similar to that of the rabies vaccine - immunity begins to develop 10 days after vaccination, reaches a peak in 1 month, begins to decline after 6 months, and disappears after 1 year. ……
Moreover, even for patients who have been infected with plague, there are also specific drugs such as streptomycin injections available. In addition, sulfonamides also have some effects.
Of course, none of the above is free - after all, it all boils down to money.
"... Is this a money issue... If I squeeze a little bit, there will still be some. But the amount may not be as much as you expect. After all, you must only accept cash such as gold and silver coins. And in Selling medicine here is not as simple as you think... If it doesn't work, I still have some gold and silver utensils and jewelry here. If you like them, just take them..." Being After teacher Shizuka Marikawa injected the plague vaccine and asked for a lot of streptomycin injections and sulfonamide powder, Levi finally calmed down, but said with a somewhat embarrassed expression, "...By the way, since my wife Because of her pregnancy, she has gotten rid of the mark of the main god system and can escape from this damn world. Can you help take her out first and find a better obstetrics and gynecology hospital to stay in? "