Great time travel

Chapter 10. If you have money, you can still squeeze it

On the small balcony of the villa facing the sea in the Manor of the Holy Warriors, Knight Levi, who has just taken a nap, is bathing in the warm sunshine, while admiring the undulating scenery of the Mediterranean Sea, while sitting on a specially-made wooden toilet to excrete .

In medieval Europe without papermaking technology, this was a rather painful thing, but after receiving a small pack of toilet paper generously donated by Miss Ma Tong, he finally didn't have to wipe his butt with dried rough tree leaves ——It felt like grinding the skin with sandpaper!

Um?Why not use a cloth to wipe your ass?Do you know how much linen cost in the Middle Ages before cotton came to Europe?Many apprentice knight squires only have two linen shirts for changing and washing!And the softness and smoothness of that linen cloth is probably not much better than that of dry leaves.

The next step after squatting on the toilet is naturally to squeeze out the milky white paste from the plastic hose, pile it evenly on the toothbrush, and start cleaning the teeth in front of the mirror.In the past, a trivial matter that he was familiar with so much that he could no longer be familiar with it, but Li Wei did it at this moment with incomparable sacredness and seriousness.

Brush your teeth, rinse your mouth, roar a few times into the bright sun, and exercise your throat.Then Chevalier Levy spread the soap evenly on his face and hands, rubbed it together for a while, and rinsed off the foam with water poured from an earthen pot.

Next, he couldn't help sniffing the back of his hand, the scent of matcha on it was really refreshing.

It seems that several years have passed since the last time I smelled this kind of breath! ! !

——It feels so good to return to modern civilization!
After being so indulging in this for several minutes, he finally finished washing and turned back to the room.And his wife, Zhao Na, who is seven months pregnant, has already boiled water with a small charcoal stove.So, Knight Li Wei sat down at the table leisurely, first took out a shining golden wine bowl, then took out a pack of spicy beef-flavored Master Kong instant noodles, tore open the bag, put the noodles Cake, seasoning, all in one go.

——Hey, use a real gold bowl to make instant noodles... This is just like the legendary "Emperor plowing the field with a golden hoe"!

However, Knight Li Wei didn't feel ashamed to be reckless. He just poured boiling water calmly... Immediately afterwards, a strong smell of spices that is unique to cheap instant noodles and very familiar filled his nostrils.

In the old days when an online writer stayed up all night to code and had no time to cook and no money to order takeout, the smell of instant noodles that once made Li Wei feel like throwing up when he smelled it, is more precious than any delicacy here and now. The delicious aroma is even more alluring.Especially after taking a sip of the fragrant spicy soup, the spicy feeling from the mouth to the throat made him feel endless aftertaste, and he was even moved to the point of tears.

After peeling another ham sausage and stuffing it into his mouth to chew, Knight Li Wei 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, 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 it happily. stand up.

Women have been known to always be able to fit dessert into the other stomach.But in ancient times when productivity was underdeveloped, the price of sweets was far 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 antler of later generations in China. kind.Even honey is expensive.Except for fruit, other sweet foods rarely appeared on the medieval table.

So, after several years of tedious life without sweets, the lady has suffered a lot.

Now that she finally had a chance to feast, she literally turned into a chipmunk in an instant, stuffing small cakes into her mouth and puffing up her cheeks, which made Li Wei amused, but at the same time I also felt a touch of warmth and sweetness.

However, in this dark age, both relaxation and joy are short-lived, and only the heavy death and destruction is the eternal theme...

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After finishing their respective breakfasts that could not be swallowed, or had endless aftertaste, everyone gathered in Lord Levi's study again to discuss the current response to the Black Death and how to make money from this disaster. to enough money.

——It is said to be a study room, but in fact there are not many volumes in the room, and almost all the books are piled up on the shelves are contracts and account books.After all, papermaking has just been introduced to the West through Arab merchants these days, and most scribes are still using parchment, which is staggeringly expensive.The only valuable maps of France, Provence, and Europe are the relics of those veterans of the main space.

At this moment, Doraemon has launched a [mini-reconnaissance satellite] with a [domestic rocket], and through the surveillance screen has a bird's-eye view of the black death outbreak in various epidemic areas-the corpse cart full of corpses, Ditches and ponds filled with dead bodies, huge pyres where corpses were burned, empty streets and markets...while the rest of the people were drawing on the map of Europe with red pencils, marking the latest areas where the plague spread.

"...According to Mr. Livy, today is February 1348, 2, although it has been almost four months since the 'death fleet' which brought the plague bacteria from the Crimea peninsula arrived in Sicily Yes, 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 Sea, and the population affected is not too large..."

Wang Qiu pointed to the map of Europe with a small stick, on which there were many red spots dotted around, "...Genoa, Pisa, Naples, Brindisi and Sicily in Italy, Marseille and Sicily in France. Toulon, the Barcelona of Spain—Of course, Spain is not unified yet, and it is hard to say whether Barcelona is part of Spain. Then there are Athens and Constantinople in Eastern Europe, which are all black in Europe at present. In addition, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt in the Near East, which belong to the Christian territory, have also been swallowed by the Black Death, and Rhode Island, the last stronghold of the Crusaders in Asia, has also been blackened. Death and illness tormented very badly..."

"...From the map, the situation of the plague doesn't seem too bad!"

As a doctor, Teacher Ju Chuan Shizuka frowned and said, "...The top European cities such as Rome, Paris, and London are still intact, and most of the outbreaks are only some second-tier cities. And according to Mr. Li Wei, this The warning of a plague has spread from Italy to the European continent, and all countries seem to be taking precautions! How could it still spread to the whole of Europe in the end and kill 500 million people in history? "

"...Because with the pathetic level of medical care in this era, even if the authorities have been warned in advance, it is useless in the face of the plague!"

Wang Qiu shrugged his shoulders and replied, "...In a sense, the Black Death was as terrible to medieval Europeans as the zombie crisis is to modern people. The reason why the zombie crisis is terrible is not only because it has no cure. It is because sick people (zombies) will get up and attack and infect healthy people. For Europeans in the Middle Ages, the Black Death was also an incurable and incurable disease. Although the Black Death patients could not run and bite, they carried Rats and fleas infested with germs can easily scurry from one house to another, from one village to another..."

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——In the world we humans live in, there are actually two food chains. One is that 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 more important to many creatures.In this special food chain, the small ones prey on the big ones, and the weak ones prey on the strong ones, that is to say, the grass eats the sheep, and the sheep eats the wolves... and the plague bacillus that caused the Black Death in the Middle Ages happened to be on this food chain. One of the top predators.

During the spread of the Black Death, Yersinia pestis first infected certain blood-sucking bugs—fleas and lice.These fleas and lice then become accustomed to living on rodents—rats, woodchucks, woodchucks, etc.Finally, these rats broke into cities and villages, and brought Yersinia pestis to humans, which triggered a major outbreak of the Black Death.

In fact, many bacteria on humans are transmitted in this way, but most of them do not have the terrible and brutal destructive power of the plague-most of the bacteria in the world will try to coexist peacefully with their hosts.There are countless bacteria living inside of us, but they rarely kill us.These germs may use us, harass us, and exploit us, but they rarely kill us quickly, any more than we usually burn our houses down if we're okay.Even HIV can coexist with a human host for a long time.

But Yersinia pestis acts quite violently. It often kills patients within a few days, just like the Ebola virus that has become discolored in later generations-for a germ that needs to spread widely, this is in the In a sense, it is also a kind of suicide.Therefore, in the modern world, the plague has become a relatively rare thing. Once it appears in a certain place, it often causes a sensation and panic.

Unfortunately, perhaps by chance, in the year when the Black Death broke out, a group of mice from the East, as well as the fleas and lice on them, and the Yersinia pestis in the fleas and lice, finally arrived in Europe together.However, European cities these days are terribly dirty, so rotten and damp everywhere, full of domestic garbage, rats can easily get food, and it is very convenient to make a nest: in the words of a certain historian In other words, construction projects in medieval Europe seemed to be approved by rat councils, and they perfectly guaranteed the welfare and safety of the rats... As a result, these rats from the East happily settled in European cities—along with the plague bacilli together!
What's even more unfortunate is that the dead Europeans killed the cats, the natural enemies of the rats, not long ago...

So, at this point, even God could not prevent the plague from breaking out in European cities.What's worse, when the plague has broken out in some cities, even if those Europeans outside the epidemic area are lucky enough to get a period of early warning, they have no proper way to fight the disease-their hometowns are the same as those who have already The cities where the plague broke out are just as filthy, and even if they rush to dig sewers for environmental sanitation, it is already too late.Not to mention that they don't know why the plague started, so they don't have such hygiene awareness at all.

What's even more frightening is that Yersinia pestis can not only cause an astonishing lethal 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 former two, and 100% of patients infected with it will absolutely will die!
Among them, when the plague spread from rats to humans, humans were infected with bubonic plague, and tumors grew in places such as the groin and armpits. The patients would have fever, headache, and vomiting, and most of them died within a week. Those with a particularly strong physique Maybe it can last for half a month.

If only this is the case, then the harmfulness of the Black Death is at best similar to that of bird flu.The real problem is that when humans get bubonic plague from rats (fleas that live on rats, to be precise), the bacillus Yersinia pestis attacks the human lungs, and pneumonic plague develops—and pneumonic plague is much more severe than bubonic plague. Intense, terrible black spots appear on the patient's body, and he develops a high fever, coughs violently, suffers unimaginable pain, and finally vomits blood and dies, usually within three days.If the blood-type plague further develops, the patient will still have skin ulceration, peeling off and bleeding, as if suffering from radiation sickness, and it will be difficult 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 it's still the same as influenza, it spreads through droplets... That is to say, people don't need to touch each other at all, and the plague can be transmitted just by breathing!Not to mention that this kind of plague still has an incubation period of several days. When someone is found sick, they have often infected an unknown number of people!

Even if the authorities succeeded in isolating every sick person, it was not enough, because the rats performed their duties perfectly as germ postmen.

In addition, unlike smallpox and other diseases that can be immunized for life as long as you get it once, the plague, like the flu, will recur many times...

The combination of these three appalling plagues is the Black Death that is currently sweeping across Europe.

Please imagine, in the case of 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 doomed to collapse! !
Therefore, even though they had been warned in advance, those kings and bishops could only watch helplessly as their territories were devoured by the Black Death, their relatives and servants fell one after another, and in the end they might not even be able to save their own lives live……

(In the era of the Black Death, Poland was the only major country that survived the disaster in Europe. No one has figured out the specific reason so far. So when all countries fell into decline and collapse, Poland, the future European floor mat, was thriving. Soon into a golden age of prosperity.)
——After hearing the inside story of the above-mentioned terrible epidemic, the Li Weis were already pale and their legs were trembling.

Don't forget, the hospital next to their manor houses hundreds of patients, which can be called an excellent source of infection.Not to mention that his cheap uncle, Chevalier Diderot, who just died of the Black Death, died in this house, just one wall away from their bedroom... Although they have used everything from vinegar, incense to Wearing a mask and other disinfection methods you can think of, but who knows if it will work?

When I think that I may have been infected with the Black Death, but it is still in the incubation period... Do you think they can't tremble?

Fortunately, seeing them trembling like sifting chaff, Doraemon was kind enough to check them with the [Automatic Medical Box], and then gave Mr. Li Wei a good news: They are currently in good health and everything is normal.

At the same time, Ju Chuan Shizuka, a female school doctor, gave the Li Wei couple another good news: Although the plague is so terrible, it is not so dangerous in the modern world.First of all, it actually still has a vaccine available.Although there is no life-long immunity like the smallpox vaccine, it can at least achieve the effect similar to the rabies vaccine-immunity begins 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 already been infected with the plague, there is also a special drug called streptomycin injection, and sulfonamide also has some effects.

Of course, none of these things come for free—after all, it’s all about money when it comes down to it.

"... Is it a question of money... If I squeeze a little bit here. But the amount may not be as much as you expected, 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 is really not possible, I still have some gold and silver utensils and jewelry here, if you like it, you can take it all..."

After being injected with the plague vaccine by Mr. Ju Chuan Shizuka, and asked for a lot of streptomycin injections and sulfa powder, Li Wei finally calmed down, but he said with a bit of embarrassment, "... By the way, since Because of her pregnancy, my wife has already got rid of the marks of the main god system and can leave this damned world, so can you help me take her out first and find a better obstetrics and gynecology hospital?"