Chapter Thirty-Eight: Inter-dimensional Amazon (Patreon)

The first thing I check is my experimental cooking arrangements. The chimney is looking pretty good, and seems to be directing the smoke out of my cave rather than into it, which is good. Not so good is the draft that the fire is creating by pulling air in from Kalanthia’s cave – I’ll have to do something about that… Not now, though. Now I check the grid I’ve been baking just above the fire. It seems pretty sturdy, so I use a couple of thick sticks to lift it so it’s sitting on the little shelf-like protrusions just above the fire.

Here goes. I lift the wok up and slowly, gently place it on top of the grid, ready to take it away if I have any hint that either the grid or wok are likely to crack. There are a couple of hair-raising moments when I’m convinced that at least one of them is about to crack or fall off the protruding ledges it’s all balanced on, but in the end, everything goes well. Eventually, the wok, half-full of water, sits on the makeshift grill I’ve created, everything whole.

I sit back on my heels, unable, and unwilling, to prevent the grin from cracking my face in half. Perhaps this should pale in comparison to killing creatures that were trying to kill me, or hiking my way through more forest than I’ve ever seen in my life, but I don’t care. I’m proud of what I’ve done here, especially considering that a few days ago I couldn’t have even lit a fire without a lighter. I can still feel the grief that had bubbled up earlier pulling at me, but with the successes of the present, its gravitational pull is lessened, and I can push it mostly to one side.

Now for the next step. As the water slowly heats up, I add in the malachy leaves I’ve been saving up. They’re far too salty as they are, but that’s all to my benefit now. The dried out leaves float at first, but as they become more and more water-logged, they drift down to the bottom, moving only with the bubbles which have started to form at the bottom of the wok.

I don’t want to leave the set up in case something happens and I lose my precious resource, so I continue my home renovation. I start on another important task – dryers. In order to create a bow and arrows, I need sinew. Dried sinew. I’ve got plenty of the fresh stuff in my Inventory, but I need it to be dry before I can pound it and separate out the different fibres. Not to mention that I’ll need to dry other resources too. Actually, that reminds me to find some arrow wood sooner rather than later.

For now, though, I actually need to set up a drying rack, or something like that. In fact, what I end up doing is creating a very, very rudimentary drying rack. I need to leave the cave for a bit, but don’t want to risk Murphy having his way and something going wrong as soon as I leave the area, so pull the wok off the fire temporarily.

Heading out of the cave, I go down to the tree line and find a tree that has lots of straight shoots growing out from the base, like a willow or hazelnut tree. This tree clearly doesn’t belong to either species, but its wood looks like it will suit my purposes.

Choosing a few shoots around the width of my thumb, I hack at their bases with my knife until I’m holding five branches taller than I am. Hacking at the tops, I cut them down to my height. An axe would really make this task easier and I make a mental note to add making one to my to do list.

Snapping a few other thinner shoots, I pack all my harvested resources into my Inventory, which has increased to thirty spaces since levelling up, something I’m glad to note. Next, I search for something I can use as a binder. Settling on some sort of vine that’s climbing up a tree like ivy or some sort of creeper, I gather a few strands and pop them in my Inventory as well.

Back in my cave, I stoke the fire again, adding more fuel. Next, I carefully place the still-hot wok back on the fire and then pull my newly-gathered materials out of my Inventory. Thus prepared, I start creating my basic rack. It’s really very simple, but despite that takes far more time than I would have expected.

Mostly the delay is caused by it being more difficult than I thought to make the vine binder do what I want it to do, at the same time as keeping the branches in the right positions. By the time I finish, I’ve sworn enough to make a sailor blush and finish off by declaring that if the thing falls apart at the wrong moment, I’d rather hang the sinew outside and guard it from inquisitive creatures than put myself through this frustrating torture again.

Then I think that I could have just used my bark-fibre cord instead of a vine binder and I curse loudly enough to make Kalanthia rumble in annoyance. Sighing in frustration, I rub my face with my hands in an effort to calm myself down. Just because the memory from the survival stone used tree shoots and vines doesn’t mean Ihave to, especially when I’ve already prepared something specificallyfor situations like this…

Anyway, at least I have – I hope – a workable dryer. It’s basically just two pyramids of three branches tied at the top in a very bottom-heavy X shape, kept standing by the seventh branch connecting the two pyramids at their crossing points. Using the smaller branches, I’ve reinforced the lower parts of the pyramids with crossbeams, incidentally also creating places where other branches could be fed between to create more ‘rungs’. For now I don’t do that because of where I want to place my dryer – over the fireplace.

Moving it into place so the pyramids stand either side of the chimney, perpendicular to the wall, and the crossbeam is a good foot above the top of the chimney, I release it gingerly. The structure sways a little as it settles into place, but, despite my pessimistic predictions, it doesn’t actually fall. One step done.

Work when one is trying to survive in the wilderness seems endless. There’s always something to do. In this case, it’s preparing the sinew for drying. I don’t feel like waiting around for ages for the liquid in it to evaporate, so I’m going to do as much as I can to speed up the process. The first step is my rack – hanging it above the chimney should give it a warm, dry atmosphere to encourage quick evaporation of the remaining bodily fluids. Now I’m going to cut it into smaller pieces so that it loses water more quickly.

Using my knife against a ‘chopping board’ of a thick branch I picked up at some point, I slice along the grain of the different pieces of sinew, making slices that are about one centimetre thick, and then however long the piece of sinew is. Having gathered them from a variety of animals, there’s an equally great variety in length. Still, even the small pieces could be useful, for glue if nothing else.

Using my newly made bark-fibre cord, I attach the thin pieces of sinew to a long, reasonably straight branch, ready to be propped above the fire once the clay has dried sufficiently. That done, I check on my ‘cooking’. The water level in the wok has reduced, but I want to actually dry it all out completely. I debate over removing the malachy leaves, but leave them there for the time being. Once the water level has dropped by half, I’ll take them out and then leave the salty water to crystallise.

So, chimney, check. Fireplace, check. Cooking area, check. Samova beans planted, check. Salt, in progress. Cord production, started. Sinew drying, in progress. I’m feeling pretty pleased with what I’ve managed to accomplish so far, and there’s still a bit of time left in the day. Well, what are my next objectives?

My current aims are to make my living situation more comfortable. Having created my fireplace actually ticks several boxes there. First of all, it’s a cooking area, meaning I can now start having fresh, hot meals on a more regular basis, a definite plus in my book. It also warms up my ‘room’, meaning that I hopefully won’t be waking up in the middle of the night any more, needing to pile on another coat because I’m cold. As a further benefit, it provides light in the dark, making navigating my alcove easier as well as potentially letting me read a book, something that I miss doing before bed.

I’d like to improve my sleeping situation, wanting to sleep on something softer than barely-cushioned stone, but anything that will properly address that will take too long. I could haul in some softish undergrowth like an equivalent of heather, but it will stop being soft fairly quickly, especially once it’s dried out, meaning I’d need to replace it fairly often. Plus, it’s likely to be even lumpier than the cave floor which actually is pretty smooth.

Ideally, I’d create a feather mattress – feathers are certainly not in low supply! The problem with this is that I’d need something to hold all those fluffy feathers, and at present I have no material to use as a tick, or thread to sew it together. Or needle. I huff. Life is surprisingly hard when you can’t just head to the closest commercial centre to buy everything. Even though I technically have all the resources around me that I need, there’s a whole lot of labour that has to go into processing them… I mean, I’m grateful for the stones Nicholas gave me, but I’d probably have traded all of them in for the chance to access an inter-dimensional Amazon.

So, probably my pile of assorted jackets and other clothes is still probably the best I can do for sleeping at this point. Honestly, that’s probably all I need to do for home renovations for now. Sure, shelves would be nice so I can put stuff on them, but I’m fine living out of my suitcases. I’d love electricity, internet, and a portal to a good hotel room, but those seem a bit out of the realms of possibility right now, even for this strange world where magic is real.

No, probably the best next step is to create some weapons and tools. My knife and mace have done a sterling job up to now, but I could do with both a bow and spear. A bow will be great for attacking and ambushing enemies at range, and a spear will help me keep more distance from my opponents. My mace is good for crushing and is perfect for dealing with multiple attackers at once, but it’s not really good for keeping my enemies at bay. Hopefully with the addition of a bow and spear to my mace and knife, I’ll be well-equipped for whatever I have to face.

Actually, while thinking about it, I might as well try to upgrade my mace a bit, or replace it if that would be better. At the moment it’s just a branch with a knot that makes it heavier one end than the other. If I could attach a stone to the end with the knot, that would make it significantly more damaging, especially if the stone is sharp in some way…

In order to do these tasks, though, I’m going to need to create some tools first. An axe, for certain, because I will need to cut wood for both my spear and bow, not to mention the arrows I’ll also need to make. Besides, it’ll probably be useful for creating firewood now that I actually have a fireplace.

I’d better also create a shard that’s capable of carving to a certain extent – I’ll need something a bit more delicate than my knife for some of the finer shaping tasks in creating a bow and arrows. Then, of course, there will be all the arrow-heads… I foresee a lot of flint knapping in my future!

So far I haven’t spotted any trees which would be suitable for creating pitch, so I’ll have to try and work around that, and if I spot any evergreens or sticky resin, I’ll collect some then. Alternatively, I can create glue out of the remains of the sinew I was chopping up this morning. Though, I don’t really want to boil that in my wok, so maybe creating a clay pot would actually be a good idea. Yes, creating perhaps three clay pots of different sizes for different purposes sounds sensible.

Decided, I get up and stretch, then prepare myself to settle into a long session of pottery-making. The sooner I get started, the better – the clay pots will need to dry before they’re fired, so I’ll be able to do other things during that time.