Chapter 8: Chapter 8 – The Real Struggle

Andrew awoke in his burrow and headed outside. Once again enjoying the brief moments of the peaceful cold morning.

Shit. I've got to move today huh.

I guess some things don't change. Moving still sucks, and this time I don't have any friends with a truck. Its just me.

He headed down the hill and scanned the road in both directions, checking for any sign of an incoming caravan before heading to the skeleton of a wagon he had left behind. The wagon was still on it's side, but given that he had removed most of the wood from it, he was able to flip the frame up onto its' wheels without too much trouble. His increased strength definitely helped and he was sure such a thing wouldn't have been easy when he first came here.

He then just pushed the metal frame up the hill. It was slow going work, and the wheels struggled with the rocky terrain leading to the forest, but he was far too strong for something like that to slow him down at this point.

Once the wagon frame was safely deposited in his campsite he realized he would have to replace almost all the boards he had stripped before it would be functional again. This meant he would have to revisit one of his failures from a few days ago. Making an axe.

He had exactly one iron ingot left from melting down all but one of the pick axes, and he would definitely need more than that in the future. He decided to organize his packing list before worrying about something he didn't have first. Better to know exactly how badly he needed this wagon.

The forge stones and stone circles that powered it were priority number one. It had taken him days to create those. The additional Ingot, his shovel and sledgehammer, His sacks of food and metal plates. His three hammers, two of which were empowered, The clothes that he lined his burrow with, the lantern and pitcher of oil, his coil of rope, the chest containing the five additional crystals and his rune keeping book were all priorities. Though to be perfectly honest he didn't have much more than that. Everything he had managed to acquire so far was important.

I wonder if this is how hoarders think. I need all of this stuff. Even that pile of old pick axe handles. Even If I plan to make an axe to harvest fresh wood with soon. The pick axe handles are important. Super important. What else?

Oh right.

He grabbed his shovel from where he had piled up his various tools for inventory and began digging. He quickly uncovered one barrel, then another. When he had pulled all four barrels out of the ground he popped one open, revealing the rusty rocks within.

Of course, I should melt these all down into ingots. More concentrated and easier to move that way. Can't believe I forgot I buried all this crap. It's probably going to be one of my most useful resources out here now that I have a way to melt it down.

Okay moving list ready:

Forge an axe

Smelt the Ingots

Cut some trees

Make some boards

Repair the cart

Drag that heavy fucker an hour's walk through the forest

Set up new home

Level up

Find people

Easy.

He set to work forging the axe, assembling the tools he had gained practice with yesterday and heating the forge. The axe head was significantly easier for him to forge than the spearhead had been. He wasn't sure if that was due to the influence of his increased blacksmithing level or the relatively simpler design but he wasn't complaining either way.

He drew out the metal into a wide crescent shape with a long trailing rectangular end. He hammered this into a circular socket, using the reinforced and fire resistant axe handle he had discarded earlier as a base.

[+ 1 Strength for performing physical labor that pushes your limits]

Maybe scavenger isn't so far off. I find myself making the most out of the littlest bits of junk all my other projects produce. Shit, maybe I really will take that pile of old axe handles with me when I move.

Once that was finished he grabbed one of his unused axe handles and fitted the slightly too big axehead over it. He then held the completed project in both hands and empowered it, trusting the mana to tighten the socket and sharpen the blade.

You will become an axe. You will fell trees and cut wood with precision. You will not dull, you will be sharp and durable.

When he finished the axe turned out exactly as he had wanted. The head fit tightly, the blade appeared sharp, and the handle felt a little weightier than it had before. He took a few test swings before setting it to the side and resetting the furnace.

He then started the process of turning the iron ore into ingots. He started by attempting to load the rocks directly into the crucible and melt them down that way, removing the slag as he went. He was left with a tiny amount of liquid material. He poured it into the mold, and let it cool while he loaded more rocks into his crucible.

He wandered off into the forest to search for a suitable tree. He found one a short distance from his camp. One of the shorter ones in the area, but still far larger than he would likely need. When he returned to camp the ingot looked cool and solid. He turned the stone mold over and tapped the back with his hammer to dislodge it, a process he had repeated many times already. When the ingot popped free and hit the stone below it shattered into three pieces. He pulled the crucible from the forge and emptied what he now knew was useless metal into the empty ingot casing and set it aside with the shattered pieces of his other failed ingot.

Well shit. I definitely did something wrong there. The axe heads came out just fine when I melted them down.

How was this supposed to work before magic? Make a big fire and heat the metal up right? Carbon content is supposed to be important somehow. Am I losing that somewhere along the lines? Or including too much? An old-school forge would be filled with charcoal or coal. There's probably some kind of chemical reaction there that I'm missing. I should probably see if I can get it running the traditional way before I mess around with changing the process up.

For that I'll need a lot of wood though. Which means back to the tree for now.

Andrew decided to abandon the smelting project until he had enough wood to make a bunch of charcoal to experiment around with. He instead worked on chopping the tree down, and headed off into the forest in that direction.

I've also never cut down a tree before, but really, how hard could it be?

It turned out to be pretty hard.

He didn't have any previous experience, but the ones around here seemed supernaturally dense. Even with strength far above what any human should've been capable of back on earth, it took him several hours with the axe before he made it close to halfway through. It felt like he was striking iron, and he wondered if he would've been better off with the pickaxes.

[+ 1 Strength for performing physical labor that pushes your limits]

[+ 1 Strength for performing physical labor that pushes your limits]

He decided that this was probably far enough and took a step back to evaluate his work. This was one of the smallest trees he could find in the area and it was still easily sixty feet tall. Thick and with few branches until about halfway up, and even then the branches were thin compared to the trunk, decorated with bunched up clusters of unfamiliar three pronged leaves.

I'll have more than enough wood to remake the wagon with just this one tree. Guess I'll have to add lumber to the list of things I have to pack on my way over. Unless making boards is a lot harder than I think it is. Which it probably is.

He stepped to the opposite side of his cut and began to work there, weakening that side so that it would hopefully fall towards his larger cut. He was only fifteen minutes in before he heard a series of pops and cracks and decided to back up.

He backed away as he watched with fascination as the tree began to tilt toward the larger cut, the snaps and cracks cascaded into one massive continuous sound as he saw the wood splinter around where the cuts were made. It splintered out randomly and several chunks were rather large. Stepping back was the right way to go.

The sound of branches cracking and snapping was almost louder as landed on the forest floor. It was within sight of his camp and he had cut it in that direction. Not nearly close enough to fall on anything, but the less distance he had to move the wood the better.

He spent the rest of the day working with the axe. Just chopping off branches and setting them in neat piles to be hauled to camp later. He had underestimated just how many of those there would be. The only breaks he gave himself were the slow branch laden walks back to camp, transporting a pile of branches to a stack near his campfire.

[+1 Strength for performing physical labor that pushes your limits]

[+1 Strength for performing physical labor that pushes your limits]

[+1 Strength for performing physical labor that pushes your limits]

He had to stop working on the tree when night fell, it was too dark out to easily navigate the branches and his arms were getting quite tired. He still had to figure out the smelting process so he would have plenty of time to work on the tree anyways.

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He gathered all of his bundles of branches by his campfire and quickly realized it would be far too small to accommodate the mass production of charcoal. He decided to simply use the big hole that had once contained his barrels instead. He grabbed his fire starter and quickly lit a torch to see by, then set the fire starter in the hole, set his staff against it, and then began to pack the hole as tightly as he could with the branches. He broke the branches down into small pieces to try and fit as many in as he could.

He figured that better charcoal would require higher heat. It was mostly a fire makes charcoal, more fire makes better charcoal, kind of situation. He covered the hole with a ring of stones and dirt to try and pack the heat in, like a big oven. He then dug little air holes evenly around the sides to make sure it still had enough oxygen to burn.

Satisfied with his burn pit he grabbed the staff and began channeling mana through it. He pumped a good fifteen mana into the firestarter below before smoke began to rise up from the pit. He wiggled the staff out and set it aside. He then began to carve himself another fire starter board using the light of the torch he had gotten going before sacrificing his last firestarter to the charcoal gods. He would need it again and he was pretty sure his previous one wouldn't survive the pit.

The pit was still trailing smoke and heat by the time he finished the new firestarter and he was fairly confident it wouldn't be able to travel out from it's pit. The wood on top had ignited by this point, but he couldn't see much past that and he knew the stuff on top at least wasn't near charcoal yet.

He decided to let it cook overnight and check on it the next morning. He had plenty of branches and tree left to go so he was in no danger of running out of materials.

It was still smoking by the time he got up, so he decided to let it burn itself out before he messed around with it. He worked all day on clearing the rest of the branches. Each time he returned with a bundle of them he could see the pit still smoking and continued to work on the tree instead. When he finally returned for the night it had stopped spewing smoke. He dragged the dirt and hot stones off the pit with a long branch and peeked down into it. The lack of light made it hard to see, but the pit was full of charred wood.

Probably a good sign.

He called it an early night and decided to let the pit cool overnight. He could still feel the heat rising off it and had a little more de-branching to do anyways before he would have a bare tree to experiment with.

The next morning when he checked on the pit the charred wood was cool. He dug through the pit and piled pieces up next to him. The wood on top seemed to be mostly just burnt. As he pulled from deeper in the pit though, he found what he was looking for. Bits of glossy, powdery charcoal that stained his hands black and could be easily snapped. He made a pile of the good stuff and threw the rest back in along with enough new branches to fill it back up again.

He had managed to create a fair bit of the good stuff, but wasn't sure how much he would need to properly smelt his iron ore, and so wanted to create a healthy supply in case what he already made wasn’t enough.

He covered the pit again and started the fire from the top this time, He didn't feel like making a new board and figured it would be an experiment to see if that actually had any effect on the end product.

He wanted to get to iron processing though and so began to build a new, more mundane, forge for smelting the iron. He used a combination of rejected stones from his first forge and newly harvested river stones to build a little round forge. It had a couple of small holes at the bottom to allow for airflow, and an open top small enough to be covered by a couple of flat stones. He filled the forge with charcoal, which used about a fourth of his supply, and started it up.

He let it burn and build up heat for a little while before he piled as many of the iron ore rocks as would fit along the top of the forge and closed the lid.

He alternated between cutting branches from the tree and adding more iron ore and charcoal to the forge. He had to take a break a several times throughout the day to drag ash out of the air holes in the bottom with a branch.

By the time evening rolled around he had gone through all of his charcoal and about half a barrel of ore. He let almost all the coals burn down until there was barely an orange glow at the bottom of the forge before he used a sturdy branch to break it all apart to reveal the lumpy mass within.

There were a few errant pieces of charcoal that he knocked off the mass, but for the most part the entire bottom of the forge was filled with a big black twisting rock. It was heavy as hell and still glowing slightly. He used his stick to roll it out of the remains of the forge and over a large rock on the ground. He wedged a couple of other rocks under the ore lump and took a sledgehammer to it.

He wanted to break the lump down into manageable chunks before it fully cooled. The Iron easily broke into chunks in some areas, but bent and flexed in others. It seemed like he wasn't quite fully successful in making a chunk of Iron, or at least not any Iron he recognized.

He managed to break the rock into a bunch of smaller pieces, and left those in the dirt to cool off overnight while before checking on his charcoal pit and heading to bed.

I'll probably have to turn all those branches into charcoal If I want to convert all this ore into iron. This is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. Games always made it seem like you just throw the ore into a furnace and *poof* iron bar! I mean, obviously games are simplified but still, this is a fantasy world right? Gimme a break on some of this stuff.

In the morning he examined his little iron bits in the light of day. They were heavy, and had a metallic sheen, though the texture varied significantly from piece to piece.

Alright, let's try the crucible again, see what that gets me, then try just working this straight into an ingot or tool or something.

He collected a few of the more metallic looking bits and filled the crucible with them, then set it in the furnace and started it cooking. He killed time waiting for it to melt by piling up the bits of lumpy iron and organizing his piles of branches. When it looked like it would take a while longer for the iron to melt he gave the forge a good charge of mana and headed back to his tree.

He chopped a few manageable logs off the tree before checking on the forge again. He used the little iron stick to pull slag out of the crucible and it looked much closer to the stuff he pulled out of the scrap Iron. Definitely an improvement there. He worked the forge for a little bit before he was satisfied and poured the resulting metal out of the crucible and into his stone cast.

It was a significant amount more metal than his first attempt had provided and he had high hopes for it, but resolved to not start another ingot before he had a chance to test this one. He allowed it to cool while he rebuilt his smelting forge and checked on his charcoal pit. He ended up spending a few hours chopping more logs before the ingot cooled enough that he could test it.

When he popped it out of the cast it survived the impact easily, and when he hammered the ingot it bent and flexed but didn't shatter. The ingot had changed from the charcoal black of the iron lump to a familiar reflective grey. The ingots were a little darker in color but retained the reddish glint that was apparently a result of his mana smelting process.

Perfect. Only took Three days of testing, but I've got a shit ton more iron to work with. Or at least I will, in like two more days probably.

It took him five more days. He alternated between managing the charcoal pile, smelting lumps of iron ore into the black rocks, melting the black rocks into ingots, and chopping logs out of the tree. He finished cutting logs at the end of the first day and progressed from there to attempting to create wooden boards to rebuild the wagon with.

He ruined most of the boards he tried to make but the tree was so large it didn’t matter in the end. He still had far more than he needed, far more than he could probably take with him. He eventually had to smith a handsaw and clumsily sawed his way through half the tree before he had his first respectable board. By the time he was finished he had gained [Lumberjack lvl 2], [Carpenter lvl 1], [Mana Smelting lvl 3], [Blacksmithing lvl 3], a solid ten points of strength, five in intelligence, two in vitality, and an absolutely ever-present hatred for all treekind that he hoped wouldn’t ruin his nature affinity.

In the end though, after all that work, the thing that truly got to him? Nails. He had finished smelting all the rocks. He had a solid stack of eighty ingots. So many he would probably have trouble ever using them all.

And he had forgotten that he would need nails to make the wagon.

He spent most of the evening of the ninth day drawing his newly forged ingots into long thin bars that he could then convert into nails. He had to use this and the bladed axe head of his remaining pickaxe to cut the nails to size. They were far thicker and more squarish than modern nails but he figured they'd keep the wagon together until he got to the crevice at the very least. He finished his last nail well into the night and headed to bed.

It was only on the morning of the tenth day that he was finally ready to start rebuilding the wagon. After all the work that went into cutting the boards, smelting the iron and forging the nails, building the wagon was almost anti-climactically easy. The iron frame and wheels were already all set, so he was basically just building a box that fit on top. Well within his capacity as an amateur carpenter. Though he did have to recut several boards when he mistook the sizes, and sure, there were some gaps here and there, some boards might have ended a little higher than others making the top a little jagged, but hey, it would work.

It'll probably be fine, I'll just have to see how far it makes it weighed down on the journey tomorrow. Ten days to make a cart… It feels like it took forever, but I guess that’s pretty good considering I made almost everything from scratch. Still, that was working non-stop. Whatever, it's done now.

He spent the rest of the day packing up all of his belongings onto the cart. There was quite a bit to move and he had to distribute the heavy iron ingots and wooden planks across the whole cart to avoid putting excess strain on the frame or wheels. He also had to find a balance of bringing as much as he could, and not overloading the cart beyond his means to pull it. He had to pull off about half the boards he had initially loaded it with once he realized it would be completely impossible for him to push. Even then he anticipated the journey taking all day tomorrow, with plenty of breaks and strength increases. A silver lining out of all of this at least.

Slaves could probably never exist in a world like this. Push someone long enough and they'll have more than enough stats to simply overpower you. Though I guess there's always magic I suppose, there are probably some twisted opportunities out there with that around. Hopefully I'll never find out.

By the time evening fell he was finished building, loading, and testing his new wagon. Piles of wooden boards, charcoal and branches littered the camp. His flat boulder was now black and pitted. His firepit had grown significantly in size and there was a big blackened hole in the dirt where his forge once sat.

I suppose I've made quite a mess out of this place. So much for the 'leave nothing behind' rule boyscouts drilled into me as a kid. I suppose it’s a new nature now though, and I doubt charcoal and branches will be much of an issue for it. I might want to take part of the morning to fill in my burrow though, don’t want that tree suffering for all the time I spent under it. Hypocritical considering I just cut down another, but I feel like I owe it to that one.

The journey the next morning was easier than expected. It took some serious work to navigate the wagon through the forest, but he had underestimated once again the strength he had gained from all that labor the last week had put him through. He only had to take three breaks on his slow journey through the forest, and the trek uphill wasn't nearly as bad as he had imagined. Wheels made a huge difference between this experience and dealing with the boulder what felt like months ago.

[+1 Strength for performing physical labor that pushes your limits]

[+1 Vitality for pushing the limits of your endurance]

He made it to the crevice before evening hit, passing by the mostly consumed corpse of the bear whose defeat had been his last milestone. He had to pause at the entrance of the crevice to lay boards from the back of the wagon across the river to allow the wagon to pass through. The land on either side of the river was too narrow for the wagon to cross, but luckily the crevice itself widened out quickly, and the river here was narrower. He left the boards there across the river and pulled the wagon to it's final resting place about a third of the way into the little valley. It was covered in a tide of flat slabish rocks and the wagon wouldn’t make it much farther in.

His first order of business was blocking up that crevice entrance a little. Make it a little harder for anything to sneak up on him while he was sleeping. Luckily he had plenty of daylight left.

He gathered some additional boards and built a makeshift wall to cover the entrance to the crevice. It was braced against the floor within the crevice and would be difficult to break down from the outside. He didn't manage to build it entirely flush with the crevice so there was a small gap where it pressed against the walls on either side, but it was only large enough for very small animals to crawl through. Nothing that he was worried about. He was however worried about the jumping potential of those wolves though, so he built it fairly high, well over his head. The river below was a separate issue. Once he had his forge up and running he planned to build a bridge with an iron grate underneath to guard the river below. No telling what lives out here.

Once that was finished he got to work preparing himself a proper camp. He cleared a spot in the dirt and laid wood planks out and covered them in cloth to form a sleeping platform. He then dug out a hole not far from the river for his forge, and another for his campfire. He worked to steadily clear space around the wagon and his sleeping area. Piling most of the rocks near the wall blocking his crevice.

In an emergency I might be able to use those stones to reinforce that wall. Though if it gets to that point and I'm trapped in here I'm probably fucked either way.

He finished by making neat tables of stone by stacking smaller rocks for legs and hefting the larger slabs of rock up to form the tabletops. He even made himself little stools out of the piles of rock. Sure they were unsteady as all hell, but hey, he had em.

[+1 Strength for performing physical labor that pushes your limits]

Maybe I'll experiment with making wooden chairs and tables later, but considering how much wood I wasted making boards and that monstrosity of a wagon I'd probably waste half my current wood on a single chair.

I really have it all out here though. Easy access to water, I don't have to hike through the woods for each drink of water anymore. Tables and chairs, made out of stone but they would be better than working on the ground all the time. A wall around him, so I no longer have to wonder what will come prowling out of the forest at night. Oh man, coming here has really made me reevaluate my priorities. Don't think I would've ever been quite so thankful for a rickety stone stool as I am in this moment.

For tonight I'll just rest. Make a fire, enjoy the last of my jerky and fruit, stretch out and relax. Tomorrow it'll be time to work on the next priorities list.

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