Chapter 3 - Manufacture in the Wild
To make better clothing, I need better leather. I accumulated a lot of dried furs over the years and can use them, but to get heavy-duty leather, Red and I hunt a deer, barely damaging the fur.
I start the process immediately. I wash the hide well in the creek near my cabin, scrubbing away the blood and dirt. I set the fur in a wooden basin filled with an alkaline solution—a concentrate from specific plants I boiled and corked weeks ago. Leaving it in the solution for a couple of hours makes the skin spongy and weak. I use the salt to rub the fur off with a round, soft river rock. It's tedious work, but eventually, the hair comes free. The texture is now thick but fragile.
To dry it properly, I need chemistry. I put starch made from a disgusting-tasting graminar plant—something I found in my early quest for food and immediately regretted tasting—on a flat table. I lay the fur on top, held in place with boards and weights, making a frame and letting the air touch the exposed side.
Once dry, I wet it again to remove the starch, but this time, the leather dries on a stick, draping like a stiff towel. I then oil the leather with a nice scented oil, a bit like eucalyptus, which helps mask the smell of the tanning process. I gently rub the hide with a piece of polished wood to smooth it out and force the oil deep into the fibers.
Now the leather is dark brown and slightly oily, but a lot more supple and stronger than before. It feels like real gear. I use thin, softened rabbit fur, using a similar but gentler process, as a second layer on the inside of a pair of pants!
My first pants in this world!
Sniff... It brings a tear to my eye. I have enough remains to make a belt, plus knee and ass patches too, making sure they are tough and will last the heavy work I will put them through.
I go on a crafting spree, making a complete set: fur-lined pants, a sleeveless shirt, a thick hooded long coat (cloak-style), and a backpack. The cloak has a wolf-hoody collar and sleeves, deer fur on the outside, and rabbit inside. The sleeves are a custom design—more like a double layer where I can put my arms through when it is cold and rainy. When it is sunny, I can leave it open with my arms free. It hooks onto my well-fitted leather shirt, not my neck, for the ultimate comfort. I destroyed many furs in the process of figuring out that pattern...
I have to oil them from time to time, especially after any rain. I thought about shoes, but getting used to bare feet was tough, and now that I can stalk a deer barefooted without snapping a twig, I don't want to change that. Yet.
I am ready to go further away from the camp with Red. We set off and explore as deep as we can, noting the animals around and the landmarks.
...
We are now sitting next to a campfire, looking at the giant lake blocking our path. I cannot see the other side, but I can tell this should be a lake from the way the water reacts to the wind—no tides like an ocean.
I noticed over the years that the sky here is a freak of nature. It's like the universe was sliced in half. To one side, there is the Void. Absolute, terrifying nothingness. Not a single pinprick of light, just an endless abyss of ink where creation stopped. It feels like if you stare too long, you'll fall off the edge of existence.
But turn your head the other way, and it's a sensory overload. A wall of light. It's not just a starry night; it's a dense, suffocating blanket of millions of stars, swirling nebulae, and galactic dust. It's so crowded with light it almost looks like a solid ceiling.
We must be at the very edge. The frontier of the universe.
The sun seems to cycle through this madness over the "year." It spends half the year crossing the black void, and the other half blinding us against the wall of stars. When we are on the star side, at its "horizon," we can see a giant star, closer than any other. You can tell it's a smaller star in the same system—a binary companion.
My brain is fuming with too many ideas on how to calculate the precise hours and such. Nothing is the same and the measures cannot be used in my perceptions. One second is not one second, but 1.4 or something.
On that rambling thought, I fall asleep under the stars—and the void.
...
A few months pass.
Red and I explored as far as we could with the current equipment I have. I finally relented in making some boots. Hunting is fine, but walking 200 km barefoot is not fun. My soles are tough, but they aren't stone. I used a huge boar tusk to make the soles—which was a nightmare to carve—and many layers of leather to make them strong, with a bit of fur to be comfortable. They climb just under the knee.
Doing this, I realized the insects tend to leave me alone as long as I don't stray too far from home, so boots and a hood are a must in those cases. It must be that my region has something the insects hate, but I have no clue what. Maybe it's the specific sap of the trees or a magnetic anomaly.
My next task is metallurgy, which is a completely new, exciting experience for the bored me. Who knows what metals can exist here? Still, iron should exist. Science's laws exist here too, so the periodic table should still apply, more or less, in some cases. But maybe not only iron will be magnetic. Or will it actually be?
I admit the glowing part when I "tamed" Red adds a layer of mystery to the physics of this place.
Instead of searching for iron mines, I use the sluicing method in a shallow part of the river to grab the heaviest rocks and sands I can find. Then, I try melting them in a smelter. I painstakingly destroyed said smelter 46 times in the process of learning to make heat-resistant cement and use proper rocks that won't explode in high temps.
It is surprisingly easy to find metals in places untouched by humans. I found gold, I'm sure, but it's a useless metal for now—too soft for tools. I found tin, lead, copper, and iron, but this is where my knowledge stops. I have 36 different, unidentified nuggets and heavy sands. I managed to melt 12 of them and make ingots. The others? I have not found the melting temp yet in my primitive kiln.
Being able to make nails and a hammer changes a lot of things. Well, axes, shovels, any tool really... I construct a water wheel to automate some of the grinding. It allows me to make higher-level stuff, like clean planks instead of peeled logs. They are not perfect since I can't make good steel yet, but I used an unmeltable tough sand on the tips of the tools, and it makes them a lot more resistant to abrasion. I just need to be careful not to hit with the handles or weaker parts.
With an industrial-level workshop, I start really testing and mixing materials. Red hunts food for me since I never leave the place except for training. He seems to enjoy being the provider while I sweat buckets over the furnace.
By the end of the year, I was able to make a hand crankshaft, knives and razors, cooking utensils, a water canteen, and fingerless gloves with metal padding on top of the hand. I also forged 20 spearheads, 20 throwing stars, shin and arm guards, a new, stronger backpack, and my main weapon: a heavy staff. All in their own optimal materials.
The wood from the staff came from a giant tree, very tough and heavy. My small axe couldn't even leave a dent in it originally. I used erosion and the water wheel to carve it pretty, filling the carved patterns with molten metal, then quickly dumped the staff in beeswax to cool and treat it. It gave a strange color pattern on it once polished. I can use all my strength and not break it. I can break large rocks with it.
The knife and staff heads are made of a special alloy I discovered. It turns red in melting and shrinks by ten times its volume. It becomes really heavy and hard, but once it cools down, it can never be melted again. It acts almost like a ceramic-metal hybrid.
The blades(large knives) are 15cm wide and 40cm long. Very thin, but unbreakable with my current strength. Sharpening them was a hassle—I went through five whetstones just to get an edge. In my hands, they currently look like short swords.
I tried to charge my power into them and slash at a tree. I cut the tree down in one slice. Clean through. The power seem to have effects on the laws of physics.
I would have loved to make a gun, but I can't even make a bow yet... I'm awful at making iron in general. It rusts, is weak, or brittle. Nah, my red alloy is the bomb!
I did make a crossbow, however, by adding tin to my alloy before it cools. The red metal becomes supple enough to bend and spring back into its original form. I'm lucky because, again, spring steel is complicated to make, but I got better results from the equivalent of this bronze-like mixture.
I catch my reflection in the water bucket. By now I look around 13 years old, maybe 5'2". By 16 I should be close to 6 feet, I hope... I would gain the final inches after that. For now, though, I'm a short, heavily armed, metallurgy-obsessed kid living with a wolf. Life is good...