❄️ Chapter 19: Winter of Innovations
🌍 Earth Date: February 18, 99 BCE – Late Winter ❄️
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
🔥 Glass and Furnace
Junjie didn't waste time. As soon as the smelter was stable, he had the villagers begin construction on a separate glass workshop—small, sturdy, and placed at the edge of the valley where wind naturally howled through a narrow stone funnel. Nano had mapped the air currents weeks earlier and flagged the spot as perfect: consistent, high-velocity airflow to feed a roaring furnace. They built the main glass furnace from layered stone and clay, its firebox insulated to withstand searing heat. A second oven—simpler, but just as important—was for annealing, the slow, controlled cooling that kept glass from shattering. The blacksmith forged long hollow pipes, blowing rods, and sturdy iron tools, even mounting a small diamond from the slavers' loot onto a wooden handle for a crude but functional glass cutter. It wasn't delicate work, but it got the job done.
Two young men, tough and a little wild, volunteered as the first glassblowers. They didn't mind the heat—they loved it. Nano handled the recipe: sodium carbonate from soda ash, calcium oxide from quicklime, and river-washed silica sand. The batch melted cleanly, flowed well, and could be shaped by hand or mold. Junjie trained the crew on the basics—free-blowing and mold-forming jars, rolling out rough windowpanes, and sealing bottles for storage. Their first pieces sagged or collapsed, but by the end of the week, shelves filled with real glass—foggy, wavy, imperfect. Windows went into the weaving hall and communal kitchen, letting in light where only cold air and smoke once crept. It wasn't pretty, but it was progress. And it changed everything.
🧂 Alchemy and Salt
Nano wasn't done. One glance at the big gray blocks of rock salt, and he grimaced. "This stuff's an alchemist's mistake waiting to kill a stew." Laced with dirt, mystery minerals, and who-knew-what else, the raw salt was more hazard than seasoning. So he taught Junjie the fix: dissolve the salt in water, filter the brine through charcoal, then evaporate it—either over fire or in wide sun-baked pans. The result was pure salt, safer, tastier, and whiter than snow. The villagers embraced the process like a sacred rite. Salt wasn't just seasoning—it was life. And now, it was clean, refined, and the kind of small miracle they could taste.
🏫 Schoolhouse, Sort Of
Chengde Ruibo—Junjie's father—had quietly become the village's first teacher. The "classroom" was just a dry corner of the weaving hall, but it worked. A row of slate boards lined the wall while children hunched over, scratching characters with chalk. Lessons came from the classics—the Three-Character Classic, Book of Family Names, and Thousand-Character Classic—alongside math with abacuses, ink strokes, and paper scrolls, plus the Latin alphabet, part curiosity and part future investment. The mothers worked nearby at their looms and spinning wheels, pretending not to listen. Of course, they did. Sometimes they corrected him; sometimes they corrected each other. Learning, it seemed, didn't need permission—only a voice to follow.
🌱 Compost and Plows
Progress, as it turned out, smelled awful. At Nano's insistence, Junjie had the villagers collect every scrap of waste—animal droppings, kitchen leavings, human waste, and old plant matter—into neat compost piles, to their initial horror. Then they watched as the heaps heated, broke down, and transformed into rich, dark soil perfect for spring planting. Suddenly, dumping a chamber pot out back had a purpose.
Next came Nano's latest spark: a proper plow, something better than a stick dragged behind a tired ox. With Nano's designs and Junjie's guidance, the blacksmiths and carpenters built a trial plow—an iron-edged blade, angled for efficient soil turnover, wooden handles, and yoke compatibility. More were already underway, promising that spring planting might not cripple half the village.
🪣 Barrels and Wash Basins
It was down by the river, in the biting wind of late winter, that Junjie noticed the women of the village hunched over icy rocks, beating clothes with sticks until their hands were red and numb. Nano's voice cut into his thoughts. "There's a better way. Cultural archives describe a wash barrel with a ridged board—faster, cleaner, warmer." Junjie imagined it and nodded. A large shallow wooden barrel, a carved washboard for scrubbing, and even wooden buckets with handles for hauling water. Paired with a shoulder yoke, a person could carry two full buckets at once.
He brought the idea to the carpenters, sketching out the barrel and washboard, then explained the metal hoops that would keep the staves tight. The carpenters sent him straight to the forge. Yutu, the blacksmith, listened as Junjie described the hoop sizes, then cut, riveted, and cooled each iron ring before sending them over in neat stacks. In the winter workshop, the carpenters fitted staves together, slid the cooled hoops down into place, and tapped them snug with mallets. Soon, barrels, basins, and buckets took shape—good for storing water, keeping grain dry, or even preserving meat in brine for the long months.
When the first wash barrel and board were ready, Junjie carried them home and showed his mother. Her brows lifted. "We can wash inside the lodge now, away from the wind?" she asked, running her hands over the ridged board. "And reuse the same water? That will save so much work." Word spread quickly. Soon, several women gathered to try it, chattering as they scrubbed, laughing when one suggested that if the clothes were wrung out more, they'd dry faster.
"The rollers should be closer together," Meilin remarked, squeezing a thick tunic. "But some clothes are thin, some are thick."
Junjie took that problem back to the forge. "What if the rollers were pressed together with springs, so they could adjust?" he asked Yutu. The blacksmith considered it, then nodded and set to work, adding spring tension to the wooden rollers so they clamped firmly on thin cloth but gave way for thicker garments. When Junjie returned with the improved wringer with a spring, the women tested it and grinned at the steady streams of water pouring from their laundry.
"This," his mother declared, "is a gift worth more than gold in winter."
🧠 The Genius Nobody Questioned
At some point, Junjie became the village's quiet miracle-worker. Nobody proclaimed it—it just happened. He'd point at a pile of junk and say, "We're going to make soap," or, "This sand's going to be windows," or, "Pile poop over here and wait three months," and every time, somehow, it worked. The younger ones leaned in eagerly, quick to help and quicker to brag—"I helped stir the soap barrel!" or, "Those windows? I rolled the first one." The mothers, busy at looms or hearths, took it in stride, saying, "If Junjie says it'll work, it probably will," while already adjusting their routines.
A few older men grumbled behind beards and bent backs—"That boy's half mad," one muttered while hauling compost, "Back in my day, we didn't stir dung with a stick and call it wisdom"—but they still showed up, shovels in hand. Bit by bit, the village stopped asking why. They just followed his lead. "Sure, Junjie. Why not?" His wild ideas had simply become part of the routine.
❄️ Grinding Through Winter
By the time the last snows began to melt, the days had settled into a hard rhythm: on clear mornings the men mined iron, coal, salt, and stone while hunters checked traps or followed tracks, and trees came down to be hewn into timber; on foul days everyone packed into the workshops where women wove cloaks, baskets, mats, and rope, and children helped with spinning and threading while "accidentally" eavesdropping on lessons in the new school.
The glass shop's first triumph was smooth window panes that let in pale winter light and shut out the drafts that once slipped through shuttered holes; only later did blown vessels gleam on the shelves. Compost pits and new plows promised richer fields when the thaw came. Sturdy barrels stood ready for water and grain, buckets with carved handles and shoulder yokes made hauling easier, wash basins and ridged boards brought laundry indoors, and a wringer with a spring pressed water out in steady streams; fresh meat from Junjie's hunts could even be salted and brined for the months ahead.
Grumbles still echoed in cold halls, jokes still circled over coals, and old stories were told to keep fingers moving—but they weren't just surviving the winter. They were building the bones of a civilization.