It had taken Nik a few runs to move all the charcoal to the small cave but he managed it in a record time thanks to [Running] and [Haste]. The cave was located just about at the halfway point from stream to lake, well if you ignored the vertical and lateral deviation.

As the cave would be protected from most issues that could result from rain and general dampness Nik originally hadn’t worried about anything but getting the charcoal to a rain-sheltered location.

Once this had been accomplished he decided that simple storage wouldn’t be sufficient, slight condensation and wind could ruin some of his work quite easily. To tackle the latter issue he decided to create a few mats out of sticks, to increase the distance between floor and charcoal, hopefully saving him some of the charcoal.

This took him the remaining evening, as he went somewhat overboard. Creating three mats, each around the size of a meter by a half meter. The amount of charcoal he ended up with wasn’t even enough to fill one of those mats ups by half but this didn’t bother Nik by much, instead motivated him to keep working harder in the following days.

It wasn’t the only thing that motivated him. Identifying the charcoal, something he had completely forgotten he could do had left him with a bitter-sweet taste in his mouth.

Mixed Inferior Charcoal - Purity: Inferior; Heat output: Minor; Burn: Inferior

While it was nice enough that [Identify] now actually seemed to show information about some of the properties of a material - once it had to do with his class - I didn’t do much for him since the information he received was only somewhat helpful. It also motivated Nik to strive further and improve upon his techniques.

The first issue obviously was the rating of some of the ascribed properties. What exactly did “Inferior” and “Minor” mean? What is better. Is Inferior better than minor? It is most likely the other way around… It would make more sense. Minor means that there is some worth to the item. Inferior means it is worse than everything you compare it to, right?

With those thoughts Nik moved through the forest, turning back to the lake. Once he arrived he moved along the lakeside towards the river outlet. The day before he had spotted a rather large reeds patch further down the lake. A material he had some uses for if it had a similar structure as back home.

Happily, he waded through the shallow water, plucking the leaves of the reeds and stowing them in the basket he had brought. He hadn’t seen any fish in the lake so far, so he was surprised when he saw some swimming around the reeds, noting that down, in case he should run out of berries - they just were way too good to eat anything else. The regeneration aspect was amazing.

The reeds did end up being different from what he was used to from earth, identifying as Nebon Reets. Instead of the characteristic thin straws, each reed was about a finger thick and similarly strong to bamboo, possibly weaker.

Once his basket had filled up, Nik went back to the tree where he had slept on the previous nights and started weaving once again as it grew dark. This time however he was weaving the reed leaves, into a very shallow bowl, that would hopefully be less permeable to dust and tiny rocks.

After he got done with that he was really considering taking a short nap, but he had previously promised himself to stay up as long as possible to be able to adjust better to the longer day-night cycle. While the sun was just below the horizon this would be a perfect opportunity to level [Unobstructed Optics].

Getting up he grasped the foot by foot large reed-basket in hand and moved back towards the cave. During his slight jog, not using running this time Nik tried to follow his previous footsteps, which were still visible in the ground. It would make sense to develop a path so he could profit from his trail running buff.

After arriving at the cave he quickly stored the matt and promptly left again to try and get at least another round of coal cooking.

The wood gathering proved somewhat successful but it was growing really late, so instead of reigniting the half-filled charcoal pit Nik carried the wood in two charges towards the cave and moved on back to the cave. Bringing charges back to the cave once he had gathered a significant amount. There he stacked them to hopefully dry faster. He hoped that a lower water content would improve the currently inferior charcoal. Finally, as tired as he was he moved back to the tree.

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The next morning Nik woke up only sometime before sunrise. It was already getting brighter outside. The first thing he noticed was an abhorrent smell. It was his clothing and his own body, though to a lesser degree. He had completely neglected his clothing cleanliness and it showed, well smelled.

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So he climbed down and began cleaning his clothes roughly in the lake. He had no soap and barely knew more about cleaning than using the appropriate products and a washing machine, so he was hopelessly outclassed.

It worked out somewhat though and his clothes smelled less bad after he had cleaned them. The smell of smoke was still present but he ignored it, as this would likely be a common occurrence in the next couple of days. While it seemed inappropriate to him, he left the lake wearing only his boxer shorts. While he hadn’t seen any humans he felt uncomfortable wearing nothing at all, and only wearing boxers were already straining the limits of his comfort zone.

In an attempt to increase the pace of his previously started efforts he set up a second batch of charcoal repeating the method of his first production cycle. This time however he set the fire on top, in an effort to encourage thorough burning all throughout the structure and not only at the intakes. Sealing up all the holes once he could see the fire through the air intakes.

Tired and fairly exhausted he moved back to his trees and ate more berries and nuts. He was really keen on finding other edible stuff, he was missing baked beans and pasta a whole lot. As of right now, he didn’t really feel like trying to go any of the other inhabitants of the forest. The monster with the face on its chest had almost seemed sentient though super aggressive, and he was not about to eat anything sentient.

Additionally, berries had offered great benefits so far, he doubted that living beings would give similar bonuses. Maybe other plants though, after all the skill was called Digestive Herbology.

In an effort to be increase productivity in the next couple of days Nik collected all the gathered iron-rich rocks and stored them too in the cave. With some internal positive encouragement - as Nik was starting to be tired -, he arranged some in a half-circle at the end of the four-meter deep cave and set up a little fire - using both some of the wood and charcoal -, to hopefully increase the speed with which he could dry the wood.

The rest of the day was spent gathering more wood to further his charcoal creation. Nik quickly noticed that he was going to need a lot of charcoal, and that building an axe of some sort would be a necessity in the near future. For now he could use fallen branches and cut smaller branches off.

In the afternoon he switched to creating a bloomery-like construct. The reasoning behind that was two-fold. Firstly Nik planned on getting some sort of smelting going on, having long ago accepted the usefulness of his general skills he wanted to get more smithing skills and maybe create stuff he could use. Secondly was that during the day Nik had occasionally tried to reduce the stones to a fine powder to increase the efficiency of the iron melting. It had not gone well. Most rocks couldn’t even be broken up, and those that could were still too large for Niks taste.

While his knowledge about smithing was lacking Nik was aware that creating a fine powder usually increased smelting speed, could reduce the required heat for smelting, and gave better results in the end.

So the next thing Nik came up with, was to just heat the rocks by themselves to high heat, as that would hopefully help in splitting up the rock and also decreasing the internal structural cohesion. The general idea behind that was that there might be water inclusions inside the rock that would split it if the pressure got to high, but if not water other elements would definitely weaken the stones. Ideally, he could reuse the bloomery for that later on, and maybe if contamination could be reduced for alloying the metals too.

For this, he once again moved towards the small stream and gathered some of the more claylike mud. This he combined with a large supply of reed leaves to hopefully increase the structural integrity. In the morning during which he had primarily gathered more wood and set fire to the charcoal pit, he had thought about the placement of all of the stuff. He really wanted it to be by the lake but that was unpractical as long as he had nothing to keep the charcoal dry.

Thus he was gonna build it at the cave. He was gonna have to find a stream somewhat up the mountain to supply himself with water, and that was gonna be a not-so-fun endeavor but for now just creating the base structure would be sufficient. The construction would also take longer due to his supply chain, which was getting wood or coal from the forest and clay from the small stream. The second might be found somewhere on the lake too but Nik wasn’t gonna spent time on that just yet.

The general idea that Nik had for the bloomery was a tapered cylinder, going from about a meter in diameter to about a third. With a wall thickness of at least 20 additional centimeters to keep the heat losses low enough. Additionally, it would need to have at least one, maybe two air intakes at the bottom to continuously provide enough air for the combustion. This however was still not completely fixed as Nik was unsure what kind of bellow design he would go with. The final part was that the ground of the bloomery should idealy be a metal that wouldn’t deform under high temperatures or a ceramic, for now he had access to neither and would thus use the same clay structure on the bottom with a door on the side that could be removed to extract the bloom after the smelting process.

The bellow design Nik had come up with wasn’t anything special and would require him to first craft some basic tools to help with wood crafting. The plan was to hollow out a tree with an as big as possible diameter and insert a wooden disc with the same diameter as the inside of the hollowed-out connected to a drive shaft. Both ends of the tree-bellows would have a small exhaust hole that would cause the air on the inside to flow out.

The intakes would be holes on the opposite flat sides of the piece of log and have either leaves or small bendable pieces of wood or bark as the valve disk. It would basically be a check valve, though the lowest-tech version possible. It required Nik to find some sticky and air-tight resin, but the versions he had encountered during his branch cutting seemed promising.

The airflow tubes would if possible be made from bamboo, but Nik hadn’t found any yet, though the biome seemed to be somewhat tropical. His second choice would be the recently discovered reeds that were hopefully hollow on the inside or maybe had a similar makeup as bamboo.

Being aware of what had to be done next Nik went on to gather everything he would need to build the infrastructure of metal forging.