Building a bathhouse turned out to be much harder than I had anticipated. Bren's help was invaluable; he molded the stone and built the rooms with a new entrance next to the cave entrance, as well as a bonus entrance from the storage room in the cave so we didn't have to go outside to access the baths. However, the rest of the process was much more challenging than I had imagined. Working in a small, damp, and humid stone room was far from pleasant, and we had to ask Ember to clean the two larger bath rooms, the smaller private one, and the entry area frequently as the humidity encouraged the growth of slimy moss on every surface.
Thankfully the little guy was as hungry as ever and seemed more than pleased to help out in the evening in addition to his dish cleaning and triage administration duties.
"Maybe we should brute force this instead of trying to find a way to make and maintain water levels," Artis suggested, looking mentally drained. "We can see if a crafter can make something to generate recovery water out of some of the mana gems I can make from my own mana. Then we can use your mana gems to heat things still." The stone was still too hot for the water to be anything other than steam when it entered, so we needed to find a new solution. Currently we just had mana gems from my mana type attached to the inside of the baths heating the surrounding stone and water that came in contact.
"I think the main reason Bren said people don't do that is because it's considered expensive," I said. "But at this stage, it's the only solution I can see actually working. I would love to know how the city bathhouses do it, but for now, mana gems are the way to go. Let's go get Bren and start planning, I guess." Crafting mana gems was time-consuming, even with the tool to help, so we needed to find a way to make the process faster. Unfortunately despite his family’s building knowledge Bren had been clear that most bathhouses kept their exact methods and mana types used a close secret to prevent others copying to steal business from them. As it wasn’t a survival issue no city lord wanted to irritate merchant families by getting involved either, unlike when someone found a food production improvement or a new method for producing potable drinking water.
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News that we were building a bathhouse had spread, and gossip traveled fast among the hunters, who were mostly in their twenties. While this would be a huge improvement for hygiene, Artis was impressed that no disease outbreak had happened yet. Even though higher-level people got sick less often and we didn't have many children in the settlement yet, we were starting to understand why cities with proper bathhouses that were mage-operated were so expensive.
"Alright, sure, we can grab Chris as well this afternoon and find out if he can create something to help. We can only hope it isn't too unmanageable. It's almost lunch, so let's get cleaned up and see if we get lucky and bump into him. If not we can go grab him after we talk to Bren about this more." Standing up from my spot working on one of the baths I made my way over into the main treatment space to wash off my hands and face from the sweat and dirt that built up while working.
With Artis being able to produce cleansing water for a low-mana cost, we had made a basin attachment to each of the treatment beds, as well as an extra group of them at the back. Even though there were classes that specialized in small creatures that even un-specialized mana couldn't detect, it was still hard to believe that they existed and had so little mana that you couldn't sense them at all. We had developed a habit of washing our hands in one of the basins along the back wall anytime we swapped tasks, and Artis had encouraged people to wash their hands with one of the pitchers of cleansing water he provided before meals rather than just wiping them off. It didn’t seem to make a difference, but it made Artis happy and everyone knew settlements with happy healers were often spared from a lot of problems, and with how wide the field of healing was it wasn’t uncommon for each healer to provide different advice for different things, so no one seemed to take issue with the small routine change thankfully.