After the girls had left to work on figuring out how they would get rid of the frost bats, Ben began his own goal, earning Myriad faith amongst the town.
It started out easy enough, Fontesh showed him all of the enchanted items she possessed, which wasn’t too many. The cold box for storing food, a water jug for collecting water from the air, a stove for cooking, and a few simple lights. None of the enchantments on the ones she owned were overly complicated and Ben was able to improve them all. It looked like they had all been produced with lower levels of magic than he was capable of enchanting with, so he was able to get them all working better while being more mana efficient in only a little over an hour.
The problem came when he wanted to start repairs on the house and asked about a resource he was certain would be available, given that all of the houses seemed to be made out of wood.
“Wait, what do you mean there isn’t any oil in the village?” He asked, shocked.
“We all have some around for cooking of course, but the quantities you’re looking for just aren’t something we can manage. Why is it so important?”
Ben could only groan. He suddenly understood why the village was so beaten down. The entire place was rotting. The wood the houses had been made from hadn’t been treated beyond just charring it. Sure, that would help to increase the lifespan, but that was no substitute for properly sealing it all.
He had to wonder if that meant that the villagers had made their homes themselves without properly understanding how to do it, or if they’d been ripped off when they hired someone from outside, but that didn’t matter. All that meant was his workload had just drastically increased.
Or did it? He was in a village full of plant mages after all, maybe they’d be able to do something about it.
“Hey, this is a random question, but I don’t suppose you could stimulate a tree to yield its sap or extract the oil from some seeds?”
“Um, it might be possible, but if it is I’m not sure how. We typically use our magic to speed up the growth of a plant or to increase the yield of our crops. I could probably make a tree grow more seeds if that would help?”
“It would be great if you could do that! Considering that it sounds like your house hasn’t been treated at all, I’ll need a lot. Would you be free to go to the woods now?”
“Alright, since I’ve already tended to my garden and the sacred forest is off-limits for the time being I’ve nothing else to do during the day. I’ll just be a minute to find Delair.”
“Cool, pretty sure my worker has had enough time to sleep so I’ll grab him and meet you out front.”
He made a pitstop to the room to empty out his bag before running to the back of the house to bang on the shed door. It took a few minutes, but eventually a groggy Skoe answered and looked up at the sun.
“I could only have been asleep for a handful of hours.”
“And I haven’t slept at all, don’t be a baby. I need to collect some more things from the woods so I need your help. The sooner this is done the better off Sachel will be.”
Helping me create a favourable evaluation of you in town will probably be good for her too, now hush I’m not losing my free labour.
<...>
The man groaned but gave in, taking only a single one of his swords and strapping it to his hip before they met up with the other two. Delair seemed to be filled with energy at the idea of the little outing and immediately tried to climb Ben. Fontesh apologised while trying to keep her daughter under control, but he just laughed it off and placed the kid on his shoulders as they went off to the woods.
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When they got there Fontesh took Delair off his hands and brought her to a nearby tree she knew they could get seeds that could be used for lantern oil if anything went wrong with their enchanted lights and started stimulating them to grow, training her daughter in the magic at the same time.
Ben handed them his spacial bag so they could fill it as they went and took Skoe around, trying to find any good fatwood to extract tar from to act as a sealant, as well as for any shingling that might need to be done.
He took his ax and went up to trees with dead, low-hanging branches and scraped away at the bark until he found what he was looking for and pointed it out to Skoe.
“Here, see how the wood here is darker? Cut away every branch like this you can find. We’re going to need a bunch,” They needed branches rich in tree resin so they could extract it for their waterproofing, and they would need a lot. Given that there were almost thirty houses in the village, if he was going to be getting every one of them done, he’d have a lot of work to do.
“How many is a bunch?”
“Just keep getting them until I say to stop,” At that his four-armed companion made a face, but he was having none of it. “And no complaining allowed, this is infinitely easier than what I’m going to have to do.”
He handed over the ax and got to work on his own task, making even more tools he would need from any large enough stones he could find. Unfortunately, this time he wasn’t so lucky as to be making something simple like a hammer or an ax. With only the destructive power of his enchanting, as well as the hammer and chisel he’d made the previous night, he was going to have to slowly chip away at rock to make both a sealable container to produce tar, as well as an oil press.
Once he found the first rock big enough for what he needed, he took a seat on it and closed his eyes, mapping out how he was going to go about it in his head. It would take a while and he’d have to be careful to avoid any mistakes that would need him to start over, but it was possible.
Starting with the sealed container, he used his enchanting to selectively weaken areas of the rock he was at, shaping it to be a more uniform cylinder while being careful to leave two sturdy handholds on the sides. From there, the next task was to hallow it out, turning it into a large pot the wood could be put in. This too wasn’t so hard to accomplish, with the greatest difficulty being to maintain the mana running through the stone chisel he’d made to keep it from breaking.
While not hard to do as it didn’t require a lot of care, it was still slow. By the time he was done that, the pot was almost complete. All that was left was creating small holes in the bottom for any tar to flow through, as well as creating a bowl to catch it and a lid that would be reasonably airtight.
The bowl was easy enough, he just found another large stone and began shaping it the same way he’d done before, taking more care to create a lip for the first container to sit on. It was the lid that would be slightly more difficult. He could simply try to create a lip at the top of the pot for a lid to sit on and cake it with mud to keep it airtight, but he was worried that wouldn't be good enough, especially since he’d never made anything like this before.
Instead, he carefully cut a spiraled channel into the rim, while cutting the lid to match so both pieces would screw together. He’d still cake it with mud when he was using it to be sure, but he was confident it would get the job done.
With that complete, it was on to the oil press. His immediate issue was that he only had a rough idea on how to put one together, which might impact his overall yield, but there was nothing he could do for that. He’d already asked Fontesh if the village had one he could use, but it seemed any time they wanted oil they simply did it by hand.
He couldn’t help at marvel at how vastly different the lifestyles could be in the world, from how advanced Anailia was with its abundance of magic materials, to his regular lifestyle in Stonewall, which while lacking compared to his life on Earth hadn’t been so bad as a whole, to this. He was sure if the dryads weren’t so cold to outsiders then their overall standard of living would improve, but there was nothing he could do to change how they lived and instead he got to work on the press.
The design for this one was simple, though he’d have to make it all in one piece. It came down to making a pot with a small hole in the side where any oil obtained would be squeezed out, but at the top of it there would need to be a thick bar with a threaded insert for a screw-like bar to be. The challenge was that the bar needed a handle at the top for twisting, with a base that would go into the pot, matching its diameter, meaning the entire thing would need to be made from the same piece of stone without taking anything apart.
By the time he was done he felt mentally exhausted despite having three minds available to him, but his work was far from over yet. With tools complete he looked to the others with him. Fontesh and Delair had almost filled the entire cubic meter of space the spacial bag provided, and Skoe had assembled a large pile of usable sticks. All that was left was getting it all back so he could get everything started.