He stayed up that night to try out this new mortar. Unsurprisingly he needed way more limestone than he had gathered, but it turned out that the human’s light stick did a great job at mining when heated. Chef even managed to get out a sack’s worth of limestone before he broke that too.

Oh well. By the time it was noon of the following day, he had two up and running kilns again. It really was as easy as mine the rock, bake the rock, crush the rock, wet the dust, and pile brick on top. The hard part was cooking the limestone without a working kiln, but he just made one kiln with the crappy clay mortar he’d used before and baked it in there. So he really had one and a half kilns since that one would collapse in the next rain, but who was counting?

Not Chef. He hated math.

With the sack emptied of rocks and clay and filled with wolves, he grabbed the cauldron and set out again. This time it was squirrel soup followed by two wolf stews, but the townspeople were still grinning ear to ear as they ate. Some of the worst cooking Chef had tasted in the past few weeks was celebrated by these people.

Not that he was complaining, not really. That just meant that he could save his boars and flour for himself. He was still missing something critical for a proper pastry, but he would experiment more when he got back. Baking was an art more than a science after all. Because if it was science then Chef wouldn’t like it. Because of his previously mentioned hatred for math, obviously.

With the humans fed for another day, Chef made his way back to his cave home. He could finally go back to baking food instead of needing cauldrons and pots for it. Sadly, his need for a cauldron these past few days had forced him to dump ingredients just… wherever. And, well, he had a salt pile in the cave that was about five goblin feet wide. Said salt pile was filled with carved animals of various types but predominantly boars. Most of the smaller or otherwise stringy meats weren’t all that worth preserving.

Chef had run out of free space in his storage containers a while ago; the three jugs just didn’t do enough for him anymore. He kept a jug of super goop on him at all times just in case he needed to gas someone or something so that was one. He used another for honey and yet another for cream since both were used often enough and relatively mana intensive.

Ironically, he found out that the honey wasn’t that bad anymore right after he had decided to use that jar for it.

The unfortunate part was that even if he dumped the honey, or more accurately just sat down and ate the entire jar in one sitting like an animal, he’d still have nothing better to put in it. Everything that needed storage was way bigger than the jugs were except for the cream and goop.

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Then Chef remembered the buckets that the kiln maker had. Was there any real reason he couldn’t just make one of those out of ceramic instead of wood? Maybe? It was worth trying at least.

Chef still had plenty of clay and decided to start with that. He then realized he had no buckets for the back and forth thing.

“Why does a kiln need bricks from a kiln? Why does ceramic require a bucket? Why can’t anything just be made without needing that thing to already be made?!”

This was becoming frustrating, and he really just needed to shout out his frustrations. Sadly his jugs had mouths just a bit too narrow to be helpful for this mission. He just sat there for a moment, bucketless. Sighing, Chef decided to do what he could with what he had. Again.

This time that meant washing the clay in the creek nearby. He really went at it too, washing small chunks at a time to make sure he was getting as much of the impurities out as he could, squishing the wet clay all the while. Once he felt like he’d washed the first piece enough, he tried to stuff it in the breadbox. It didn’t fit.

Right, the flour. I forgot.

He hadn’t offloaded his flour yet. And between the jug of it that the handsome man had given him and the jug of goop he carried at all times just in case of emergencies, he really couldn’t fit anything else in his inter-dimensional storage. Oh well. He decided to just put all the wet clay on his lap until he felt like he’d prepared enough.

The walk back was awkward, shameful, and full of squishing sounds. He dropped lots of clay before he gave up and decided on multiple trips. Doing it all at once actually wasted time since he now had to clean the grass off the fallen clay.

Regardless, he had his clay eventually, enough for a bucket at least. And now it was time to use Rise and Set Temperature to cheat and save time. How hard could this be?

Very, as it turned out. The kiln maker had made it look so easy, but it took hours and multiple tries before the buckets he made didn’t break almost immediately. Turned out that sharp angles and ceramic didn’t mix. Who knew?

Once he had two buckets things got easier. More bucket like things were the priority, though they were really just big bowls with lids. Eventually he got to the point where all his ingredients had a different container. The townspeople were making good progress on the mill too, not that he really understood that one. What he did know is they went a bit faster after every one of his visits.

They must like my food more than I thought.

What Chef wasn’t thinking about was how high leveled his cooking had gotten combined with the decent level of the wolves. While he couldn’t get any stat points from them unless he ate a couple dozen of them, the low leveled humans were a different story entirely.

It wasn’t just motivation that sped their movements. They were literally getting stronger and faster from eating his food. It took another two days before Chef figured that out.

Overall, two weeks had passed since he gave the town their one month time limit to build the mill. And while he hadn’t been paying attention to who was or wasn’t in town, two people escaped to go get help.