Chapter 12:The Secrets Behind a Wooden Shack_Haja, The Explorer

It is the early morning of February 19th 333 RPT, the location is a small shack about a two-hour long journey away from the village of Minoborgo. The shack was originally made out of wooden planks and over the years, there have been many critters gnawing away at the wood making up the frame of this small shelter and ruining its protection against the wind.

The owner of the shack has long had a terrible time during the winter seasons due to that.

The cold wind breezed through the estate; it would crawl through the facade before slipping through any walls and obstructions and coiling around his body, that was covered by a simple leather blanket. Normally, he would be used to this to some extend by now but especially since the last few years of his life, the cold has been getting to his aging body more and more. It has gotten to the point, where he dreads every night that he dreaded every night he had to endure in this freezer of a house. He felt tired from every morning where his body was figuratively paralyzed and was refusing to get up. Nevertheless he continued standing up in the morning and he continued lying down for the night. For this was all he could do.

This is why he is all the more surprised about the feelings he has experienced for the last few days: The feelings of cold and numbness have drastically subsided from his life. It is no exaggeration to say that the last week of his life has given him the best sleep, he has ever had.

Only one thing has changed in this week from the previous ones in his life:

He found a young boy on the streets and gave him shelter for the night.

It has been 4 days since then and the young boy has asked him to stay in this shack for the time being in exchange for helping out with daily chores as well as the farming business. In reality, the man would have let the young boy stay for free had he wanted that but the child seemed too eager to do work for him to turn it down. The old farmer consoled himself with the fact that the working experience would one day benefit the child’s future.

The man and child in question are none other than Imogyeran Ashenwald and Hyoran Astaros.

Mr. Astaros has just awoken from his night of sleep and is preparing himself for the day. While changing his clothing for a set that is more suitable for outside activity, he is thinking back about the connection between the weird young child entering his life and his sudden improvement in health. He can only come to one conclusion:

<< It truly is wonderful to do good deeds in your life! A good dead a day keeps any doctor away, Hahahah!>>

Mr. Astaros is interpreting his past physical symptoms as consequences of psychological causes of a lack of social engagement and a potential trauma about not having children being the cause of his divorce.

In other words: Mr. Astaros is happy to have some company in his life and thinks, that this is why he is feeling better. The truth however is a different one:

When taking a look at the exterior of the shed, one will notice a batch of places on the wood that have a different curvature than the rest and have a ‘natural’ aesthetic in comparison to the previous mossy wooden planks.

When preparing a plank, a carpenter would first take a grown tree and debark its trunk until only the inner part of it was left.

After dividing the trunk into multiple parts of the same length, they would then proceed to use an axe to divide the round trunk into two halves of a cylinder.

The newly acquired shapes of wood would then be separated along the natural grains of the wood with the help of a wedge. Most of the time the process of turning the wood into planks would stop at this place, where the thickness of the slightly rounded wood was relatively high. Reason being, a precise process would take a lot more time and expenses and the excess wood would be relatively high, resulting in too much work.

As a result, the planks had clear half-cylindrical tendencies and even after building a shelter with them, there exist a lot of spots, where the wooden planks do not perfectly align or simply leave paper-thin nooks and crevices for the cold wind to sweep in. On closer inspection, it can be seen that the edges of the wood are very rough and one could easily get hurt by simply sliding down a finger around one such piece.

Currently however, the seems between the planks seem to almost have grown together, connecting all the wood that is used as the wall together.

What Imogyeran did was gathering and influencing the spirits representing growth and nature, that permeated this patch of land, and making them reactivate the original growth properties of the wooden planks. This resulted in the different pieces of wood growing together and creating a windproof front that would be a lot more effective than before. But this is by far not the only thing that the young boy did in secrecy:

First, he enchanted the walls as well as the roof with the properties of low temperature permeation (effectively making the wood a better insulation for warmth) by once again using the spirits of the area.

Next thing he did was work on the ground of the shack: A typical shack uses either wooden floor or a floor made out of packed dirt. The advantages from using the compressed amounts of dirt are a decent stability and cost-effectiveness as well as a cooling effect during the warmer seasons but the disadvantages lie in the moderately easy contamination due to insects and pests, which reduces the hygiene in the household. Furthermore, the dirt is directly connected to the rest of the ground and during colder seasons the warmth of the room will be dispersed through it to the adjacent space resulting in inefficient heating systems. Since there are only a limited amount of resources in the area and Mr. Astaros doesn’t have neither the capital to gain them regardless, nor the expertise to create them out of already existing materials, he cannot change anything on his own but Imogyeran is different. First, the young boy takes a patch of the barley seeds, that his current host has bought the other day, and makes them artificially grow.

Once again, the young boy can communicate with the spirits in the surrounding areas, which represent growth and fertility, and is able to enhance the growth capacity of material that should have already lost its ability to grow like the wooden planks or bestow it upon those, that would eventually gain those capabilities with enough time and care. The downside to this method of growth is the low value of nutrients inside the crops grown that way (in other words the food grown with spirit arts are inedible) but it is still used quite often in highly populated areas because the people are interested in the fibers from the crops for different reasons.

In this case, after growing the crops to a desirable level and splitting their fibers down into thin strands(and after a separate dry-freeze-process that keeps critters from being interested in this material), he began to wattle them into thick strands that were relatively durable and could be used as a great insulator for warmth. The downside was the time it took to do that: Since this was the first time, he ever tried to wattle and since he did all this in secret during the night (during the day, he hid the strands in the ground), the entire process of wattling enough lines to clad the entire floor with took a total of 5 days. This was only even possible with the help of ‘Yun’, who enchanted his hands for a higher wattling efficiency and dramatically reduced the time it would otherwise have taken.

Simultaneously, the biggest change to the ground was made with stone: Imogyeran used the spirits in the ground to locate larger rock formations beneath the surface and with some amount of effort and constant work, he was able to move the rocks through the ground underneath the shed and to reshape them into a bowl-form that worked as a protective layer from critters and the like. On a superficial glance over the floor nobody would notice this fact but the effects, especially for the colder seasons, are and will be tremendously beneficial for the the shack’s inhabitants.

This three-layer-method for the floor has been created by the master-craftsman Drafshelm Arkinson, who is currently working on a book with this as part of its contents with his best friend and writer Araka Palma. Both of them are from the country of Rabakda to the north of Ayrilia.

But the question remains unanswered for now: How does the boy know this?

Regardless to the answer, old man Astaros has finally finished changing into a set of outdoor clothing and is getting ready to start the day.

After entering the front-section of this room, Mr. Astaros is able to see the young boy being in one corner and doing some decently advanced stretching exercises. During the last few days, there has not been a single one, where Imogyeran skipped out on his extensive physical exercise. It is apparent to the farmer that he must value his body greatly, or at least that’s the way he is interpreting the situation.

Currently he is doing a split with his lower body while alternating in stretching his upper body in a direction from one of his split legs.

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<>, he spoke to the boy in the corner.

You and a feline mountain beast, really? Next thing you are going to tell me that the kennel have learned to fly, old man?

Sigh, I obviously can’t say that seeing that I am currently invading his turf with my presence. Instead let’s just be keep being diplomatic:

I put on one of my practiced business smiles and hand him my answer:

Groan, I still think that persuading him to let me address him as Mr. Astaros would have been worth it but oh well. Can’t cry over spilled beans.

Breath in and breathe out, Imogyeran. You are better than this. You don’t need to get angry at someone, who is obviously that much less competent than you. This is nothing more than a temporary place to stay, so just keep your cool and-

The old man was proudly making this suggestion while making rapid steps in the direction of the cornered child.

This was the final straw and the sense of emotional control in the still largely immature Imogyeran snapped. His following actions were purely based on emotion and instinct.

<> ,

my first order of business is creating a safe space, so I decide to call for ‘Yun’ in order to create a wind barrier that slightly propels the old man from me. Obviously I signal ‘Yun’ to hold back sufficiently and simply repel him back a few steps.