It had been 3 months since I awoke to this world.
I never once rested or dilly dallied and constantly prepped for my eventual departure to another land to find civilization and find people to make my colony.
At first I just continued hunting gathering skins to turn into leather which could make clothes and other equipment such as backpacks, pouches, shoes, ponchos, hats and so on.
I didn’t only hunt either I also spend time gathering different kinds of herbs to make medicine, crafting a makeshift mortar and pestle and make a few pieces of pottery it didn’t take long before I could make some basic medicine, unfortunately since the tools I had available weren’t very up to par I could only create low to mid quality medicine meaning serious sickness were not things I could cure just yet.
Anyways later I also tried my hand into taming beasts, once I had gotten enough pelt and only needed to hunt for food gaining a few companions to ease my load through traveling or protection became another goal.
Because the area I was in was some kind of boreal forest where it was perpetually cold.
I only found creatures that were used to the cold here, like caribou, deer, elk and some other creatures.
Since I had a lot I wanted to carry with me and wanted to ride a creature to make my travels easier I first looked for some kind of pack mule amongst these animals for me to tame.
Of course taming too many animals was an issue as well since I didn’t want my travel speed to be too slow neither did I want to take care of that many animals.
In the end I decided to tame 3 caribous to be my mules and for me to ride.
The process was pretty simply I just used traps to capture these 3, starved them for a bit so they wouldn’t oppose me and periodically fed them by hand for 10 or so days while showing care and tenderness even though I was the one who was putting them through starvation.
Within 12 days I easily tamed these 3 caribou, the original pack of caribou they belonged to had long since left from my harassment so they wouldn’t be hindering me taming these 3 caribou.
After all was said and done I had successfully acquired 3 beasts of burden, since I didn’t want to bother thinking about a name for these 3 I simply named them Cari 1 to 3.
Bad, I know but I really didn’t want to bother.
On another plus side, upon taming these 3 caribou I quickly noticed that there was a change to the ability I had, a new icon appeared with the head of a wolf, the first icon that showed the area around from a bird eyes view was just a mere box but this one was more intricate and what it showed me was another window which detailed every beast I tamed, where it currently was, what state it was in both externally and internally, and how well trained it was.
These Caribou weren’t exactly the smartest animals in the world and from what it seemed the amount of things I could teach them were limited to attacking others and generally be obedient.
Above that was fetching things for me, being messengers and understanding when to protect others in dire need.
Animals that had the ability to talk weren’t animals at that point but individuals like humans which is why they weren’t considered animals.
Now knowing that the ability could still improve and change I started to wonder what the limit was, it was already amazing that I could track the beasts I tamed, knowing what state they were in was also handy in case something unexpected happened and I couldn’t understand the cause.
Maybe when I create my colony even change would occur but right now that was still far off into the distant future.
Getting back on track, my life gained another routine in the form of training my caribou, it’s at this point I noticed that my mood which was usually very cold and detached started to improve with the presence of the caribou who kept me company and turned my lonesome life into a brighter one then before.
My medical knowledge and social knowledge told me that the presence of another significant life-form to interact with was good for mental health, because I’ve been isolated for so long I immediately noticed the change once I had a companion who I could be close to, the reason I didn’t go crazy by now by all this isolation was because I had dozens of traits in my repertoire that hindered such development.
Any ordinary person would have gone mad at this point and gone into a mental break, likely I wasn’t just an ordinary person.
Now with the addition of the 3 caribous, cari 1 to 3 I started to think about getting myself some bodyguards as well.
My first thought was about taming a wolf, a timber wolf to be precise as I had already those close to my area so they wouldn’t bother me, but after thinking about it and discussing things with my already present knowledge I quickly came to the conclusion that taming a wolf would be too difficult without spending a lot of time.
Carnivores animals in general were far harder to tame, but fortunately I had found a small pack of huskies not too far from here to put under my wing.
Observing them for a bit I came to understand that this small pack of huskies had gotten themselves into quite a pickle as they couldn’t hunt sufficient food for everyone.
In total there were 5 of these huskies all basically grown up, the reason for their lack of food was because of the wolves nearby who caused trouble at times and made life hard for them.
This forest in general had already strictly organized areas laid out where which animal would hunt in and whose territory it was; the area I was in belonged to the brown bear I had killed while most of the other areas belonged to the wolves or other predators.
Every other area had too many members which the huskies couldn’t compete with.
I used this fact to make them my pets.
Not one to waste time, I immediately started using the same method that I used with the caribou, violence was another option against predatory animals, but that rarely worked as it most of the time always backfired and even if it did work I would only teach these huskies that they could usurp me if they killed me which is not what I wanted.
No, hunger was the easiest way to tame an animal, but compared to the caribou it took an entire 20 days to tames these five, but in the end it was still worth it since I finally gotten both pack mules and a few guards on my side even if they weren’t human.
The names I used to name these 5 didn’t change from how I named the caribous either I just called them husk1 to 5.
Terrible, I know.
Finally, next on my agenda was something that came to mind after looking over the map and see what I could find.
On a hill a small distance away I found a small iron deposit sticking out into the open.
Upon discovering that I immediately had the idea to upgrade my current equipment, not just into iron, but steel.
Steel in the end was just iron with all of impurities removed, with my smithing knowledge I knew exactly how to make steel without needing any advanced tools, the only downside was that the process would be a bit difficult and take a good amount of time, but making it was well worth it as steel tools would give me an extremely high edge in the future.
And as such I started my work.
Using my caribous as carriers, I, along with my pack of huskies traveled towards that iron deposit to collect all the iron we could carry back home.
The moment I came back home I made the smelting furnace called bloomery using mud, sticks and straw, lighted an extremely hot fire, waited until it was ready before dropping the iron into the furnace batch by batch while waiting for each batch to melt and separate before finally collecting the end result which was stuck at the bottom.
The result looked like a charred amalgamation that felt like glass which was called slag, this huge lump was called iron bloom, which wasn’t really iron quite yet
Taking that burning lump of iron bloom, I brought out a wooden hammer I had prepared earlier, putting it on a flat hard surface I hut the lump until I beat out all the impurities which were the black glass pieces stuck inside while sometimes heating the lump to make it easier to beat for cleaning.
This work was strenuous, but the end result was wrought iron or bloomer iron, still not quite iron, but already halfway there.
Next I used charcoal that I also prepared back then to combine with the wrought iron and heated up the entire thing to combine which was called cementation.
This process alone lasted for an entire week, my aim was to make the wrought iron combine with the carbon inside the charcoal finally creating something known as blister steel.
But even then the process wasn’t quite complete yet. At least not to the point I had created a quality of steel.
Next I made a clay crucible to heat the blister steel and remove all the impurities that were left behind by the cementation process to make the final product which was ultimately cast steel.
Forming this cast steel I first made a steel hammer so I could make the rest of the tools far easier going forward.
Afterwards came my tools, allowing me to create a hunting knife, a better spear head, a better axe so on and so forth.
I made all the tools I could imagine I would need, this all taking exactly more than a month and a half.
At the end when I finally finished I believed that I was fully prepared and ready to leave.
And just as I made my plan to for departure a sudden alert rang inside my head.
The map icon shone with an eerie red, I immediately opened it to see what was going on and as soon as I did the map alerted me of 4 individuals coming into my area.
4 humans to be exact.
This was the first time I had met humans since I came and it was also the first time I would kill humans in this world.
A Place Of Legends 