Building a Civilization and Raising Cubs in the Beast World – CH52

Chapter 52

No one knew exactly how much honey the young wolves had consumed over the years, but the amount of honey in Bai Tu’s hands was visibly increasing. 

In just a few days, he had filled three large wooden barrels with honey. As the wolves grew older, their appetites only grew larger. It turned out that over the years, they had raided every beehive in the tribe’s territory just to keep themselves fed.

Unlike the wolves’ method of recklessly jabbing at beehives with long poles, Bai Tu had a more careful approach. He would first prepare herbs like mugwort and light them near the hive. 

Once the smoke drove the bees away, he would carefully remove the honeycomb. 

Afterward, he transferred the queen bee, larvae, and a portion of the honey to a prepared beehive. This way, it was easier to harvest honey in the future, and during the winter, the hives could be moved indoors for warmth.

Every time Bai Tu harvested honey, Lang Qi would glance at his foolish younger brother.

Each glance made Lang Ze’s face throb even more painfully, as if the shame of his actions had added to his injuries.

With the increasing amount of honey, Bai Tu was careful not to use it all at once. Honey had a long shelf life, so there was no rush to consume it immediately.

The honey pomelo tea was a unanimous hit. Summer was already unbearably hot, and hydration was crucial. 

Drinking a bowl of chilled, refreshing pomelo tea was pure bliss. 

Bai Tu added it to their routine, making a batch every couple of days. Sometimes, he even used other fruits in place of pomelo. The ingredients were simple, natural, and safe to consume freely.

However, as production increased, Bai Tu began to notice a problem: they were running out of tools. Wooden barrels, which were being used extensively, were prone to damage and wasted a lot of wood.

All the barrels currently used by the tribe were handmade by the rabbit tribe. 

They would chop down large trees, hollow them out with their claws, and shape them into barrels. Because the barrels weren’t coated or treated, they weren’t entirely waterproof. 

Tribe members had to transfer water into stone pots before it leaked too much. The barrels primarily served as transportation vessels.

Now that Bai Tu was making large quantities of tea and other drinks, the stone pots were often tied up with cooking, leaving only the wooden barrels for liquids. 

Unfortunately, the barrels didn’t last long. Soaking in water made them absorb moisture, which caused them to deteriorate quickly. 

After only two days of use, the barrels would become completely waterlogged. Drying them out often led to cracking, rendering them unusable.

When a barrel cracked, the only option was to make a new one. But the amount of wood needed to produce so many barrels wasn’t insignificant. 

Furthermore, the process of hollowing out the wood was highly inefficient. The interior had to be entirely carved out, and since this was done by claw, it produced only wood shavings, which couldn’t be reused and had to be burned as firewood.

The barrels were made from tall, straight trees that were both thick and sturdy, but using such valuable wood for barrels felt wasteful. On top of that, the increased cooking frequency was causing the wooden bowls to wear out faster as well. 

These issues made Bai Tu seriously consider an idea he’d been mulling over for a while: upgrading their tools.

Continuing to rely solely on stone and wooden tools wasn’t sustainable. It was time to introduce new types of tools—such as pottery.

The first step in making pottery was to build a kiln. 

Fortunately, the lime powder the leopard tribe had gifted them was still in good supply. 

The lime hadn’t been used much for silkworm farming, so Bai Tu planned to mix it with sandy soil to create a binding agent. The other required materials would have to be made from scratch.

Bai Tu enlisted some of the wolves who had free time after returning from hunting to help make clay bricks. 

To his surprise, this task became wildly popular among the wolves. Bai Tu only needed seven or eight people for the job, but the wolves constantly fought over these spots, eager to participate.

Both the rabbit and cat tribes, who had initially wanted to join in, stood to the side, stunned by the wolves’ fierce competition for the task.

Bai Tu sighed and waved his hand. “Fine, everyone can help.”

Recently, the rabbit tribe had dug up a lot of clay while working on trenches, which could now be put to good use. In fact, it was seeing this abundance of clay that made Bai Tu decide to try making pottery in the first place—no matter how many ideas he had, it would all be futile without proper materials.

As the clay bricks were molded and set out to dry, Bai Tu led the group in crafting pottery pieces. 

The clay, free of impurities, was kneaded and beaten repeatedly to remove any air bubbles before being shaped into the desired forms. The finished shapes were set in the cave to dry in the shade.

Once the bricks had dried, they were stacked and held together with lime and other adhesives to build the pottery kiln. 

To increase the kiln’s temperature, Bai Tu built a bellows based on his memory of one. 

With plenty of bricks on hand, Bai Tu also constructed two stove platforms. 

Previously, cooking had involved propping up stone pots with whatever appropriately sized rocks they could find. These makeshift setups varied in shape and size, and they all had one thing in common: poor wind resistance. On windy days, flames would scatter in all directions.

The brick stoves, by contrast, were not only far more functional but also better-looking than the stone setups.

Once the pottery kiln was complete, Bai Tu fired it empty to temper the structure. After the kiln’s interior changed color from the heat, he began placing the dried clay pottery inside to fire it.

This was Bai Tu’s first time actually firing pottery, and aside from some trial runs, he had no prior experience. He relied purely on intuition to judge temperature changes. The firing process lasted the entire night, and the kiln was left to cool the next day.

Once the kiln’s temperature dropped to room temperature, Bai Tu carefully removed each piece with tools.

The results were mixed. 

The temperature control wasn’t ideal—half of the ten pottery pieces cracked during firing. 

Two others, placed too close to the edges of the kiln, hadn’t fired evenly and were undercooked on one side. However, the remaining three pieces were fully usable. With a 30% success rate on his first try, Bai Tu was quite pleased.

Initially, Bai Tu had made over twenty clay pieces, but several had cracked during the drying process. 

The second batch had fewer cracks, so he prepared them for another firing. After documenting the changes in flame color during the first firing on a bamboo slip—flame color being closely tied to temperature—Bai Tu used this record to adjust the wood supply and refine the firing process for the next batch.

In the second firing, the success rate improved slightly. 

Whether it was due to luck or better temperature control, three out of seven clay pieces were successfully fired, raising the success rate to over 40%. Altogether, Bai Tu had produced six usable pottery pieces across the two firings.

Out of the six, one pot leaked water, but the remaining five were perfectly functional, suitable for holding water or cooking soup.

Since this was just the beginning, Bai Tu had modeled the pots after the tribe’s wooden bowls, which were about the size of a single-serving pot by modern standards. 

To test them, Bai Tu built a small stove from bricks and began heating them.

Though everyone was already used to Bai Tu coming up with surprising new items, no one expected something like this. 

The pottery looked similar to wooden bowls but was far more practical. It didn’t leak a single drop of water, just like stone bowls, but it was much thinner and significantly lighter.

If Bai Tu hadn’t warned them that ceramic bowls were fragile and couldn’t be handled carelessly, everyone would have rushed to pick them up for a closer look.

As the beastmen marveled at this unfamiliar creation, the water in the ceramic pot on the stove suddenly started boiling. The group’s curiosity turned into sheer astonishment.

Due to their limited skills, the stone pots and bowls made by the beastmen were all thick and heavy—especially the stone pots, which were not only bulky but also required a long time to heat up before cooking. 

Recently, the tribe’s demand for water had increased, leaving the beastmen tasked with cooking to spend nearly the entire day in front of the stove. 

The earthen brick stoves Bai Tu had taught them to make had improved things slightly—at least they no longer had to deal with fire bursting out in all directions—but boiling water was still a laborious task.

Yet, while the water in the stone pot hadn’t even finished preheating, the water in Bai Tu’s ceramic pot was already boiling. How could they not be shocked?

Bai An’s eyes lit up with excitement, and he immediately saw the potential. “Bai Tu, can we make more of these tools?” 

A lightweight, quick-heating pot like this would be a sensation at the market! 

Even if they didn’t trade it for other resources, having more of them in the tribe would make life so much easier. 

With these convenient ceramic pots, they wouldn’t need to crowd together for meals anymore. When winter came, everyone could cook their own soup in their caves.

The stone pots, with their slow heating and large size, were too few in number for every beastmen to have one. In winter, sharing a pot for hot water was inconvenient and inefficient.

Bai Tu nodded. “Of course. I’ll teach everyone how to knead the clay properly. I also plan to make some larger pots for cooking or storing water.” 

With an abundance of clay available, there was no reason to hold back. Bai Tu also hoped to eventually replace all the tribe’s tools with better ones.

Gesturing to the damaged ceramics, Bai Tu added, “The cracked ones can still be used to store things that don’t require being watertight, like fruits or salt. 

If you’re storing salt, just line the inside with a dry leaf first.” 

The cracked pots weren’t completely useless; they just couldn’t hold water or be used for cooking. 

For other purposes, they worked just fine. The tribe couldn’t afford to be wasteful—every resource was precious, and a small crack didn’t mean it should be thrown away.

“I’ll use them for salt storage,” Bai An said, immediately taking on the task.

While preparing the next batch of clay pottery, Bai Tu came up with a few new ideas. “I’ll make a set specifically for measuring, with handles attached. That way, we can use them to distribute salt or other supplies more easily.”

Currently, the distribution of resources like salt wasn’t very precise. For example, salt was traded at the rate of ten contribution points for “a handful,” but the size of that handful depended entirely on the team leader’s hand. 

This method wasn’t particularly hygienic either, as some leaders used their bare hands while others used spoons of varying sizes, determined only by the material available at the time.

Bai Tu planned to standardize the tribe’s measurement system. Within their own tribe, minor discrepancies in resource distribution weren’t a big deal, as most beastmen didn’t fuss over small differences. However, as collaborations with other tribes increased, having a unified standard would help avoid many potential conflicts.

The pottery-making project was in full swing, and before long, they had built a second kiln. 

These kilns wouldn’t just be used for firing pottery—they could also be repurposed for smelting iron or firing bricks in the future. They would never go idle. If they had more lime, Bai Tu would have considered building a third kiln right away.

With continued practice, the pottery success rate had risen to around 50%, which Bai Tu was quite satisfied with. 

Starting from the third batch, he began experimenting with larger pots, which had more practical uses. 

Achieving such a success rate with these larger pieces was already impressive. Furthermore, the rate of cracking during the drying phase had decreased significantly, showing clear progress overall.

Knowing that Bai Tu needed lime for the kilns, Lang Qi led a team of wolves to the location Bao Duo had mentioned to mine more lime.

The journey to the Brown Monkey Tribe took three to four days, but the wolves, taking only minimal rest, completed the round trip in five days. However, Lang Qi returned with a less-than-pleased expression.

Bai Tu’s heart sank as he saw Lang Qi’s face. Did they not find any lime? Or has it all been used up?

“There were only ten baskets’ worth,” Lang Qi said, clearly dissatisfied. He had taken thirty wolves with him, intending to bring back enough to meet Bai Tu’s needs in one trip.

“Ten baskets is fine. It’s enough for now,” Bai Tu reassured him. He would think of alternative solutions later if they needed more.

Lang Qi then handed over another basket. “We found these stones nearby.” He wasn’t sure if Bai Tu could use them, so he decided to bring them back just in case.

Stones? Bai Tu froze for a second before picking up one of the rocks to examine it closely. Limestone?

If this was limestone, there was no need to worry about running out of lime ever again!

Bai Tu held his breath and asked, “Are there a lot of these stones?”

Lang Qi nodded. “Plenty. The entire mountain is covered with them.”

“An entire mountain of limestone…” Bai Tu muttered, his voice barely audible. This was practically the same as having an entire mountain of lime at their disposal!

For a moment, Bai Tu couldn’t find the words to express his feelings. Finally, he exclaimed, “You’re amazing! Absolutely incredible!”