Chapter 17: The Cotton Quilt
Arriving at the market, Zhao Man headed straight for the base-run depot. He had no real idea what he should buy, but fortunately, the shop was far more crowded than usual. Lingering near the patrons, he eavesdropped on the hushed, rapid conversations around him.
“Every snow season, buying nutrient solutions costs an absolute fortune. Sigh.“
“Everyone has to buy them. We buy them year-round anyway, it’s just that buying a few at a time makes it seem like less.”
Zhao Man took mental notes: Nutrient solutions—an absolute must. Twenty cents a vial; give me five points’ worth.
“I need to grab some fabric. My brother-in-law brought back two sacks of raw cotton this year, and my family bought a bit off him. It’s just enough to make two padded jackets for the kids.”
Fabric? I’ve got some at home. Cotton? Got that too. Perfect for sewing a proper quilt. Two bolts of cloth: 160 cents.
“My eldest son has to help run base training camps after the snow falls. Word is the barracks are freezing, so my daughter-in-law told me to pick him up a Cloud-Cocoon suit.”
“My man has to go too. I need to buy him one as well; his old one barely keeps him warm anymore.”
A Cloud-Cocoon suit? That was completely outside Zhao Man’s realm of knowledge, but it certainly sounded remarkably warm. Tailing behind the two women, he squeezed into the garment section. The Cloud-Cocoon suit was a muted slate-blue, incredibly light and soft to the touch, feeling much like the thermal base layers from his previous life. A whisper-thin two-piece set, with the most economical version running twenty points.
“Are you grabbing draft strips?”
“Yeah. Want to split a roll?”
Draft strips? Hearing another unfamiliar term, Zhao Man stashed the thermal set into his pack, clutched his bolts of fabric tight, and fell in behind the pair.
The weather-stripping foam was a palm wide, rolled tightly into a cylinder as thick as a torso, resembling a miniature mortar shell. One roll cost fifty cents. It was awkward to carry, so he paid another cent for an oversized woven sack, stowing the fabric and the draft strip inside to carry like a tote.
With the crowd jostling back and forth, Zhao Man looked all around, dividing his attention to eavesdrop on the ambient chatter. Suddenly, the weight in his hand shifted downward. He glanced down to see a young boy clutching a razor blade, right in the middle of slicing open his backpack. Catching Zhao Man’s eye, the boy spun around on his heel, slipped into the dense crowd, and vanished.
Zhao Man surveyed his surroundings. Practically every resident had their backpack slung securely across their chest. Emulating them, he clasped the bottom of his pack with both hands, looping the draft strip over his forearm.
Zhao Man then wandered among the open-air stalls outside. The independent vendors mostly sold harvested wild greens and handcrafted goods, with prices fluctuating wildly. The base-run depot, on the other hand, kept its prices mostly insulated from seasonal shifts. The vast majority of the crowd was buying potatoes, hauling them away in sack after sack. With the snow season bearing down, foot traffic had multiplied several times over, yet a full sack remained steady at ten points.
After browsing several more stalls without spotting anything else he needed, he doubled back to the official depot. Following the crowd’s lead, he picked up a fur-lined winter trapper hat, a windproof overcoat, and a pair of insulated gloves, which ran him five points. With that, Zhao Man made his way home. While every purchase was strictly necessary, the blistering speed at which his points drained still made his wallet ache.
Zhao Man carried his backpack across his chest and had a sack slung over his shoulder, but since everyone around him was hauling armfuls of bundles and sacks, he didn’t stand out much. He even spotted a burly female Beta sprinting past with a full sack of potatoes hoisted over her shoulder, striding along like the wind.
Suddenly, she halted. Following her line of sight, Zhao Man spotted a pack of street urchins sprinting toward her from the distance. She gripped the mouth of her bag with one hand, gave her shoulder a firm heave to balance the load, and planted her feet apart in a steady, wide stance. With her free hand, she drew a dagger from somewhere on her person, glaring down the oncoming rush. Seeing her stance, the children skidded to a halt and scattered in all directions.
“Hmph! Thinking of swiping my food? You little runts must be tired of breathing!”
The surrounding crowd didn’t bat an eye, long accustomed to such scenes. Zhao Man pulled his gaze away and kept walking. Two minutes later, a sharp scream rang out ahead. His stomach dropped. Clamping both bags in a death grip, he pivoted toward the commotion, only to see that same gang of children regrouping and swarming a person cradling a bag of potatoes. The victim was crouched against the wall, using his scrawny frame to shield the potatoes clutched to his chest. The children darted around him in a tight pack, lunging with their hands and kicking out with their feet. The distant shout of a patrol unit echoed down the alley; unable to break through in time, the kids scattered into the maze of alleys.
Zhao Man tightened his grip on his bags, not daring to linger for a second longer, and hurried home at a brisk trot. Back inside, he stowed the nutrient solutions, the draft strip, and the bolts of fabric into the bamboo tubes beneath his bed. He folded the Cloud-Cocoon suit, trapper hat, windproof overcoat, and gloves, packing them alongside his other clean clothes into the newly bought woven sack, which he tied off and set in the corner of his bed.
Returning to the kitchen, he went through his daily routine of boiling water. Out of the sack of potatoes he’d bought, seven remained. He washed them clean and laid them across the bamboo rack to steam. Then, he fished out three stalks of bracken ferns from the jar in his bedroom.
When he had originally pickled the ferns, he had torn them down to the thickness of chopsticks. Zhao Man shredded them further into paper-thin threads, then snipped them short. Three stalks yielded half a bowl of salted pickles. After tossing them with chili flavoring and umami seasoning, he took a test bite: Not bad, just a touch on the salty side.
Darkness gradually settled outside. Click. Zhao Man flipped the switch, and the interior flared bright as day.
He sliced up half a potato and stirred a chopstick’s dab of berry jam into warm water to make a cup of sweet tea. Paired with a bowl of spicy, savory pickled ferns, it was a proper meal. The fern pickles were a little too salty on their own, but balanced the bland potato perfectly; whenever the starchy tuber felt too dry, a sip of the sweet fruit tea washed it down smooth. Pure perfection.
Finished with his meal, Zhao Man took a quick combat-style sponge bath using the lukewarm water, changed into clean clothes, poured the cooled boiled water into his flask, and packed his dagger and potatoes into his backpack, setting everything up for tomorrow’s early outing. Only then did he return to the bedroom and retrieve the fabric left over from his previous tailoring.
Zhao Man did the math. The sheet had originally measured five meters by five. When he had cut the bedsheet to size, he had cut away an outline matching the bed frame, leaving a square void of roughly two meters cut out of the original square sheet.
Trimming away the excess uneven section, Zhao Man folded the newly tailored three-by-five-meter quilt casing in half and laid it flat across the mattress, peeling back the top layer and piling it loosely at the foot of the bed.
He hauled a sack of raw cotton from the corner of the room to the bedside. Zhao Man remembered Tang Heng mentioning that this cotton had already been combed and processed. Untying the binding twine, he reached inside to grab a handful; it was fluffy, cloud-soft, and remarkably springy.
Zhao Man gathered armfuls of cotton and dumped them onto the lower casing, shaking and teasing the clumps as he poured. Once he had emptied roughly half the sack, he set it aside and crawled onto the bed, smoothing the cotton out inch by inch into an even layer. Seeing that it looked a little thin, he hopped down, grabbed the sack, and shook out more, repeating the cycle several times.
While strolling through the market that morning, Zhao Man had seen finished cotton quilts for sale, but a single blanket cost three full points. Crafting one himself was infinitely more economical.
Gauging that the thickness was just about right, Zhao Man spread the cotton into a uniform batting and pulled the folded casing at the foot of the bed up to drape cleanly over the top.
He produced his sewing kit—a standard household repair tin manufactured by the base, packed with various daily odds and ends. Pulling out the needle booklet, he found a row of needles arranged neatly from finest to thickest, the heaviest gauge measuring as long as his middle finger.
Zhao Man drew that thick needle, threaded it with a brown spool that closely matched the cloth, and set to work basting the three open edges shut. Once he completed the first pass, he examined the seam: the stitches were loose and spaced far apart, looking thoroughly flimsy. Concentrating on his handiwork, he made two more passes along the perimeter with tighter, more meticulous stitches.
With the three outer seams locked down, he ran two crisscrossing rows of quilting stitches through the center, both horizontally and vertically, before putting away his needle and thread to call it a night. The rest could wait until tomorrow.
Worried that the batting might shift out of place, Zhao Man simply sprawled out directly atop the quilt to sleep. And truthfully, after enduring the rock-hard wooden slats for so long, sinking into such a thick, cushioned mattress made every single pore in his body sigh in unison: Heavenly.
