A New Village
「Whoooosh—」
Snow was falling today. Big, fat flakes drifting down in fluffy waves — everyone back in the village was probably curled up at home right about now, munching on potatoes.
「Clang! Clang! Clang!」
Huh? The blacksmith workshop was running today too? Well, I suppose when you're tending a fire, the cold doesn't bother you much.
My body is invincible. My senses for temperature, pain, and everything else work perfectly fine — they just stop registering past a certain threshold. In plain terms, I could walk barefoot through the dead of winter wearing nothing but a sundress and never freeze or get frostbite!
"Oh, it's warm in here."
I dropped by the blacksmith workshop, the only place in the village that made any noise at all.
"Ah, Haneul, you're here?"
My friends' vocabulary had really been improving lately. Sometimes it felt less like talking to cavemen and more like chatting with modern people.
"A day like this? Why not take a rest — what are you making?"
"The farmers say the ground's too hard to dig, so I'm making something they can use."
Damn potatoes kept growing even in winter, so our village had no such thing as an off-season for farming. Only days like this, when snow or rain fell, did anyone get a break.
"Let me see."
I looked over what farm tool they were working on. It was something like a pointed hoe.
"How is it?"
"You're planning to use it on ground frozen this hard?"
"Yeah. Too flimsy, you think?"
"Use this for something else and make a pickaxe instead."
"A pickaxe?"
It would eat up a lot of iron, sure — but for ground frozen this solid, a heavy pickaxe you could swing down and smash through the earth was exactly the right tool.
"That'll take a lot of metal, won't it?"
"Yep. Still worth having one around. It'll even break stone."
"Mm, good. Make it."
I remember gifting them a hammer and anvil around summertime, but over the winter the workshop had changed quite a bit. Multiple charcoal kilns, a much bigger furnace. The village was going to get cramped at this rate.
"Akta, isn't it getting tight in here?"
"I've been wondering about that myself. Once the weather warms up, I'll have to talk to Garungda about it."
Start with a blacksmith workshop, grow into a city of iron. I'd have to prepare for that in advance.
「Kuuung— Thud!」
Even in the dead of winter, I was busy. I was building a village ahead of time around the iron mine we'd discovered back in the summer.
Well, calling it a village was generous — more like wrapping up some walls and laying down a few roads.
"Hi, Haneul!"
It was one of the friends who'd come for iron ore. He'd dressed a little warmer, wearing fur hides — but his arms and legs were still bare.
「Sniffle—」
Dressing like that in this weather, of course you'd be cold. He was sniffling and snorting his way through lunch in the freezing air.
"Oh, you came for the iron ore, right? I'm setting up house plots here in advance. Aren't you cold, though?"
"A little. It'ssss cold."
I pulled out some cloth and wound it round and round his arms and legs. I'd given out plenty of fabric — where on earth did he keep using it all?
Was he rationing it?
"Ooh! It's warm! Thanks. I came for rock — what's this place?"
Now that his body had warmed up a little, curiosity had apparently kicked in.
"A new village."
"Who's gonna live here?"
"The blacksmiths. Being close to the iron ore would be better, no?"
"Ah... right."
For friends who traveled on foot, this place was far too distant. Scraping ore here and hauling it back to the village to work, like they did now, held no promise for the future. They needed to make more iron, work it more often.
Part of me wanted to travel to China and check whether ironworking had started there yet, but you couldn't just go wandering across a landmass that enormous.
Give it a hundred, two hundred years, and the technology will get there, I suppose?
I sent my friend off and kept building the walls.
This place had to be sturdier than the rest. It would play an important role, after all.
The unusually bitter winter passed at last, and a fragrant, warm breeze began to blow.
At the village gate, several hundred people had gathered in a noisy throng. It was the day the blacksmiths departed for their new village.
"Akta. We'll bring you your food ourselves."
It had been decided that the blacksmith village would focus entirely on working iron. Whenever they supplied goods made of metal, this side would supply grain in return.
Their tools still snapped and bent often from inexperience, but compared to stone farm implements, wasn't the difference like heaven and earth?
Farming had gotten so much easier. Which was exactly why they'd decided to divide the labor.
"Garungda... will I really be all right?"
"Didn't Haneul tell you? That what you're doing is important work."
"Thank you..."
Emotion getting the better of him, Akta's voice trailed off.
Honestly, I felt a little sad myself. Even if it wasn't far, wasn't he still leaving for a place beyond our sight?
Feeling glum, I slipped away and climbed up onto the palisade.
"Haneul? Are you crying?"
"Agna? When did you get here?"
"..."
Without a word, she simply gathered me into her arms — and her embrace was so warm.
"Haneul, you can get there in no time, can't you?"
"Yeah... I suppose."
Unlike my friends, who had to march for a full day, I could fly wherever I pleased — back and forth a dozen times in a single day if I wanted.
"And still... it feels like I built the village just to kick them out of it."
That was why I felt so low. Knowing it needed doing, I'd built the place first — and now I was shoving my friends out of the village and sending them away...
"That's not it. He said he was grateful."
"Well, that's a relief then..."
"Go see Akta."
"Yeah... should I?"
Plenty of friends had died along the way — hurt, or sick, or starved. Life in the primordial world was brutal, after all. But for some reason, today of all days, my heart just ached.
I climbed down from the palisade and approached the people on their way out of the village.
"Oh! Haneul! Where've you been?"
His face was bright. So leaving wasn't weighing on him as much as I'd feared.
"Ah, went to get some air."
"The village is amazing. Thank you."
Akta had come back and forth plenty of times over the winter, so he'd seen the place plenty by now.
"I'm sorry. It feels like I'm kicking you out."
"Hahaha! I was thinking the same thing. Don't worry about it."
Well, he'd at least been aware of it — still, maybe I should have built the village later, I thought.
"Haneul! Come visit often!"
"You bet! I'll come by all the time."
Maybe I'd worked myself into a gloomy mood over nothing. It wasn't even far — I could just drop by whenever I liked.
And somehow, I ended up tagging along with them.
"What are we going to call this place?"
I suddenly found myself wondering what the villagers would name their town. Shouldn't there be some kind of name to tell it apart from ours?
"It'd be strange to call this one Ugra too, right?"
"Right?"
"Haneul, you name it."
"Me?"
What was there to use? It was a village full of iron, after all. Iron-ville? Steel-town? Hmm... none of those sounded right...
"How about Soemoda? Soe means iron, and moda means plenty."
A simple name: the place where iron gathers.
"Oh! I like it! That's a good one. Soemoda!"
It was just a simple name, but apparently it hit the spot. What a relief.
Having come and seen the place, I had to admit it suited a forge perfectly. There were so many trees around that it would spare the villagers a lot of hardship.
Chopping wood to make charcoal was backbreaking work, after all.
「Thump-thud. Thump-thud.」
Everyone was busy — felling trees for houses, gathering stones, hauling clay.
Huh? While we're at it, why not make bricks too?
Once you had them, building houses would be so much easier, wouldn't it? They'd be great for making kilns as well.
"Akta! Let's try making bricks!"
"What are those?"
"Something that works great for building houses, or stoves, things like that."
"Sounds good then. How do we make them?"
First, I knocked out a bunch of square wooden molds. The only ingredients you needed were the molds and some clay.
"Now, see this mold? You pack it full of clay, pressing it in nice and tight. Then you ease it out carefully and let it dry — that's step one. And we'll need to make a whole lot of them."
"Then let's go to the river!"
Whether they'd actually understood or not, my friends grabbed the wooden molds and trooped off toward the riverbank. Now that I thought about it, this was going to be a slow, laborious job, wasn't it?
"Haneul? Our forge hearths are made of clay and they get hard — is this the same thing?"
Come to think of it, the hearths and the furnace in the workshop were built from clay too. So they'd grasped the basic idea.
"Exactly! Except if we make them all the same size, building gets way easier."
The real advantage of bricks was standardization. Uniform shapes made stacking precise — and fast.
"So we already know how, then. Dry them out and put them in the fire, right?"
"Yep. It'll take some time though. Should we do it next time?"
Contrary to my expectations, the brick-making moved along much faster than I'd thought.
These primitive friends of mine weren't something to look down on — they thought things through.
They started stacking the dried clay bricks from the ground up, row upon row — and in the middle of it, what did they do but leave gaps and stuff in coal and firewood?
"Akta, what is this?"
My plan had been to build several kilns and fire the bricks inside them. What on earth was this?
"Firing a little at a time or all at once — either way it gets baked, doesn't it?"
"Well, sure, but..."
Isn't this a bit much? It towered well over my head, and it stretched more than ten paces long.
"Will it work?"
"It'll work."
Ugh... I don't know. Is this really okay?
They even built a chimney up on top, slathered the whole thing with one last coat of clay, climbed back down, and lit the fire at the base.
And so, two days passed.
「Crash-rumble-rumble—」
The brick mound began collapsing, wall by wall, starting from the outside.
"Whoa! This actually works?"
An enormous cascade of bricks came tumbling down, still radiating fierce, fresh-baked heat.
Plenty had cracked or shattered in the firing, but they'd find their own uses soon enough.
"Heh-heh. See? Easy as that."
Well, look at Akta, showing off. He really has changed.
"Hahaha. Impressive stuff."
I mean, it was genuinely impressive, wasn't it? These friends of mine were no fools living without a thought in their heads.
Once that first firing was done, one group stayed behind to keep baking bricks while the rest headed back to the village and started building their houses.
"Ah, so we're not building houses out of bricks, are we?"
"What's a brick house?"
"A house you make by stacking those bricks — the whole thing, walls and all."
"Pfft, that'd be a waste. We've got plenty of wood, no?"
The villagers didn't build the brick houses I'd imagined.
They stacked bricks where things got hot — under the ondol floors, in the stove flues — but the roofs and walls were still framed with timber.
"I guess this is better, actually? Flat, big stones are harder to find than you'd think."
"Right? They're hard to find and hard to haul."
It had cost us a few days to fire those first bricks, but it saved a mountain of time compared to hunting down stones for every ondol floor.
"Haneul. Thank you. It's so much easier thanks to you."
"You figured it all out yourselves."
"But if you hadn't told us it could be done, would we ever have tried?"
"Fair point, I guess?"
With the blacksmith village established and several hundred people gone, our own village felt quiet for a while — but only briefly.
As if they'd been waiting for the space to open up, new people came flooding in. Apparently there was a queue forming somewhere out there beyond the hills.
"Garungda, where on earth are all these people coming from?"
"Feed them full bellies, and plenty will come."
Ah... I'd forgotten. Just how harsh the primitive life was. Ordinary people out there must have been starving day in and day out, weren't they?
"We'll have to expand the village."
The potatoes in the warehouse showed no sign of running down, so food didn't seem to be a concern.
Eating nothing but potatoes and still packing on muscle — these were clearly not the potatoes I remembered. The least you could say was that they were loaded with protein.
"It's fine to grow this big?"
"Of course~ Just make sure the food keeps up."
"Haneul, as long as there are potatoes, no one starves."
Right — like I thought, these are definitely not ordinary potatoes.
But? Ever since we'd decided to grow the village, the walls had been stretching outward at an absolutely frightening pace.
And over the hills, across the rivers, they kept appearing — endless processions of people.
Whoa... this is overwhelming, you know? In this era, weren't populations supposed to top out at a few hundred, maybe a few thousand at best?
With the blacksmith village carved off on its own, I'd expected things to feel empty — instead, the rate at which people kept multiplying was terrifying. And now they seemed intent on expanding the village further east.
A whole group of them was heading east with tools slung over their shoulders.
Watching them march off with gleaming iron implements in hand was a beautiful sight.
"See? Iron really is everything."
Copper or bronze just couldn't manage it, could it? And they'd never once managed to find copper on their own, anyway.
Even the hairpin they'd made for me was supposedly something they'd scraped together with great difficulty from somewhere.
By the river, the fishing camp looked like it was halfway to becoming a village already — wait, didn't that make three settlements of ours already?