“Aaah~”
As soon as he sank into the steaming bathwater, an exclamation slipped from Dawi’s mouth.
This was the bathroom of the lord’s manor.
The bath Dawi was soaking in had been prepared by servants drawing water from the Allos River, heating it in a huge cauldron, carrying it over in buckets, and pouring it into a large wooden tub.
Dawi immersed himself in the tub and washed his whole body for the first time in ages.
The days had been too cold to wash in the lake, and to Dawi, who had not been able to clean himself properly all this time, this hot water was nothing short of a blessing.
As he scrubbed his body with a cloth, the grime came off and the water turned murky.
There was no soap or anything like that, but simply washing away the grease and dust with hot water
was enough for Dawi to feel thoroughly refreshed.
New clothes had been prepared for Dawi when he came out of the bath.
‘Is this made of wool? Or some cloth similar to wool… I haven’t seen any sheep around here.’
The clothes were old garments made back in the days of the Empire, before the zombie outbreak.
Dawi put them on and entered the room.
A fire was blazing in the fireplace on one side of the room.
As the warm, cozy air wrapped around his whole body,
Dawi realized anew just how harsh an environment he had been living in.
‘I can’t sleep on a hard, cold floor all winter…!’
Dawi resolved that once he returned tomorrow with the tools, the first thing he would do was build a house.
The next morning.
Dawi’s bearskin cloak had been transformed into a splendid long coat.
The bighorn hide had become a sturdy pair of leather pants,
the wolf hide had become warm gloves, and the snow leopard tail had been softened and reborn as a scarf that wrapped snugly around his neck.
With a brown bear coat and a hat pulled low over his head, Dawi finally looked like a cowboy.
Looking in the mirror, he smiled without realizing it.
“The rest of your luggage has been loaded onto your horse. Follow me.”
Malmari, who had spent the night in the stable, seemed to be in a fairly good mood as well.
Malmari snorted, blowing steam from his nostrils.
‘But is this the only horse they have?’
Aside from Malmari, there was only one old gray horse left in the stable.
‘There were more than ten knights…’
The baroness noticed Dawi’s gaze and spoke.
“In the early days of the zombie outbreak, food was desperately scarce.
Needless to say, other crops were out of the question, and even the potatoes all had to be saved as seed potatoes for the future. So we held out on fish and the food brought by merchant ships… but it wasn’t enough. In the end, we began slaughtering the horses. Now only that one old horse remains.”
Even so, because the baron’s household had chosen back then to use the potatoes as seed potatoes instead of eating them right away, the people of the territory were able to avoid starvation now.
“I heard that merchant ships were still coming until a few months ago. Was it still not enough?”
“Yes. The only product we had to offer was bilberries.
The cities in the south began to fare worse as well, and they brought less and less food with them.
Still, there was a merchant ship that kept coming until the end.
In a world where everyone is struggling just to survive, coming all the way north to buy bilberries isn’t an easy thing. They weren’t buying them because they truly needed bilberries. It was simply their goodwill.”
“I see…”
The baroness gave a sorrowful smile for a moment.
“Now, even they no longer come.
They aren’t the sort of people who would simply stop sending ships, so something must have happened in the southern cities.
Without the wheat, rice, and other grains they used to bring… the territory’s food situation is worsening again. It’s fortunate that we have potatoes and fish, but…
That is why I truly hope your ranch succeeds. And then, please sell our territory a variety of food.”
“Of course. Next year, I’ll have more to sell than just corn.”
“Good. Then go safely.”
Dawi bowed his head in farewell and took Malmari’s reins.
He did not mount the horse.
The newly made saddle and the saddlebags on either side were piled high with goods.
Clip-clop. Clip-clop.
A cowboy and a single horse left the small basin and headed back into the deep mountains.
.
.
.
The baroness had even packed things Dawi had not asked for.
Among them were bilberry wine and jam.
When Dawi arrived in the mountains, he uncorked a bottle of wine, took a sip, and shouted,
“Good! Shall we begin?”
If only to store the garlic he had received from the baroness, Dawi decided to build a stone icehouse first.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
Dawi began digging into the ground with a shovel and a hoe.
With proper tools, the speed of his work could not even be compared to before.
A few days later, the stone icehouse was finally complete.
Dawi drove in pieces of wood to make a slope, then braced the walls and ceiling with timber so they would not collapse.
“Now, once the lake freezes, I’ll just have to move the ice in here.”
There was no ice yet, but underground it was already far colder than outside.
Dawi filled an iron pot with snow and packed it carefully against the walls.
Then the temperature dropped even further.
Using an axe and a saw, he cut branches and made a wide platform in the middle of the stone icehouse,
then placed corn and meat on top of it. He also set the sack of garlic to one side.
He was worried that moisture might rise from the ground.
By the time he finished work on the stone icehouse, the sun was already setting.
Dawi entered his tent and curled up.
Leather blankets spread over the dirt floor,
and the campfire in the center was warming the air, if only a little.
Smoke escaped through the gaps in the tent and drifted up into the night sky.
‘I really can’t keep sleeping in a place like this forever…!’
Having experienced the bed and heating in the lord’s manor, Dawi could no longer return to this way of life.
‘Starting tomorrow, I’ll build a proper house.’
The next day.
Because of the hard floor, his entire body felt stiff.
Feeling the chill seep all the way into his body, Dawi sprang to his feet.
“As expected, I need to build a proper house!”
He first checked on Malmari.
Malmari seemed listless as well, as if he had been cold too.
After feeding Malmari some corn, Dawi prepared his own breakfast.
He scraped corn kernels off with a dagger, put them into an iron pot, and crushed them with the handle of his axe.
Then he added garlic washed in stream water and boiled it.
Bubble, bubble.
The smell of corn soup rose into the air.
Dawi sprinkled a little salt over it, scooped it up with a spoon—one of the utensils he had received from the baroness—and put it in his mouth.
The savory taste of corn and the saltiness. And the spreading aroma of garlic.
‘Were spices and salt always this magnificent…?’
Dawi emptied the iron pot cleanly.
When he washed the pot by the lakeside, small fish came over and pecked at the scraps.
After breakfast, Dawi headed back to Malmari’s tent stable.
“Malmari, I’ll make you a proper stable soon too.”
He said this while stroking the horse’s mane.
All night, Dawi had thought about heating.
And one heating method from the world he had lived in came to mind.
It was ondol.
Of course, he did not know the detailed structure. He only remembered that heat was made to pass beneath the floor, and that stones were laid over it.
Remembering a documentary he had seen on TV as a child, he muttered,
“If I make it roughly like that, it should work…”
Dawi thought of the rocky cave where the bear had lived.
He had considered using it as a stone icehouse, but since the cave allowed more outside air through than expected, he had simply left it alone. He figured he could split the rocks in that cave and obtain stones to lay on the floor.
Dawi led Malmari to the rocky cave.
Click.
Then Dawi took out his shotgun and aimed at the rock.
‘Please split cleanly!’
He shouted inwardly and pulled the trigger.
Bang!
A single slug round shot toward the rock.
Thud—crack!
With the first shot, a long vertical crack split through the rock.
“Good. With grain like that, surely…!”
Bang! Clack! Bang!
After firing several more times, a long split piece broke away from the rock.
“Done!”
He loaded the stones onto Malmari and moved them to the tent.
Then he chipped at the stones bit by bit with an axe, shaping them as much as possible into flagstones.
After several days of work, flagstones were piled up beside the tent. They were uneven and each had a different shape, but they were good enough to be called flagstones.
Beside them were smaller chunks of broken stone.
Dawi took down the house tent and began stacking stones carefully on the ground.
Like building a wall, he made a stone path in the shape of the Korean letter ㄹ, about fifty centimeters high,
then kneaded mud and filled the gaps between the stones. With the lake nearby, it was not hard to obtain mud.
Squelch! Squelch!
Dawi was in the middle of filling the stone wall with mud.
Then he suddenly realized something.
‘Ah… I didn’t dig the ground!’
Ondol was a method that heated the entire floor of a room.
Normally, he should have dug out the floor and made a passage for the heat beneath it, but Dawi had already built stone walls on top of the ground.
“Breaking it down and making it again is… rejected. It would take too long. Should I just raise the entire floor of the house instead?”
But raising the entire floor of the house was impossible too. That would also take a long time, and he had used more stones than expected just to make the heat passage. So he changed his mind.
“I give up on an ondol room! Instead, I can make it like an ondol bed.”
In the end, Dawi changed the design to a method where warmth would flow over raised stones like a bed instead of beneath the floor. He would make a somewhat large ondol bed.
Digging up the ground again and making it, or raising the entire floor of the house, would take far too long.
Dawi wanted to spend tonight warmly right away.