Making Soap:

I had actually managed to finish a lot quicker than expected at the expense of a lunch break, thankfully though it was only 2:57 PM so we could still go for a late lunch before all doing our own thing, with us all having to clock out by sunset it felt wrong to not give them at least three hours of free time, plus we had already accomplished today's goal so there wasn't really much left to do.

After lunch, everyone did their own thing while I decided to go into the jungle to look for fruit near the fireplace. After all of our predator encounters at the very least, the nearby area around the fireplace was safe. As for why I decided to do this I just felt that I hadn't been eating enough fruits to obtain all of the nutrients I needed, plus I had to find a lemon soon otherwise I would begin to develop scurvy as I had already gone more than a month and a half without consuming any vitamin C to my knowledge.

Thankfully it didn't take much to find some after looking for them, one of the great benefits of living in the jungle I suppose, plus from where I was I could see a banana tree from where I was so I decided to get some potassium as well while I was at it, of course not by climbing the tree as it was way too dangerous to do that but by chopping it down.

If there were any predators nearby I'm sure they were temporarily scared off by the sound, as for everyone near the fireplace, I wasn't worried as they had already heard this sound before. It was actually nice to eat fruit every once in a while as meat got dull and boring very quickly especially without any spices to put on them, and although I could just look for them in the wild, unless I began to produce them on the farm they would only be a temporary addition.

I really had to thank my nutritionist, although he was very strict when it came to following my diet and making me pay attention to his explanations on how things worked, it did help the knowledge stick better to my brain, I just never thought that I would actually have to use it, there were a lot of things that I never thought useful that I would need now.

One big example being the knowledge from my chemistry class, although I did like the class and paid attention all the time, learning the periodic table was probably the hardest thing I had ever had to do as I was terrible when it came to memorizing any type of graph. I even began reciting it from memory to see how much I still remembered,

"....Chlorine, Agron, Potassium, Calcium… WAIT POTASSIUM!?"

I had completely forgotten that potassium was an element, why that mattered, Potash. Back when I was in high school I had one of those teachers that liked to be 'hip and with the times' and we were going through a survivalist phase where people became obsessed with surviving in the wild on their own, mainly because there was a propaganda campaign that made surviving in the wild seem fun in order to counteract the explosion of more advanced virtual reality due to fear of even more widespread obesity in the US which quickly spread worldwide.

So in an attempt to relate to us, he did a small experiment one day where he taught us how to make potash also known as a sort of potassium that could be used for lots of important things like to improve crop growth and even make a very primitive version of soap by adding potash to animal fat.

Although it was pretty funny to see the professor try his hardest to relate to us and use modern slang to make the experiment interesting the info he gave us was still very useful, for example, potash is gotten by burning wood for their ash and then grabbing said ashes and putting them in a container before filling it up with water.

From there you just had to grab a bottle and fill the area right before the opening with dirt before pouring the water and wood ash mixture into the water filter it so that the water and potassium passed through onto a container under the water bottle turned water filter before letting it the water evaporate leaving only potash.

The reason why this worked was simple enough, potash was water-soluble so when the wood ash was mixed with the water, the potash dissolved into the water, that's also the reason why it was the only thing that didn't get filtered out of the water by the dirt as it was part of the water when it went through, plus the reason for why when the water evaporated, only potash was left. From there all that was left was to add animal fat onto the potash and mix it to get a primitive version of soap.

Thankfully I had actually been putting all of the ash from the wood we burn into a hole near the fireplace, not because I had a use for it at the time, but mainly because I felt that it would just be wrong to throw it into the river, who would've guessed it would be such a good decision, welp you reap what you sow I guess.

Plus although we had already eaten the jaguar carcass I could just hunt for another by setting up a trap, and so I did, and apparently, there were still predators around because a puma fell into the trap in only two hours securing the animal fat part of the recipe, even better the watered I had filtered using a wooden cone I carved to replace the water bottle for the water filter before setting up the trap had already evaporated leaving potash ready to use at any time.

And just like that, I had soap. Of course we were not burning enough ash a day to make this something everyone could use on a daily basis so it would be considered a luxury, but at the very least I finally had a way to wash my hand and any potential external injuries I could get in the near future.