10. Leatherworking

The afternoon sun was like a mother's hand, touching my cheek and reminding me of my mother. The wind was strong in the meadow, even if it had rained heavily last night, and on this clear afternoon the southeast wind from the Endless Sea was trying to melt the snow and ice in every part of the Star Lake meadow. I stood against the wind, the cool breeze blowing across my open-skinned chest, and stood on the hillside shouting at the green world in the distance.

I say out loud to the world: Hello, here I am!

Each piece of parchment has a clear and neat record of the adventurers' harvest. Smooth and warm wolf skin, every skinner cooks the skin, and who here doesn't have any mannite? But there is a great deal to be learned about skinning a wolf perfectly, without hurting any of the grain on its skin. Windwaves are considered the most elementary of magical beasts, but the skin of any magical beast is capable of carrying magical power and drawing magical patterns. That is why leather armour made from wind wolf skin would be sealed with magical inscriptions by junior magical inscribers and turned into magical equipment. It is very difficult to engrave magic on leather, and there are many factors for failure, so magicians have very strict requirements for the leather of magical beasts. So a skilled skinner is in demand, and Uncle Fred is one of the best. In addition, there are four sharp canine teeth, which are the first material for making carving knives, even the steel is not as hard as it is, and it is easy to carry, which is one of the few valuable things on the wolf.

The group brought back a total of eleven wolves, and it was said that a wolf's den was destroyed. Every pack has a alpha female, and this one was no exception. The adult female, over four metres in length, was laid out on a plank cart and skinned by Uncle Fred himself.

The skinning knife in his hand was like the eye of his own hand, darting between the she-wolf's fascia and subcutaneous fat, as if he was stripping his own mother-in-law's clothes, and with a gentle tug, the magnificent garment was removed.

Clutching a roll of parchment and a magic knife and pen in my mouth, I elbowed Kurtz in the left ribs and leaned over to ask him, "Kurtz, aren't you an orc wolf warrior, wouldn't you feel a bit bloody at the sight of this?"

With wide eyes and a straight face, Kuz told me from beside me, "We are wolf orcs, and unlike wolves, wolf orcs are not related by blood. The children of our tribe also hunt some wolves, they eat our livestock and sometimes rob wild flocks of sheep from us."

The whole adventuring group had followed the scouting ranger to chase the herd of demon antelope after lunch at noon, and it was said that our caravan, which was responsible for skinning, would then follow to pull the demon antelope. The two young warriors who had been on guard to protect us in the morning were taken away, leaving the other two, slightly wounded, who had spent the morning bumping around on their horses, and by this time had eaten their lunch and were lying in a light sleep on a wind-swept sunny hillside in the late afternoon sun. It was still the young witch who stayed behind, with her new task of assigning the skinning of wolves, and she watched carefully, occasionally interjecting to point out some of the skinners' mistakes. The relaxed atmosphere of the morning was suddenly gone, and the older men in the caravan began to work with trepidation.

Kurtz and I were the spectators, and at this point Uncle Fred was in the cattle car, watching dutifully as the uncles skinned their hides. The enchantress slowly paced up to me, paused for a moment, and suddenly her hand, stuck in her coat pocket, reached out and handed me a handful of yellow-orange beans, smiling a rare smile; she really had that little bit of youth left in her smile, which was nice, otherwise I would have classified her as an old hag. That's when she said to me, "Here you go."

"What's this?"

"Beans."

"Cooked."

"Um, please!"

A short exchange of words, perhaps she looked at me as too young to take a little extra care of me. The sudden availability of the fried beans made me feel like she was the sister next door. I politely stood up to thank her, and she looked a little surprised at my saying thank you. The common imperial language does not include such a salutation as thank you, so perhaps she was a little surprised that a young child like me, a mere wanderer, could use an imperial salutation!

The two slightly wounded warriors of the adventuring group were called up not far away, and one of them set off with four ox carts to look for the adventuring group hunting for magic antelopes on the grassland, while Kurtz and I and Uncle Fred and a few others were left behind to cook the skins, and the extraction of the magic cores had to wait until all the adventuring group members had returned. The red and bloody heads of the skinned wolves, as big as calves' heads, were piled up on the grass, the blood on the heads already dried up and turned black and purple.

The remaining work is still very heavy, as the skilled tanners stay behind to treat the blood, mud and fat from the skins, then boil the skins in boiling water with alum and dry them on wooden racks, before applying mannite to turn them into good leather. These are the processes that test the skills of the tanners the most, because once the grain of the hide is damaged, the whole hide will be downgraded by several grades, and even apprentice inscribers will not practice their inscriptions on the worst of the hides.

Sitting with Kurtz in the only ox-cart, we followed Uncle An to a small lake not far away to fetch water, he was very serious when he drove the ox-cart and did not talk. It was me and Kurtz who were joking around in the cart, which would have kicked both our butts if Uncle Fred had been there, while Uncle Ann was careful to make the cart smoother.

I still had a few fragrant beans in my hand and was eating them with Cuz, one for you and one for me. I hadn't succeeded in practising my anti-magic last night, but after consuming some of the magical power in my body, I found that the fire elemental magic that had been restless had quieted down and was just roaming and gathering, and the burning sensation that was always present in my body was surprisingly a little smaller, which made me feel physically comfortable. Sometimes, somehow a little reason can be very satisfying, like I am now.

When we got to the lake, Uncle An didn't let me and Kuzi do anything at all. He carried two buckets of water by himself, walking back and forth between the lake and the cattle car, and Kuzi and I, being the kind of children who take advantage of people, naturally jumped out of the car and followed Uncle An with a bucket of water, much to his relief. It's always in this way that people get along harmoniously, like this time after fetching water, on the way back Uncle An opened up the conversation and was willing to talk to us: "My little one is as big as you are, I don't know how happy I would be if he was as well behaved as you are."

"Uncle An, do you have children at home?" I thought Uncle An's family had been robbed by the barbarians and he was left with his oldest brother, which is why he joined the merchant group, but it turned out he still had family at home.

Uncle An laughed and said, "What words, I still have three wives and five children to feed."

"Ah!" I opened my mouth wide.

Uncle An said, "My two younger brothers died and left behind a sister-in-law and cubs that I have to raise. That's the way it is in our area, the barbarians come every few years and rob the men to become mining slaves, leaving a bunch of women and children with no one to depend on. That's how it is in every family. I wanted them to go, but if they stayed, I would have to keep them, and they would be my daughters-in-law. Before I came out, the oldest of the five children was not yet ten years old and the youngest was not yet a month old. I think I can at least refurbish my house this time, and it would be better if I moved to a place closer to Shrovetown, maybe it would be safer."

"So Uncle Ann, how do they live at home when you're out running a business?" I asked curiously.

Uncle Ann smiled spontaneously and said, "The country people live very well. They eat rye and tree rice, which are all over the mountains, and if they're lucky they might even find some pheasants in the snow pits." I didn't ask too many questions for fear of annoying people, but it's true that this world is rich in produce.

Kurtz was a bit dumb but a hard worker, and I was a small but very good talker, and I did the job of looking at the piles so well that even the piles of unharvested wolf heads were clearly identified, and I wrote down my signature on each bloody head. So our two youngsters were very popular in the group. Uncle Fred was also very impressed, apparently he had persuaded two of the adventuring group leaders to let us two boys join the hunting group this time, and it made Uncle Fred happy that we could more or less do something and help out, so that the others would have less to gossip about.

The meadow had been deposited over an unknown number of years, with the alternation of winter and summer, and the years had turned the grass into decaying leaves, making the meadow fertile. I crouched down next to Uncle Fereyd and listened to him talk about his experience. He had been an apprentice in a shoe shop for more than twenty years, when he was a boy not much different from me, and was paid only one loaf of white bread a day, and even now the apprentices in the shop still follow the old tradition that the young apprentice is not paid anything, only one loaf of white bread a day.

Each master teaches his apprentice in his own way, as each tanner has a different understanding of the concept of leather, and in this day and age there is no school of thought, but a skilled tanner always has his own unique method, and Uncle Fred's only sense of leather is the grain.

It was for this reason that Old Kulu always praised Uncle Fred, as many of the totem marks of the Orcs were based on the grain of the leather, which Old Kulu referred to as the natural magical formations of the leather itself, which were embedded in the grain, and because of this, the leather would carry the magical power and eventually be made into magical equipment.

Uncle Fred told me that following the grain of the leather would cause the least amount of damage to the leather during the process and would give me a better chance of producing a better quality hide. Crouching to one side, I watched as Uncle Fred gently pushed the knife in his hand between the leather and the sinew with four fingers of his left hand, and the leather was peeled off. I smiled and said to Uncle Fred, "Uncle, you'll have your own skin-making shop later, and I'll go and be your little apprentice later, and you'll give me a white loaf of bread every day until evening too."

"It won't be easy for you to get white bread, if you don't work hard. Ha ha!" Uncle Fred laughed loudly, and I think that everyone, nobleman, commoner, slave, needs to have a little bit of satisfaction in their inner world, which is their source of happiness and sometimes the meaning of life. Uncle Fred also had a desire to use the money he made from this run to open a small leather shop, even if it was a little out of the way, as long as it was his own.

This was the time when Uncle Fred was at his best. He looked like an artist when he picked up his skinning knife, confident and passionate, and that was Uncle Fred's complacency. I have always felt a sense of purpose in my life because of the extraordinary magical power in my blood, and I have often been a little proud of it, a secret that old Clu told me to keep buried in my heart until I could protect myself.

The men in the caravan didn't give you the right not to work because you were only five, but they weren't upset that I was lazy for being a thief at my age, and I had done my job if I could keep track of the windwolf material in the books. Kurtz had a hard day's work following Uncle Ann to the lake to carry water, and he hadn't put in enough work for dinner today. I would have liked to accompany Kurtz, the little orc didn't really like working with strangers, and he only trusted me apart from old Kulu. But the young enchantress, who had been in charge of supervision and vigilance, stopped me and said to me, "Scribe, the caravan of adventurers will be back in a few moments, and there is a large number of magic antelopes that you need to register, don't go far."

The female magician's address to me made me a little dumbfounded, the first time someone managed to call me such a formal name, I was a little embarrassed not knowing how to answer her, looking at her eyes some narrow smile, only to know that it was joking with me, I do not know why she has a good feeling about me, it seems that I am not bad with people!

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