Chapter 58 Moving into the New Home

Early the next morning, Xiao Qiang brought a draft blueprint of a wooden house and handed it to Mu Tong.

The blueprint was simple, clear, and easy to understand—at least brothers like A Yu and Duo Ji could make sense of it.

A Yu and Duo Ji looked at the blueprint with pleasant surprise. "Is this the new house we are going to build?"

"Yes. Do you think there is anything that needs to be modified or supplemented?"

"No, this is wonderful." A Yu stared fixedly at the drawing: Was this going to be their future home?

The house depicted in the blueprint was primarily made of wood, featuring an exterior of raw logs and an interior constructed with mortise and tenon joints using timber. The blueprint also specifically noted that a certain type of tree sap discovered by Xiao Qiang in the forest could be applied to the timber for anti-corrosion treatment. Another type of sap, applied over the anti-corrosion layer, would provide fireproofing.

Mu Tong had originally intended to build a stilt house, but Xiao Qiang's proposal was a three-story wooden building. At the point where the house met the cave, a direct passageway could be built from the third-floor terrace to connect with the cave entrance.

This wooden house had distinct functional zones and covered an area of nearly two hundred square meters. The first floor contained a foyer, living room, kitchen, dining room, storage room, and bathroom; the second floor had three bedrooms and a restroom; the third floor featured a bedroom, study, restroom, and a large terrace.

The kitchen on the first floor was positioned where the house connected to the cliff face, so its walls were not made of wood. For fire safety considerations, the materials used were homemade adobe bricks and stones. A chimney was built into the stove, leading directly outdoors.

The restroom utilized a squat toilet, with a bucket of water kept inside for flushing. A septic tank was dug outdoors, perfectly resolving sanitary issues. The floor of the first-floor bathroom was made of stone, while the floors of the second and third-floor restrooms were paved with thin, sturdy, and smooth stone slabs.

The roof was designed in an inverted V-shape. A layer of thick wooden boards was laid across the wooden beams, followed by a layer of tied straw mats, then another layer of boards coated with anti-corrosive liquid, and finally topped with a thick layer of dry grass, completely solving the leakage problem. As for wind resistance, even if a strong gale blew away the topmost layer of tied straw mats, the middle layer of boards was securely fastened to the bottom layer with stone nails, leaving no fear of it being blown away.

Furthermore, the bottom layer of boards was connected to the wooden roof beams using a mortise and tenon structure, making it extremely firm and reliable.

The window designs were varied, including latticed windows, long windows, hinged-and-lift windows, patterned windows, and threshold windows. They were all crafted from solid wood, with various patterns carved into the centers.

Because the eaves on each floor sheltered the outer walls, there was no need to worry about rainwater drifting inside on rainy days.

For the windows that required translucent covering, paper was not used; instead, they used a kind of animal skin brought back by A Yu. This animal skin was extremely thin and highly translucent, rivaling oil-paper soaked in oil from ancient times, and it was also very moisture-resistant.

The blueprint provided by Xiao Qiang was not only easy to understand, but also gave detailed explanations of the origin and processing of each material, all of which were readily available in the Twilight Forest.

For instance, the primary wood used was red-branch timber, which was very common in the forest. This wood was hard, heavy, and fine-grained, with a dense structure, strong resistance to corruption and durability. It also possessed a unique fragrance, was not easily infested by insects, and had beautiful wood grain, making it exceptionally suitable for building wooden houses.

As for the cave, Xiao Qiang had also made plans to build a Chinese-style heated brick bed (kang) inside. The stove would be set up in the cave kitchen, and the kangs would be installed in the two bedrooms. With the kangs, getting through the winter would be much easier.

Both the wooden house kitchen and the cave kitchen featured a very large water vat, and each had two stoves, ensuring that two pots could be used simultaneously.

Outside the wooden house, a fairly large courtyard was enclosed by a circle of tall fences.

The three of them looked at the blueprint with great delight, especially A Yu and Duo Ji, who eagerly anticipated the appearance of their new home. With the plan in place, the three of them began making preparations.

Newly felled timber typically needed to be soaked for two to three months to leach out the sap, followed by rough processing and artificial drying before the moisture content of the wood could reach the required standard.

As for the wood used to make furniture, it had to undergo high-temperature steam drying. In addition to meeting the moisture content standards, the fibrous structure and performance of the wood had to be minimized to ensure that the finished furniture would not warp.

Consequently, just the preparation work for building the new house would take several months.

However, how could Mu Tong wait that long? Although she currently lacked cultivation, she still possessed talismans, array flags, and array discs that she had crafted in the past. Therefore, once the required amount of timber had been felled, she used water ball talismans to soak the wood, whirlwind talismans to air-dry it, and fireball talismans to dry it at high temperatures.

Of course, all of this was done in the dead of night, shielded by invisibility array flags and powered by accelerated array discs.

One and a half months later, all the materials were ready—including the carved patterns on the doors and windows—and the construction of the house commenced.

Another half month later, a beautiful three-story wooden house was completed.

The foundation of the wooden house was excavated from the huge boulders on the hillside. With Mu Tong's small knife that sliced through stone like mud, digging out a stone foundation was as easy as turning a palm, not to mention that the substantial number of trees had also been felled using this knife.

On the day A Yu's family moved into their new home, everyone in the tribe came. Seeing the tall, dense fences, the sturdy courtyard gates, and the solid little wooden building, the entire tribe was in an uproar.

To match the move into the new home, Mu Tong had also crafted wooden carved large beds, dressing tables, bookshelves, wardrobes, tables and chairs, chests, and daybeds over the past two months. She even used a huge leaf discovered in the forest to make curtains.

After drying, these leaves turned a brilliant yellowish-green, possessed the texture and feel of coarse linen, and featured irregular dark patterns, making them quite decent for curtains. They could block the sun in summer, ward off wind in winter, and could also be used to make various bags and outer garments.

The shaman, Hou Yi, looked at the rare furniture filling the house and finally understood what "furniture" truly meant.

Moving to a new home naturally called for a feast, and everyone in the tribe attended. Although the wooden building was large, it could not hold more than two hundred people dining together. Therefore, the venue for the feast was moved to a relatively flat spot on the small hillside outside the wooden building.

Several large stone cauldrons were set up in the open space. The food cooked inside consisted entirely of purple rice, green beans, chard, celery, thorn cucumbers, noodle fruits, and konjac tofu provided by Mu Tong, along with over a hundred pounds of large snake meat—used to make snake soup—brought back by A Yu over the past two days; a wild boar weighing over six hundred pounds, prepared by braising in soy sauce; and two sheep beasts, each weighing over three hundred pounds, designated for roasting.

After the grand housewarming banquet concluded, the clansmen gathered at the chieftain's home the next day to celebrate. There was no other reason than this: when construction began on A Yu's house, both the chieftain and the shaman had also started building their own houses. Their house designs differed slightly from A Yu's, but all originated from Xiao Qiang's hands.

Around the time A Yu's house was finished, the chieftain's and shaman's houses were also completed. Meanwhile, some of the more well-off families in the tribe had nearly finished their own preparations for building new houses.

Naturally, the felling tools used by the clansmen were still the three knives borrowed from Mu Tong and the two brothers.

The clansmen reveled for three consecutive days, celebrating the housewarmings of the Divine Envoy, the Chieftain, and the Shaman in succession, after which peace gradually returned to the tribe.