Giving a mighty roar Urist ruthlessly cleaved into a tree with his ax. Hack, hack, and hack, in three mighty swings the tree began to fall. He waited for the tree to fall before laying his Ax to rest. Picking up the shovel next to him he began digging around the stump. Once he felt he had dug enough dirt he put the shovel next to the ax. Spitting in his hands for good luck Urist found a good spot to grab the stump pulled upward with all his strength.

Popping sounds could be heard as the stump roots snapped under pressure. With one mighty roar, the stump was now removed then thrown to the side.

One more down, I wonder how many trees we have left to remove?

Wiping the sweat off his face, Uirst looked at how much of the wall was done. They were making good progress having about forty percent of the wall done. He didn't quite know why the bamboo seeding was important, but the seeds could maybe be used for food. They already had started cooking and eating fresh bamboo shoots for fiber.

From the chats, he learned that others were having the same problems with solving their food crisis. With more members joining their civilization every day and no food to reliably eat. They could only buy food using points making the leader's hearts bled with remorse. Although they brought in fish, mushrooms, and wild game back home to eat it wasn't enough.

“Rat you hungry? Think it’s time for a snack break.”

“Sounds good, my stomach is rumbling.”

With that decided the two of them put their tools down and Urist opened the trade window and purchased some cheap food from another civilization. Instead of points, he traded raw clay. However, this civilization had a fatal weakness despite being quite lucky with their abundance of huge food resources.

Their weakness was that they lacked materials such as clay, metal, and sand. Of course, he decided not to trade them as the small amount of metal-rich dirt was needed greatly. And besides that, the sand wouldn't be much use to them as well without a kiln. At most the people he was trading with, could make primitive clay pottery.

Although we could also make pottery it wouldn't be in large quantities and would take some time to make. For now, just buying buckets of material is a cheap alternative since making pottery is hard. Still, since we’re making a firing place for bricks we could sell the extra for food or points.

Eating a strange purple fruit called Lilavoll, his gaze wandered around the area. Near the cave, he could see Uria and Hot working had to extract more metal using the frother. Currently, they were working with the tin since they had a good batch of copper ready to go.

Ormila and Urmom were taking a break from making ropes to play with the loadstones to collect iron. Despite being assigned to making rope team, they had other tasks to keep boredom away such as making and designing traps.

It was the same for Lun and Ariel who used their gathered bamboo to make cool items with the tools they begged Urist to buy. Currently, they were making shelves to hold things outside of the civilization crystal storage.

The air was quite peaceful, however, Urist couldn’t help but feel that something quite off he just couldn't put his finger on it. So he kept working by cutting trees down and pulling trunks.

Since Reaver had nothing to do, after she had finished taming the animals she came over to help dig holes to put the fence in. As such every dwarf was hard at work in their jobs even if they were taking breaks.

It wasn't until the afternoon passed that the exploration team came back. But Urist wasn't smiling as Arben was carrying the wounded Elrish on his back. Behind them was Rork carrying a large dead tiger on his back with Briana and Baikm holding two tiger cubs each.

"Get him into the cave! Uroa! Prep the medicine, I'll buy the thread and needle!"

"Boss, what do we do with these?"

"Hand them over to Reaver! Quick we must save Elrish!"

Arben rushed into the cave with Briana in tow. Urist was quickly going through the market buying an expensive first-aid costing 600 points. He also bought a needle, and thread in haste and then carried the stuff over at the entrance.

Elrish was moaning in pain laying on his front as blood gushed from his back. Urist took a shot out from the first aid and shot the dwarf with anesthesia near the wound.

Elrish let out another moan of pain before Uroa stuffed his mouth with a mixture of medicine. In his half-conscious state, he was forced to swallow the paste of bitter-tasting medicine.

Within a minute knocking him out cold. Urist was quite surprised by how well the mixture worked these two girls weren't slacking. Next, the two girls worked together hand in hand to clean the wound of blood. They checked that although there was a lot of blood the cuts weren't that deep.

Three lines didn't go that deep, about 1/8 inch at the deepest part. By luck it had seemed, any deeper and his spine would have snapped as a large claw mark ran along his entire back.

Cleaning out his wound with plants and water the girl's hands fumbled at first since this was their first treatment. But in time they managed steady their hands and clean out the wounds and stitch up Elrish wounds.

Seeing how little of the first aid was used Urist felt quite ashamed to have bought it. Still, he didn't regret it, at least now they used the bandages within to cover the stitches.

They then carefully laid Elrish on his back and put him on a new comfortable leaf. Urist asked one of them to watch over Elrish and make sure when he didn't make any sudden movements waking up.

The last thing they would want is for him to reopen his wounds. With such things handled and Elrish life not endangered Urist gathered the expedition team and asked for a report.

Standing nervously, the four dwarfs stood before Urist, not sure what to say.

"How did you run into a tiger? Why do you have its cubs? How was Elrish injured in such a way? I want to know everything that happened after you went out!"

Of the four dwarfs, the three males looked over at Briana who was the eldest. Seeing them act this way, Briana had the sudden urge to strangle them for pulling the attention of the boss towards her.

With a sigh, she began her tale, "So boss it began like this..."