The sun channeler suffered from the same flaw he saw in the process of creating sun slivers in the end. It took a heck of a lot of time for whatever it did, but that mattered a bit less with the amount of stuff to do anyway. Besides leaving a second set of orbs out to transform in the daytime, he left to hunt another cow or bull as he required its leather.

He tried to smoke the meat, but the sheer quantity quickly revealed how improper his oven was for this goal. As it turned out… Cows are pretty damn big.

While he did ask about how to make a smoking rack at the village, and he roughly know how to make it, there remained the issue of actually doing it. You know, the important part.

Since he only needed the leather though, it seemed best to just kill another for its leather and allow the meat to rapidly deteriorate. He felt bad doing so… But who’d judge him for wasting the flesh of a single cow?

Not to mention its body wasn’t truly being wasted, he could allow it to rot into his garden to provide further nutrients to the plants there.

Regardless, he carried the limbs and torso of the bloodless beast to his garden and left the body there. By tomorrow morning it’d be a pile of bones at most, then simply no more the day after. Meanwhile his plants neared completion. The rows of hemp grew to a few metres tall, while each seed actually sprouted with multiple stalks, giving rise to a couple hundred more for him to use. Flax as well came next, but from what he saw, it required far wetter ground to grow, which might mean farming near the river or a second garden towards the western wetlands.

Either one wouldn’t be an issue, but it remained a matter for the future.

With the cow hide strung up on the tanning rack, he left to collect a day’s worth of sap from those yellow trees, as well as the bark, to slather both sides of the hide in that runny mixture. With experience, he coated it in the strawberry coloured fluid before looking at his cube again.

That’d taken a whole hour to do, relatively fast since he killed, skinned, and tanned a cow in that time.

But now came the new recipes. These had been left as a sort of reward for this very moment, and now he looked forward to seeing what the next level of recipes were for solar magic. He was expectedly met with two new recipes one from the sun channeler alone, whilst the second required both the channeler and his charm to be crafted.

It left him to wonder if the same was true for the solar droplet.

The first recipe was called a solar well. It required two sun slivers in the bottom of the middle column, three pieces of quartz in the top row, and four more fired clay plates in the remaining spots. He couldn’t really guess what this thing did, but given the name it seemed possible that it stored sunlight in some way. Perhaps like a short-term weapon against night-time monsters.

Something he’d inevitably need as things besides zombies appeared at night.

While nitro-slimes might seem like an ignorable threat, there were several times he almost walked near one and potentially blew himself up. A menace to his life at all times.

The second item was a solar circlet, made of four bronze ingots in cardinal spaces, as well as two sun silvers in the top two corners. This far simpler recipe could be achieved as soon as he transformed the new sources of darkness into sun slivers. And then he could create that solar droplet to see what it did. Overall, he needed quite a bit of time to make everything presented to him, but it wasn’t actually that hard.

With leftover clay plates, he could make the solar well straight away.

And the bronze ingots, which he lacked, weren’t actually too hard to create. Since he needed to make those bronze rings as well, he could easily resolve both issues at once.

About an hour later, he’d repeated the process used to smelt metal quite a few times. Eight ingots and two sets of rings laid in front of him. The leather continued to tan overtime, and he believed that a new major step was mere inches away from him. “Four paper, two nitro-gel, and one hemp string… And done. A stick of dynamite, technically.”

He suspiciously called it a technicality due to nitro-gel’s explosive power far exceeded dynamite. It was almost ridiculous how much heat it emitted in those seconds, not to mention how slimes repeatedly detonated with ease. Still, he wanted to test the effects of the powerful rod in his hands, and carried a lit stick over to a relatively clear spot of ground near the steam. A bit of dirt kept it upright as he lit the rather short fuse… Then backed away in case it sent debris everywhere.

“How bad can it be? Just one small stick, barely longer than my hand.” He never worked with dynamite, but he’d seen props and old pieces in museums so the shortness of this stick really stood out. With its white card cover and the heavy weight of gel within, he didn’t at all doubt the power of this thing.

Like the crack of a whip, he saw a stream of fire violently explode up towards the sky, carrying with it a mass of debris which even landed near him! Fortunately, it wasn’t that bright compared to his attempt to directly light a ball of the stuff.

When he went to go check the blast site, he not only saw that the surrounding dirt and pebbles were gone, but a small pit now remained where the stick detonated.

“Mining won’t be hard at least,” he cooled his mood by saying that, but this showed a very high possibility in killing that golem.

Its body couldn’t resist such explosive power!

Especially with several rods tied together!

With that in mind, he believed himself capable of killing more dangerous beasts which previously left him concerned. Hippos and alligators were two specific ones as either could easily catch up from underwater and then…

Well, he heard the horror stories. Compared to most sharks, he actually had to fear these two beasts. Fortunately, the temperature nearby seemed a bit too cool for either to naturally appear, but he knew better than to say ‘never’.

But moving on, he used the bronze rings and remaining leather to make the binder which he found to work in an extraordinarily simple manner. The thick leather sheets formed the front and pack of the binder, with edges that had been trimmed and sewn over with a thin strip of leather for a better appearance. From there, the bind was in fact made of a wider strip, then sewn together with both faces, however, he found the bind remained stiff somehow. Lastly, the bronze rings had been pierced through one side of the spin such that they could be spun easily through the thin inner layer.

Unlike the little clips which could be pushed inwards to insert paper like he knew on Earth, these were simply loops with a tiny gap, more like a keyring in design!

With his strength it was easy to open and close each ring.

Now to just put all the notes he left in his room into this binder instead.

Too bad it didn’t unlock any new recipes.

Without any better ideas on what to do though, he just sat down with a set of 15 hemp and flax stalks, then began the process of breaking the dried flax into tiny fibres, although it clearly gave far less due to its thinner size than hemp stalks. Fortunately, the 15 units took this into account, and by the end he gained 170 hemp fibres and 177 flax fibres.

He turned 169 of the hemp ones into string, whilst he used 175 flax fibres instead. Rather than waste inventory space on either though, he found a relatively empty chest in his little shed beneath the tree and threw all the string into them. As well as tying the fibres into a knot so they didn’t accidentally go missing.

That only took about an hour and a half to do, which left a confusing amount of time on his hands.

“Ritual time, I guess?” Without any better ideas on what he could do in the meantime, it became decided to just throw together a bonfire and make this new rune. He had two totems in case something went wrong with the first.

Its ritual was a fair bit more complex than all the others he’d done so far.

But building a bonfire isn’t exactly the toughest thing ever. First he cleared a small patch of land, and flattened it with repeated stomps. Then came the bonfire itself, for this he decided to use sticks to create a cage in which some bundles of logs and the gel accelerant would be placed to create a huge fire. Throwing in the totem would be a piece of cake, and he just had to memorise the whole process flawlessly.

With a slightly longer one this time round, he needed more than just half an hour to note it all to memory.

Shake ten times in the left hand, with a single second of waiting between each one. Then repeat for the right, walk clockwise around the bonfire in single steps, shaking it once with your leading hand, but ensure both arms are stretched out throughout this circular path. Repeat this once more in the other direction, and allow the flames to keep him warm for until a wave of true calmness overcame him. From there, it dictated one of two possibilities. Firstly, the flames began erupting with heat in a rhythmic manner in which case he simply shook the chimes in equal timing, after ten repetitions the final step may begin.

Alternatively, the surrounding temperature suddenly erupted, as though he was standing in the middle of a burning field. This far rarer case was some sort of ‘test’ by nature, albeit a rare one. Like the ox who must remain static in the face of flames, he too remained still in a burning field.

Overcoming fight or flight instincts is hard for the untrained, even more so himself who never once served or took part in battles prior to this last week.

And the final step. After the repetitions, or he successfully stood calm in the burning field created by the totems strange magic…

Step forth, and reach in to take the rune from the prison of flames.

His hand shouldn’t be burnt in the process, but it was said the pain remained. How would that feel?

Did he even possess the will the unhesitatingly withstand that sort of pain for a rune?

In truth, he hadn’t paid too much attention to this final line of the ritual at first since his mind focused on carving the totems first. But as he needed to memorise the full process.

As for the bonfire, it was just a small thing, about waist high. A pile of cut logs filled up to the brim, and the totem could be easily placed on top without falling deeper into the bonfire or falling off. When he went to grab the notes of this ritual from his room as well, he made sure to bring the leaf skirt, as was necessary in all of these. Now came the fun part, where he lit the bonfire and prepared to not run off in fear or backed away due to having to literally stick his arm into fire.

Who the fuck discovered these things?