Chapter 19

Red Clay Bricks and a Gaze Toward Iron
With their first successful attempt at pottery behind them, the dining table at Akio's cabin now regularly featured handmade bowls and plates with a warm, rustic charm. Unlike their old wooden dishes, the earthenware provided a reassuring sturdiness and the convenience of comfortably holding hot soups, bringing a small but undeniable improvement to their daily lives. The children proudly used the vessels they had crafted themselves, making mealtimes even more enjoyable.

“Now that these pottery dishes are proving so useful… next comes that,” Akio muttered one day, staring at the cabin walls. His gaze lingered on the remaining gaps in the walls, which were still patched over with bark and clay as makeshift repairs.

“Bricks, you mean?” Ayane asked, sensing his thoughts.

“Yeah. With that clay, I’m sure we can fire sturdy bricks. With bricks, we could reinforce these walls properly, level the floor… and maybe even build something bigger down the line. Like a proper storage shed or a workshop,” Akio explained. Sylvia nodded quietly in agreement.

“The old elven structures were said to use fired earth blocks as well. They were durable and fire-resistant—a logical choice,” she added, her words providing strong support for Akio’s plans.

Making bricks, however, was an even larger undertaking than crafting pottery. Akio first crafted several wooden molds to form uniform rectangular blocks. Then, with everyone pitching in, they transported large amounts of clay from the stream they had found, kneading it well with water. Sylvia shared ancient elven wisdom about mixing in sand and finely crushed dry grass.

“Doing this prevents cracks during drying and increases strength after firing,” she explained.

They packed the clay into the molds, shaping each brick carefully and setting them to dry in the shade. It was a simple process, but the sheer number required patience. Still, the children, eager to make their home sturdier, worked without complaint.

After several weeks, they had produced hundreds of dried bricks. Akio expanded the area where they had fired the pottery, modifying the makeshift kiln to handle a much larger batch of bricks at once. They also needed vast amounts of firewood, so collecting it became a daily chore for Alto and Kenta.

Finally, the day of the brick firing arrived. The kiln was set ablaze, and the fire roared for several days. Managing the heat was even more difficult than with the pottery, so Akio and Sylvia tended the flames in shifts, barely sleeping.

When the long firing process was over, they waited for the kiln to cool, the tension in the air thick as they approached the moment of truth. Inside, they found bricks much like the pottery—some blackened with soot, some misshapen, and others cracked from the intense heat. But among them were unmistakably sturdy, heavy bricks with a rich reddish-brown hue, resonating with a hard, solid sound when tapped.

“We did it! These will hold up!” Akio exclaimed, holding up one of the well-formed bricks triumphantly. The children erupted in cheers. Sylvia also picked up a brick, tapping it with her finger and listening to the sound.

“Not bad. These should easily withstand the wind and rain,” she said, a satisfied expression on her face.

They wasted no time putting the bricks to use. They paved part of the cabin floor with them, creating a surface far easier to walk on and clean compared to the bare earth. It would keep them free from mud on rainy days. Next, they reinforced the drafty walls with bricks, noticeably improving the cabin’s insulation.

“This is amazing, Akio-san! It’ll be so much warmer this winter!” Ayane exclaimed with joy. The sense of achievement that came from making their home more comfortable and secure with their own hands was a joy beyond compare.

Buoyed by the success of the bricks, Akio's gaze naturally drifted toward the reddish-black stones in the corner of the cabin—the suspected iron ore. They had made pottery, then bricks. Next came extracting metal from those stones. It would be a challenge far beyond their previous efforts.

“It won’t be easy to get iron from those rocks. A normal fire won’t be enough. We’ll need a special furnace, plenty of high-quality charcoal, and a way to keep the air flowing strongly,” Sylvia remarked, as if reading Akio’s thoughts. Her words hinted at the difficulty ahead, yet her eyes burned with the quiet determination to face this new challenge alongside him.

If they could produce iron tools, knives, nails for construction—their lives in this world would change dramatically, in every sense of the word. The path ahead was still long, but within Akio’s heart, the flame of hope burned brighter than ever.

What do you think about this chapter?