With my brief obsession with trying to recover my lost taste buds over, I returned back to focusing on the bounties of fall. Kuch went back out to try and hunt something again, odds likely being another aggressive beast. I think I only wanted to do one or two more, lest I actually destroy the ecosystem's balance. I wasn't intending on only hunting predators, but the speed of my dolls wasn't fast enough to catch most of the faster herbivores.

  I guess I would have to make traps for those. Maybe after winter, I wasn't in such dire need anyway when I checked and pulled out my newly treated leather from the tannin solution.

  Boar Leather (Item Quality: 47) (Infuse Level: 151)

  My, one single boar pelt gave me quite a fair bit of leather! I could make a fair bit from this already, another couple and I'll definitely be set for a little while. Since I removed all the hair bristles off, both sides were completely smooth and pleasing to the touch. Oho, here comes new fashion options-!

  But before I could lose myself to my very guilty addiction, my head snapped up when one of my bird scouts spied something unusual. It was the one to the south, along the coastline that the land eventually turned into. There, in the distant ocean, a faint orange glow illuminated the dark horizon.

  That wasn't sunrise, the moons of Shin still hung high in the sky amid stars.

  Was it...fire? Ah, maybe a battle at sea? I did wonder what that was all about. Maybe pirates raiding merchants? Or a fight against a mighty sea monster? Those did exist in FLOW and had been some fun boss fights. I wondered how it'd look though without gunpowder weapons like cannons. Likely a lot of boarding actions either way.

  I frowned and hoped that regardless of whatever the conflict was, it stayed far away from me. The last thing I wanted was to be drawn into a fight right now. My gaze locked onto that sight for a few more minutes, then turned away. I'll check later if it was over.

  Kuch had brought back a wolf this time. I'll process that in the meantime.

  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------?

  The battle was over by morning and I wasn't so lucky that abandoned cargo washed up on the beaches. I wasn't so unfortunate to have bodies wash up either. So I put it out of my mind and turned to myself in the mirror, showing off the new winter coat I had made. It even had fur, courtesy of the wolf Kuch had hunted.

  Fine Fur Coat (Final Grade: 198)

  Ah, now I could live out the image of trudging through snow in a forest, whenever that came. That was how I managed to take my mind off having a winter fashion show and put my mind back onto current season preparations. Let's see, what else should I grab before a freeze came?

  Oh, autumn berries! I could mash them up and that into alcohol, that was a useful crafting material. And also a fun consumable- let's see if this body could get drunk! Kuch, dear, fetch some please? Thanks.

  While they lumbered off to do so, I went to check on how Frie's rebuilding efforts had gone. The main building was now properly patched up so that there weren't any random holes in the walls leading to the outside. That was great and now with an application of [Foundation], they should hold so long as I was around. Now come repairing the inside, which they could do with the wood, hammer, and nails I made. They could do the inner walls and the floors at least, the rooms here were large enough to actually allow for Frie to work unimpeded.

  However, they couldn't repair or replace the furniture. That would be my job, the actual crafter, and I saw no point in it for the moment. I had no need of anything and was the only inhabitant of the manor, so it was definitely a low priority project. But I did go and put up those replacement doors like I'd promised! New, sturdy, thick ones with fresh hinges that I'll be sure to keep clean. Once again, the great hall had a great entrance way leading in.

  But the owner for them had changed. Hence why my knight's coat of arms no longer greeted any who approach the door. Rather now, it was a little abstract carving that was a side profile of my upper body, mirrored across both doors. I almost wanted to think of it as being two of me symbolically opening the way into the manor, which matched up with my constant use of dolls now. One day, maybe I'll even have a doll door guard.

  I'll probably need a better title than that if I went with the role.

  Let's move on and fix up the western wing next. I wanted to start building back up my library collection, especially now that I could make books using parchment, leather, and thread. I didn't have any glue, mainly because the trees in this part of the forest were unfortunately not the type to produce very sticky sap. I think I'll have to go to the deep forest, but not knowing what exactly was in there, I did not want to take the risk yet. Not without better dolls who could face down whatever emerged from within.

  Ah, Kuch returned with those berries I'd asked for. Good, what else to fetch- ah, the river would likely freeze over during winter. I best gather up more clay before I would need to break through the ice to get more. In the meantime, time to start turning these berries into juice, then wine. Oh, but first, a dose of [Infuse].

  Bush Berries (Item Quality: 27) (Infuse Level: 68)

  Yeesh, poor ingredients and pretty bad roll on this. I'm guessing it's maybe a late harvest, or perhaps it's because these had been growing in the wild. Hm, maybe I should uproot and bring them closer to the manor to tend to. Maybe if I really wanted to go in for a session of making quality wine.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  For now, guess I'll just forgo the wine and distill to pure alcohol. That alone would be a useful fire accelerant for keeping a fire burning at a consistent temperature. With my goal set, I began with a stone mortar to start with smashing the plucked berries, skin and all.

  I did so until they were as liquid as possible. Then I collected the juice into a pot, noting that this much would probably end up amounting to maybe half a barrel when this was all over. That should be enough for my purposes. I held up my hand and activated a new cooking skill that would save me much time. "[Ferment]."

  In the real world, you needed specific cultures of mold and bacteria to ferment things. But as FLOW was definitely not a learning game that had reason to feature each and every single one of them, along with just how ubiquitous the process was to a lot of foods, the developers added a skill to ease the process. [Ferment] allowed magic to take the role of yeast and so many others, while also accelerating the process.

  When the glow faded, I was greeted not with berry juice, but the start of berry wine. Were I interested, I could seal this in a barrel to let age and develop into a finer taste. It was said that no self-respecting player cook would ever serve a vintage younger than a hundred days back then, but only because that was how the server time functioned. I think now in this world, I'd have to measure it by seasons instead.

  But like I'd mention before, wine wasn't my goal here. It was alcohol, which required me to swap over to my distiller workstation. I poured the wine into the main body and began to heat the mix, concentrating the liquid through evaporation until the previously colored fluid now trickled out as a crystal clear liquid.

  Distilled Alcohol (Item Quality: 61) (Infuse Level: 99)

  Sub one hundred, meh. Good thing that I was going to be using it less as an ingredient, and more of an aid. I tested it by taking a shallow amount in a bowl and tossing it into the distillery's setup. The fire flared and burned brighter for a brief moment, confirming that it had worked quite well. Excellent.

  Now my charcoal could burn almost just as well as coal, if not better. That would help me in my crafts, but I was pretty sure it was unfortunately still lower than the necessary heat required to turn iron into steel. There was simply no getting around that limitation, I needed to get coal and refine that into coke. Plain and simple.

  However, feeding the flame wasn't the only thing this pure spirit was good for. It also was a handy disinfectant, so I could finally clean my kitchen and have sterile surfaces to work with. In fact, I could probably even dip all that grimy old glassware in them and clean it. But given many had hairline cracks, I might as well crush and add them to that supply of crystal sand I made a while back.

  In fact, why don't I do that now while I've got a fire going? It wasn't hard to just transfer the embers to the fueled forge. The poor quality iron had been shaped into proper glass blowpipes already when I went I had gone a little maniacal in my first iron craft session. Now these shouldn't warp and when put in the forge like the ceramics, though that did still have a use.

  Like when I had made iron, I dumped the crystal sand in a sacrificial pot and set in into the forge to heat. Unlike then, it melted down all the way and turned into a gooey mess contained only by the container that held it in. I stuck the end of a blowpipe in and carefully scooped up a good dollop, spinning it about to make sure none of that liquid treasure dripped off.

  When I was satisfied, I pulled the rod out and sucked in a deep breath before blowing. Because my body didn't actually need air, the entire amount went in through the pipe and was injected into the core of of the sticky mass, expanding it almost perfectly symmetrically. A few casual waggles corrected the slight errors against and I checked along the length. Another breath was needed and I repeated the process quickly, before the material could cool.

  Almost there. I put the rod back into the forge to heat, because I actually did need it hot to cool. That sounded a bit paradoxically, but trust me. When it was glowing again, I pulled it out and activated [Quench] to force a sudden thermal shock, localized entirely around where I wanted the neck of the vessel to end. With tongs, it snapped easily and came free from the rod.

  Back into the forge, and this time I used my own hands, uncaring of the heat. It didn't neat to get so hot again this time, just enough so that I could use a wooden paddle to gently smooth out the rough neck. Ah, why was I using wood? Because it didn't retain the heat as much, allowing me more time to mold the work into the exact shape I wanted.

  Once I was satisfied, a final touch of [Quench] to this time gently cool the entire structure finished off the small bottle I had made. Something that I poured the alcohol I just made into, so that I knew exactly how much I had at an idle glance. Already glass was proving its use and I grinned. I really was going to enjoy having it around for my crafts now.

  Crude Glass Bottle (Final Grade: 394)

  I'd probably have thrown myself into a glassmaking marathon right there and then had Kuch not alerted me they just found something at the river. Something very interesting.

  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------?