✦ ✦ ✦
“Dried baobark feels rougher, but not like it would splinter,” I said.
“Right? There’s no poison either. It doesn’t make for good lumber, but it’s safe,” Hudom supplied.
A wood this brittle and dry wouldn’t work for construction or sculpting, and probably wouldn’t even work as firewood—if it didn’t crumble on the way to the fire, it would surely burn up in seconds, which wasn’t good for making a bonfire last. I wouldn’t write it off entirely until I tried it, but the baobark’s prospects as fire fuel didn’t look promising.
“Say, Hudom, does the entire baobark tree turn brittle when it’s dried? Trunk and all?” I asked.
“I’ve never tried drying a whole tree, but I’d expect it to. Anything you have in mind?”
“I might be able to use it for my hexes,” I said.
Specifically, I was thinking of making incense. There were various ways to make it in various parts of the world, but the main ingredient of Japanese incense used for funerals and other Buddhist ceremonies was powdered tabu—a Japanese bay tree. If I could powder the fragile baobark and mix it with aromatics and grains, I could mass-produce incense, which could make magical offerings and cleansing of souls more accessible.
“Let’s collect the baobark later and set them all aside for that purpose,” I said.
“It’s not like it’s useful for anything else,” Hudom agreed.
“If those trees can be of use to your magic, Master Takebayashi, you could set aside a dedicated area to cultivate them in,” Sebas suggested.
Good idea. While I’m at it, I could build a distillery for the goblins. Sake is especially useful as an offering to lost souls... It seems like my list is growing.
Returning to our top priority at the moment—building the mountain path—we continued setting up the foundation blocks. After three hours’ work, including a few short breaks, we were halfway done.
“Thank you, everyone. That concludes the portion I had scheduled for this morning, so let’s take a short break and return to the cottage,” I announced. We could probably finish the whole path today if we worked nonstop, but we weren’t in that much of a hurry. As such, we began leisurely setting up our lunch.
How are the goblins doing? I wondered. If they were making steady progress, some of them could join our work.
“Something to drink?”
“Thank you.”
Watching Sebas hand out canteens, I used Taming magic to check in on the goblins. From what I could tell, it was mostly smooth sailing. The goblins had split up into teams to tackle four tasks: felling trees, trimming branches, hauling trunks, and carrying branches. The larger and stronger hobgoblins handled the felling and trunk-hauling while the weaker goblins stuck to trimming and carrying the branches. Then, there were eight goblins—the ones I’d tamed first, giving them the most seniority—supervising all four teams.
They weren’t as efficient as us, but there was great strength in numbers. Several mounds of logs and branches dotted the clearing. I was planning to eventually use the land the goblins were working in now as farmland, but it was going to serve as our lumberyard in the meantime—a place to put all of the trees we were cutting down in these initial phases of construction. If they carried on like this after lunch, they’d clear enough space by sunset.