Ning Shu and Zhi stocked up on a lot of meat. When Ning Shu saw that they had gathered a good amount of meat, she slowed her hunting speed and started gathering herbs instead.
During the winter, the entire world would be blanketed by ice and snow so forget herbs, she wouldn’t even be able to find grass.
After drying the herbs she gathered, she wrapped them up with beast skins.
Not long after the excitement over the invention of pottery wore off, Qian Jia started building a house. She couldn’t take the dampness and stuffiness of the caves anymore.
So she complained to Rui that back home, she always lived in a house and that living in a cave made her feel like she was becoming a serious caveman.
Although Rui didn’t know what a caveman was, he nodded and said that he would build Qian Jia a house.
Qian Jia was very excited and immediately started making plans for a house. She had been wanting to get out of the cave for a long time. It was wet and there were so many bugs.
The first step was making bricks, so she had people collect rocks to serve as bricks.
The entire tribe got busy gathering rocks so they soon came up with a large collection. Qian Jiaj liked the granite that Kai found the most because this material was very hard.
Since she didn’t have cement, she just used mud. She came up with the brilliant idea of using the silt in the river because that mud was sticky enough to act as a substitute for cement.
Under Qian Jia’s guidance, a very simple house was built and the ceiling was covered with sogon grass.
Although it was a simple house, it had a door and a window, and there was even a heatable brick bed inside. It was very crude, but Qian Jia was still very excited and rolled around on the brick bed happily.
When the tribe chief saw this, he immediately had his son make him a house too.
Houses became the newest novelty in the tribe. They had always lived in the caves, so it never occurred to them that it was possible to live in this kind of place.
Zhi would go look at the houses every day.
There gradually started to be more houses in the tribe. After seeing the houses, no one wanted to live in the caves anymore.
Zhi was very envious and said to Ning Shu, “Cao, why don’t we make a house too?”
“There’s no point. It’s going to be winter soon. The grass won’t be able to hold up to the snow’s weight and all the snow will pour into the house,” replied Ning Shu.
Zhi nodded and fell silent. She didn’t bring up wanting to build a house again. Ning Shu told Zhi that if the cave felt seriously wet, just scatter charcoal or grass ashes on the cave floor. Those were capable of sucking up moisture.
Ning Shu had always made use of the ashes this way in her cave.