Joseph's POV (The hunter) :
It's been two months since the kid became our chief, or king, and I must say, I'm impressed.
I expected him to laze around with his newfound power but it seems he's better at politics than hunting, even though he's not half bad at that either…
At first he mostly changed stuff like who was in charge of what and who each one should follow. It was pretty boring, something like restructuring our society or something.
Some have been pretty noisy about not being their own boss anymore but it calmed down as his other changes came along. But I'm not sure they will stay quiet for much longer.
He started with our way of handling food, it's been a while since the dome started to cool down but even after it was fixed the temperature didn't go back to usual.
Many plants and animals died from the initial drop while the biomes in themselves started to resemble each other more every passing day.
From what I could see during my hunts, the entire dome was changing to have a uniform temperature and landscape.
This resulted in many of the animals to migrate without finding a place to settle causing us hunters a lot of trouble.
As I said before, plants also started disappearing, and Matt did not like that at all. He gave us the task of collecting as many seeds as possible while he checked with some of the sages and crafters to make an area for each type of plant to be cultivated in.
He's also very keen on saving the animals but there's no way for us to save everything and everyone.
We prioritized the tame ones like cheep, cows, pigs… but many of them died on the way or when predators converged on their areas.
One morning, a friend of mine found an entire clearing covered with dead horses and a few dead predators, the bodies were savagely mutilated and devoured, probably by a pack of wolves and bears seeing the teeth marks.
I swear this is some kind of animal free for all out there. To make things less chaotic, we have been killing all the predators that could not be controlled and with the help of some tamers we proceeded with our selective genocide.
Result of all this, our biological diversity dropped significantly leaving us with only farm animals, hunting predators, wild ones that could produce certain resources and rare or pretty ones that the chief wanted to keep.
They all needed to be treated depending on their original needs, so fucking anoying to take care of.
It's a very drastic decision but I won't mix myself with all that, especially when I'm already so busy balancing the brand new ecosystem that we have.
I overheard an elder talking about the animals recorded in one of the old books, we are lucky fishes, big lizards and other strange creatures don't live within our borders or else this would have been even worse.
Seeds in comparison had it easy, most of the trees were able to handle the temperature and the smaller plants that couldn't were simply replanted in the newly built strange glass cage called greenhouse the king designed.
"HEY! Joseph, we got a lion pride heading our way!" Another hunter that was on duty with me cried out.
"Urgh, alright… let's take care of them."
So I picked up my bow and started shooting.
Oslo's POV :
That brat gave me a shit ton of work, first I had to lead the construction of some kind of huge smithy, he didn't even let me build it next to my workshop!
Instead he made all the builders and crafters dig out and make a foundation inside the side of the heart of the mountain.
I remember when I passed in there for my coming of age ceremony and it was hot as fuck!
However it seems that the lava cooled down quite a bit, while still hot, it was much more bearable, akin to the heat of my furnace when smelting a weapon.
I suppose this is why he wanted us to make that in there, to make production of his next projects easier… but it came across a big problem, many young crafters weren't able to stand the heat for too long before collapsing. Causing many of them to complain and say they would quit… only to start working again the next morning.
Burns and wounds became more and more common and yet not a single one of us stopped working.
I think I get it now why others call us crafters stubborn and stupid. Ha! I'm proud of it!
When the whole project was finished, Matt joined us to make the next parts which were upgrades for our new smithy, which was still an empty dug out cave at this point.
He called it industrialisation or whatnot and showed us a bunch of plans for machines and contraptions that would make our job easier.
Sweet lord have I never seen anything so beautiful in my life! The power, the design, the magnificent techniques!
Splendid!
And to think that little shit came up with this? Well I actually believe it. Even though his earlier junk was pretty intricate there was no way for it to last long and be anything but a toy. This? This is a work of art.
So me and the boys started working while our little king pulled back his sleeves and did the same. Seeing him like this kinda makes me happy to work under him to be honest.
We moved a lot of our equipment from the surface down here and did our job.
Smelting the minerals, fusing them, smelting again, shaping, smelting, shaping sharpening, shaping, cooling, cleaning to obtain diverse metallic pieces.
Then arranging, assembling, welding, assembling, cleaning and… voilà, one industrial beauty finished.
So we continued working, more and more of these machines appeared in the workshop every few days, bulky ones, long ones, heck even a giant hammer that could fall and rise repeatedly was made, it puts my titan hammering technique to shame.
They are majestic beings of steel created for the sole purpose of making our task at creating them and other creations easier… and better, the dream of any respectable craftsman.
Some of them also gave us the chance to work with more resources at once. Before we could only forge a small metal blade or accessory that would be combined with another part to become a whole.
Like a wooden handle with a sword blade or an ax head.
Now we could finally work humongous quantities of molten metal without it cooling or melting all over the place.
Giant furnaces powered with steam and lava, pressing mechanisms, casting, forging, grinding… It was an art exposition.
The king that brought these ideas to us grinned at our awe and asked us to listen to him so he could show us what he had made at that time.
He came by for a few hours every day amidst his busy schedule to work alongside us, we only saw bits and pieces of the things he made during these months.
He also asked us to leave the smithy to him for one day, for us to rest and for him to finish whatever he was making.
As we came down we saw how much the smithy had changed.
The huge room we had dug out where all the machinery was placed in now had a thick wall of blurry glass separating us from the volcanic heart.
Strange pipes were now attached to the ceiling that was also reinforced with thick steel bars.
These silver colored pipes slithered around the entire room but I really didn't know what they were for. Bringing water ? But then why are there holes in them?
He gave us a grateful smile and congratulated us for our hard work before saying he would reward our future contribution and then flipped a small lever on the wall I hadn't noticed.
I felt cold air hit my sweaty face and cool down the entire room, this was brilliant! How many revolutionary ideas does this kid have?
After asking him how he did it, he simply told me that this was a Canadian well, as if this was obvious from the start.
He told me that it would both cool the smithy and heat some of the village above, it sounded incredible!
After that we went back to work, week after week we would make different contraptions at his demand one after the other.
At first it was an entire building made out of glass and steel we implanted in the old savanna.
It took us a lot of time to learn how to work with so much glass and steel but we managed.
The biggest problem was bringing sand and limestone down to the smithy in large enough quantities from the southern lake.
We made some kind of giant well that the chief calls an elevator just to solve this problem. He took half of my artisans for that project but it made coming down here so much easier.
And now we are making some kind of giant metal door we had to carry piece by piece all the way to the exit of the mountain all the way in the south.
There is just one problem, we are running out of iron and I haven't told the king yet since I don't want to disturb him while he's working on his own stuff.
I'll have a chat with him once he's finished with that glove he's been working on.
1613 words