Chapter 118: First feast of the settlement (1/2)

”I'm finally done!” Layn screamed from the bottom of his lungs, falling down on the hard bricks that made up the floor of the kitchen. ”After two damned days, I finally did it!” he praised himself, even more, adoring the crude result of his poor craftsmanship.

For the last two days, Layn had a single task. To turn the bricked structure called a kitchen into a real one. And to do that, there were more than just a few utensils that he had to prepare.

First came the fridge. Obviously, without all the complicated chipsets, coolers, and liquid coolant, Layn had no way to even approach the topic from the usual, technical standpoint. Creating a fridge that people from his original time would consider a fridge was just impossible.

But what would be magic worth if it couldn't substitute for technology in situations like this?

Layn ended up setting on the wisdom of his ancestors. He didn't do it because he found the idea fancy or inspiring, but simply because he had no other real choices. If he wanted his group to be capable of storing food for long periods of time, something absolutely necessary on the grassy desert, he had to rely on the wisdom of the past.

And soon, the entire kitchen had to go through a serious remodeling.

First, Layn got two of the mercenaries to dig a huge basement for the kitchen. Once that was done, the excavated material was set in the area of influence of the crystal Layn recovered from the nearby site in the lake, turning it into a prime, formation-setting material.

Then came the annoying part that consumed over one and a half-day of Layn's efforts. With the walls of the basement hardened, Layn then personally covered them in a thick layer of the magic-infused material. Once that step was done, he enclosed himself with this new refuge of his, working tirelessly for the entire night to carve all the markings and runes necessary to bring his desired formation to life.

Layn came out of the basement roughly an hour after the daybreak. His entire body was covered in a mix of dried-out sweat, dirt, and the formation material. Yet, despite his state indicating just how hot it had to be in this unventilated, underground room, Layn was actually shivering from cold when he came out.

'Still, that formation was a fucking miracle,' Layn thought to himself, slowly gathering his body up from the floor. Yes, the floor. It was another of the improvements made by Layn as soon as the fridge-like basement reached its completion.

The formation within the basement had two elements. The main and the simpler one was the freezing effect that the formation imposed on the area enclosed by the formation padding. The actual challenge of setting that formation laid in its other part, responsible for limiting the output of the freezing formation.

'In the end, using a military-grade trap formation to create a fridge was a bit too much,' Layn thought, patting the bricks that made up the floor of the building. And as strange as it might be, this floor was necessary.

According to Layn's plans, before this place would turn into a proper city with craftsmen, farms, and various factories, all the buildings were set to have their floor made with the hardened earth. It was the simplest kind of floor to create, given how all it took to be placed was a burly man stomping on the ground for a few hours.

But that wasn't the case for the kitchen. With the powerful formation freezing its basement at all times, the cold spread all around, turning the lands nearby the kitchen completely unusable for farming. While this alone wouldn't be a problem given how Layn wasn't insane enough to place farms in the middle of the settlement, there was another, huge problem to fix.

When the freezing temperature of the basement propagated in every direction, the floor of the kitchen was no exception. And the triple layer of the Layn's brick barely did this job. With this protection from the cold,  the kitchen became usable again.

'But I couldn't afford to keep it uncomfortable, could I?' Layn smiled at his own thoughts as he looked towards the last element he personally installed in the building.

It was a stove. Quite simple in its design, it consisted of three chambers. One at the bottom, and two empty ones stacked right above it. The bottom space served as the burning area. Once filled with fuel and ignited, it would heat up both of the other chambers, one of which would be covered with a huge, cooking plate, while the other one connected to the airflow system that Layn wasted another few hours to implement.

The airflow system was based on a pretty simple idea. If fully insulating the floor of the kitchen from the cold of the basement was impossible, all that Layn had to do to fix this problem was to introduce some heat back to the system.

And that was specifically what the other chamber in the stove was there for. Rather than being used for cooking, it forced the overheated air from the chamber into a special tube, that connected the spaces intentionally left between the three layers of the bricks. The floor consisted of a layer of bricks, supported by a huge amount of small, wooden blocks, another layer of bricks, another layer of blocks, and then a final layer of bricks.