Lords of the Heavens

Chapter 438 The Test of Winter
"Add life to all!"

Li Wei had already activated the full-service management mode through the Prestige Stone, directly preventing the possibility of some people randomly adding points from the source.

Then, he spent another 10,000 hunting experience points to select 200 people, bind and activate their one-star hunter cards, and incidentally spent another 10,000 hunting experience points to upgrade them to two stars for free.

This way you can get another ten attribute points, and you should still put them all into health until you reach level one awakening in health, and continue to add to it until you finally have 150 health points.

In this way, you won't be afraid of ordinary colds or flu. You can endure a little cold, hard work, or suffering.

Finally, Li Wei used his extensive experience as a woodcutter to help all the refugees who hadn't found a second job.

In short, apart from the thirty-four soldiers and the thirty-two craftsmen, tailors, butchers, blacksmiths, stonemasons and other refugees who were originally of high status, the rest, even the children, became dual-professionals.

Each refugee has an average of 150 health points, and some refugees with better starting conditions can have more free attribute points to increase their stamina and strength.

It feels like Chinese New Year!
In a flash, the loyalty level was back to 100.

Li Wei gave a disdainful sneer and once again experienced the helplessness his second aunt felt.

Next, he generated several more quests using the Prestige Stone.

The top priority is to build some sturdier wooden houses, the kind with fireplaces and heated brick beds. We need to build twenty of them, and each one should be able to accommodate twenty people.

There's no problem with that, because Li Wei brought all the building materials from the small village in the mountain bay. The houses they originally lived in were similar wooden houses, so there was no need for any processing in the middle; they just needed to assemble them with iron nails.

Li Wei didn't even need to give specific instructions; the refugees could build it themselves. What used to be a constraint on them was their physical weakness and thinness, but that's no longer a problem.

Especially when there are enough tools available.

This area was allocated to sixty people: ten craftsmen and fifty laborers, who were able to start construction on five wooden houses simultaneously.

The second task is to build a blacksmith shop. There are three blacksmiths among the refugees, one of whom is a three-star blacksmith, and the other two are two-star blacksmiths. There are also fifteen blacksmith apprentices. This blacksmith, Orpheus, can handle this on his own.

Having a blacksmith shop would also facilitate construction.

This area was allocated to eighteen people.

The third task was to build a wall. More than 400 people needed a large space, and this space also needed a wall with a perimeter of at least one kilometer.

Given the current limited resources, we will first adopt a combination of log walls and stone walls.

This task wasn't technically difficult, but it was mostly physically demanding, so sixty people were assigned to it.

The fourth task is to explore and excavate the surrounding area. This requires soldiers to escort the woodcutter out to chop wood, as the demand for firewood will be high this winter. Hunting and gathering can also be done during this time.

This task was left to Chris's team and twenty woodcutters. The former were responsible for hunting and security, while the latter only needed to cut down trees and transport them. Of course, this round trip could take hundreds of miles.

The fifth task was to gather supplies and prepare food, which could be done by assigning many strong women, a total of forty people were assigned.

The sixth task was to reclaim wasteland.

Yes, this is a task that is not needed now, but will be very important next year. It is because Li Wei strengthened all the refugees by bleeding himself dry. Otherwise, there would be no chance to do this, as there are not enough people to do it.

But now, Li Wei can spare twenty strong farmers to help him cultivate wasteland in the camp. The mission objective is to cultivate 300 acres first.

As the saying goes, "With food in hand, one has nothing to fear," and this is an eternally irrefutable truth.

However, there is one difference: while other farmers cultivate fields for planting next year, Li Wei cultivates fields for immediate planting.

He worked very fast, clearing ten acres of farmland in less than a day. The soil moisture was good, so there was no need for irrigation. Li Wei directly buried three hundred fire crystal stones evenly in the ten acres of farmland.

Well, let's treat it as an experiment.

He wants to plant winter wheat, which is definitely too late for this season, but perhaps with the help of magic and hard work, it will be successful.

After burying the fire crystal, he planted the seeds, then covered the surface of the farmland with a thick layer of wheat straw, and then weighed it down with tree branches.

It is worth mentioning that Li Wei used two-star quality winter wheat seeds, which have 40% higher cold resistance than ordinary winter wheat seeds.

On the third day after he planted the winter wheat, the weather changed. Gray clouds piled up in the sky, and a cold wind blew from the northwest. Overnight, the temperature dropped by more than ten degrees.

The biggest challenge has arrived.

Fortunately, the first batch of five wooden houses were successfully built at this time, and the blacksmith shop was also able to open its furnace to forge some iron nails and other materials.

Li Wei had no choice but to suspend the work of the hunting and logging teams and turn his attention to the construction of the houses. Unfortunately, there were only ten craftsmen who knew how to build houses, and it was not something that could be accomplished by adding more people.

It is worth mentioning that this unique wooden house is unique to this world, seemingly inherited from an era more than two hundred years ago, and has not been greatly improved over the past two centuries.

As long as the foundation is laid properly, it can be quickly stabilized, solid and strong, and has good heat retention.

But if you ask these craftsmen to design and build another type of house, they will be completely baffled.

These craftsmen's skills were passed down from generation to generation, without any formal training, such as force formulas or anything like that.

This is also a headache for Li Wei.

It should be noted that his initial idea was to build a large log fortress to enhance the thermal effect. If this task were placed in Li Wei's Blazing Territory, let alone an engineering genius like Zhao Qingshan, or a fundamentally sound engineer like Nelson or Lenos, any of his engineering team leaders could design at least two sets of blueprints within a few hours.

Moreover, they have many ingenious ideas, which they can then effectively apply in practice.

During the initial development of the Blazing Territory, this abundant team of engineers was a tremendous help to Li Wei. It's a pity, the level of craftsmanship in this world is only so-so. You disagree? Come and try!
Li Wei really couldn't handle it; it's like being in a completely different world.

So now, with the temperature plummeting and a heavy snowfall imminent, he has no choice but to personally cut the wooden planks while directing the woodcutters to nail them to the windows of the newly built wooden house, essentially taking on the post-construction house renovation work.

There was plenty of plank, and Li Wei was in charge of ensuring it met the standards: three-centimeter-thick planks, all the same length, width, and height, nailed together along the outside of the wooden house to ensure a tight fit.

Meanwhile, another layer is nailed inside, which can be considered an otherworldly version of insulation.

Meanwhile, some farmers were also being directed to dig soil, dig wells, mix mud, and plaster and grout the interior of houses with nailed wooden planks—another desperate measure for insulation.

Of course, this inevitably requires bringing out the powerful weapon of the heated brick bed.

Back in the Blazing Territory, Li Wei never had the chance to use it because Nelson, Lenos, and their group of capable people had thought of things much more than Li Wei. Before his plan for a heated kang bed could be implemented, they had already welded a hot water boiler and installed indoor heating.

However, each cabin here can only accommodate ten people.

Yes, although Li Wei requested that twenty people live there, the craftsmen believed that it would damage the house's stable structure. Well, they had a point.

You can call the shots in your own territory, but this heated kang (traditional heated bed) is something I, Laozi, must call the shots on.

Li Wei is really good at this, because he has simulated it in his mind many times.

After all, it's actually quite simple.

In short, a wooden house can accommodate two heated kang beds and two stoves, one to the south and one to the north, corresponding to each other, and can really fit twenty people if squeezed in.

As for a fireplace, forget about it.

Because Li Wei has now keenly realized that this winter there will be a shortage of not only food, but also firewood.

The surrounding mountains are all bare. There used to be many trees, but they have all been cut down. Gale Fortress needs a lot of firewood for heating every year.

After the first wooden house was renovated and the heated kang bed was made, it was snowing heavily outside.

However, the craftsmen did not stop building the wooden houses; they were very motivated, since no one wanted to live in a dugout.

At this moment, Li Wei lit two stoves, and the smoke calmly dissipated from the chimney outside, with a pretty good effect.

However, it will take at least ten days for these two heated brick beds to dry completely, so we can move in ten days later.

So before Li Wei could even go over and renovate the other four wooden houses, they were already packed with a bunch of refugees shivering from the cold.

This is fucking ridiculous!

Okay, it is indeed very cold; the lowest temperature has approached minus twenty degrees Celsius.

Of everyone, only Li Wei was unaffected; the others, including soldiers like Chris, were not having an easy time. After awakening to the first level of life, their resistance to freezing could only be said to have increased to a certain extent; they could not truly be fearless in the freezing cold.

So in the end, all he could do was make sure that wooden planks were nailed inside and outside each cabin to minimize the penetration of the cold wind; the rest he could only tough it out.

As for the construction of the wooden houses, that cannot be stopped.

Even though a wooden cabin with a fireplace isn't very warm, it's still much better than a dugout.

Fortunately, while we lack many other things, we don't lack people. The laborers are rotated every hour, so the ten craftsmen just have to work harder, wear more clothes, and do less work, which is enough to keep them going.

The heavy snow stopped after one night, reaching a depth of ten centimeters, but it was not enough to build snow walls and igloos.

The weather didn't get any colder afterward, but many refugees inevitably suffered from frostbite.

Unfortunately, Li Wei had no better solution to this, and he never expected things to develop to this point.

To be honest, he has done everything he could and should have done.

He hasn't slept a wink for the past ten days.

That is to say, he has enough physical strength and a strong mental foundation, otherwise he really wouldn't have been able to hold on.

Because these refugees are truly hopeless, like mud that can't be propped up.

He was responsible for dangerous and labor-intensive tasks such as raising the roof beams, and for cutting the wooden planks.

The well hasn't yielded any water yet, but he has to travel over a hundred miles to fetch water for the camp's more than four hundred people every day.

Although there are resource cards that you can carry with you, and you can use them for three days once, there are just too many things to do.

This became his downfall.

Fortunately, everything is improving, and the refugees are behaving reliably. They don't complain or grumble, and their mindset is stable. On the contrary, they feel that they have never experienced such days before, so they work very hard. They know to take care of the elderly, weak, women and children first. Even when there is no specific work, they don't stay idle. They clear the snow, melt the snow water, and continue to go out to move stones and repair the wall. They grit their teeth and endure the frostbite all over their bodies. As long as they don't freeze to death, they have to keep working.

Then, on the fourteenth day after moving to this camp, the third batch of five wooden houses were successfully built.

On the fifteenth day, water was finally found in the well.

On the sixteenth day, the first wooden house with a heated kang (a traditional heated platform bed) was ready for occupancy. The scorching hot kang immediately won over all the refugees, so the second and third wooden houses also began to have heated kangs built at the same time.

It was at this moment that Li Wei finally couldn't hold on any longer. He called out and lay down on the heated kang bed, falling into a deep sleep, completely disoriented and unaware of his surroundings.

(End of this chapter)