The three men went to the back of the house, and Chen Qi picked out several wood pieces, each about half a person in length. Seeing that Chen Qi really had come to get some firewood, Ka Luo was secretly relieved. The male that Aze had rescued the last time was full of lies. He’d clearly said that he wasn’t interested in finding himself a partner, but in the end, he went back on his word and hooked up with the patriarch’s son. Ka Luo thought of this past event and angrily grit and ground his back teeth. Ake patted his head comfortingly and Ka Luo gave him a dirty look.

Chen Qi took the wood pieces back to the front room, then checked on the two bundles of banyan roots he’d brought back. Upon visual inspection, he estimated that there were at least one or two hundred pieces of these roots. He picked one up, pulled it forcefully, and it made a slight zing sound. It was tough and not easy to break. Satisfied, Chen Qi chose two or three of the roots and simply twisted them together, then he used it to tie three wood pieces together to make a simple tripod. He repeated this to make another one, and then he placed them both by the door, where the door-curtain was half-open. This was the most well-ventilated place, which was conducive for drying the cured meat in the shade, though the room might pick up a rank smell.

He placed a stick between the two tripods, and a simple drying rack was completed. It even looked pretty good.

Ka Luo became a curious baby again. When Chen Qi finished the rack, he could not help but ask, “What is this thing you made in the room for?”

Chen Qi went to the pottery dish with the cured meat, pointed to the neatly packed strips of meat in the dish, and replied, “Drying the cured meat.”

“How would they dry in the room?” Ka Luo was still puzzled.

“En, the meat can’t be directly exposed to the sun, so it can only be dried in the shade,” Chen Qi explained as he sat on the floor. He picked up a few of the banyan tree roots and began to weave them together, like braiding hair, to make a rope. He’d just made up this kind of a rope-weaving method. Although the roots were very tough, Chen Qi still planned to make the rope thicker to add a little insurance.

The rope was soon woven. Next, Chen Qi used his dragon-horn knife to make a hole in the salted wart-pork, threaded the rope through the hole and, after visually inspecting the required length, cut off the extra length of the rope. The tied wart-pork was then hung on the newly made rack.

Without realizing it, Ka Luo had moved over to Chen Qi’s side and was watching him busying about. When the cured meat was packed in the pottery dish, it looked like there was a lot. But when hung up, it only took up half the length of the stick on the rack.

Watching Chen Qi washing his hands with a fig from a pottery dish, Ka Luo asked, “What are you going to do next?”

Chen Qi thought for a moment. “Clean up the land where the house will be built.”

“Clean up? Clean up what?”

“Weeds and stuff.”

“Isn’t it enough to just directly place the stone slabs on it? There are many empty houses in the tribe now. Just go there and move the stones over instead of going to look for them in the Loya Forest.”

Chen Qi paused. “When you build houses, don’t you need to dig the foundation first?”

“What is a foundation?” Ka Luo asked incredulously, which made him feel angry again. Why did this male always speak about things he couldn’t understand?