I didn’t linger behind to see what happened with the hominid encampment.

  As rainfall gradually picked up into a torrential downpour, I retreated back up the sloped cliffs to the high ground. Since it was already night, I ultimately opted to shelter with Lakka beneath a rocky outcrop as the fierce weather thundered on the stone roof above our heads.

  The visibility was quite poor, and attempting to start a fire would have been futile given the extremely damp environment. As a matter of fact, everything was so wet that I was fairly concerned about the condition of my bow — which I had wrapped in water-resistant goatskin.

  I spent the night meditating on my thoughts in total darkness.

  + + +

  After I awoke in the morning, the sun emerged, and I backtracked a short distance to check on the status of Hierophant Ram’s vilge on the river bank.

  Just as I suspected — it was gone.

  Everything had been washed away as if it had never been there to begin with.

  Even the team of oxen that the hominids used to pull their heavy barge up the river had vanished. Needless to say, the boat itself had disappeared, and I could only assume that they had lost all of their supplies in the fsh flood that had ripped through the bottom of the valley.

  It was very humbling scene.

  In my opinion, nothing described the tug-of-war between man and nature better than the Greek myth of Icarus. After crafting wings made of wax and feathers, he flew too close to the sun, which caused him to plummet to his death after his artificial wings melted. The story of human progress was a perpetual tale of successive failures in this fashion — two small steps forward and one rge step back.

  Simply possessing the correct theory just wasn’t enough to avoid critical mistakes.

  I was sure that the hierophant had plenty of experience of dealing with seasonal floods in the Urukai city where he grew up. However, this was an entirely different river in a foreign nd, and you couldn’t apply the same recipe and habitual formus when the fundamental ingredients were different.

  This was part of the reason why advancing technology in the age of antiquity was so challenging.

  Even if you learned how to successfully smelt gss in the nds of ancient Syria, this didn’t mean you could travel to Morocco and achieve the same result. The composition of the sand was different, and the lime additives used as flux in order to lower the melting temperature varied depending on geography. Even the specific species of hardwood used as fuel could change the temperature of the furnace, which altogether determined a successful smelt (or not).

  It wasn’t an exaggeration to say to that every recipe was heavily localized to each individual area. As soon as you switched to ore obtained from a different mine — with a different mineral composition and ratios of contaminants (i.e. sulfur) — a previously successful industrial process could suddenly be riddled with mysterious failures.

  This was an ancient world of trial-and-error, and people failed more times than not. Tradition (repeating the methods of one’s ancestors) was the one recipe that reliably produced decent outcomes, and most people did not have luxury to risk it all it on a blind moonshot with a low probability of success.

  + + +

  When I returned our tribal encampment, Calliope was understandably upset when she saw that I was randomly lugging around a rge keg of date wine. The old shaman had specifically instructed me to avoid contact with the hominids, and she actually thought that I had stolen it. However, when I expined that the entire settlement had been washed away, and that I hadn’t pyed any dirty tricks on the hominids when I approached them, she calmed down slightly.

  We simply couldn’t afford any conflict with the empire, and Calliope’s utmost priority was to ensure that the small group of elderly wolves who lived in her hidden encampment stayed safe.

  In the end, neither of us really understood why the hominids were trying to found a new brand vilge in our backyard. Their motives were unclear, but now that they were gone, they didn’t really pose much of a problem.

  We took note of the incident so that we could report it to my father ter.

  A few days afterwards, I returned to my everyday routine, hunting and gathering on the steppes.

  I spent several evenings upgrading the loom in one of the cliffside caves.

  Thanks to my memories from another world, my brain was filled with a variety of different strange factoids and schematics. Around 1500 BCE, the Ancient Greeks used a particur type of loom known as a warp-weighted loom. It was one of the oldest types of upright looms, and its main advantage was that the heddle bar made it easier to pass the shuttle between even and odd strings. This was considered to be a better design than the earlier horizontal primitive looms, which cked any special heddle device.

  Ordinarily, this innovation would have been an incredible upgrade to the existing looms of this time period… but my excitement was somewhat blunted by the fact that the people of my tribe rarely used looms. These rge wooden frames weren’t particurly mobile, and it didn’t suit the nomadic lifestyle very well.

  As a matter of fact, we barely did that much of our own textile-making in the Varg (wolf) cn. My current clothing was made out of animal hide, and we sold wool straight off the backs of our sheep by driving our flocks into hominid settlements where they were shorn directly in the city streets. My cn simply cked the static infrastructure to perform rge-scale textile processing, and it was easier for us to trade the raw materials for the finished goods.

  Of course, virtually every woman of this time period knew how to sew, embroider, and mend clothing, but I wanted to learn more about the complete textile process. We had a virtually unlimited supply of raw wool, so it seemed depressing that we had to purchase (expensive) textiles and all of our basic goods from our hominid conquerers.

  It felt like low-hanging fruit.

  I crafted a few different designs of drop spindles in order to experiment with different methods of spinning yarn.

  After a few nights tinkering, I ultimately decided that I didn’t like the design of the warp-weighted loom. The portability issues aside, it simply wasn’t efficient enough to justify how rarely my people would be able to use one. The Ancient Romans in the year 200 CE developed a vertical two-beam loom, but I also ruled this design out after some preliminary testing. If I was going to build a rge wooden device, then I would have preferred to go straight to the counterbance treadle looms utilized during the Medieval Era, which had foot peddles controlling the heddle bars.

  The only issue was that it quickly became apparent that I cked the woodworking expertise to craft simple pnks, rectangur beams, and joints. The counterbance treadle loom depended on a basic pulley mechanism, and while it was probably okay to substitute it with some some rope thrown over a tree branch, it was clear that any poor imitation that I hacked together would be too fragile for long-term use.

  Woodworking with stone tools was incredibly difficult, frustrating, and borious.

  I literally would have killed someone just to get my hands on a metal saw.

  + + +

  After giving up entirely on a prototype treadle loom, the final loom design that I ultimately settled on was actually the simplest.

  It was known as a backstrap loom, historically dated on Earth to around 2500 BCE. It was made famous by Mayan and Andean cultures in Latin America, although it was also utilized in Ancient China. Since it simply consisted of a few sticks and cords, a backstrap loom could be set up anywhere (even the mountains), and I could easily envision how the people of my nomadic tribe might adapt to such a convenient apparatus while traveling on the steppes.

  The main disadvantage of the backstrap loom was that the overall size of the cloth to woven was limited to the width of the weaver, and it was impractical to make complicated patterns that required multiple heddles. However, from a functionality standpoint, it was perfect for the needs of my tribe… assuming that I could convince people to use it.

  At the end of the day, I was simply interested in increasing our overall productivity. If it was possible to weave without an immobile wooden structure that needed to be fixed in one pce, my retives could actually produce some textiles while taking our herds to pasture, which transted into more wealth (GDP) and time to pursue other hobbies.

  The hunter-gatherer lifestyle had fairly low margin above the minimum level of sustenance, and my people would never be able to specialize into dedicated professions if all of our time every day was completely consumed with acquiring food.

  We needed to break this cycle, and small optimizations went a long way.

  + + +

  Nearly a week after I had that strange encounter with the hominids at the bank of the river, the next episode of excitement came in the form of a passing caravan.

  I spotted them while I was taking a long detour from my usual hunting trail.

  There were natural tar pits in the badnds approximately ten leagues southwest of our tribe’s encampment, and I had coincidentally swung by the area in order to survey the terrain. Tar, also known as ‘pitch’ or ’bitumen’, was essentially a viscous waste product of petroleum that naturally seeped to the surface.

  Apart from the rich floodpins created by the Great River, the Fertile Crescent was ironically quite a hostile environment as soon as you left the fertile farmnds. Given its arid desert climate and low levels of rainfall, people of antiquity used to dig wells for water, but they’d curse their luck when this useless bck gooey stuff came to the surface.

  …A useless sticky substance that would one day in the distant future be called ‘bck gold’.

  + + +

  From the distance, I could see that the passing train of wagons was having some trouble near the tar pits. The caravan belonged to the Krois (Rams), a tribe of horned beastkin who resided in the hills to the west, and I could see that at least one of their wagons had broken down.

  Presumably, their caravan was returning from the east, fully loaded down with piles of precious trade goods that their tribe had purchased from afar. The weight, however, had been their worst enemy — as the solid wooden wheels of this era in antiquity were not rimmed with metal. They cked the durability of ter developments, and it was easy to see how the poor terrain and heavy pressure on the wooden wheels could lead to catastrophic fissures in the wood.

  The caravan could not move… unless they chose to discard their precious cargo.

  It was not an enviable dilemma.

  Internally, I debated my next course of action.

  My cn did not have good retions with our neighbors. Ever since my father the chieftain ‘betrayed’ the other tribes during the invasion of the Urukai Empire many years ago, the Krois resented us for submitting to the hominids, and they refused to trade with us year after year.

  I wasn’t very optimistic that they’d welcome my company on the account of my heritage.

  That being said, those horned beastkin were technically trespassing on our nds, and I felt like it was only proper to extend a helping hand.

  Ultimately, I pointed my mule towards the broken train of wagons across the oil sands.

  ?