Unital Ring I by Reki Kawahara

Author:Reki Kawahara [Kawahara, Reki]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Light Novel
Publisher: Yen On
Published: 2021-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

True to its nature as an Ancient weapon in ALO, Leafa’s sword sliced up the spiral pines like they were nothing, despite not being a proper woodcutting ax. It took no more than thirty seconds for her to cut down a tree, so even with three people working on skinning and hauling it off, any delay would cause our side of the process to get backed up.

After fifteen minutes of high-focus teamwork with Asuna and Alice, we had another tremendous stack of spiral-patterned logs in the clearing. There were three piles of ten logs each. That should be more than enough to make the seventy-five sawed planks we needed for the repair.

But as I stood there satisfied, hands on my hips, a question occurred to me.

“Um…how do we make the planks…?”

There were plenty of planks available for purchase at the local home improvement store in the real world, but I didn’t know exactly how they made them. I guessed they probably just sliced the logs into thinner pieces…but you’d probably need some heavy-duty equipment to process logs of this width.

Asuna had the knowledge to back up my guess. “Of course, we don’t have a large band saw here, so we’ll at least need a frame saw…”

“F-frame saw?”

“Yes, it’s a huge saw they used back in the Meiji era.”

“Ohhh…I think maybe I’ve seen that in a Japanese history textbook once…”

I’d never heard of a band saw, either, but I could guess that it was the name of another kind of wood-processing tool. “So we need a saw…We might be able to craft one with iron and the Blacksmithing skill, but both of those will probably take a lot of time. But then again…they didn’t have saws all the way back in the earliest periods of Japanese history, right? So how did those people make planks of wood?”

“Well, let’s see…”

Even brilliant Asuna had to pause and make a face like she was searching her memory, but as always, she found the answer there. That’s how I could tell her brain was simply different from mine.

“A saw that can cut a log vertically, like the frame saw I mentioned…came to Japan from the Asian mainland in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Before that, they would hammer wedges into the logs to split them, then use hand axes and planes to finish the surfaces. Splitting wood with a wedge is basically just hoping the grain will split in your favor, so it was inefficient and susceptible to failure. Longer planks were a real extravagance back in those days.”

“Huh…With wedges, eh?” I murmured, gazing at the stacks of logs.

I’d been examining them as we stripped the bark off. The name spiral pine definitely referred to the way the tree rotated like a drill as it grew. The fibers were twisted into a spiral pattern inside the trunk. If this game could even factor in grain direction to individual trees, then striking them with wedges was almost certainly going to shatter them without a straight split.

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