Work Prophet
Chapter 92 - 8 The New Home of the Lizard People

Chapter 92: Chapter 8 The New Home of the Lizard People

Fosto was tasked with purchasing a large number of tents and blankets, which was the first thing Li Yu did to ensure that the lizard people had the most basic shelter.

On the Bratis Continent, a typical farmhouse is generally constructed with wood serving as the basic framework, with gaps filled by a network of stacked branches, then covered with a layer of clay for sealing, and the roof is often thatched with straw or reed.

Most farmhouses have just one room where the entire family, regardless of size, lives together, and even poultry and livestock are allowed inside, including but not limited to chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, and cows. These animals provide a bit of warmth for the people living inside during the cold winter days, but they also bring mosquitoes and an annoying smell.

This is also why many commoners always smell foul.

A few wealthier self-sufficient farmers may have two or three rooms, allowing for separate bedrooms and stables, and even a dedicated storage room for food.

But this could also make them a target for bandits and thieves passing through.

Although the farmers almost all cook their own food over fire, there is no chimney inside the houses.

The stoves they use are not enclosed; when cooking, the house is often filled with smoke, looking just like a sauna, and Li Yu kept coughing by the smoke the first time he had a meal in a farmhouse.

Eventually, the smoke would disperse through the skylight in the roof.

As for furniture, it is even more scarce, with only tables, chairs, and wooden chests. Some households don’t even have beds and have to squeeze together on a grass mat.

Even so, living in a house is certainly more comfortable than in a tent, not to mention six or seven people crammed into a thin tent.

It’s bearable in the summer, but come winter, it is very possible to freeze to death due to insufficient warmth.

It was just that the lizard people’s previous living conditions were so harsh that it wouldn’t have taken long for issues to arise due to the housing environment.

In fact, during the five days that Li Yu was away, after the lizard people had cleared the bodies and ruins from the territory, some who couldn’t wait had already started building new houses using their ancestral skills.

Once Prophet Li Yu returned, he was immediately dragged by the enthusiastic lizard people to inspect their labor achievements.

He found himself surrounded by a crowd under a large tree, craning his neck to look up at the treehouse above.

The treehouse was entirely built from branches, with bark filling in the floor and walls, and a layer of thatch on the roof which should provide some protection from rain.

The key thing was that the treehouse was about a dozen meters above the ground. The lizard people found a small trunk, cut off extra branches, carved grooves to create a ladder, and happily climbed up and down the tree.

As for Li Yu, he politely declined the homeowner’s invitation to sit inside.

Death wasn’t scary, but a fracture from a fall would be a real hassle. Li Yu had many things left to do and didn’t want to be in bandages all the time.

Moreover, Li Yu confirmed one thing: he had been too worried before; these lizard people should be quite hard to freeze to death. If they could survive in wooden houses, sleeping in tents should be no problem at all.

However, Li Yu was not planning to let these lizard people live in tents indefinitely, or to let them build unsafe and inconvenient little treehouses that seemed to be full of safety hazards everywhere.

This was the first group of followers he had recruited, and also the ones Li Yu intended to use as an example for others, to build a model village.

If other potential customers came to visit and saw the followers still sleeping in trees on Saturdays, they would probably immediately lose any interest in joining the religion and flee as far as they could.

Even when recruiting new members in pyramid schemes, they are treated to a good meal to create a successful atmosphere; it’s impossible to start off with a large dormitory where a dozen people get nothing but steamed buns and cabbage.

Therefore, building houses was added to Li Yu’s to-do list, and it was placed quite high on that list.

When it comes to building houses, the type most familiar to modern people is surely the steel-reinforced concrete structure.

Steel-reinforced concrete, as the name suggests, is a combination of steel and concrete.

In 1867, a Parisian gardener discovered that adding steel hoops to concrete could solve the problem of "brittle fracture," making steel-reinforced concrete immediately become the world’s most popular composite material (although, at the time, the gardener himself didn’t understand what brittle fracture was, nor the principle behind it, but it was good enough if it worked).

Steel-reinforced concrete structures have remained popular to the present day, undoubtedly because they have many advantages: they’re wind-resistant, waterproof, fireproof, insect-proof, and affordable.

Although concrete was still obscure on the Bratis Continent, its production process wasn’t complicated: crushed old pottery mixed into mortar (hydrated lime mixed with clay) could produce cement, and by adding some gravel and sand, the mortar would turn into concrete.

In Li Yu’s universe, cement and concrete were already being used as building materials during Ancient Rome, but due to the previously mentioned problem of brittle fracture, concrete could generally only be used for foundations, columns, or domes, not for structural elements that needed to endure bending stress like beams or suspended surfaces.

Moreover, as the Roman Empire fell, this technology was lost along with it, only to be rediscovered and documented again more than a thousand years later.

In contrast, steel smelting was much more troublesome. While there was steel on the Bratis Continent, it was mainly used to forge weapons and armor, and a set of armor or steel weapons often commanded a high price.

Slightly poorer knights might not be able to afford a full set; otherwise, Ireya wouldn’t have only provided Cloth Armor and spears to support the militia in the Trinidad Feud.

With such high costs, steel could definitely not be used for building houses.

As for smelting the steel himself, Li Yu had also looked into some information; a more feasible approach was probably the Bessemer steel-making process.

This steel-making technology was invented by an engineer named Bessemer in the nineteenth century, but its principle isn’t complex. With the current technological conditions of the Bratis Continent, a primitive version could already be produced.

However, after some thought, Li Yu decided to give up this extremely tempting idea.

He was certain he wanted to smelt steel, just not right now.

The most pressing matter at hand was to solve the basic needs of clothing, food, and shelter for the lizard people.

He could push back the clothing part and first purchase ready-made clothes to get by; the remaining urgent issues were food and shelter.

Smelting steel materials would take too much time now; even if he started immediately, the lizard people might not be able to move into steel-reinforced concrete houses by winter.

After weighing the options, Li Yu still chose brick and wood structures for the batch of new houses soon to be constructed.