"No," Frodo replied, raising an eyebrow. "It is just rendered fat, pine resin, and dried berries. They are common resources. Why?"
Silas scratched the back of his neck. "I overheard the elders talking. They said the Salt-Gatherers rade a heavy sack of black glass... obsidian... or even a handful of the green bleeding stones, just for a tiny shell filled with a paste that smells like sweet berries."
"A sack of obsidian?" Frodo got startled, caught off guard.
Recalling his previous life as a senior mechanical engineer, Frodo realized his blind spot.
He had spent his career calculating the tensile strength of alloys and the thermodynamics of turbines.
He had never cared about the price of luxury commodities, especially cosmetics...
To him, a sweet-smelling balm was just a chemical mixture to prevent infection.
His initial motivation to create the red salve was simply to cure the bleeding cracks on his own lips caused by the freezing wind.
But in the brutal reality, a paste that prevented pain and smelled like the rare, fleeting warmth of summer was essentially magic. To a primitive chieftain, it was a massive status symbol.
If a small shell of this balm could literally buy a sack of weapons-grade obsidian or native copper ore, it was an brilliant economic exploit.
Unlike standardizing flint arrowheads, the raw materials of fat, pine sap, and berries required almost zero specialized labor to gather...
Thinking it through, Frodo let out a genuine laugh. "Silas, that is an incredible observation. I will look into it."
"Frodo... the sweet paste," the teenager asked, looking down with a hopeful gaze. "May I take a small shell of it with me to the fletching circle?" This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
"It won’t hurt the stockpile," Frodo smiled, guessing exactly what the boy wanted to do with it.
The Western ridges were bleak and unforgiving.
A gift that smelled of summer was an effective gesture when courting a girl scraping hides in the cold. "There is a small stone bowl of it near my sleeping furs. Take a scoop for yourself."
"Thank you, Frodo!" Silas saluted by thumping his chest, turning and hurrying out of the alcove.
Afterward, Frodo immediately called for Vash.
As the Head of Rations, the fierce elderly woman had essentially become the tribe’s premiere economic and resource manager.
After Vash hobbled into the alcove and took a seat by the fire, Frodo roughly described the idea of trading the sweet balm.
"Do you think this is something the Salt-Gatherers would actually trade heavy stones for?"
Vash did not reply immediately. She stared at him with bewildered eyes. "Frodo, are you certain you can make more of the sweet summer-grease just from the old dried berries and tree blood?"
"You’ve used it yourself," Frodo spread his hands. "The scent comes from crushing the dried berries into the hot fat and sealing it with the sticky pine resin. The materials are basically worthless to our survival calorie count. But Silas claims the nomads value it."
"Value it? They would kill for it, Frodo!" Vash said. "The scent of summer is a chieftain’s ward against the evil spirits of the winter! The southern nomads only find such sweet smells for one moon cycle a year. If they trade with the far-off tribes, a single handful of sweet-grease can buy a pile of the sharpest black glass."
Vash leaned closer. "To prevent other tribes from stealing their status, the Salt-Gatherers hoard the green bleeding stones... copper. If you can make this grease whenever you want, even if we only trade it to the neutral wanderers, we could fill this cave with the sharpest rocks in the world without ever having to mine the frozen earth ourselves!"
"So, that is how it works," Frodo muttered softly. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Your sixty winters of surviving the brutal trade politics of the ice were not for nothing, Frodo thought.
Regarding the absolute scarcity of primitive commodities, Vash’s insight was magnificent...
With this information, Frodo rapidly formed a preliminary industrial plan in his mind.
There were many ways to scale up the production of the balm.
The simplest method was to assign the elderly and the youngest children to mash the dried berries and steep them in boiling water, extracting the concentrated oils before mixing them into the rendered fat.
The pine resin would act as a natural preservative and binding agent.
In addition to the luxury balm, this exact same extraction process could be slightly altered to boil down the sweet, starchy roots they gathered into a concentrated syrup.
It wouldn’t just be for trade; if distributed to the recovering slaves and the children, the sudden spike in carbohydrates would massively enrich their diet and accelerate their rehabilitation.
Frodo’s main reason for the painfully slow development of his heavy weaponry was the severe shortage of a specialized workforce.
Mining frozen rock required massive caloric burn and dozens of strong men, which he simply did not have.
Investing their weak population into heavy industrial mining would starve them.
But establishing a *light industry* manufacturing high-value luxury goods using simple labor was the most cost-effective approach imaginable...
Since the manufacture of the sweet balm was incredibly profitable in the primitive trade network, he could take advantage of this economic loophole...