Winter mornings in the North are cold.

More than that, they’re dark.

When I look up at the sky, the moon and stars are perfectly visible.

There’s only one moon, and I recognize some of the constellations, so I assume this is Earth.

I have no idea where I am or what year it is, but it’s definitely a high-latitude region.

The sun doesn’t properly reach the village until nearly noon.

By afternoon, the steep fjord cliffs cast everything into shadow.

When the weather turns bad, heavy snow can keep us trapped inside the house for days.

Once it gets dark, all we can really do is sit around the stone hearth on the earthen floor, nibble on dried cod or herring, or go to sleep.

That’s why the few hours of daylight during winter are incredibly precious.

So the moment I finished wolfing down my barley porridge with a spoon, it was time to get moving!

Before anyone could assign me chores, it was time to make more salt and earn some spending money!

…But first, I needed to eliminate the cause of my previous failure.

“Erin, you were awful.”

“My butt turned bright red.”

“It couldn’t be helped.”

“Mother Asild was worried about you.”

The source of my previous failure pouted her tiny lips.

Mother Asild had every reason to worry.

I was the third son, but now I was effectively the eldest.

My memories were vague, so I couldn’t clearly remember them, but apparently I once had two older brothers.

The eldest died during a raiding expedition.

The second died from illness.

With both of them gone, it was only natural that my parents would become overprotective of even the smallest prank their remaining eldest son pulled.

“If you keep quiet this time, I’ll share some smoked cod roe with you.”

“Even Lady Freyja, Goddess of Fertility, would surely turn a blind eye for the sake of a good harvest.”

She was easy.

A hungry child couldn’t resist food.

Having successfully bribed my watchdog—Erin—I was confident my next secret salt-making operation would succeed.

Before that, though, I needed to spend several days making concentrated seawater.

That part was surprisingly hard work.

I filled wooden buckets with seawater and placed them in the shade behind the house.

I prepared about three of them.

At night, the water inside the buckets froze, but a little seawater always remained at the bottom.

I’d break the ice and throw it away.

The remaining water would have a higher salt concentration, so I’d combine it with the leftovers from the other buckets and let it freeze again.

After repeating this for about four days, the seawater wouldn’t become any more concentrated.

Then I could boil it.

I think the method was called freeze concentration or something like that.

I didn’t really know the details.

As long as I could make concentrated seawater, boiling it down became much easier.

A better furnace for boiling seawater would make the process even more efficient.

At least, that’s how it worked in theory.

The problem was always putting theory into practice.

Honestly, I’d gotten used to hauling water from helping around the house.

The sea was nearby, but carrying heavy buckets was exhausting for a five-year-old body.

Maybe it was because her bribe wouldn’t be paid until afterward, but Erin refused to help carry the water.

“Hmm…”

“So the seawater left behind after the bucket freezes contains more salt…”

“Thor, how did you even think of that?”

“The opposite, actually.”

“I licked the ice and noticed it barely tasted salty.”

You know how kids go through a phase where they want to lick everything?

The ice in the bucket looked white, so I wondered if it’d taste salty.

When it didn’t, I became certain the salt had stayed in the remaining water.

After that, I just kept repeating the process to see how concentrated it could get.

I also vaguely remembered reading somewhere that Arctic ice contained very little salt.

“So then?”

“You’re boiling the concentrated seawater with this strange stove?”

“It’s not strange.”

“I call it the Westwind Furnace—Vestri.”

“It pulls in plenty of air from the west, and the tall chimney creates a strong draft.”

“That makes it burn incredibly well.”

“And because it burns so efficiently, it produces very little ash or smoke.”

Burning damp firewood indoors was a disaster.

If someone accidentally tossed wet logs into the stone hearth inside the house, the entire home filled with smoke.

Unbelievably, people actually kept an open fire burning inside their homes.

Despite that, the house wasn’t ventilated properly because everyone wanted to keep out the cold.

Naturally, people coughed more.

The health problems were obvious.

There had to be something like PM2.5 floating around in all that smoke.

That’s why I wanted to build a furnace that burned hotter and cleaner, then replace the old open hearth.

I didn’t want anyone in my family getting sick.

This version of my rocket stove—now renamed the Westwind Furnace, Vestri—had several improvements over the last one.

I dug the firebox entrance slightly lower than before to create a greater height difference between it and the chimney.

Combustion was all about controlling airflow.

Air volume and elevation differences were everything.

The truly revolutionary part, however, was the small hole I had opened partway up the chimney.

It directed some of the hot smoke into a separate tunnel made from stone and clay.

That smoke tunnel connected to a small chamber built from stone and packed earth.

If everything worked, the results should be delicious.

“So good.”

“What are you complaining about?”

“Hmm…”

The test results were… decent.

I successfully made salt.

That much wasn’t surprising, since I’d already prepared concentrated seawater and had nearly succeeded last time.

However, diverting part of the smoke hadn’t gone very well.

After all, it was only a homemade smoke tunnel built by a child.

There were gaps everywhere, so smoke leaked out, and parts of it couldn’t withstand the heat and nearly collapsed.

Then there was today’s main attraction.

The little chamber at the end of the smoke tunnel was supposed to produce delicious smoked food.

“The cod roe is incredibly delicious.”

“It is.”

“It’s far, far tastier than the dried cod roe we keep hanging in the house.”

Erin happily bit into the golden smoked cod roe she’d received as her promised bribe.

She was absolutely right.

It was far, far better than the cod roe drying inside our house.

Something was strange.

Why?

“It smells wonderful.”

“Well, I did burn fragrant branches like juniper.”

That much had gone exactly as planned.

“And even though it’s smoked, it isn’t rock hard.”

“It has such a strange texture.”

“Hmm…”

“Maybe the temperature just happened to be perfect.”

There were two main smoking techniques: hot smoking and cold smoking.

The latter was especially valuable.

By lowering the smoke temperature to below 25 degrees Celsius and smoking food for a long time, the smoky aroma remained while the ingredients themselves weren’t damaged by heat.

It also preserved food for extended periods.

Even in modern times, it was considered a premium method.

Normally, achieving cold smoking required building a long, winding smoke tunnel several meters in length to cool the smoke.

You’d constantly monitor the temperature with a thermometer and carefully regulate airflow using baffles while smoking the food for hours.

But because this smoke tunnel had been clumsily built by a child, smoke leaked through the gaps, allowing outside air to cool it even further.

On top of that, the cod roe I experimented with had only been a tiny piece.

By sheer coincidence, I’d managed to produce properly cold-smoked cod roe.

“I wish I could reproduce this consistently…”

If I could preserve food using cold-smoking techniques, perhaps the winter preserved foods hanging in our house would finally taste a little better.

As I nibbled on the smoked cod roe that tasted like an expensive delicacy and scraped the illegally produced salt from the stone pot into a dedicated wooden container with a spoon, I cheerfully found myself thinking about exactly that.