"I'm going to make matches. I'm going to make sure everyone has a convenient source of fire!"
After One-Eyed Pirate returned from Story Kingdom, that was what he said.
"Matches? What are those?" someone asked curiously.
"I don't understand either, but I support you. I can give you this yellowish, foul-smelling stuff I collected. It catches fire easily."
One-Eyed Pirate thanked them.
Little Girl could not leave Story Kingdom, which greatly disappointed him.
He did not give the dog-head gold to her parents. He gave the gold left over after payment to a kind person in the city, saying that he was going to sea and would return, and asking them to take good care of Little Girl.
The kind person agreed.
After returning to the great forest, One-Eyed Pirate began considering what he could do.
In the end, he thought of the little wooden sticks in Little Girl's hands—those miraculous matches.
However, he had underestimated the technical difficulty involved.
They required far too much chemical knowledge. Chemistry was a product of the modern age, while they were still in a primitive society.
Of course, there was a simpler kind of match: coat a wooden strip with Sulfur, then strike flint with a piece of iron. The sparks could ignite the sulfur-coated wood.
He searched painstakingly, recalling the smell of her matches.
At last, with the help of the priests, he found it!
The sap of several plants could be mixed together and smeared onto soft Wooden Sticks. Friction would then ignite them.
And so, in the Primitive Era, he made matches! He lit a great many of them.
In the firelight, he saw Little Girl being held by her grandmother as they hurried toward heaven! How could this be? Hadn't he entrusted Little Girl to a kind person's care?