First Pottery Making

The excitement of discovering high-quality pottery clay was like a pebble cast into a calm lake, sending ripples through Chen An's heart that refused to settle for a long time.

It was more than just the joy of finding a material; it felt like catching a glimpse of a path toward a more comfortable, civilized future along the desolate road of survival.

The idea of firing pottery, like a tender sprout breaking through the soil, grew rapidly in his heart with powerful vitality.

He knew well that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. A grand blueprint for pottery-making had to start from the most basic, primitive step: obtaining raw materials and practicing shaping.

He returned to the riverbank downstream where he had first discovered the clay.

This time, his goal was clear—large-scale collection. He crafted a wide-bladed stone shovel, reinforcing the wooden handle with tough vines to turn it into a crude but effective digging tool.

He carefully excavated along the edge of the clay layer. The grayish-white clay was very thick, allowing him to dig out large chunks with ease.

He was not greedy, focusing his collection on the relatively pure parts near the surface with fewer impurities.

To avoid introducing too much grit and affecting the quality of the finished product, he used a fine-mesh bark sieve he had prepared in advance to perform a preliminary screening of the excavated clay.

The process was tedious and time-consuming, but Chen An was meticulous.

He piled the refined, delicate clay on a pre-cleared patch of flat ground far from the water source, letting it air-dry to evaporate excess moisture, giving it a moderate hardness suitable for subsequent processing.

A few days later, he had collected enough high-quality clay blanks.

He cut down a few sturdy branches, trimmed the twigs, and polished them smooth to serve as a workbench for kneading the clay. With everything ready, he faced his long-awaited and nerve-wracking first attempt.

Chen An chose to make the simplest shapes—a small bowl and an open-mouthed pottery jar.

Recalling vague impressions, he began his first-ever attempt at pottery creation.

He sat by the workbench and took out a fist-sized piece of air-dried clay.

The clay was cool and soft, carrying the unique fragrance of earth. Mimicking the potters from his memories, he began by repeatedly kneading and slamming the clay.

This process was crucial; its purpose was to expel internal air bubbles, making the clay texture more uniform and dense to prevent cracking during firing.

"Puff, puff, puff..."

The dull thudding sounds echoed in the quiet courtyard. Chen An gritted his teeth, pouring all his strength into his palms as he repeatedly kneaded the grayish-white lump.

At first, the clay was unruly, constantly falling apart in his hands or leaving deep finger marks. He had to slow down, feeling the nature of the clay, learning how to leverage force, and how to make the lump rotate and stretch smoothly in his palms.

Gradually, he grasped some of the techniques. The clay became smooth, pliable, and elastic in his hands, much like well-kneaded dough. He shaped the clay into a smooth, round disc to serve as the base for the bowl or jar.

Making the bowl was relatively simpler. He placed the disc-shaped base on the workbench and took a small piece of clay, rolling it into a long, uniform coil.

He attempted to coil the clay strip by strip, stacking them onto the base. This was the most primitive "coil-building method." However, the actual execution was a hundred times harder than he had imagined.

* Clay strips breaking: The rolled strips were either too dry and prone to cracking, or too wet and prone to collapsing, making it difficult to maintain consistent thickness and strength.

* Weak joints: The stacked strips did not bond firmly with the base, separating at the slightest pressure.

* Warped walls: Lacking support and experience, the coiled walls were always crooked, making it impossible to maintain a vertical or rounded curve.

* Fingerprints and blemishes: His fingers inevitably pressed deep marks into the clay, leaving the surface pitted and uneven.

Making the small jar was an even greater disaster. He tried to shape the body directly with his hands, and the results were predictable. The clay blank kept deforming in his hands, either collapsing in spots or losing its shape entirely, eventually resulting in a deformed monster that was wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, lacking any sense of proportion.

Sweat soaked his clothes, his fingers were stained dark gray by the clay, and his fingernails were packed with mud. He failed time and again, repeatedly rolling the misshapen clay back into a ball to start over. A sense of frustration washed over him like a tide, nearly making him give up.

Why is this so hard? He panted, looking at the pile of crooked failures on the ground, feeling a wave of helplessness.

But the unyielding spirit deep in his bones was ignited. He remembered the courage he felt when he drove back the Demon Wolf outside the Safe Zone, and the hardships of clearing the garden. What was this little difficulty compared to that?

He took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down. He stopped chasing immediate success and focused on solving specific problems one by one. He tried using a damp wooden chip as an auxiliary tool to help press and shape; he paid closer attention to the moisture and thickness of the clay strips; and while coiling, he gently pressed the inner wall with his fingers, trying to make the walls more uniform.

After several days of near-obsessive practice and countless failures, Chen An finally completed his first batch of "works."

One was a vessel that could barely be identified as a bowl. The walls were uneven in thickness, with one side significantly thinner than the other, causing the rim to tilt. There was a small depression in the center of the base, clearly a mark left during kneading. The surface was covered in fingerprints and tool marks, rough and crude. The overall shape was as naive as a child's doodle.

The other was the jar, which had an even stranger form. The upper part seemed to attempt a neck, but it wasn't smooth, while the lower part appeared bloated. The overall proportions were off, and the center of gravity was unstable, as if it might topple at any moment. But miraculously, after repeated patching and pressing, it stood on its own and did not collapse completely during the drying process.

Looking at these two crooked, flawed clay blanks, Chen An did not feel disappointed; instead, he felt a sense of relief mixed with a complex emotion of achievement and intense frustration.

The sense of achievement lay in the fact that he had done it! From a lump of chaotic mud to two objects with basic forms, this was a qualitative leap! It was the first practice of humanity transforming natural materials!

The frustration stemmed from the huge gap between the finished product and his ideal state. These rough, ugly, and flawed objects were a far cry from the light, clean pottery he had imagined. They looked more like totems of some primitive belief than practical vessels.

He carefully placed these "works" in a cool, ventilated corner to let them air-dry naturally. He knew this was just the first step of a long journey, a clumsy but necessary practice. Through it, he had felt the temperament of the soil, understood the difficulty of shaping, and accumulated valuable experience.

The air-dried clay blanks turned darker in color and harder in texture, yet they remained fragile. Chen An tapped them gently with his finger, producing a dull "puff" sound, quite different from the crisp ring of stone. This sound was the prelude to the clay's nirvana.

He gazed at these two crooked creations, his eyes devoid of disdain, filled only with focus and contemplation. Next time, he would do better. He needed to find better shaping methods to solve the issue of irregular forms. Perhaps he could try using molds? Or, start by making simpler, long-shaped objects?

The experience of his first pottery-making was like a baptism—painful yet immensely rewarding. It honed Chen An's patience and willpower, and made him deeply realize that every step toward civilization required the most primitive and arduous exploration and accumulation. The trial of fire still lay ahead, but at least, he had taken the first step in shaping the earth.