Jacob looked at the bloody mess in front of him and frowned.

“Nope, you don’t hold a knife like that. Instead, change the grip like this. Otherwise, you risk cutting your thumbs. Yeah, both.”

“If you cut right in the middle, you already wasted a lot of that skin. So instead, start from the edges, move slowly around the legs and then use your own hands to pull away from the skin.”

“Yeah, that looks good!” he gave a thumb up to an ash-blonde man that was asking him questions about his work.

“Now, you’ll need to scrape the worse stuff from it and then simply use your Qi to ‘make it more resilient’. Of course, you’ll waste some hide, but at some point, you will know what I mean. You use too much, and the hide becomes too hard to use for Inscription Pattern, you use too few, the hide soaks in enough Qi to make it unusable because it becomes a poor conductor of Qi. The distribution needs to be uniform. Since we are using Mantis realm Demonic Beasts, it’s going to make your job a bit harder. But remember, you can skin even Dragons with enough time and patience. Just take your time, don’t rush it. If you get frustrated, stop. Do not work if you are not focused, because you would be wasting very precious resources.”

Jacob went to a table with no one in front of it and dragged his own Demonic Bloody Wolf. He could skin it in seconds and have a huge parchment canvas in a minute, but he took his time to show all the people who had more problems with the process how to perform the right cuts, what to do when the hide was cut from a battle and so on. Thankfully, the majority of the wolves he had given out at first were the ones he had killed, meaning that they usually had a clean cut on their necks, not weird burns or gashes all over their body. Any tanner would have loved Jacob as a client.

It took three hours before people started becoming extremely tired, and Jacob had to end the lesson.

“Well, we have a nice amount of parchment, considering that it’s your first time,” he smiled at the bloody and tired people.

“Epagogia set up some warm showers before going to Ochre. You can use 2 Contribution Points to get a very nice and warm shower for people who didn't already know. You get 100 Contribution Points for every crafting lesson you take; plus, the warm shower is free after the lessons.”

Jacob was not responsible for those numbers or for the warm shower idea. They both belonged to Luis Albert, who had taken to the administrative job like a shark in the ocean. As helped by Marina, who coordinated the ground operations, the duo had built a hyper-efficient machine.

The crowd started grumbling and dispersing, going toward the warm showers. One person, though, approached Jacob. It was the same guy with ash-blonde hair that had done a decent job on his first day with the skin.

“Hi,” the guy started.

“Hi! You did an amazing job,” Jacob smiled at him, “if you want to know anything else, don’t hesitate to ask. You are probably my best student today.”

“Uhm, I do have a request, but it’s not related to—” the ash-blonde guy pointed toward the tables with the parchment gathered by some of Marina’s men. “You are Jacob, right?”

“In the flesh.”

“Epagogia told me to ask for you. She gave me some Cultivation Technique and other stuff, but I can’t fight or anything. Do you have time to teach me that? I’m Flavius, by the way.”

Oh, so this is Epagogia’s new prospect?

“Nice to meet you, Flavius. And yes, I do have half an hour to guide you through your Martial Style and other things. Epagogia mentioned you have a 9th level talent; it’s good that you sought me out, your talent is nothing to scoff at…”

Jacob immediately raised one eyebrow.

“How come your cultivation is low, though? If your talent is so strong, your cultivation should be much higher than this.”

Flavius, the young man in front of Jacob, was only at the 4th stage of the Cockroach realm.

“Eh, they crippled me. I spent a month in bed without being able to cultivate at all. Epagogia healed me. I was fully paralyzed, and I couldn’t even move my head.”

“Ah,” Jacob was surprised. “That’s quite peculiar. But at least it means you are not a slacker.”

Flavius was surprised by the lack of compassion by the guy in front of him. In the same way, Epagogia had done, he had simply analyzed the situation as rationally as possible. To be honest, Flavius was not a big fan of that approach. Too many doctors were colder and colder nowadays, one of the reasons he had started losing interest in finishing med school.

“I mean, man, that’s not nice of you,” Flavius blurted out, almost involuntarily.

“Mh?” Jacob had been thinking to himself and was surprised by the guy’s reaction.

“I just told you I got stuck in bed for a goddamn month, and your reaction is ‘well, at least you are not a slacker’? Come on, that is absurd!”

Jacob’s eyes widened, but a smile too appeared on his face.

“You are right, I’m sorry. I can be very insensitive. Why don’t we go somewhere with fewer buildings around? And why don’t you start telling me about what you did before the apocalypse? Caring about people is indeed very important.”

Flavius was a bit freaked out by the almost alien response, but he was still glad the guy had recognized his own fault.

And so, he started telling his very uninteresting story.