The Way Ahead

Chapter 64: High-pH Training

For the first month, Construction turned out to be essentially trivial to train. It seemed like every time he turned around, he had a new level in the Skill. Granted, that was mostly the result of him officially ‘moving in’ to Obairlann.

While he was forced to use green wood for it all, Edwin managed to make himself a decently sturdy chair out of a few young trees, lashed together with copious amounts of rhoreed and using the same for a woven seat and backing. At Inion’s insistence, he made a second chair, which turned out significantly better than the first.

Edwin was able to use much the same method for a ‘door.’ It had no hinges and was basically just a frame of wood with rhoreed tightly woven in the center, but it did its purpose serving as a block for wind and insects. He didn’t have any sort of latch to it either, and just had to pressure-fit it all into the doorframe. Not ideal, but sufficient for the time being.

Making a table was somewhat trickier, but after a few failed attempts Edwin was able to cut himself boards and make something which didn’t immediately fall apart. Despite his best efforts to try and make glue from the hooves of his hunted deer- though great for training both Harvest and Purify- it was ultimately fruitless, so he eventually abandoned that approach, and instead tried to make glue from tree sap.

While the glue which resulted from just melting dried resin and trying to Purify it wasn’t great, it still worked, and rubbing in sawdust helped take care of the residual stickiness as he used it to keep his table in one piece. It still wasn’t anything fancy, just a set of boards glued and lashed together set atop a frame structure similar to his chairs, but it worked well enough to keep his bowls off the floor as he slowly covered it with several layers of rhoreed mats.

His second table he set up in the elevated corner of his house to function as a workbench. While the ‘basement’ might have been a more traditional place for an alchemy lab, subterranean structures had awful ventilation. Granted, the ‘upstairs’ wasn’t that much better in the absence of windows or most anything else, but the leaf ceiling allowed fresh air in and contaminants out well enough for the time being.

Speaking of the leaf ceiling, Edwin didn’t have the faintest clue how it worked despite many, many experiments. It allowed more non-desirable gases to pass out of it but not into it, which included smoke, but managed to keep heat in quite well. It allowed light through, but was waterproof (Edwin had tested by hauling a giant bowl of water to the top and pouring it out- not a drop made it in). He couldn’t fall through it, but when he was inside he could easily move the leaves out of the way to leave. Perhaps most curiously, it shed no leaves on the inside of the house, but certainly did on the outside.

Asking Inion was fruitless; she simply said that it was the magic of the place and didn’t know how it worked.

Still, a month in, he had a lab bench, a table, chairs, and loads of clay bowls and pots. At a certain point, he transitioned from trying to make earthenware to actually making bricks- he still wanted a proper kiln, and bricks were the way to do it.

His first batches of brick, being as pure of clay as he could manage- Purify was happy- turned out… alright. His test batch was sloppy and irregular, as he wasn’t going for consistency until he had a good methodology down. At first, he wasn’t firing the bricks long enough, but then found that putting them in for longer just resulted in the outside being… singed?

In time, he figured out what was going on, and settled on a consistent mixture of clay with sand as a filler, mixed together and dried in a form over the course of several days. Once the bricks were dry, he could stack them inside his kiln- he could only do batches of about 10-20 bricks at a time at first- and then slowly increase how ferociously the flames burned, providing bursts of Firestarting at times to help up the temperature. Towards the end of the cycle, he had the Skill turned on constantly, producing some insanely hot flames. He never fed Mana Infusion into the mix, though. He’d get around to experimenting with it eventually, but didn’t want to destroy his kiln with a stray explosion.

While the resulting bricks weren’t great, they were functional. In time, he built up enough of a brick collection to make a more traditional kiln. To aid in insulation, he at first kept using a pit, but dug out his former shelter to the level where the soil turned to clay. From there, he surrounded the kiln with fire on all sides and burned it as long and as hot as he could manage. The bricks helped to diffuse the heat somewhat, and while a couple cracked from the fire, the trial was ultimately a success, as he lost fewer bricks in the firing and the setup wasn’t nearly as complex.

A few iterations later had him making a hefty topper to a tower-shaped kiln surrounded on all sides with fire. After a while and a few rebuilds later, that was permanently assembled, mortared together with additional clay, and Edwin kept it burning nearly constantly. Firestarting reaching level sixty meant he could keep it going almost indefinitely if he really tried, though the amount of focus it still required meant he couldn’t maintain it while sleeping.

Even between batches, Edwin didn’t allow whatever he was making to cool, instead fashioning himself a set of grips that allowed him to pull out the kiln’s contents and put in new materials without burning himself. Even then, he needed to use his gloves, which resulted in a few pieces of pottery lost due to fumbled retrievals.

The tradeoff was quite worthwhile, though, as his kiln slowly accumulated an outer wall to help contain the fire’s heat even better, complete with air intake and chimney.

Now that he’d finally completed it, he decided to try and use his kiln for other purposes, like drying wood for the firepit inside (Obairlann letting smoke freely pass through the ceiling was so convenient) when he didn’t feel like keeping Firestarting up.

It was… a work in progress. Initial tests had just resulted in the wood he had loaded up catching fire and burning themselves to ashes. Curiously, Purify had lent its hand to cleaning all that out, which made Edwin wonder how far its effects spread.

While he didn’t know for sure what had caused the wood to catch on fire, he rather suspected that it was the result of the interior of the kiln being within the range of his Firestarting, and in doing so making the drying wood spontaneously combust when the heat was turned up. Unfortunately, turning off Firestarting altogether didn’t seem to heat the wood up enough for any significant effects, as the green wood didn’t burn hot enough without Skill assistance.

It was a… frustrating conundrum. He needed to somehow figure out how to exclude an area from his Firestarting while maintaining it for hours on end. Worse still, despite his best efforts, he could barely even shape the area of effect, which seemed to be stuck at an approximately 4 meter radius centered on him. Concentrating with all his might allowed him to create a tiny divot in the sphere, changing the border in a small area by a centimeter or two, which at least let him know what he wanted should be possible, just really hard.

In the space between Obairlann and Inion’s pond, the two of them had started a small garden, primarily using seeds from Edwin’s dried foodstuffs. Thanks to Inion’s Gardening and related skills, they had already harvested a bunch of beans and lentils from his first generation, and the second generation was now well underway.

While Inion could speed up maturation of plants and had done so already, letting them harvest their first crop a week after planting, she claimed that doing so repeatedly wasn’t good for the soil unless specifically treated, or if she had the right Skill.

Given what Edwin recalled regarding soil fertility, nutritional contents, and crop rotations, that checked out. What surprised him more was that Inion claimed some plants- particularly magical ones- would be utterly ruined trying to speed them up at all. Others could only be sped up with specialist Skills, whereas others required you didn’t use Skills on them, or perhaps they needed a particular magical fertilizer…. It was a whole mess and Edwin was glad Inion could fill in a lot of the Grimoire’s gaps of knowledge. Naturally, he dutifully recorded all such tips and techniques via Almanac on the corresponding pages.

Despite the complexity involved, they still had a section of the garden dedicated to said magical plants. Firevine- Inion had managed to locate a sprig of the stuff through some technique she claimed was just raw talent- was growing along the walls of Obairlann, a small shrub of common purple-edged glowleaf stubbornly clung to life near the bond, and Edwin was doing his best to ensure his Sunstalk got a proper foothold and survived past sprouting, a task he had thus far been unsuccessful in.

Firevine lived up to its reputation. Its leaves were a deep, dark red which lightened to white along the edge, and their irregular shapes did look reminiscent of tongues of fire. Under careful examination, the sprig felt slightly warm to the touch, and while it hadn’t quite spread enough for Edwin to be sure, it looked like it grew in an irregular, fire-like pattern.

Glowleaf plants were apparently quite common, but the exact type of bush that he’d found was supposedly less so. With purple edges and greener, more powerfully glowing centers, seeing the bush at night looked mysterious and otherworldly, blue-green and violet hues mixing strangely as he glanced over them.

Sunstalk, or at least what bare scraps of the stuff which Edwin had available to him, was the most spectacular-looking plant he had. In direct sunlight, the sprouts seemed to vanish into a mere glitter in the sunbeams, only reappearing when the illumination died down some. When it did so, it would release much of the built-up sunlight, bathing its immediate surroundings in a touch of daylight for about a minute per hour of sunlight exposure.

It probably would have looked significantly cooler if Edwin had more than a half-dozen successfully sprouted grasses, as according to the Grimoire, the light-releasing patterns resulted in fields of the grass rippling with sunlight when in darkness, light being transmitted from stalk to stalk and dying out quickly but not without putting on a spectacular light show first. Still, considering what he had, he was content. Heck, he wouldn’t have had what he did now if he hadn’t noticed some tiny grass seeds mixed in with what he had left of his dried Sunstalk.

Well, that was how life went sometimes. He didn’t have a strong need for any of the three yet, it was just nice knowing that they were growing. They, particularly Inion, stayed on the lookout for any other plants to add to their collection, especially the healing talsanenris berries, but hadn’t had much luck thus far.

Once he had some of those, then he’d be able to make healing potions and have something to sell in Vinstead. He certainly didn’t have enough money left over from Lefi to buy everything he’d want. While his hunting had certainly improved with time, and Survival drastically cut back on the amount of food he needed, there was a list of easy-growing plants he wanted to include in his garden.

That wasn’t even counting wanting flour, canvas, a whetstone, oil, some more metal bowls to keep him from having to regularly replace his distillery, nails… the list went on, but mostly amounted to basic goods which should be relatively cheap to buy yet were impractical to make out in the wilderness. He’d managed to remove soap about a week prior when he’d managed to get a bar of oil and lye mixture to actually turn out properly, but that had only increased his need for oil.

Was it the most comfortable situation he’d been in? No. Was it the most enjoyable time he’d had on Joriah? No.

But it certainly was effective.

Level Up!

Skill Points 635→830

Progress to Tier 2: 989/1770 (Avg level: 45/77)

Alchemy 62 → 65

Athletics 57 → 62

Basic Mana Sense 45 → 51

Breathing 54 → 57

Construction 15 → 44

Firestarting 50 → 62

First Aid 30 → 34