Book 2, Chapter 36

I had three goals to accomplish in the next few hours. First, we needed to get the garden planted back in the ground. Second, we needed to raise some kind of shelter. Third, we needed a ward stone to protect us while we slept. That third one, at least, I’d been able to work on before we teleported to the valley. The runes were carved, but I hadn’t had a chance to give them a final inspection or actually channel mana into them yet.

I’d placed us on a flat piece of ground in the middle of the southern side of the valley, which stretched about three miles from east to west and half a mile north to south. Our home overlooked the valley with a hundred feet of elevation, though the slope was gradual enough that there were a few obvious trails leading up and down. If I had the mana and time to spare, I might shape some stairs into them to make it easier to bring supplies back up from the valley floor.

As to why I’d chosen this particular spot on the southern slope of the valley, the biggest draw was that it was already mostly clear of trees, meaning it would take very little prep work to set up new fields. About three hundred feet away from where we’d arrived was a small stream that was only a few feet wide and deep.

It would probably be more convenient in the long run to build farther down the valley wall where it would be easier to get access to everything the valley had to offer, but that would require a significant amount of labor now clearing out space in order to build and keep the wards functioning properly. That was labor I didn’t have time for, not if I wanted to get back to Derro soon.

While everyone else started discussing how best to lay out the garden with a mind for expanding it since they had four adults and two children to feed, I marked out the dimensions of the home I planned on making. I had to make a few adjustments to my base design since we had the extra people, but I’d accounted for that in my original plan and it just meant extending one side a bit farther out.

Transmute earth to stone did most of the heavy lifting for the first portion of my construction. I stood there, staff in hand, and turned a section eighty feet long by thirty feet wide and twelve feet deep into pure stone. Then I started raising it straight up, forming exterior walls with a roof that curved up into a dome. I split the bedrooms, three on one side for my parents, my sister, and myself, and three on the other for Ayaka and Talik. The extra would likely be used as storage for now.

I put a kitchen and common room in the center, along with a bathroom. Closets were added, then windows and doors. I molded a set of stairs leading down to the basement near the backdoor off the kitchen, then divided the basement itself into sections. One would be used for my alchemy lab, another for my workshop. A third section was reserved for my crucible, though I was not looking forward to transporting it. Those rooms I left sealed up behind a wall of solid stone, empty for now. No one needed to know they were there, yet.

My exterior work finished, I glanced back at my family to see everyone gawking at the new construction. It had taken about an hour between transmute earth to stone and stone shape to transform that raw material into a suitable dwelling. “How’s that garden coming along?” I asked.

“Er, it’s…” Father glanced back at the half-planted rows. “It’s coming.”

“I wanna see!” Senica yelled, racing past me into the house.

I followed after her, mostly because I was extremely ready to unload my phantom space of all the furniture that was clogging it up. While my sister raced around an empty stone house, I went from room to room, dropping pallets in the bedroom, our table in the dining room, and books into the common area where I’d formed long rows of shelves into the wall.

Lastly, I accessed a closet off the kitchen, though perhaps calling it a closet was misleading. Stone doors were cumbersome to handle, so I hadn’t bothered forming any. Right now, it was just an empty nook, just big enough to accommodate one thing. The granite pillar Freak had used as his mana battery to maintain his enchantments slid out of my phantom space and onto the floor with a loud whump as it regrew to full size. There was no need to waste mana on the enchantments keeping it portable anymore.

That was where the real work started. I made light enchantments that were tied to touch panels I carved into the wall. I made heat enchantments for cooking on. I made vermin repellent wards that covered the entire structure. I even created sound wards for individual bedrooms. Lastly, I made water enchantments to go along with the indoor plumbing I’d whipped up. No more outhouses for me.

I ran multiple pipes in from the stream leading to the kitchen and the bathroom, and those were enchanted to block or allow water through at a touch. I also ran waste pipes out to come out down the slope from us at a spot I’d noted that was partially sheltered under a ridge of stone and unlikely to become accidentally clogged. With the vermin ward extending through the pipe, no animals would try to make their homes there either.

With my phantom space finally, mercifully, empty, I was free to go find a nice spot where I transmuted dirt to sand, then sand to glass so that I could make windows. Those got loaded back into my phantom space and brought to the house, where I used stone shape to install them flush with the exterior of the house. Every room got at least one window, and I shaped benches directly beneath the ones in the common area.

Then I took my family and our… permanent guests… on a tour where I explained to them how to activate the enchantments and what they did, followed by showing them the mana battery and how to recharge it. “This is different from the ward stone,” I said. “Think of it like a pantry full of food. Every time you use one of the enchantments, a bit of food gets consumed. If you don’t want to run out of food, you have to keep adding more to the pantry. And if you do run out of food, you starve to death.

“The ward stone is a bucket with a hole in it, where your goal is to keep adding water faster than it drains away. You can’t plug the hole because you need the water to drain, but if it does run out, that’s fine. You can just add more. What I am saying to you is if you let this battery run dry, all the enchantments I laid down in this house will break. Adding more mana to the battery after-the-fact will not restore those enchantments.

“Wouldn’t it be better to do everything with inscriptions then?” Ayaka asked.

“Not unless you want to leave the inscriptions empty and constantly needing just a little bit of water added to your bucket every single time you want to do something. Otherwise, there’s no way to turn the lights back off when you’re done and it’s just wasted mana. The battery is far more efficient for maintaining enchantments, and this thing will hold a huge amount of mana. There should be enough here to last you all for a month even if you don’t ever give it more.”

“You all?” Mother echoed. “That sounds like you’re not staying.”

“You’re not?” Senica asked. “Nooo, it’ll be so boring without someone else to play with.”

Given that Senica and I hadn’t done much in the way of playing in the last two years since I’d awakened my old memories, I wasn’t sure why she thought that would change now even if I did stay. I could only blame the notion on a child’s selective memories. Either way, I was far from done in Derro. My parents finally agreeing to leave Alkerist only alleviated some of the time pressure I felt to act, not the need to be there.

“I’ll stay the night,” I said. “Then I expect to be gone for another month or two before coming back here permanently. The last thing I’d like to do is evaluate everyone to see if you’re all ready to have your cores ignited. Four cores would go a long way towards keeping everything powered properly here.”

The results were more than adequate, but no one was quite ready to do it on their own. I thought I could probably help Ayaka and Talik achieve close to a perfect ignition, so that got added to tomorrow’s agenda before I left. Mother needed a bit more practice, and I was less willing to let her have anything less than a perfect core, not after the compromise Father’s made to his own capabilities to save Nermet.

Senica, surprisingly, was also doing quite well for her age. While nobody specifically asked her to demonstrate, she demanded that I watch while she mimicked what the adults were doing. If I took a month to tutor her exclusively, we could probably make a good showing of her ignition. Considering how limited her resources were and how much she’d figured out just by watching other people, it didn’t feel excessive to say that my sister was something of a prodigy. She was certainly doing better than I had as a child the first time around, if nothing else.

My reserves were starting to dip from all the work I’d done today, not to mention the expensive teleportation. After setting the ward stone up between the house and the garden where it could encompass both, I was starting to consider stealing a bit of mana from the granite pillar just as a top off.

But no, I reminded myself of that giant fish monster waiting for me below Freak’s lair and my plans to harvest its mana after I killed it. As long as I kept enough mana in reserve teleport back to Derro, I’d be fine. And if not, well, it probably wouldn’t hurt to sew a little more chaos and I would have time to generate more naturally.

We ate a late dinner that evening, one cooked on the new magical stove I’d enchanted. While we were eating, Ayaka said, “It feels strange not to be administering to the nightly tithe. Been doing that for years now.”

“I for one don’t miss it,” Talik said.

“Consider the battery and the ward stone your nightly tithe targets,” I said. “I don’t know what kind of monsters are in this valley, but the ward will keep them from even knowing you’re here if it stays powered all the time, and it’ll defend against anything trying to break through if you do get spotted.”

“Hah… Yeah,” Ayaka glanced out the empty doorway down to the valley below. It was only lightly forested, but that still left a lot of places for things to hide. I wondered if she was having second thoughts about coming along.

“It won’t be for a month or two, but I will be going back to the village at least one more time. If this experiment doesn’t work out, you can always go back,” I said. “Or if you just want to go visit for a day, I can add a teleportation circle later on once you’ve all had a bit of training and can be trusted to activate it without blowing anything up.”

That got me some slightly alarmed looks, but the idea of not being trapped here if something happened to me seemed to reassure them. Of course, none of them could use such a circle yet, nor could they power it even if they knew how until they learned how to create a large enough mana crystal. Those details could wait for another day.

We finished our meal, stayed up for a bit discussing future plans, and for the first time in months, I slept on something besides sand or cold, unyielding stone.