Darten set the clump of dirt containing the dead Treant gently on the ground and moved all of the soil and rock away, leaving just the monster’s corpse lying there. “So, they left?”

Kay looked around the camp for signs of where they might have gone but found nothing. “Well, Eleniah was going to scout around for threats and resources in the area before I heard you guys fighting those beetles, so maybe they went and did that?”

“What next then?” Darten asked.

“We should make buildings. Or, well, you should make buildings.”

Darten frowned at him. “I’ve never actually done that before, just to be clear. I know that a lot of Earth Mages work in construction, but I was the first Earth Mage in our village for a long time, and I don’t know any spells that will help with that.”

“But you have Earth Manipulation too, right?” Kay glanced around the area, already planning a few things out.

“I do…”

“Then it should be fine; we’ll just have to be careful and methodical.”

“Alright…”

Kay, looking around some more, didn’t find what he wanted in the area. “Let’s head this way.” He pointed at the nearby cliff wall and started walking., Darten following along with a bemused expression on his face.

They stopped in front of the cliff, and Kay stared upwards at it. It wasn’t as tall as the massive cliff outside Tumbling Rapids, but it was a few hundred feet tall. Kay stepped up and tapped at the surface. “This feels like solid stone. Do you know what kind it is?”

Darten motioned at the rock, and a piece of it broke off to float over to him. He stared at it in the palm of his hand for a moment. “It’s rock.”

Kay chuckled and shook his head. “Don’t know a lot about geology?”

“I know that it’d be helpful, but I haven’t met anyone who knows enough to teach me.” Darten shrugged, “I can tell you that it’s a tough kind of rock, so building with it probably won’t be bad.”

“Alright.” Kay stared at the cliff face before stepping back several feet. “Can you pull a sheet of it out from the face? Maybe…” He stepped back a few more steps, “This far?”

Darten looked at him, then his feet, then the cliff. He gestured at it, and a chunk of rock ripped off and floated over. “I can do that.”

“Huh.” Kay frowned at the large rock, “That’s… We’ll come back to that then. Can you manipulate the size and shape of those columns you made earlier when we were fighting?”

“Yes, I can.” Darten watched Kay, intrigued, “Why, do you already have another plan?”

“I don’t know about ‘plan,’ but I have a few ideas. Can you make the columns into a wall?”

“Sure.” A few seconds later, a thick wall of stone shot out of the ground a few feet away.

“Awesome!” Kay jogged over and inspected it. “Good! Can you make it horizontal?”

“What?”

Kay jogged over to the cliff again. “Imagine that the cliff is the ground, and make the wall come out from there, so it’s horizontal to us.”

“Oh.” Darten concentrated on the cliff, “I think so?”

“Try it!” Kay held out a hand to show his thoughts. “Try making it this thick and this tall.”

“Okay.” Darten’s eyes narrowed as he concentrated, and Kay scrambled to get out of the way. A moment later, slower than the others, a wall of rock extruded from the side of the cliff. Except for this time, it wasn’t a wall; it was a floor.

“Perfect!” Kay cheered.

Darten looked at the floor with surprise. “Huh. I just leveled Earth Magic.”

Kay grinned up at him. “Experimenting with your skills is great, huh?”

“It’s isn’t bad,” He agreed. “What next?”

“Stability! I don’t actually know a ton about architecture, but I know we don’t want anything falling down on us.” Kay paced around the smooth floor Darten had just made. “Can you pull some of those pillars up at the four corners?”

“Sure, that’s easy.” Four pillars of stone burst from the ground.

“Now make more walls in between them!”

Darten paused. “Oh. Um, wait a moment, please.” The four pillars shot out of sight, and four more appeared, thicker than the last set. Then still slowly and with obvious concentration on Darten’s face, four more walls grew out of the pillars one at a time, starting with the farthest wall and ending with the closest.

Kay stared at the rectangular, roofless building with a huge grin on his face. “This is perfect!”

“It doesn’t have a roof.” Darten pointed out.

“I know, that’s next, but how are you doing?”

He glanced down at his hands. “I’m alright on mana. Not that tired either. I can keep going.”

Kay rubbed his hand together. “Perfect!” He walked around the back of the new building and inspected the distance from the cliff to the back of the house-to-be. There were about six inches of space. “Okay… Actually, let’s get some practice in first.”

“Practice?”

“Float that rock you made over to you again,” Kay ordered. When the rock was floating right in front of Darten, Kay nodded. “Right, now manipulate it.”

“Um, how? I mean, I kind of already am by making it float.”

“Change its shape! Make it smoother, make it rougher, manipulate it. It isn’t Rock Telekinesis.”

Darten shot Kay a flat look. “It isn’t a liquid like blood; I can’t just change what shape it is or the texture of it.”

“Of course you can!” Kay pointed at the building Darten had just made. “You just did! Do you think that there were perfectly smooth pieces of stone just sitting in the ground, and you just pulled them out perfectly? You used magic to change the shape and texture of the stone.”

Darten stared at the building. “I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

“Just practice with that rock,” Kay said in a quieter voice. “I know you can do it.”

“Alright, I’ll trust you in this. It’s not like it’s going to hurt me to try.” Darten focus shifted to the floating stone. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to practice too.” Kay drew his punch dagger and made a small cut on the back of his hand. “I need to get better at a lot of stuff.”

They spent the next few hours training. Darten initially broke pieces of the rock off over and over, trying to work with it differently. When the first rock was gravel, he pulled another one over from the cliff.

Kay worked on his Blood Shaping mostly. He’d had an idea related to regular Blood Manipulation and working with the flow inside his body, but he’d decided to wait on that for now. Messing with blood flow inside his own body would be a great way to accidentally kill himself. Possibly using some kind of magical blood doping to make him faster or stronger would be really useful in combat, but he’d prefer to do his original practicing with a healer on hand. Kay was sure that he’d be able to trade something for the help of a good healer, even if it was teaching. The healer from the Tumbling Rapids Adventurer’s Guild was interested in learning Blood Manipulation to use in healing, and he had another few skills he could teach as well. His three skills from the Bloody Healer class were all capping out at nine right now, not from any real block; he just hadn’t had a lot of chances to use them recently. The fights he’d been in a while traveling here had been quick and efficient, with Eleniah taking care of most of them. She’d let him fight, obviously, but he was never in any real danger of getting injured. Hopefully, with a base set up for however long they’d be here, he’d have more chances to try and get those skills to twenty, so he could tier up.

Darten let out a frustrated growl as another rock split in half. “Dammit!” He made a tossing gesture, and both halves flew into the pile of broken stone and gravel off to one side. He stomped over to Kay with a scowl on his face. “How are you so sure I can do this?” He demanded.

Kay paused in his exercises and mentally sent the blood sword he’d been trying to keep stable to float behind him. “Because I’ve already seen you do it.”

“What? When?”

“When you floated the Treant over to camp. You surrounded it completely so it wouldn’t fall out. You changed the shape of the earth you were controlling right then.”

Darten growled again. “That was dirt, not stone! Dirt already moves around a bunch; I was just moving it with mana instead of picking it up with my hands and shaping it!”

“Can you manipulate sand?” Kay asked.

Darten sighed at the sudden subject change. “Yes.”

“Then I know you can do this with rock. Do you know what sand is?”

“What?” He scowled. “It’s sand?”

“But do you know what it’s made of?” Kay pressed.

“No…?”

“Sand is tiny rocks. So is dirt, or at least partially.” Kay walked over to the pile of rubble and picked up a small piece. “What is this?”

“A rock,” Darten replied, his tone a lot less frustrated and a lot more interested.

“Catch.” Kay threw it to him and walked back over. “Break it apart.”

The small rock broke into a few pebbles in Darten’s hand.

“What are those?”

“Smaller rocks.”

“Break them again. Again. Again. Again. Again.”

In Darten’s hand were tiny pieces of stone, smaller than rice grains.

“What are those?”

“Um. Rocks. But also… sand?”

Kay smiled widely. “Rocks break down from weathering into smaller rocks, and eventually sand and dirt. Different kinds of sand and dirt are made of different kinds of rocks. And also bits of seashells for sand and a lot of dead plant and animal life for dirt, but in this case, we’re focusing on the rock bits.”

Darten looked up from his hand. “There are Soil Manipulators and Sand Manipulators.”

Kay frowned and stared at the ground while he thought. “I guess the System or the World or whatever is helping somehow? Or maybe concepts just don’t work exactly the same way? Because there are different kinds of stone, and dirt and sand too, so… Never mind! That’s off-topic; we’re talking about you and your skill.” Kay pointed at the cliff. “Get another one.”

A chunk of stone broke off and floated over.

“Now,” Kay stepped in close as they both looked at it. “You know that this rock is made of a bunch of other smaller rocks all connected.”

“No, it isn’t,” Darten argued, “It becomes smaller rocks when it breaks.”

“What’s the difference?”

“It, there’s, it just is!”

Kay sighed. “Set that one down.”

The rock thumped as it hit the ground.

“You can fuse rocks together, right?”

“With a spell.”

“Whatever, as long as you can do it.” Kay walked over and grabbed a few smaller rocks from the pile. “What are these?”

“A bunch of rocks,” Darten sighed.

“Fuse them together.”

The rocks started moving towards each other like magnets attracted to each other, then they merged into one new, lumpy rock.

“What are they now?”

“One rock.”

“Break them apart again.”

The rock gently shattered.

“Fuse them in a different shape.”

Darten paused in place, an interesting look on his face. The small rocks fused again, this time into a different look rock from the first one.

“Now do that again, but without breaking them apart,” Kay ordered.

Darten’s eyes narrowed as he stared at the stone, then back to Kay. “How do you know this? You’re from another world without magic. How are things working the way you say they will?”

“Literal otherworldly knowledge. My world had no magic, so we studied how the world was in order to affect the world with its own rules. I’m not entirely sure how much of Torotia’s rules are the same, but it’s enough that things like this work.” Kay raised his hand with the rock in it up, “Change its shape.”

Slowly, with great concentration on Darten’s part, the rock shifted in place without breaking. Within the space of a minute, the lumpy rock became a perfect cube of stone.

“Perfect!” Kay cheered with a giant grin.

Darten’s eyes were massive as he stared at the cube. Kay noticed as he looked off to the side, and they got even wider. “I just leveled Earth Manipulation to twenty.”

Kay smacked the part of Darten’s arm he could reach. “Awesome! That’s fantastic.” He pointed at the small boulder on the ground next to them. “Now do it to that one.”

Darten looked down at it, then back up to Kay.

Kay grinned up at him. “We’re going to have such a cool base once you get started.”