My first item on the docket for the day was to take a look at the skill that Cheshire had suggested to me.

⬘ Transmutation I ⬘ Allows for the transformation of materials into adjacent materials at an exchange rate based on the difference in value between the two. Some material is lost in the process; If the difference in value is too great, all product will be lost. Allows transmutation to be performed by the Core’s manamites, rather than the core itself. Transmutation I can only process tier one materials.

TYPE:

Magic

CATEGORY:

Arcane

Honestly, I could completely understand why he’d recommended it to me. In fact, it seemed like something I should have caught earlier—my excuse was that it was filed fairly deep into 'Magic’, rather than ‘Construction’. Maybe trusting him wasn’t the best idea, but at the very least I felt confident that this skill wasn’t a trap; I’d just need the points to actually get it.

Well, I only knew of one way to get skill points: the old-fashioned way.

I politely butted in over [Core Link] to ask Ephi if she could remember to go for any easy exterminations she spotted while she was out exploring, to which she agreed. It really wasn’t hard to convince her of anything if food was involved.

The amount I got from her was never much, a few percent a day, typically—but it added up over time and didn’t require an ounce of extra effort on my part.

So, construction it was.

I had a few projects going on at the moment. The gym’s arena still needed to be completed, which would require a way to attract and trap the bugs that would serve as the challengers for my errant Maximus Decimouse Meridius. I had a completely bare room about fifteen feet wide by fifteen feet long sitting across from the passage leading to the aqueduct, too. Aside from that, I still needed to make a grow-room of some kind for the tea.

He’d left me with a small handful of seeds for his ‘tea’, which I had already inspected to try and get a better idea what I was going for.

❖ Moondrop Tea Seed ❖

Category: Plant Seed of a plant native to the coastal floodplains of Arrol. Grows well in warm and humid environments. Its leaves have many culinary and alchemical applications.

Resynthesize:

Cost: 10 MP

My plan, in an ideal world, would have been to push the plant to ascend and level up a few times, then look into seeing if its traits passed on to its seeds or if I could clone it by clipping a part off and planting it. [Botany I] wasn’t cutting it for any information on that, so I’d have to follow Cheshire’s words and look beyond just my tooltips. Good old fashioned experimentation would carry me there, but I’d need a place to grow first.

The building blocks of life, at least for plants, were soil, water, and sunlight. Sure, there was more to it than that, but if I could get those three reliably, then I could grow something. Then, I’d just need to fine tune the environment to suit the plants I was planning to cultivate—or cultivate the plants to the environment, instead? Ascension was an option, and there was the possibility that I might find some kind of way to modify the seed’s preferred clime.

This was going to be a big project, not one I could simply throw myself at until I stumbled upon a solution that worked ‘well enough’.

So, I pulled out my notes for the first time in ages and began to plan. I’d need irrigation and soil, two things that I thankfully had in plentiful supply. Fertilizer wouldn’t hurt. A way to give the plants sunlight while still being able to control the temperature, that was the big problem. An open roof would leak heat fast in these lands, and no amount of adding airlocks or insulated walls could help that.

I needed glass.

Making it the old fashioned way was out of the question, given how I’d need sand to do so and the coast around here wasn’t exactly a beach. That wasn’t even broaching the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about the process of making it, lacked a kiln, and didn’t even have fire yet.

SHARD OF COALESCED WILL LVL: 1 NAME: "Boss"

Traits:

Skills:

[Botany I]

[Biology I]

[Creator's Insight]

[Mech. Engineering I]

[Textiles I]

Features:

[Manamite Creation]

[Self-Synthesis]

HP: 10 / 10 CATEGORY: Elemental MP: 20 / 50

(+25 daily) SPECIES: Dungeon Core WEALTH: 5 SIZE: Tiny XP: 26% MANAMITES: 68 / 200 STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 0 5 0 9 6 7

Nascent heart of a world-born entity, crystallized from soul energy. Exerts control over a localized area. Criteria for Next Ascension Tier:

Level: 2

Wealth: 5

Cost: 50 MP Virtual Hoard:

➤375.2 Raw Stone

➤235.3 Loose Soil

➤38.2 Biological Material

➤41.2 Raw Lumber

➤6.8 Plant Fiber

Twenty mana out of the fifty I needed. Given that I was basically earning one mana every hour, if I could level up over the next thirty hours, that would put me a prime position to move right into ascending with my mana already full.

No point wasting time. I started with the arena, tightening the dome that covered it to make sure nothing within could wriggle out and escape. Then the entrances were next, as I added proper liftable wooden gates at each threshold, controlling any ways in or out. The final thing I would need would be a way to collect ‘contestants’ for our coliseum. I did have some ideas for that, but nothing lined up as perfectly as I would have liked. What I built amounted to a stone-walled funnel sitting submerged in the ground, with a mechanism to shut it once anything slid down too far. My aim was something along the lines of an artificial pitcher plant in design, but I lacked bait for now so it was on to the next project.

The empty room. I had an idea for this one.

A storage room was about the most basic thing I could think of, but it was important all the same: the vault had worked well as a catch-all for things up until this point, but if we were going to be stepping into the realms of agriculture and manufacturing like I was hoping, we’d need a place to keep things in an organized manner. Shelves and all that. Having leaves just sitting around rotting on the floor wasn’t going to make for a quality product.

Thankfully for me, shelves fall under the umbrella of ‘simple immobile object’, which meant that building them was very simple to do. I lined the walls with tiered shelves jutting straight out, with supports anchoring them to the walls as well as thin rods going from floor to ceiling. For the central area of the room, I opted to leave it open to contain anything large we might come across. After that came polishing, which usually involved added mouse accessibility features all over the place: tunnels through the wall at ground level, miniature ladders and staircases as needed for Ephi to be able to navigate, if she needed to.

And now both of my pet projects were done in barely any time at all.

I glanced at my sheet, wincing as I saw that I’d gained a whopping two mana over this period. It wasn’t even noon yet and I was out of things to do already?!

Well, I could start on the bones of the greenhouse. It wasn’t ideal, but I didn’t exactly have time to waste. Regardless of whatever modifications I could do to the tea plant, it would still take time to grow and actually begin producing.

Every room needed a skeleton to build off of, so I started with that. From the hallway, I continued straight onwards and carved it out further, my mites ripping through the earth with their usual fervor and finalizing this tunnel. At the end of it, I began to lay the plans for my groundwork. The earth here was shallow overhead, and as I carved away the dense bedrock the soil above caved in frequently. It didn’t matter much—it all needed clearing out anyways and the manamites didn’t really seem possible to destroy via mortal means like suffocation or crushing.

“Hey uh, Boss?”, Ephilia poked in over our link stirring me out of my focus.

“Everything alright?”, I checked first, tearing my attention away from the project to peek at what she was working on.

“I’m fine, just… I mean, I guess you were right about them leaving.”

Oh, huh. This hadn’t been exactly what I had predicted. The campsite that the humans had set up was in shambles, with the only thing not ruined in some way being the hastily-constructed stone firepit. Their cart told a story of its own, currently tipped on its side laying across the road about fifty feet away from the site, with the beast of burden pulling it and its masters being nowhere to be seen. The forest floor seemed charred in a few places, though there weren’t any active fires I spotted.

“Well, more for us, right? You gonna go check out the cart and look for more?”

“No—look, down there, on the ground. All that mud all over the road? Those are footprints,” she replied, an urgent tone in her message, “A lot of them.”

It had been hard to tell from our distant position but having a bird’s eye view was a point in our favor. Something big had gone down here since our last visit though, that was for certain.

“Looks like whoever these folks were, they came out from the trees and spooked the humans bad. Didn’t catch them entirely unaware. They tried to get the cart going, managed to get it onto the road but lost control, maybe? I don’t see any blood so I doubt they killed the horse. No trace of the humans either,” I muttered, scanning the area below for any other hints I could find.

“I’m going to wait up here for a while before I try going down there, I think,” she chimed.

I couldn’t stop myself from expressing my whole-hearted agreement. “Good idea. Let me know if you see anything unusual, alright? I’m working on a few things back at home.”

Shoving my mind back out of the mouse’s head, I returned back to building. From the mouth of the hall, something began to take shape. The bones for the room were simple: a cross-shaped hallway, with the ceiling cut away entirely to allow direct access to the sky. Next, I added another cross at a forty-five degree angle, trying to match it up evenly in size and clearing the space above as I went. This starburst shape would hopefully help me keep my measurements right as I went.

Next, I began to dig out a ring connecting to the outermost points of the prongs I’d constructed, curving gently from one to the next as the perimeter of the greenhouse took shape. Perfection wasn’t going to be entirely possible, but I wanted to aim for something that wouldn’t bother me every time I looked at it, at the very least.

“I’ve got some bad news. The coin’s gone, Boss,” she chimed, her disappointment tangible, “Looks like whoever found it got poked when they were going for it, though.”

I glanced back over our link. She wasn’t wrong; the bush we’d tucked the coin beneath was fairly easy for a small animal to squeeze through, but a human fitting their arm in was another thing entirely. A number of thorns were caked in now-dried blood, and there was even a large scrap of navy-blue cloth still snagged on one of them, torn from whatever it had originally been part of. Taking a closer look, there seemed to be embroidery on it of some kind, but it was too torn to recognize of what.

“Damn, that’s a shame. Wonder how they found it,” I grumbled, a bit sore at losing that bit of potential wealth. I wouldn’t have been so patient if I hadn’t been confident that no one would find it, but I guess I was wrong. “Hey, while you’re out—on the way home, can you keep an eye out for any seeds, nuts, berries, that kind of thing? Call me when you find any and I’ll appraise them—and maybe bring a few home if you’re feeling up for it.”

She nodded, beginning the trek back home—though I noticed that she took to climbing back up the rock wall this time, rather than going around. Probably trying to avoid another encounter with that owl, assuming that way led to its territory.

Clearing out the rest of the interior came next, which was going to take time. There were trees that needed felling. While the manamites might have been an excellent chainsaw, I was a terrible lumberjack. Given that I couldn’t start from the top, that meant I had to topple them. With the distance to the core room, I wasn’t in any real danger of getting whack-a-mole’d by a pine tree smashing through my roof, but it was still an ordeal nonetheless. These were still old-growth trees of great size, and they fell with enough force to shake my foundation. I wasted nothing though, gnawing away everything from the root systems to the branches until nothing remained.

At the very least, I had finished my soft goal for the night before Ephi had arrived back home in finishing my woodcutting—this meant I could continue working without disrupting her sleep.

For the next two days, that was the focus of my attention. I allowed my mana to nearly cap out, maintaining it at just a few points below fifty and spending the excess to bolster my army of builders as the swarm grew larger.

She brought back her haul, based on a few that had caught my attention in particular. We couldn’t bring back anything too big, which meant I had her focused on looking for small, easy-to-carry produce.

Which meant that the pumpkins that we found…

Ah, sorry. Not pumpkins.

❖ Sungourd ❖

Category: Plant Vibrantly-colored squash that grows on the ground. Nearly all parts are edible, from the flesh to the seeds to the leaves.

The ‘sungourds’ that we found couldn’t come home with us, considering they were big enough that Ephi could have probably hollowed one out and used it as a vacation home. I was just going to stick to calling them pumpkins for my own sake. Unless they had some difference that I couldn’t see, they were just normal pumpkins.

While I worked, she took it upon herself to start foraging, bringing home anything she could find that looked like it could be planted in the earth. We found not-blueberries, not-chestnuts, and these pink-and-orange ‘cloudberries’. I couldn’t tell if those were an actually new fruit or just another cheap rip-off of an old one from Earth, so I shrugged and left their name as it was.

They’d make good additions to the greenhouse once I got it running.

So phase one of the project was done: excavation. Now I was left with a cylindrical pit in the ground about fifteen feet ‘deep’, though this varied a bit depending on the elevation of the surrounding area. There was still quite a bit of work to do, though. First was the construction of a proper wall around the outside, which would keep the dirt from above from continuing to spill inside. For now, I focused entirely on structure, making a no-frills wall encompassing the circular pit.

The roof would remain entirely unfinished for now.

Next, I began on planning out the layout of the room, creating a route from the water supply into the recessed area as well as setting up drainage. I split the flow into two semicircular raised aqueducts that crossed opposite edges of the room before conjoining at the far end and falling into a small pool recessed into the floor. As I built, the ideas kept coming, and the hours passed me by like clouds through the black, moonlit sky.

“Are you gonna let me in to take a look?”, she grumbled, sitting at the hastily-constructed gate I’d slapped onto the end of the hallway to keep the inside of the base secure while I figured out the roofing situation.

“Just a moment, adding the finishing touches now,” I chimed. I couldn’t really help it—sure, creating things was fun on its own, but seeing the reactions of others made it all the better. After all, I had a surprise for her. “You’re allowed to sleep in, you know,” I quipped as an aside.

“I wake up when my body decides to. It’s not like I’ve got a schedule to stick to, Boss.”

“Sheesh, okay, okay. There, that ought to do it.”

Satisfied with yet another job performed well, my ever-loyal mites retreated into the walls to nap for a moment, but not before I carved a tiny mousehole in the stone barrier for Ephi to pass through.

Eager to finally see what I’d made, she wriggled through the hole, huffing a bit as she struggled to pass through—I was getting the hang of making it just small enough to give her some trouble to antagonize her a bit.

“Wow, looks like someone needs to lay off the crickets,” I snarked as she pushed herself through.

She pouted for a moment, shooting back, “Don’t even, I don’t have to take that kind of sass from someone whose size is measured in square footage.”

Ouch.

With our usual exchange of ‘pleasantries’ out of the way for the morning, she trotted deeper into the room, following the brick path I’d laid, silent as her head drifted from one direction to another, taking it all in.

“I thought it was supposed to be a green house. It’s only gray and brown,” she finally commented.

“The green comes later. Greenhouse, like a place to grow plants. I kinda went overboard with decorating the place I think. It doesn’t really matter what I’m building—as long as I’m making something, I get experience for it.”

Empty dirt plots ran in a wide ring along the outer wall, along with a second ring nearer to the middle. These rings were intersected by a cross-shaped path—the side branches I would use as hardpoints for later expansion. At the center of this intersection was an artificial pond, only about ten feet in diameter and filled with water from the aqueducts running overhead.

The far wall from the hallway housed a last-minute addition, though. This wouldn’t be used as a way to expand. I’d carved an archway that inset into the wall about three feet deep.

It was here that I tried to find some closure to something that had been bothering me for a long time.

To call me an artist would be a stretch by any measurement, but I did my best. On a stone plinth within the alcove, I had tried my best to construct a small statue out of white stone.

A rat, sitting on its haunches with the shape of a core held in its outstretched hands. Its edges were sharp and geometric, the mites struggling to construct the finer details of the organic shapes of a living creature.

I hadn’t bothered to carve any words of dedication. Ephilia couldn’t read, and there was no one else I could share the feeling with except her. Still, it felt like it belonged here.

Buried in the earth beneath it was a stone casket. Grisly as it was, I had discovered one of the flaws with my virtual hoard: while it was easy enough to withdraw and deposit material, the original arrangement and shape of the material wasn’t taken into consideration at all. A chair was wood, a wall was stone, and mice were biological matter: meat and sinew and bone. I gave them a proper burial as best as I could, though I couldn't remove just them. It was unfortunate, but the ripper cat's processed matter would share the same grave. In the end, it was just a small show of gratitude for unknowingly helping me cling to my sanity in the early days.

And for giving me the closest friend I had at this point.

SHARD OF COALESCED WILL LVL: 1 NAME: "Boss"

Traits:

Skills:

[Botany I]

[Biology I]

[Creator's Insight]

[Mech. Engineering I]

[Textiles I]

Features:

[Manamite Creation]

[Self-Synthesis]

HP: 10 / 10 CATEGORY: Elemental MP: 49 / 50

(+25 daily) SPECIES: Dungeon Core WEALTH: 5 SIZE: Tiny XP: 94% MANAMITES: 102 / 200 STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 0 5 0 9 6 7

Nascent heart of a world-born entity, crystallized from soul energy. Exerts control over a localized area. Criteria for Next Ascension Tier:

Level: 2

Wealth: 5

Cost: 50 MP Virtual Hoard:

➤1,112.0 Raw Stone

➤455.3 Loose Soil

➤0 Biological Material

➤347.1 Raw Lumber

➤22.8 Plant Fiber

I was clean now.

Ephilia’s tour of the incomplete garden eventually led her to the alcove, though I could spot her eyeing it long before she arrived.

“It’s… a mouse holding you?”, she chimed after a few moments of staring at the sculpture, glancing around as if expecting me to tell her she’d guessed correctly.

“It’s symbolic,” I sputtered, having been expecting a more sentimental response, “Every fancy-looking garden needs a statue or a monument in it. I know it’s a bit much, but it just felt like something I wanted to express somehow. I was originally going to put more of them until I realized I couldn’t get them to look different from one another, so I just made one and modeled it after ‘Ratticus'. Sorry, I know you hate the pun names—he was the really fat one with the white-tipped ears, like yours.”

She paused, her eyes going wide with realization. “Oh. I think you’re talking about my mom.”