Temüjin, as usual, was awake before me. Since my first breakthrough I had required less sleep than before, which he had confirmed was a side effect of the higher state my body had achieved. Given how long he had been cultivating and how much more powerful he was than me I doubted he bothered to sleep much at all, anymore.

After I had dished up the usual bland porridge and poured my tea he spoke, “I will be leaving for a few days. Your martial training is suspended until I return, although I would suggest you run through your forms. Continue your cultivation, but do not break through until I am back. Use the time to finish your room.”

I nodded and opened my mouth to ask a question. He cut me off almost immediately, “I make a circuit of the valley every month. Any beast that would pose a threat to Gladewood I either kill or scare off. Goblins infest the territory around us, so I also ensure that they do not gain a foothold here.”

“They didn’t seem terribly tough when I fought them on my first day here. Are they a nuisance or a real danger?,” I asked.

“Both. The first, if you deal with them before they can get a foothold. The second if you allow them time to settle and start breeding. They breed quickly and can break through to the foundation stage within a few years of birth. I suspect the encounter you had was with young goblins that had not yet started their cultivation. Individually they aren’t a threat and their power plateaus quickly, but they can overwhelm even a prepared village like Gladewood with a green tide of bodies if not handled quickly enough,” he said.

“Are they intelligent?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he answered, “They are intelligent. Smart enough to communicate with each other and build rudimentary settlements. They’re also malevolent and cannibalistic. They are classified as a feral race.”

I cocked my head, waiting for him to explain further. He gave a small grin at my curiosity. My habit of pestering him with questions amused him greatly. Traditional training, at least in this region of the world, apparently involved the student shutting up, never questioning what they were told, and being thankful for what small nuggets of information they were granted. I was raised to wait for the teacher to finish before asking questions, to question everything, and form my own conclusions. Luckily for me he didn’t take offense. Cultural differences had formed the bulk of our conversations for the first few days and it seemed that he appreciated the modern Earth take on educational practices. Temüjin was a hard-ass, but he was also someone that placed a high value on independent thought, I was learning.

When I didn’t ask the obvious question, he continued, “Orcs and gnolls are also feral races, along with a few species of both giant and kobold. Feral races don’t cultivate like we do. They gain power only by eating the flesh of those things they kill. Beast or human is of no concern to them. So, rather than allow them to build up into a great horde that would sweep over the land, we kill them where we find them.”

“Seems like a wise precaution. I take it that gnolls and orcs are both individually more powerful than goblins but don’t breed as quickly?” I queried.

“Mystery skill?” he asked, proving that I was correct.

“No, just a standard fantasy trope back h…,” I stopped for a moment before continuing, “back on Earth. Weird.”

It was my turn to be on the receiving end of a raised eyebrow and cocked head, so I continued, “I was about to say “back home” but then I realized that this is home now. Funny that I haven’t even thought about it in days. By all rights I should be a blubbering mess at leaving behind friends and family.”

Temüjin nodded knowingly, “That’s partially my doing, and perhaps partially the doing of Eolia. For my part, I’ve been trying to keep you busy enough to prevent you from focusing on what you left behind. I have always found that physical labor or training allows us to gain mastery over our emotions, rather than letting them master us.”

“And Eolia fits with that somehow?” I asked.

“I believe that the Gods numb our emotions toward our previous life to some degree. When I first ascended to this world it was something that I noticed as well. Leaving behind many wives and many sons should cause grief. It did, but as if I was feeling that grief from a great distance. Whether that can be considered a gift, or a curse, is beyond me,” he answered.

We finished our breakfast in silence and Temüjin gathered a few supplies and left. Reveling in my newfound freedom I quickly ran through the martial forms he had been teaching me before starting to haul rocks down from the mountain. It was mid-morning before I dropped my last load for the day on the growing pile of misshapen boulders that I had started previously. Now, faced with a large pile of raw materials, I looked at the building site with a critical eye.

The floor and part of the walls were already done. During my training over the past few weeks I had used earth manipulation to loosen the soil all the way down to bedrock and both air and water manipulation to move the dirt, minus any pebbles, to the garden. Truth be told, it was probably a slower process than using a pick and shovel but Temüjin had thought it an excellent exercise in both control and in manipulating multiple elements at once. I had then fused any remaining pebbles to the bedrock along with several large boulders I had carried down as part of my training and melded them into a smooth floor slightly larger than the square I had originally marked out. Walls had been raised to a height of about two feet all the way around the perimeter and were a good six inches thick at the base. Stone is strong, but it doesn’t handle lateral force very well. If I didn’t start with thick walls at the base they’d just crumble.

I started carrying stones to the wall and melding them in place before shaping them to match the width and height. Originally, I had debated shaping the walls in a single go by just heaping in stone until I was done but decided against it. For one, it would take an incredible amount of energy to shape all three of the walls (no need to shape the wall already connected to the house) at once. For two, I was trying to work on my control instead of trying to brute force the walls into shape. Taking things in small steps would take longer but in the end my results would likely turn out all the better. I worked tirelessly, the qi I was drawing in infusing my body to increase my strength and stamina, and only stopping when the sunlight started to fade. My stomach was making angry noises at me as I walked into the kitchen to prepare something to eat.

The next morning, I looked at my construction with an unhappy eye. Temüjin’s home was built from river rocks that looked like they had been sealed together to form a wall about waist high. From there it had been finished in the style of a log cabin. I had essentially made a cube that was uniformly grey with walls eight feet high, eight inches thick, and lacking a top. It was, in a word, ugly. Sure, it was functional, or would be once the roof was in place, but it didn’t match. Temüjin wouldn’t be happy with it and I certainly wasn’t, so I spent the next three hours cursing myself for not paying attention yesterday. Using a thin stream of earth qi as a cutter allowed me to reduce the height of the walls so that they matched the existing structure before I piled the rubble off to the side. Finished with that, I trundled out of the house and into the surround forest to find trees to turn into logs.

You’d think that finding wood in a forest would be easy. Normally I’d even agree, but the type of tree I was looking for was uncommon in an old growth forest. It had to be straight, which automatically ruled out any tree with a bend or a Y-shaped trunk. It had to be tall, since I was trying to keep the diameter of the logs used consistent along all three sides. Lastly, it couldn’t have a diameter that was too large, or my retaining wall wouldn’t support the weight. I found my first one and after cutting it down and lugging it back I ran into my second snag.

Green wood isn’t an ideal building material. As wood dries it tends to warp and shrink, neither of which is a good thing when building a structure. I didn’t have a kiln to dry the logs or a saw mill to make lumber, so I tried experimenting with qi. Trimming a few of the larger branches I tried using fire qi to dry them. That quickly lead me to using water qi to put out the resulting fire. My next test was a jackpot. I pulled a vacuum on one of the branches using air qi to prevent flames, then infused the wood with fire qi to help remove the water. The bark flaked off in places due to the heat and resulting shrinkage, but the water was easily removed. Repeating the process with the tree after I had removed the rest of the limbs I was pleased to note that the entire process only took about half an hour.

I grabbed some dried meat and fruits from the kitchen to snack on rather than cooking lunch and headed back into the woods. It was a refreshing change of pace to build something with my own hands, and I was enjoying the challenge enough that a hot meal seemed like a waste of time. A small grove of what looked like pine trees yielded the rest of my building materials and I dragged them the half mile back to the cabin one at a time. The trees were between forty and sixty feet tall and were far heavier than the rocks Temüjin had made me carry down the mountain but dragging them wasn’t outside the scope of my newly improved strength. After using qi to kiln them I used the remaining daylight to remove about three inches of wood from both the top and bottom of the logs. Not only would this reduce the overall weight that my stone wall was forced to bear, it would also provide a more stable foundation for the wooden portion of my room.

My entire day had been filled with hard labor, but I wasn’t done. I piled up the wood scraps and lit them with a flick of my wrist so that I could continue working after dark. In the flickering light of the bonfire I placed the first log on my rock wall. In a flash of insight, I used earth qi to bore holes in the log, large ones a few inches in diameter, before threading stone through them and binding it to the rock. That would keep the walls from shifting while I worked and would provide a guide for the rest of the construction. By the time I had run out of logs the moon was high and the stars were brilliant points of light in the night sky. I clambered down from the completed walls and was satisfied with the semi-finished product. I’d want to cut in some windows later for light, but I didn’t know if Temüjin had any glass. I’d live with a candle until then. Cutting a hole in the wall before I had a way of covering it up just didn’t seem to be the brightest idea.

Using water qi to grab moisture out of the air to wet a towel, I cleaned my face before leaning back against my construction masterpiece. I was beat, both mentally from using qi and physically from all the hauling and chopping I’d done. That was easily a week’s work, hard work, back home. Just planing the logs down would have taken me all day with primitive tools back home. Here I did it with brute force and the help of some earth qi to convince the fibers of the wood to separate. I was a one-man sawmill!

On a whim, I ran some qi through the wall. The logs were heavier than I had anticipated; and I was curious as to how the stone was handling the load. What I felt made me sit up straight with concern. I still had to add the roof and the stone base was already under a small amount of strain. It would hold, even with the roof in place, but I wasn’t happy with it. I’d need to add some reinforcement, somehow, but I wasn’t going to worry about it tonight.

Leaning back against the wall, I let my qi idly play through the stone as I enjoyed the cool night air, the embers of the fire, and the stars. Night here was incredibly peaceful. Sure, there were the usual nature sounds, and here they were far louder than back home. What I didn’t hear were gunshots, or cars, no music blaring, no harsh neon lights glinting off pavement. Maybe Temüjin was right and Eolia did mask my emotions toward my old world. I somehow didn’t miss television or the radio. I didn’t miss books when I was basically living a fantasy life. Football games or a new restaurant don’t seem important when a twelve-hundred-year-old martial arts master agrees to teach you how to throw fireballs and kill something twelve different ways with a teacup. I built a log cabin in a day with hand tools! Granted, it was one excruciatingly long day, and I already had the foundation done, and the roof wasn’t finished…Maybe I didn’t do it in one day. I had been in awe of Temüjin when he ran at full speed across the slippery rocks in the streams on the way here and now I could do it! It took some practice, and I fell a bunch, but I figured it out.

And the stars. Every time I looked at the night sky here I swore to myself that I’d never take it for granted. With almost no light pollution in the valley the stars were so bright you could almost read by them. The constellations were completely different, of course. Temüjin had taught me a few that were used by the native population to navigate. In summer the constellation named The Archer pointed toward north. In the winter they used the rather aptly named Snow King. Currently it was in the western portion of the sky, depending on the time of night, but in the winter it was always dead south. Unmistakable for anything else, the Snow King was a rippling aurora of every shifting color and glittered with blue and white lights as it floated across the night sky. It wasn’t as bright as the aurora on earth, but it was every bit as striking. Local legend, according to Temüjin, said that the Snow King was once a cruel and powerful tyrant. He had ruled the world with an iron fist and plunged it into eternal winter until he angered a being known as “The Dragon at the Center of the World” who was upset at being cold all the time. A powerful cultivator, the Dragon fought the Snow King before banishing him into the sky, breaking his power and destroying him so that he could cause no further harm. The legend further stated that the Snow King would eventually pull himself back together and return, only to plunge the world back into his icy grip. To someone from earth it sounded suspiciously like the racial memory of an ice age. With people able to live multiple centuries and such a visible reminder in the sky it may have been viable for such a myth to persist for a few thousand years.

I sighed and stretched before getting up. Tomorrow was a new day and I needed sleep before I tackled fixing the wall. Designing a roof with the materials at hand was also on my priority list. I wasn’t sure how I could make a truss to hold up the roof without nails, and I wasn’t going to figure it out with how exhausted I was. I’d study how Temüjin’s roof was constructed in the morning and hopefully it would give me some ideas. Turning back to take one last look at my work before going to bed, my eyes were immediately drawn to where I had been sitting. A small portion of the stone had taken on the same look as the small globe I had made my first day of practice.

Intrigued, I decided that sleep could wait for a few minutes and sent another qi probe into the wall, this time actively paying attention to what I could feel from it. That portion of the wall was holding up fine under the load. I couldn’t detect any strain at all from it, even when I pushed more energy into the probe. Excited, I moved to another side. I put my hand on the wall and forced my qi through the stone. Leaving the flow open for a few minutes, I looked at where I had placed my hand. No change at all. I tried again, this time letting the qi flow naturally. It took a while, but I was able to see some results. It was slow, though. It would take at least a full day to do the wall at that speed. I moved to the third wall, to keep my results separate, and tried a third time.

This time, I leaned back against the wall and let the qi flow through while I meditated and tried to keep the thought of reinforcement in my head. The stone drank in the energy without resistance, and I slowly increased the flow until it reached an equilibrium. I began to actively cultivate while keeping the qi flow up. The drain from the wall was enough of a counterbalance that I didn’t need to take any medicine, which was nice. I hadn’t cultivated without being stoned before, and I found I quite liked the sensation. Without the fuzzy head I was able to fall further into a relaxed state, a bit like the state right before sleep. I closed my eyes and sat there while the stars spun above me, and let my mind drift away on the qi flows as I cultivated.