Okay, yes, I was now technically part of a military unit, but the important part of what happened next was that I had nowhere to put my deific body. The physical conditioning I had to work do in the city became routine very quickly, but I wasn't pushed to my limits like the soldier recruits were. And military logistics was... not thrilling. I quickly realized that the majority of my job was doing every scrap of paperwork except those that really needed the Captain's attention. Unlike the work at the docks, Bard was very clear about what to do and how to do it, so at least I never felt out of my element. But I worried a great deal about leaving my second body just "wherever", so whenever I had a free moment, I switched my concentration to it and tried to figure out how to make a place for myself at the cliffside that would be more permanent.

My deific body, I was learning, felt a bit different than my physical one. It was... made with magic, so maybe it wasn't biological? It worked the way it should, had all the right parts (I checked, but I'm proud to say it wasn't the first thing I did) but it was really, definitely different. None of my magic or godly senses told me exactly what it was, but I suspected that was due to the combined ignorance of me, the godly power, and the source of magic as to exactly how cells worked and so on, or at least, a complete lack of a language to describe it. I mean, if I had magic holograms I could describe what a cell was, but I am not sure I could describe the difference between plans, animals, and other things. That was niche knowledge I didn't have and likely would never get.

Fortunately none of that actually mattered, even if it was an interesting distraction. Still... the question was always there in my mind: did this universe really work the way Earth did? If anything would be able to prove it, I figured biology would. What could possibly be more delicate, more responsive to different laws of physics and chemistry, than a complicate mish-mash of trillions of moving parts?

Anyway, when it came down to daily life, the deific body was convenient, if still... human-ish. It did hunger and thirst, but they were more distractions rather than hard requirements, at least for now. It was ridiculously strong; I managed to pull a (admittedly small) bush out of the ground easily, when it definitely would have been a humiliating struggle with my regular body. This body's skin was tough, but sensitive; grabbing the brush didn't hurt, but I felt even little knob and twig that poked into me. Similarly, taking off my magic-made shoes and walking around barefoot felt weird, but my feet showed no signs of marks or chafing.

Perhaps most importantly, though... my eyes were excellent. It was ironic, but shouldn't have been: my favorite thing was quickly becoming sitting on that cliff and looking out over miles and miles of unspoiled wilderness, in almost exactly the pose I had chosen for my avatar in the Little God's Room. I could see so many birds, so many trees blowing in the wind, many small clearings, little glimpses of animals moving through the trees... and in the far, far distance, little signs of civilization. In particular, I could see a couple stretches of what were probably the same road, when it was turned in my direction, but that was most of the way to the horizon.

Eventually I did work my way back around to the problem of shelter. My options weren't great unless I wanted to spend soulflame, and eventually, I just gave in to that idea. To minimize danger that I'd be spotted, I just made a hollow near the top of the cliff and entirely behind the waterfall, inaccessible to anyone who couldn't fly, sloped so that any water that blew in would drain out, and just deep enough that I could rest comfortably. Naturally, in the back of my head I was making plans for expanding it; I figured that I'd eventually have magic power or more flame to spend to make it up to be whatever I wanted, but for now, this nook would be quiet, isolated, and safe enough. I couldn't really look out from it, what with the waterfall in the way, but getting from there to the cliff and back was not much work.

Back in Olesport, things continued apace. Along the way, Captain Bard managed to scrape up more people to serve in the military, but they were not what anyone would consider quality troops--if a patron in the bar was only racking up a tab and never paying it off, if a second son or daughter wanted nothing to do with their family's business, if anyone was trying to escape their past... they ended up wearing armor. He had a way of making it work, and that probably didn't include telling them they'd be shipping out and probably dying come winter--in short, better than I would have done in his shoes.

Unfortunately, the quality of the equipment was pretty poor, to my eyes. Olesport had an iron-smith who did work for everyone, but he wasn't specifically a weapon smith nor an armor smith. It seemed clear to me after examining the equipment that he also didn't have any magic of a type that would let him sense materials, or maybe he just didn't understand what he was looking at. Either way, the work he put together was flawed; I could not have claimed to do better, but this was stuff people were counting on to save their lives, and it burned me that it wasn't up to snuff. With the tools available to me, though, especially when I couldn't use godly anything... all I could possibly hope is to find a way to use Earth magic to improve them.

Studying Earth magic in my down-time, though, was more confusing than anything. At least this book seemed to have no understanding of chemistry or the physical structure of things; in fact it seemed to know nothing about materials in general, and could only describe techniques by feel. You could strengthen some materials, but not others; you could bind things together and make repairs, but unless things were perfect they would end up weaker. It was all... disappointingly shallow, and it made me realize what an advance the scientific method had been.

Well, maybe other authors have done something like that. Olesport and Alanna's temple are most likely not the center of knowledge in the universe. In fact, once I thought about it, at least a couple places in a couple books have mentioned an "Order" who seemed to have a better collection of books; I wondered what I would find if I ever got a chance to go there. In the meantime, I was just interested in getting as many of these people back alive as I possibly could.

So I borrowed a dulled practice sword and tried to work it with Amber Essence. I honestly didn't know what I was doing, except that I understood that to get the cracks and impurities out of the iron, I would have to shift its structure. After a bit of work, I realized that there was a problem on my end: in my head the crack was small, but on the microscale, even the smallest crack was likely hundreds, maybe even millions of atoms wide, depending on how bad it was. Bridging that gap wasn't just about taking things that were touching and connecting them, it required sending a bridge out first.

That was a little weird, though. The book had made clear that amber essence wasn't really about reshaping things; you couldn't take a block of iron, make it all gooey, and shape it with your mind into a statue. You might, if you were really good, make the iron really soft and shape it with other tools. That probably meant hammers rather than your hands, but making details was definitely easier if you didn't have to go at it with full force.

The point is, I couldn't just stitch cracks in the iron together with my mind, and what I read in the book said it was never going to be that easy. But at the same time, it seemed like it should be. What was Earth magic if not control over these things? What was magic in general if such an obvious problem didn't have a ready solution?

Before I had a ready answer to that question, Mel began showing up and helping... or "helping" with the training of the recruits. I eagerly took part in any training that she taught, but for the most part, it was the kind of basic fitness that you expected from a martial artist--lots of stretching, stamina work, repetitive exercises, and so on. Some of the exercises were strange, like straight hops, but from what I read in the Space Arts book, and the book on wind magic, those might be preparing people to use magic to boost their movements.

Still, it was a week of daily training before she did anything other than give us basic fitness instruction. At that point, she had us all sit down in a square and meditate. She didn't give a reason, but again, the book on Wind Magic gave me a hint: the Stillness Arts were (if I understood the author right, and maybe I didn't) supposed to be centered on the idea that the wind wasn't disturbed when power flowed through it. If they got there by finding a calm center, well, that wasn't much of a surprise to me.

Also not a surprise, though, was that the recruits mostly didn't understand and didn't like Mel's lessons. By now Bard had assembled just shy of four squads, with two cooks and a tailor in the auxiliaries. Bard did his best to keep them together, but so far they were disorganized and unhappy to be there. The loudest critic of Mel's was, by far, a tall, big-boned woman with the kind of face you get from being in a lot of fistfights. I think her name was Trin? In any case, she made it quite clear she thought the whole thing was a waste of time.

I really wanted to come to Mel's defense, but we hadn't learned anything. Although I could still, in my head, remember perfectly how Mel had attacked the rogue ship captain with a high kick from a dead stop and dislocated his shoulder. Thinking back on it, she had kicked him so hard that her other foot lifted off the ground; I'd thought at the time that she had hopped in order to get in range of the other captain, but with my godly power to review what I'd seen, it was clear that the force of the kick itself moved her close to the other captain, who she then kicked in the face.

So while I knew this wasn't a waste of time, I couldn't do anything like that. I relived that moment in my head over and over, trying to gain new insight into how martial arts or wind power had given her that kind of strength... but I couldn't see anything that I hadn't seen at the time, I could only analyze it again and again. Since I wasn't sensing magic at the time, I couldn't look back on that part of it.

In any case, I did a lot of exercises with wind magic in my off-time, training up my Sky Essence capacity in the hopes that it would help with Mel's training. And weirdly, I feel like it did make a difference. When she ordered us to do straight hops, I reliably jumped higher than others. When running, I felt like the wind affected me less than others. Mel clearly noticed, but she wasn't here to do one-on-one instruction. She had other things to do.

By the sound of it, that also involved dealing with her jackass relatives. Bard told me that Minne was better than Manne at collecting taxes, but basically did no inspections at all and could not be counted on to keep watch. He had apparently thought on at least one occasion that he, as portmaster, had the authority to tell the town guard to execute a troublemaker (he didn't, and they didn't). Mel had caught him taking bribes in the form of hard liquor, which he readily admitted and didn't show any sign of remorse for. And he insisted that he wasn't being paid enough and tried to threaten Mel with getting the clan leaders involved if she didn't capitulate (she didn't).

Meanwhile, "Uncle Clar" was repeatedly jailed for offering people money and calling it a loan after the fact, then demanding at least twice as much money back. If it weren't for Lucile's ability to read lies, that would be a trickier situation, but Mel had not the slightest shred of sympathy for the man. His wife, who Bard didn't know the name of, was apparently a complete drunkard and routinely destroyed their furniture. All in all, I was glad I had never met the man and hoped I never would.

One positive thing, though: my Deific Body apparently allowed me to answer some prayers unconsciously, the way I had seen Alanna do when I went to visit. It seemed like every time Mel had to deal with one of her relatives, she made some kind of prayer for insight, which the God of Eyes was happy to offer. Mostly, that just meant confirming what she already knew, that they were useless sleazebags and were expecting her to knuckle under. I'm not sure she knew who she was praying to, because it wasn't any kind of formal prayer, but I was happy to know that, first of all, my presence was helpful, and second of all, that I wasn't immediately in any danger of running out of soulflame.

Because, I discovered, the downside to having that body was that it did take some maintenance. The gold flame I had in stock was good and potent, but it was supposed to be the "most precious" flame, so I didn't like the idea of burning it--did I really just say that?--if I could use another flame. For the same reason, I didn't do anything else with the body unless I had to, although I did take it up to the cliffside at least once every few days to stare at the horizon.

The way things were going, I needed that time to relax and take in the world.