I had no idea how long I had been lying on the floor of my new alchemy laboratory before waking up, excepting that it was now fully dark and the various light sources I'd set up were now burnt out. I did know, however, that I was intentionally holding off on processing the sheer volume of information I had just forcibly memorized as a result of my use of the new research workdesk.

"Should have known better, man. Why in the hell did you hold back on upgrading? Of course you'd get more unlocks or delayed unlocks at the upgraded station. It's like you've never even techtreed you nitwit! Now what the hell is Quartzite Manipu… oh. Oh well that's just broken. Daddy likey."

I'll summarize for the remote chance that somehow my mental diary reaches the hands of someone who doesn't already know: the Stonepunk tech base is an odd one in that unlike later "punk" techtrees, it mostly doesn't have any opportunities for outright magitek. Oh, there's stuff that honestly should not work in there, but it at least wears a domino mask when doing that stuff and pretends to be mild mannered physics by day. There's one (or two, depending on how you look at it) major exception to that claim, however, but it comes with some limitations and challenges. See, if the Early Stonepunk era is defined as being the bronze age but with weird bone shenanigans instead of bronze, then the Middle Stonepunk era would be defined as a sort of late classical era. Better ossium formulations by including "essence" (thus taking on the role of iron or steel), stone gear systems that could do what Romans or early Medieval monks did with wooden gears, and a very faint smattering of customized domesticated animals and plants. But the Late Stonepunk era? That's defined as being closer to the Industrial Age. Almost a sort of bridging gap with "more conventional" steampunk ideas. You'd expect highly customized animals doing manual labor like tilling fields, or perfect voice imitation messenger birds smart enough to go to a number of destinations, leeches that actually eat diseased blood and tissue but nothing else… that sort of thing. The "one" exception mentioned earlier? It was what I had accidentally focused on in my 'research': the use of quartz crystals to manipulate light. It's important to know that this couldn't be done to the extent the Computer age accomplishes, but … it could come fairly close. And the reason for that, is that it's not actually quartz. It's "crystallized essence of quartz" -- AKA quartzite. This in turn lets the rocks shape and to some extent interact with or control the "essence" of (mostly visible) light. And that gets you Morse code flashlights, street lamps, disinfectant beams, quartzite ovens… crystal heat ray guns…

In case you missed that last one: stone age light weapons. Yeah. Ones that recharge by being left to bask in the sun, basically. Of course this is an outright violation of the laws of physics, which is where the Stonepunk alchemy emphasis again comes into play. Because as it turns out? The "essence of light"? Not that far from "proper mana". I still couldn't be a Wizard, Harry. But… maybe, just maybe? I wouldn't need to look on the face of Yog-Sothoth to dabble my toes in those waters someday.

For the time being, however, one thing was absolutely certain: men who can build laserguns do not live in dirt hovels. Time for an overhaul. Well first time for a bath, then a meal, then some proper sleep in my hovel and then an overhaul, because as it turns out I'd been building up quite a bit of infrastructural technical debt by trying to speedrun past the Stonepunk stuff while holding my nose at the whole affair when I could have been relaxing in style.

~~------------~~

The first thing I did once I'd taken care of the utterly basic self-care I'd been subjecting myself to up until this point was to actually complete the project that induced my moment of head-meets-floor enlightenment: those damned spiderzillas. With my newfound improved comprehension of the role alchemy plays in the Stonepunk technology tree, I found it far easier to isolate the 'herbivore' trait from rabbits -- by a process of intermediary steps involving the essence of the domestic carrotato as a catalyst, basically. This then mixed in nicely with the essence of domestication and… it still required four full forced generations to get the desired changes to stick.

Once it was done, however, I found myself in the possession of pig-sized herbivorous arachnids with about as much going on behind their oversized black soulless eyes as a cow that had entered catatonia due to chronic PTSD. I still wasn't about to eat anything resultant from the things, but at least from now on it would be easy a pie to get ahold of chitinite. I did, however, keep a very well contained small population of the feral variety in case I ever again needed "pure" spiderzilla essence.

After seeing the end result of my abomination against nature, I felt that I had the seed of a proper workhorse for future projects I might have. Like trained workspiders for hauling things for me or tending the carrotato and other crops I would eventually start to grow in my little abode. Their ability to travel vertically may be stunted compared to their feral cousins, but I could easily shrink a gardener variety back down and take advantage of quartzite to start vertical hydroponic farming. Because I could. And because some inkling in the back of my head kept telling me that I really ought to start consider those goblins and bugbears I'd been dismissing from my thoughts due to having seen no signs of anything like them.

To get all of that done in a reasonable timeframe however would require multiple cartload hauls of stone from the pond, and I was done doing that labor myself. I took one of the stolid spiders and with a bit of rope tied it to my handcart, using the remainder of the rope as a lead to pull it into following me. The sheer convenience of not having to worry about how much the cart was weighing was an immense relief to the whole process; getting river/pond rocks back up near the greatoak took half the time to haul twice as many as before.

I felt a little remorseful, almost, at taking down the hovel once and for all, but it had done its job diligently and it was time for something… better. Allowing myself to slip back into the builder fugue, I trusted in my new if bizarre architectural skills to construct me something far better than what I'd had before.

~~------------~~

Okay. Just how long was I 'under'? My old hovel was a regular triangular shape with about twenty feet on each side. I was now looking at a two-story cottage with a stairway where my hovel used to be leading up to the entrance, which was built into the greatoak. I mean… there's just no way this only took one day to accomplish. Not with just me and some truly dumb muscle.

Even if I am now the proud owner of a set of black-ossium quartzite power tools. When did I even… well that's a little scary. Reviewing my own memories informs me that fugue-me had apparently decided that being trusted to know what to do included using "experimental" essence tonics on myself, allowing for increased speed, strength, stamina… I appear not to have slept for five days, and will very much need to crash soon. My poor red bar is hovering at about one-third full. But at least none of those tonics appear to have had lasting transformative effects. And hey -- heated jacuzzi tub. Okay, fugue-me. You win this round.

It's the next morning by the time I take a look around my little base to see what hath been wrought. I'd apparently focused mostly on upgrading the home, but I also definitely followed through on the water tower and quartzite "street lamps". The quartzite security fencing and interior ossium barbed wire is an interesting touch for the farm area, though. Not as nice as actually having interior lighting again. Just being able to wake up without eyestrain was one of those quality-of-life things that you notice immensely when you get it back after losing it. Flushing toilets you feel the absence of throughout and notice it. But switchable interior lighting? That only hits you when you have it back.

Seriously, two floors … oh and a root cellar. A temperature controlled root cellar because of course there’s an infrared-absorbing quartzite crystal in there shining softly as it radiates that same energy as visible light. … Why would I build a spare bedroom though? I get the main room, the kitchen/dining area, and the currently bookless study. But two bedrooms each with their own separate dedicated bathroom? Fugue-me, what were you thinking? Eh. Can’t fault a guy for acts of blind optimism as defiance of the void. Plus, heated jacuzzi tub. Many sins can be thus forgiven.

On to the day. Carrotato plot was apparently growing rather nicely. Made an attempt at diluting the ‘ordinary’ usage of sanguinism to affect more tubers at less comparative cost. No real way of measuring if it worked or not, but the idea of not having to cut myself so often -- even if with a razor-sharp ossium blade -- sure did make the idea attractive. He’d check on the plants in a few hours either way.

Cattle spiders… check. Nine females, three males, just as expected. All chewing the grass in their pen with slow, vapid expressions.

Water tower … sitting at 20% capacity. It’d only been operational for two days so that’s actually a net gain of 10% per day. Call that a wash. I found myself at a bit of a loss as to what to actually do so I decided to try to organize my thoughts and gather the reed-paper ‘books’ so as to see if there were other potential avenues of advancement I’d been overlooking. It would also afford me the opportunity to test if I could only have one research station at a time.

Turns out, there were actually four or five ‘books’ comprising three dozen pages each, each of which were only half filled, really. What really surprised me, though, was that what I found written in those pages was far more organized on its own than I recalled writing -- yet I clearly recall writing each bit of it. Yet another smoking gun in my ever-building pile of existential crisis nightmare fuel, no biggie.

Might as well carry these over to the shelves in the cabin regardless. As I do, the quality of the reed-paper honestly starts to annoy me. Stonepunk schizotech has an answer to HVAC but can't produce better information storage? I call haxx. But the thing of it is, as matters currently stand my oak burlap is the finest material I can hope to make proper paper with, as the processes for woodpulp are too complex and I don't have any other cloth material as a reliable supply right now. None of the solutions at my immediate future disposal tend to indicate a chance at changing that. It keeps boiling back to the same issue, the issue that's driven me into the spidery schizotech arms of the Stonepunk Eras: a lack of manhour resources.

I really ought to do a better survey of the forest to locate other potentially useful resources, rather than simply rely on my albeit effective survival skills, as they don't really tend to mesh with what my other knowledge finds potentially valuable. I got the Stonepunk unlock by melting a goddamn spider after all. My survivalism was entirely silent on the possibility of that even occurring. While I do get some built-in hints as to how to advance in this tech tree I'm climbing, they really aren't consistent let alone ubiquitous, and it's not like I can even review logs or list requirements for items I've already unlocked. But between Sanguinism, Quartzite Manipulation, and Stonepunk itself it's quite clear that there are entire hidden subtrees I could use to improve my lot.

So. How should I go about surveying the forest? Going in person seems a waste of the exercise. I've already been concerned about my security here so… guard dogs? Train them to trigger quartzite tags when they encounter something dangerous, let them roam relatively freely, and train them to try to 'retrieve' anything unfamiliar? That's a fairly high workload for simple animals, and waaay too high for my cattle spiders as it is also against their new non-aggressive nature. So what I need is a highly intelligent pack animal whose loyalty and imprinting I can exploit to cover the gaps of only partially applying the domestication essence to them.

On the surface this puts me back at square one -- except for a few key points of fact. There are birds in this forest; more importantly there are birds I recognize. I'll want a sedative tincture to capture a few. Unlike the spiderzillas, blackbirds are merely assholes to anyone the aren't bonded to, rather than a crawling menace. The thing about blackbirds is, they're clever enough to not just be tool users, but also to be tool makers. They can also be trained to marginally understand human language, as well as developing intense pair bonds. What they aren't, however, is intimidating enough on their own to stop intrusions. But I didn't need that capability from them. What they did have is more than enough for me to start with.

What I didn't have was anything I could actually use as a sedative for them. At least, not without traipsing through the forest myself again. To quote a certain duster-wearing Chicagoan: "It never rains, but it pours.". Time to arm up.

One of the true oddities of the Stonepunk tree is that despite the manner in which ossium is generated, most of the work in producing it is done in an alchemic lab rather than at any kind of proper forge. This has its advantages and its disadvantages. One advantage is that most of the work in making any given piece is done through casting rather than hot forging, meaning that once you've generated a cast you can keep reusing it. A disadvantage to this however is that true bronze metal is strengthened by the hot forging process in a way that ossium just never can be. And unlike bronze or later metals, once ossium is cast it is ductile but only to a certain point, whereupon it will shatter rather than shear, just like natural bone. This is why the use of Basic Sanguinism is a tech prereq for Late Stonepunk Era: the development of black ossium. By extracting the essential strength and durability of a sample of ossium it's possible to infuse that into another sample during its creation. This is, mind you, a hot process and requires the destruction of an equal mass of ossium to produce, but the end product is roughly analogous to wrought iron rather than bronze.

So that's what I spend my afternoon generating enough of to create a sort of half-plate half-scale chest and upper arm piece for myself, utilizing the accumulated rabbit hides I had acquired in the last couple of weeks to create the underlying jerkin. It was interesting to see the sanguine infusion of ossium essence that I reinforced the patchwork leather shirt with before sewing in the black ossium pieces turning the hide a greyish black, from its natural light brown.

Hmm. Leathercrafts… the thought tickles something in my "lizard brain" but I don't know why or what. I don't have enough leather to do my full arms as well, let alone my legs but I can and do spend my time sewing and stitching the infused rabbit hides to make bracers and boots for myself, as I also attach black ossium guards there. Before showing up in this insane place I probably would have balked at the idea of wearing a "Roman kilt" but now all I can think of is the difficulty of needing to use infused burlap to silence the material and my thankfulness that ossium clunks like stone rather than clinks or rattles.

Next up is a quartzite heat pistol. What I wind up crafting bore more of a resemblance to a sawed-off shotgun or double-barreled arquebus than a modern handgun, though. The black ossium barrel surrounding the alchemically-grown quartzite was necessarily polished to a very fine glossy finish on its interior. It would also be barely any better than one of those hand arquebuses, if push came to shove. The lack of an effective lasing medium or focal lens means the thing would have at best a fifty foot range; and while it can fire twice in a go, it required a full minute to accumulate enough light and heat to discharge again. Faster on a hot day, but as much as a quarter regular speed in winter and halved at night or in the dark. And of course the fine fitting necessary made swapping crystals ineffectual.

I would carry two of them strapped on via a burlap bandolier. This left room on my belt for a proper black ossium saber with a rough wooden sheath and a recurved dagger of the same material.

The last item I made was perhaps something of a cheat, as it was based on what I could recall of electromagnetism: a quartzite-infused ossium compass. It seemed to work alright but was a little shaky overall on its polished granite beveled pivot. I wouldn't be able to navigate truly long distances with it due to its inaccuracy, but it would save me from needing to blaze so aggressively.

Putting all of this together took up the entirety of my crafting time for the day, barely leaving me a chance to check in on my carrotatoes and confirm that the diffused approach actually did work, but took twice as long per plant. Which was just fine, since it still netted me half again as many as three growth infusions would have. I was getting awfully tired of carrotato as a side; one part of my ambition was to find new edibles to work with.

I made a point of strapping on every piece of gear I made as soon as I finished it, today -- on the premise that I'd need the practice moving around with the weight. As such it was only when I doffed everything to prepare for the evening that I noticed that I'd barely felt the weight over the day. I made a mental note to try to find some bog iron somewhere in the forest and compare its weight to ossium -- because it was either this stuff weighed far less than it ought to or all the exercise I'd been doing in my fugue state had drastically increased my body's strength. Of course, since I had no way of cracking open my stats sheet -- assuming I even had one -- I had no way of knowing. I certainly didn't seem to have put on or off an immense amount of weight or muscle from what I could remember.

~~------------~~

Getting to sleep that night was still easier than normal as I probably was still a little deprived from my five-day-long fugue bender.

If anything, waking up the next morning was even easier. I was riddled with anticipation as I slung all of my gear on, including my white ossium recurved bow. I hadn't felt there was any point remaking it as it was already plenty capable of delivering an arrow where I wanted it. The bow itself was small enough to be slung across my back in my quiver along with the twenty arrows I had.

And just like that, I took my first steps back into the deep forest I had taken for some time. Overall the new kit had me feeling like some kind of Roman pirate, but considering I was literally wearing magical bone and glowey crystals I decided to give the swashbuckling punk-punk thing a pass on the complaints department. What I was looking for was basically anything I could safely harvest live samples of that would allow for the expansion of my farm and the creation of my not-yet-existent alchemical garden. Just a few basics would do, really, considering just what I could pull off with sanguinism trait manipulation. What I was especially on the lookout for was medicinals, however, as any numbing or pain relieving plant could be plausibly adapted to a sedative for use on the blackbirds.

Of course I could just kill a few of them but honestly I wasn't thrilled with killing animals as sub sapient as hares, let alone something arguably demisapient. Spiders can go fuck themselves though. Those I'll twist and execute like the soulless bastard I pretend I am. So instead, onward into adventure! And morning gloom as I half-randomly wander in a generally circular pattern for a few hours around my home, marking out distinctive locations and approximate distances as best I could on a hide map to fill out my visual of the land around my new home. I do find a kind of berry bush that my survival knowledge informs me is great for constipated people though, and while I do take a few clusters of its bunchberries I also make a special point to wipe my hands clean because no. I also find a few more bunches of feral carrotato and grab a couple just to keep a "control" sample around. The big win though comes when I come upon a fallen 'regular' oak and find it festooned with shelf fungus and something that my knowledge tells me are "glow beetle grubs". Which, I mean, with all the various kinds of random crap in my head now how could I be faulted for overlooking the sheer potential these things could have for me? Their larval state basically did the job termites do back home: chewing up wood and getting usable energy out of it. With some refinement that process could potentially get me flammable oils. The same thing being something I recall researchers focusing on back on Earth: being ethanol from wood by studying how termites digest it. And the adults? Bioluminescence. A self-sustaining light source not dependant upon the sun or fire. Only drawback is that my Stonepunk knowledge tells me these beetles cannot produce chitinite, so I'm stuck with the spiders still. I made sure to collect a dozen or so grubs into my white ossium sample jars, as I had no clue which were male or female.

The shelf fungus on the other hand, my survival knowledge told me was one of the very few naturally edible fungi in the forest. I already had plans to improve on that but this would be invaluable to my winter survival. By the time winter came around, I would make certain these guys were better than truffles. An absolute must yoink, would absolutely purchase again. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

By the time noon rolled around and I chowed down on my smoked carrotato lunch (don't knock it 'till you try it), I decided that I needed to change up the biome a little and headed back towards the creeks that fed into the pond. I figured the microbiome of the stream banks would be a good place to look for different plants. I especially kept a weather eye out for anything my existing knowledge didn't recognize, as that would be my best bet for some hitherto unknown breakthrough. One reason I had traditionally avoided the creeks though is that if big game of any kind was going to be anywhere in the forests it would be nearest to water. And I certainly didn't want to face that kind of threat with a bow and a pointy stick.

After what felt like about another hour of wandering and filling sample jars of varying sizes and marking locations on a hide map of interesting objects or where I found a given sample number, the babbling flow of water was joined by another sound: crunching rocks. Crunching rocks behind me. I carefully and slowly started moving my less-visible from behind arm upwards towards one of my heat pistols as I otherwise kept entirely still. The crunching sound hadn't been immediately behind me but it couldn't have been more than twenty feet. With any luck, it would turn out simply to be something having fallen from the tree canopy above, but worst case I was about to be attacked by a hungry whatever-passes-for-a-wolf-or-cougar around here.

I could feel the tension in my muscles starting to want to rise even as my swordsman knowledge from Basic Stonepunk Armaments and Standard Deciduous Survival both screamed in my head that I needed to stay relaxed in order to have the best possible reflexes. After a heartrending few minutes that were more likely a few seconds, I felt my hand grip down on the pistol.

I rapid drew and whirled around, trying to be ready for anything. Operative word there being "trying", as what I set my eyes upon was not some cat or canid. Nor, thankfully a bear. Or some blithe herbivore. No, I was now face to face with what looked like an enlarged cross between a porcupine and a raccoon. With very large, very sharp teeth.

A drooling raccupine with very large, very sharp teeth. One that was now launching itself somewhere between a leap and a scamper at me. A tiny corner of my mind recalled the Face Spider Incident and clamped down on the rest panicking. My heat pistol already in my hand, and already aimed in the right general direction, I adjusted slightly and pulled the first of the two triggers. There was an intense flare of bluish light where the breach or lock of an ordinary gun would be, and for a moment I was convinced my crazy schizotech knowledge had just lead me to fire a weapon that emitted Cherenkov radiation. Implying I had been just dosed with a lethal amount of ionizing life-mocking but physics-respecting alpha particles.

However, the following kick-back from sheer thermal bloom from the pistol throwing my arm out of alignment and away from my chest knocked me out of that. The impact on the raccupine could not be undersold. Where before I was confronted with a literally bristling fifty or sixty pound drooling abomination, now I was facing -- and easily dodging -- a smoking charred and milky-eyed abomination while the air filled with the scent of bacon. I quickly moved my second finger into place within the second trigger guard as the damned thing hadn't stopped moving yet, only to realize that its movements were nothing but death throes.

I drew my black ossium saber and with a sharp two-handed overhead downward thrust, severed its spine just below the cranium. I then also collected some samples from its body, as I had still yet to accomplish my mission of the day. A few uncooked bristles, a claw, a square of hide, and a vial of its blood -- that sort of thing. Shortly before I finished I noticed the heat pistol give off another Cherenkov blue flash, and in a calmer state recalled that quartzite emits that glow when releasing a burst of energy -- and upon reaching full capacitance. My gun was now reloaded, and I was now convinced from direct experience that it was an effective and unstealthy weapon, but unlike traditional firearms did little in terms of stopping power.

An important lesson for which I had to admit a debt to this clearly too-lean raccupine. Since I had no real way to carry the thing back, I took my hand trowel out of my sample bag and dug a shallow grave away from the stream in the soft and loamy soil, basically just pushing the soil back over it. It wouldn't keep the body from being found but would inhibit the scent enough not to draw anything else while I was nearby and that would be enough.

Doing all of this while staying on extreme high alert in case raccupines were pack animals did my nerves no amount of unkindness, but I was out here for a reason and ultimately my preparations had paid off completely: I was never in the slightest bit of danger in the encounter, and I learned that there were in fact larger predatory animals in the area. And that at least sometimes, raccupines are solitary predators. Yay me, learning all the things.

It wasn't until later in the afternoon when I found a micropond worth investigating that I found a blue-green cousin of sphagnum moss half in and half out of the water that I didn't recognize and, as I went to collect a sample cutting at it with the dagger to collect up with the hand-trowel, I suddenly noticed my green stamina bar dropping slightly as my eyes were watering from a distinctly astringent scent.

I knew at that moment I had hit the jackpot I was looking for, as whatever volatiles it was releasing had a definite effect of also making my nose go numb and my HUD flickered a barely-there blue-purple over the center of the face of the anatomic display. The moss's built-in defense against being eaten or cut was to release a numbing vapor of some kind. Barely enough to produce an unpleasant tingle on the gums, likely, but the stamina draining effect could make smaller animals or bugs vulnerable enough to being eaten by larger predators that the moss was probably avoided by most things in its natural habitat.

Hardly world-shattering. But in my hands with directed sanguinism cultivation? I had my solution to the problem. With a satchel bag that was over two thirds full, I attempted to use my compass and map to cut straight across land back to my home, as if I got the directions correct it would save me a solid mile of walking back. I did wind up having to double-back about a tenth of that distance as a result, but for a first attempt without proper triangulation tools? Fairly impressive.

It seemed the System agreed with me when I went to review my logs at the research bench and sort away all of my non-living samples before attempting to reproduce the environment my living plants and bugs were found in without allowing them escape containment, as when I did review all that, I received a number of popups:

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