Checking on the skin I put up yesterday, it looked good, the skin itself was extremely hard and thus dry, rubbing along the furred side there was minimal amount of hair coming off it, and most was probably already loose and the boar hadn't cleaned itself off recently. Now that it wasn't going to decay I could figure out the next step, I remembered that oak bark had a chemical in it that worked best, hopefully what I needed was in that book I had. It said to salt the hides to preserve them but since I didn't have that I didn't read the next step since it would be pointless. Let's see... yeah a lot of trees have tannin in them, including birch, but it says to not use this method if you want to preserve fur, it makes the skin tough but the fur is ruined.

Instead it recommended what was essentially brain goo, pull out an animal's brain then boil it in water and mash it until it becomes an ooze. Then apply ooze to the skin and let it soak in for a night then apply more the next day and start stretching it and applying more goo until it is soft and flexible. Will need to wait for a soldier with a fresh kill to come by, personally I didn't like them but the soldiers liked how they tasted so I didn't have any laying around and the newest one was already crispy on the cooking surface. I told the soldier on cook duty to hold on to the next one while I went with Valerie to see how well she was clearing out the area the plant was going.

She was doing pretty good but she wasn't knocking over the trees very effectively, mostly because she was wasting too much time setting them down gently, they were trees not eggs. I decided to take over tree moving while she churned the dirt around the roots to make them lose their grip, turning a half sphere of dirt one-eighty degrees apparently counted for her skill quest. While working I remembered when I had other workers in a team to build the wall and asked if she could still link up like they could. The answer was technically yes with a big but, due to having skills they didn't the gestalt would both have and not have those skills. So, for example, trying to make the team use mana sense would either work just fine, or knock them all out due to sudden sensory overload.

I had no plans to test that at the moment so she could just be in charge of a team without being part of it when she was with them. After clearing out a fair bit of area a soldier came to report that a fresh boar was delivered, so I let Valerie get back to working by herself while I went back to the cooking fire. The cook soldier was working the corpse over and, as I asked, she had put the head off to the side for me to work with. A solid rap to the base of the skull is all it takes to break it like an egg, then I dumped the contents into a smallish clay pot and added a bit of water. The book says that the less water you can get away with the better but you still need enough to completely dissolve the brain in it, so I am just going to add bits of water as needed instead of trying to guess an exact amount.

Next step was add fire until it was hot, as hot as you could get it while still being able to stick your hand in it, and with heat resistance I could get it hotter than normal maximum human tolerance which made it easier to use. The hot water helped melt the brain into it's constitute parts, but after a thorough mashing it was still chunky, so I had to add more water and heat and repeat the mashing process until it was completely liquified. Having extra magic hands was useful with the next step, I had to hold the skin open without getting any of the brain juice on the fur, and since I was just wrist deep in it, doing that would have been impossible. But since I could I just conjured four dirt hands to hold it open and a fifth moved to apply counter pressure as I slathered the skin side with the ooze.

I used about a third of the pot, which was probably more than I needed, but I wanted to be sure so I really worked it in there. Next was just let the skin absorb it for a day. It may be ready earlier than that due to skill shenanigans but I had no reason to rush it, so I sealed the pot with a clay cap and put it to the side and hung the skin on a pole. It was nearly lunch so I went back to helping Valerie until then, the divot for the plant's main body needed to be done before we started transport. At lunch we both went to the tunnel and like I had ordered nearly all the workers started to come out of the hole, had a whopping twenty-five of them up here. The food was split between them all and the cook soldier was drafted as the rearguard before we all headed out to the alraune grove.

Once there I saw it did its best to pack itself up for transport, several bushes on the edge were disconnected from the mass and while still alive they were no longer magical. The rest had migrated a bit into a rough cluster with the puppet in the middle, centered over it's bulk which was much closer to the surface but still underground. I announced my presence but it didn't react, so Valerie and I started shoving dirt out of the way to dig it up, as well as making a ramp of sorts on one side so it could be pulled up easier. Once the core was exposed to light the lines to the puppet powered up and without moving it appeared to have noticed me and my platoon, it let out an "aaaa" before it turned back off.

Guess it acknowledged that I was doing what I said I was going to do. As I dug it up I noticed the core looked really weird, parts of it were clearly plant but other parts looked almost like flesh. Since it was inactive I went up to and poked it's puppet on the arm to check it, and it was actual meat, not just plant matter that was flesh colored and in the shape of meat. Digging it all the way up was quite an undertaking, even with two magic dirt movers the sheer volume needed to be moved was impressive. Eventually we got all the way down and I could measure it, it was a rough sphere a little over five meters in diameter. Once the ramp was ready the workers were sent down where they circled it and mind linked together before lifting in perfect sync.

As they carried it out I noticed they all looked weirdly bulky, like they had hit the gym for way too long, I asked valerie what was going on with them as we knocked trees out of the way. It seemed that they were near the level limit for linking, I didn't know that was a thing, turned out they could only have five members in a link per level. The only downside was they would probably be sore for a bit once they broke into smaller groups but celestial light will handle that easy enough. Basically the gestalt granted them the power to perform a task, but as I was told before, the task must be theoretically possible for one to do it alone. They all knew how to lift heavy objects, so they were granted extra strength to lift an extra heavy object.

It was slow going due to having to stop and knock over a tree every so often to make the path large enough but eventually we made it to the divot... that was way too small. I had them settle it into place anyway and had them split into smaller teams, one team was those that worked on the previous wall and were assigned to start making the new section, the others were sent back inside and one was to bring a celestial up. Then we started sending it in deeper, just digging out layers of dirt from under it and letting it settle into the new space via gravity. Eventually it was completely underground and the gaps were packed with dirt, but it seemed to have entered some sort of hibernation state.

I reached under a bush and grabbed it's power root then injected energy into it directly, watching it closely with mana sense I could see what exactly the difference was as it woke back up. Once it was awake it powered up the puppet and being close to the core made the thing more responsive, but only enough so that it could crudely pantomime questions. An oddity it had was it could only move or talk, not both at once, and it had to shut down and restart to change which activity it could do. Its first question was basically how long it took and how far away it was moved, with some explanation and questions of my own I figured out it entered the hibernation state because it thought it was going to be moved very far away.

It's next question was what it was supposed to do now, so I told it about the large nectar flowers another of its kind made and I also did my best to explain cotton. The final question was about it's mana feeding situation, it was decided that either I or Valerie would fill it's hollow bulb whenever it had repaired it's storage mesh. Since it was done with questions I asked about it getting better at talking or moving, it turned out it could but it didn't know why it should expend energy on doing that. Since it was going to be given plenty of energy it had no reason to be stingy with the returns on it, but also because it would make it easier to be friends, good communication was key in all relationships, including friendship.

Friends were a foreign concept for it, they didn't even interact much with others of their own kind since being too close together could cause both to starve from having to split the mana in the area. Other than energy concerns it had no actual reasons to not practice it's human mimicry further so it finally agreed to do so. Valerie joined up with the wall builder team to dig up and pack back down the dirt ditch for the logs. I decided to check the charcoal, checking the outside I noticed no heat, so I grabbed one of the small plugs and popped it free. When the mound didn't explode that meant it was good to go, opening the door I was pleased by what I had, not only was there charcoal, but the middle must have gotten hot enough to further burn to coke.

I separated that out so if I ever needed to get a furnace super hot, like for melting iron, I had something on hand for that purpose. Most of the charcoal chunks were gathered and stored in the room with a vent, eventually it would become a furnace room but right now doing so would bake anyone that tried to use it for that purpose. The thermal insulation properties of hardened stone were no joke, meaning only fire ants, and eventually me if I could get my resistance skills high enough, could use it without dying.