Waking up blearily, I tiredly climb to my feet, wiping sleep from my eyes. Once up, I go through my now usual routine of washing myself in the stream, and eating a meal of badly cooked meat, in the sense of it being heavily burned and overdone. Then, I change into one of the few clean sets of clothing I still have, before going back out to work.

In the clearing, nothing has changed since I was last here - the shelter still half-finished, with remnants and materials scattered around the area. Immediately, I get to work deepening the trench, widening and deepening it while piling the dirt up near the shelter. Eventually, I get a half-meter wide and deep hole dug around the edge of the clearing, apart from in one section, which has been reduced from a quarter to a meter-wide strip.

Leaving the trench for now, I first grab a bite of lunch before I decide to do as much as possible to finish the shelter with what I currently have. I continue piling and compacting the dirt around the wooden and leaf-covered frame, quickly using up large quantities of dirt. As the shelter, despite it's overly long construction time, is still very small, I manage to cover most of it with what I have, leaving just a section at the shelter's peak uncovered.

Deciding to dig up more dirt a bit later, I go back out into the forest to gather some straight lengths of wood, making sure to go in the opposite direction to the lair. After about a half hour, I return with an armful of long, straight sticks, thinner than the ones I used for the shelter, but still substantial in thickness. As most are around a meter in length, I break the 10 or so sticks into foot-long lengths, getting around 3 per stick. Then, getting out my extraordinarily sharp knife set, I whittle the sticks to as sharp a point as I can get on one end.

Luckily, the Rat King's knives make the job much easier as the blades' sharpness makes whittling almost feel like cutting butter, speeding up the job tremendously. After another half hour of hard graft, I have finished with the sticks, and set them to one side temporarily. Before setting them in the trench, I decide to finish the digging by lowering the half-meter wide ditch by a few inches, and raising a wall on the inner edge, making the wall's effective height larger.

After digging the dirt, I pile it on the inside, building up a small wall, before remembering that I still need some for the shelter itself. I quickly lower the area I've dug by a few more inches, and consistently lower the trench by double the original amount, splitting the dirt distribution between wall and shelter 50-50. Within the hour, the job of making the two piles of dirt is complete; one horseshoe shaped and the other a generic conical pile.

I go around, compacting the dirt in the 'wall', so it won't be easily knocked over by any unfortunate creatures. After that, I finish up the top of the shelter, compacting it down, completing the now amorphously lumpy shape of the shelter. A brown log in a lovely green field. Damn, if it doesn't ruin the scenery!

Ignoring the blemish on the landscape for now, I turn my mind to another local blemish on the landscape, drawing from it the determination to keep working. I Go back out into the woods, before the sun starts the set, and collect more arm-fulls of straight sticks, around an inch thick. I do this three times, taking up around a half hour, and then do the same thing as I did before, breaking them into 3 equal pieces, which would be nigh impossible to do neatly without my new strength, and whittle them down to a point, giving me a total of 127 sharpened stakes.

I go around the trench, shoving the pointy end of each stake into the ground, turning them around, and ramming them into their own created holes, so that I don't have to dig them or sharpen both ends. After the trench is completed, I still have around 40, so I place them facing outwards in the wall, so that anyone jumping into it would have a nasty surprise. Looking at the near-dark sky, I head over to the entrance to the pocket dimension.

"CRASH"

My head snaps backward, and I pull my knives out of my inventory. The noise came from the other side of the shelter, so I edge around, listening intently. As I approach, I hear some muttering, and as I round the corner, I am shocked to see a small group of people mocking another guy who seems to have just tripped in my trench...

"Hello...?"