B5 C32: Restful Slumber

It was with great relief that I could confidently say Verin didn’t hate her surprise. Better yet, she’d regained her mana sense, and I’d even scored a portrait out of the entire thing.

Naturally, I’d immediately framed and hung it in my room, as befit Verin’s artistic prowess.

I hadn’t quite expected the tears, nor the heartfelt hugging at the end, but they only served as additional proof that the surprise hadn’t been thrown in vain.

It had been a few weeks since then, and I’d barely been able to pull Verin out of her studio since. In fact, half the times I did, it was only so that she could make new requests for art supply tweaks. Between being an artist and being a noble familiar with important settlement supply chains, Verin was incredibly clued into how most of her instruments were made. Already, I’d made a dozen changes to my ink and paint formulas, and with careful enough smithing, I’d managed to make a few fountain pens, too.

Ball-point still eluded me, but I figured that was fine for now.

The biggest improvement was ultimately to my paper. I’d been flying pretty blind without the internet’s help, and the extent of my knowledge had largely been “paper is made from trees.” Or, that wasn’t entirely fair. I’d seen a few snippets of people pouring some sort of wood slurry over screens before, but that was about it. 

In the end, my paper successes had come about after chopping up a bunch of wood, and then repeatedly boiling and smashing the hell out of it. All of my attempts to build fine mesh filters for straining my sugar beet molasses had helped me out from there, and I found it relatively straightforward to build a metal screen, which I attached to a wooden frame.

Luckily, magic let me cheat with a lot of steps. After creating my first successful wood slurry, I’d bound it to Conjure Liquid. Likewise, I skipped a lot of the waiting around by casting Dry whenever I needed to rid my paper sheets of their moisture. After the fact, Verin threw all sorts of fun words at me like “deckle” and “wood pulp” at me, giving me some tippers to make slightly whiter, more regular paper. The biggest advantage, however, was my usual professional suspect: Gloves of the Arcanist.

For once, the Papermaking variant appeared as soon as I activated the gloves, not requiring me to aspect my mana at all.

Paper Hands

+5 to Papermaking

Allows you to slightly alter the durability and color of the paper you make.

Between my gloves, the tips from Verin, a good bit of old-fashioned practice, and a few more levels under my belt, my paper’s quality rapidly improved. When it finally was up to my standards, I bound a bunch of sheets together with some metal rings and a wooden cover, gifting Verin a sketchbook, too.

With that being said, I couldn’t say that all of my work had been strictly for Verin. Admittedly, most of it had been. Seeing how little she’d drawn all these months had been a bit sad, especially when I could see the genuine joy in her eyes when she helped me level Drawing. I had no idea how long Cal would take, and with Verin’s current predicament, making her some supplies only felt right.

At the same time, I also needed a supply of proper paper. Case in point, I was presently putting the final touches on an architectural schematic. Done with our house for now, the target of my efforts was something different entirely.

The first time I’d attempted this, it had gone poorly, to say the least. As I finalized my plans, it was thus with no small measure of relief that I saw things going a bit better.

Designed building quality: Standard

Schematic materials: Passable

Design skills: Standard

Final blueprint: Transitory Hut of Restful Slumber (Fragile Blueprint 0/1) 

This blueprint can only be used once, at which time it will be destroyed.

Transitory Hut of Restful Slumber

Reduces your need to sleep. Any sleep you do gain will become more restful and will heal you at an accelerated rate.

Increases resistance to hostile sleep or nightmare effects. 

Architecture has reached level 8!

At last, I had everything I needed to start working on my mind again.

Not that my blueprint was all that incredible, and normally, I would have been reluctant to build such a thing in my very soul. Expecting exactly that, I’d made the structure slightly non-traditional. Instead of a classic, four-walled room, I’d made it much more lightweight. Four pillars stood, one at each corner of the room, holding up a latticed ceiling. I’d worked hard to imbue the entire structure with the concept of being temporary and easily replaced, and while I’d failed a few times already, it looked like this one would be the winner.

This structure is inherently removable, and it will make no deep or lasting imprints on your mind or soul. While this reduces its efficacy, this also allows it to be torn down or replaced at any time without consequence. 

It wasn’t perfect, and it sadly wouldn’t reactivate my Stygian Citadel skill, but it was exactly what I needed for now.

With the schematic in hand, I had my new big project for the foreseeable future. At the same time, gone were the days where I’d fixate on one thing to the exclusion of all else. At the end of the day, it was about balance.

In the following weeks, I worked diligently on my mind while making sure to carve out plenty of time to hang out with Verin. At the same time, with Verin so engaged with her artwork, I allowed myself to venture out of the house for longer periods, opening up a few new options for me.

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What is it that ship people say again? Anchors away? Something ahoy? I wasn’t sure, but that wasn’t going to stop me from embarking on my maiden voyage.

There, resting atop the waters of the sea, was a boat. 

To be fair, “boat” might have been a bit generous. Knowing that nothing bad would happen to me if it capsized or I went overboard, I didn’t put much effort into making it seaworthy. Really, it was more of a raft than an actual boat, but “sailing on a boat” sounded a lot better than “drifting on a raft.” To that end, I’d dubbed my new creation the S.S. Tess. I didn’t actually know what the “S.S” stood for, but I knew it was important.

Summoning a crude oar from my storage, I hopped aboard, and without further ado, I pushed myself over the waves and deeper into the region.

While I wouldn’t mind picking up a new Sailing skill if the system offered it, today’s goal was something very different. Despite the steady supply of squid I’d been bringing in, our household was fairly low on standard seafood. Later on, I planned to do a deep dive and look around for shellfish, shrimp, and other aquatic critters, but for now, the plan was much simpler.

I was here to fish.

To my great joy, it didn’t take long to find my first targets, either. The waters, free of any man-made pollution, were pristine, and with my Perception, I was able to peer through the gentle waves with ease. Far below, a small school of thin, rainbow mottled fish swam along, giving me plenty of time to hit one with God’s Eye.

Patchwork Herring

Now the only question was how to catch them.

I alternated through a number of methods for a while, some better than others. Using my harpoon spear was perhaps the most straightforward method, though I struggled to accurately strike the fish when they were deep enough. While I had no trouble smithing hooks by now, I didn’t have anything to make a good fishing line with, so traditional fishing rods were out. I did stick some hooks at the end of long sticks, though, seeding them with some bait. It wasn’t the fastest, but it worked.

Bait-wise, I was mostly using bugs. While the prairie was fully devoid of life, the same wasn’t true of the forest, and Pest-Killing Aura made it trivial to collect them. While I hadn’t found any earthworms, I had a few crickets and beetles, and it looked like the fish were perfectly happy to munch them down. 

On one occasion, I even used myself as bait. Sticking a hand into the water, I wiggled a finger around until the dumbest or perhaps bravest of the fish swam up and gave it a nibble. With Perpetual Armor, my skin benefited from the full bonuses of Arcane Armory, making it as hard as plate armor. The fish’s bite tickled a bit, but otherwise did no damage. On the flip side, I instantly hooked my finger and yanked it up. A quick slice from my knife, and it went into my storage.

Fishing has reached level 3!

While doing things old school made me feel rugged and outdoorsy, there was a much faster method to collect the fish, and it relied on a skill I needed to train, too.

Sinking into my mental space, I climbed atop my citadel walls and sent out a pulse of mental magic. Sense Minds rippled through the void, finding a dozen pebble-sized minds. Focusing on the first of them, I wove the spellform for one of my newest spells.

Mental Spike slammed into the corresponding fish, completely stunning the simple-minded creature. In short order, the rest soon followed.

With a solid supply of seafood for the foreseeable future, I turned back. Perhaps I was letting Cal rub off on me too much, but I could only imagine how fun it would be to see Verin squirm as I taught her how to scale a fish.

Mental Magic has reached level 22!

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In the heart of my mental space, I began the arduous task of building my new bedroom. Despite how much better I felt these days, the space itself was largely unchanged since my fight with the reaper.

The floors were a bit more solid. I’d swept most of the fragments into a series of big piles instead of letting them litter the landscape. I’d forged some of them into blocks, sitting off to the side.

But therein lay the problem.

Blocks.

Not every structure I wanted to build needed to be made of bricks.

Case in point, my new Transient Hut of Restful Slumber wasn’t supposed to be a bulky stone building. Instead, as per the name, it was a slim, outdoor hut, and in my mind, it was meant to be made from wood.

Sadly, my mental space was lacking any good trees to chop down.

Still, that wouldn’t stop me. Back when I’d first started using Soul Forging, I’d quickly discovered that I could imbue my mental shards with different types of mana. Thus far, I’d only tested the ability with earth mana to make a mold for my bricks, but there was no reason it couldn’t work for other mana types.

Of course, I was wary to use this ability, as I only had so many mental fragments, and I wasn’t sure how reversible the process was. For all I knew, each time I aspected some of my mind, I was irrevocably modifying a portion of my mind and soul. All the same, I needed to test the ability out at some point, and now seemed like as good a time as any.

Heating up another batch of shards, I injected a thread of mana into my crucible as they all melted together. This time, I used life mana, doing my best to shove aside the existing wealth of dark and mental mana. Rather than crafting another basic block, I made a stubby cylinder this time around. All the while, I tried to connect with the molten substance on a deeper level, focusing on everything I knew about trees.

Which, in fairness, was a good bit. Not their actual biology, to be fair, but with the number of trees I’d chopped down and carved up in the past year, I was practically a certified lumberjack. I lingered on the sensation of chopping through thick tree bark, of tracing the grain of the wood with my fingers before I crafted something. The scent of sawdust drifting through the air, mixing with the smell of wood pulp as I boiled it all into paper.

It was a strange sight, to be sure, but as the metallic substance began to cool down, it took on the light greenish brown of a young sapling. When the transformation finally ended, a small section of a tree trunk lay before me. 

Life Magic has reached level 23!

In fairness, it wasn’t quite right. For one, I hadn’t managed to completely erase the existing mana within the material, and the darkness and mental mana lingered within. The wood, a deep black, reminded me of the trees back in Emer’Thalis. The addition of the mental mana seemed to play with the wood grain, turning the usual neat rings of the trunk into chaotic, jagged purple lines. Moreover, parts of the trunk were just off. The bark, in particular, looked unnatural, as if someone had painted it on.

And yet. Undeniably, it was wood.

I’d play around with it for a while longer, if just to test how well I could reverse the process, but it was a promising proof of concept. Without a doubt, I’d be able to craft my new bedroom.

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Move Earth has reached level 14!

Spatial Magic has reached level 32!

Belatedly taking on one of my less enjoyable tasks, I was back in the depths of the earth where I’d defeated the Ore Muncher. After all these months, I still hadn’t removed all the rubble from the cave-in that had nearly trapped me.

Honestly, I’d been hoping that the dungeon would take care of it for me, but that didn’t seem to be the case. While the boss’s rocky corpse theoretically waited for me below, it was still covered in tons and tons of solid rock.

Thankfully, I was well suited to digging these days. Between Move Earth and Arcane Storage, I could break up the rocks and shove them into my storage space. To a lesser extent, I was relying on Portal as well, conjuring a few portals and shoving boulders through them whenever my storage was full. As I needed line of sight for the spell, I sadly couldn’t conjure one portal all the way outside, which would have speeded things up immensely.

Still, with my high Wisdom and rapidly rising Spatial Magic level, my storage was larger than ever. Coupled with Spatial Step and my Dexterity, I was able to rush out of the caves and empty out all the boulders in no time. Not particularly thinking about where I placed them all, I simply summoned all the rocks at once, not even watching as they started tumbling down the mountain.

By the time the notification rolled in, I was already halfway back to the boss’s chamber.

You have defeated a Stonehide Gryphon!

Whoops.

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Sitting before the forge, I spread the latest batch of glass evenly over a sheet of metal, watching as it cooled down into a thin pane. While I often enjoyed giving the glass a bit of a colored tint, this time, the goal was to make it as perfectly clear as possible.

Glassmaking has reached level 6!

When it was done, I painstakingly cut it into a perfect rectangle. From there, I switched to Woodworking, joining four pieces of wood at right angles to one another. Far from being satisfied with hastily nailing them together, I put every ounce of my skill into the process until it was difficult to tell they were ever separate pieces in the first place. A tiny slit was cut into the interior sides of the wood so I could slot my glass panel in, and I nailed a thin wood back to the entire thing.

Once it was complete, I shoved it into my storage and rushed over to the art studio, finding Verin waiting within.

Seeing me empty-handed, she cocked her head to the side. “Is it ready?”

Summoning my creation to my hands, I nodded. “Frame completed. Would you like to do the honors?” 

Accepting the picture frame from my hands, Verin ever-so-carefully inserted her latest painting in before sliding the glass into place. From there, she handed it back to me, and we began our procession back to the common area. A nail and some thin metal wire later, and it was done. Our living room now sported its first piece of artwork.

Dozens of colors seemed to ebb and flow across the painting, bleeding into one another even as they seemed to fight and push each other apart. If I hadn’t known better, I would have wondered if she put some sort of illusion over it, as even stationary, the painting seemed to shift about depending on where I looked. Despite the limited number of colors I’d been able to make for her, Verin had admirably captured the patchwork skies.

“Part of me feels a bit silly, I’ll admit. If we want to see the sky, all we have to do is walk outside.” Rather than enjoy her work, Verin stood there with a frown as if picking apart minor details that she could have done differently.

“No. It makes the house feel homier. And it’s beautiful.” It wasn’t empty praise, either. It really did add an element our home had been missing. “And besides, it’ll be nice when Cal comes back, right?”

The question seemed to startle Verin, as if she was only now realizing what our third companion might think of her art. “That’s right. She’s below the Perception threshold. I suppose she’s never seen the sky as anything but black, yes? How… curious. Then I hope she will enjoy it when she returns.”

A smile graced her lips, and filled with a new sense of purpose, she began to wander off. As she walked away, I had a sudden feeling we’d be seeing a few more sky paintings before the month was out.

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Soul Forging has reached level 4!

When it was finally done, I wanted to say that I’d pushed myself, pouring all of my energy into long months of hard work. In reality, though, almost the opposite was true.

My mental bedroom, as to be expected, didn’t take that long to build. With barebones hut-like walls, it wasn’t meant to be some grand structure fit for a king. Honestly, most of my time had been spent creating more wood and testing out my other mana types. I’d even built a bed, complete with a few cushions of pillowy air mana, chilled with a touch of frost. A few heated fire mana blankets made an appearance as well. 

Much in the same way I’d created wood, I added a dash of mental mana to most of the bedding while focusing on the concept of “sweet dreams.” Whether it actually worked, I wasn’t sure, but I imagined I was about to find out. I signaled my intent to the system, and at last, my first self-designed mental structure was complete.

You have built a new structure!

Analyzing…