I huff and puff with contentment at a job well done because the work is done. It was a shitload of work creating the gargantuan support pillars required so that it doesn’t fall to the meat planet, and then making the ginormous floor, again in a hexagonal shape, because hexagons are of course the bestagons.

And then creating the baseline. But it’s there; the frame of my efforts done. It’s a bit empty, more like an enormous skeleton held up to the sky. But when I see it towering over the planet that I forged with patience, magic, and infinity, it just feels right.

To see this massive monument of my efforts against the world. Because what could be more of a huge fuck you to the Astral Plane than to see its whole deal about having no matter or anything just an endless expanse of nothingness and give it gravity!

And it is beautiful: shimmering black tiles of dark iron, the enchantment carved into the surface gleaming, an elegant open hexagon split into six quadrants, and then split again and again, each split larger than my former base despite being 1/36th of the size of the new base.

Dozens of steam generators on the ground snake up the supports to reach a black box where exposed wires spout cracles of electricity against a series of truly massive runes. With dozens of little tubes reaching out of the black box, they spread everywhere, charging all the runes at once.

That very amazing enchantment also inadvertently taught me something quite important, namely, that the larger the rune, the more powerful it is.

While they are more expensive, with my truly ridiculous stocks of language, I can take the price. Frankly, the tank for how much language I can contain before I overflow means that the hard part is actually using all of it. Usually, I only dwell on a quarter of usage, unless I’m creating something ridiculous.

Either way, this property changes a lot of things, mostly about my nascent plans to defend the meat planet against invasion. If I can figure out a shield enchantment, which is surely possible, I might be able to craft a truly massive enchantment using the entire planet as my canvas. That is for the future; however, now I must focus on actually building some goddamn rooms.

—

Entry 23.1-5 Pg. 735 New Day 27

Ugh, I'm exhausted. But at the very least, I’m done with the first room on the list: meditation. I had to recreate a calm domain by essentially spewing it into the astral expanse, but after that was done, I could get started on its design.

Similar to the previous design, but utilizing the unique field that the domain creates for some artistic expression. I’ve left the place where there should be a wall empty, but all around me are wind chimes, forged of thin sheets of metal twisted into little sonorous bells.

Any attempt to move without proper consideration makes all the bells around me clatter as they knock into each other.

I’ve been using them as meditation assistance, allowing me to slowly train myself to not hear the clanging of the wind chimes without wind. And bring myself easier to inner peace.

—

Now, obviously, after getting my basics done, I had to arrange the central room. Considering the new knowledge of domains I gained while I was away, I was inspired to add to the room. Namely, a copy of the calmness domain.

Mostly because, unlike other domains or emotional magics that forcefully make me feel a certain way, the calmness domain, frankly, doesn’t feel like the tree version of me got ahold of my brain and started shaking. Or like I got 15 pounds of miscellaneous alien uppers shoved up my ass.

Plus, with its added bonus of slowing down any incoming objects, I illustrated with the meditation room's design. I can create essentially panels of objects; they were bells for the meditation room, but for the throne room/planning room, I went with papers.

Drawings, poems, plans, and trinkets are all suspended in place, gathered by categories. And if I need a look at any of them, it’s as simple as grabbing them from the storm of paper that surrounds me at all times.

Leaving me with both a room that exudes calmness, perfect for long-term planning, and one that forms an intricate mosaic of precious paper and countless plans.

—

I’ve recreated the exercise room, although it is a truly different creature than before. Hell, it isn’t even on the base anymore. Exercise is far, far more convenient when there’s something to fight against.

Most of my options previously in the case of exercise were mostly jogging in place. I couldn’t exactly lift weights before, making basically all the exercise worthless. It was only done because, frankly, the human body isn’t built to stay still. Without movement and exercise, the human mind easily falls into bouts of depression, and other various psychoses.

But considering the dangerous circumstances I’ve found myself in, getting fit would greatly help me out. I’ve built an obstacle course, an enchanted treadmill, and an improvised set of weights. Although the weights are incredibly annoying due to a fairly simple problem, gravity.

The gravity on the meat planet is so tiny that astronauts on the moon are practically crushed compared to me. So my weights, if I want to gain anything worth having, have to be ridiculously heavy. I’ve been bench pressing presumably thousands of pounds; the whole affair is made even more ridiculous considering that I have no scales.

I’ve been getting by using the Compress rune on larger and larger quantities of iron. But sooner or later, I need to do something about this.

But the other parts of my meat planet gym have been fun. Due to my making a series of treadmills that attach you to the treadmill with a clamp. I don't have the sophisticated engines or parts for a single treadmill that's adjustable. But it's fine; I just made 5 different treadmills with various speeds that I induced by changing the size of the gears on the steam engines powering them.

It’s been liberating not flying off the surface of the planet just for running a bit too fast, and the obstacle course is a whole bunch of fun. It’s mostly a series of walls that I push off of, slowly learning how to quickly move via essentially near-weightless wall jumping.

—

Ugh, I’ve finished building my workstation, and it’s already a mess. With the added size of the station, I’ve decided to create separate divisions on the topside room. For the works shop I've made a combat test room, a series of dummies that move along powered lines, and robust self-healing enchantments made to aid in aim training while testing out new wands.

A general test sight for any testing I believe could randomly murder me, which, frankly, is practically every test. Situated with a very sturdy blast door, a button that remotely turns on their enchantments, and a sturdy window made by a slit of polished magical ice.

Also a workshop, and currently mere days after its creation and it is already an utter mess of floating wires, rune ideas, momentary glimpses of eureka and enough lists to drown a giant.

But there is one piece of the series of rooms that’s not either a blasted hellscape or the biggest mess since the ant corpse attack. The series of rooms built for the advancement of more mundane technology, where I carefully pin my plans for steam engines, more advanced generators, and other clever machinations of gears, and steam in peace.

After all, it wouldn’t do to be murdered by a steam engine just because I couldn’t clean the room of copper wire.

—

I’ve made something I’m not sure what, considering that the idea was more of a fit of whimsy than a true, solid plan. But it certainly is grand beyond my reach.

The basic idea is that of an observatory—a series of lenses carved into an orb of ice placed far, far away from the meat planet.

The journey to the observatory is cramped, a single, extremely long hallway is placed with infrequent handles to speed the journey along.

All ending in a window towards the beauty of the astral.

The room doesn’t have a purpose quite yet, but well beauty doesn’t need one.

—

Speaking of which, I’ve finished the arts and crafts room. The project took quite a lot of time considering the need to create, wash, and enchant the tools necessary to make my ideas a reality. But despite the effort, it has been a balm for my soul.

With its litany of tiny enchantments being incredibly convenient. Some examples are a bunch of crochet hooks that never go dirty, carving knives that stay sharp, and engraving tools that smoothly remove a certain amount. Perfect for etching complex symbols into metal for rune carving.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

The massive room is divided into dozens of little nooks, all swimming with fabric curtains attached to the floor and held in place for a while before eventually drifting out into the astral.

I’ve made a room for crochet, embroidery, sketches, rudimentary paints, carving, and my time in there hasn’t been unproductive even if it was built for relaxation. Namely, my efforts on making something to sit on that isn’t metal or fabric have led to me making a corkboard-esque slurry of wood chips and sap. That I’ve been using in everything from clipboards to cups.

However, this place is mostly built to soothe the mind.

—

Alright, so I successfully transferred my stuff from the old base covered in any guts to here a while ago.

And as before, I placed a couch in the junk room. However, the problem is that I spent a shitload of time on this couch. An elegant creation of wool and the softest, most clean-freakish fabrics I could find and stitch together. With a burst of ribbons from the back paneling of the couch, it can be comfortably attached to. But all of that doesn't matter because the junk room is going off the deep end.

I can swear that I can sometimes see cold eyes peer over my shoulders when I’m in that damned room, and there’s some far more obvious things, like the random cycle of melting trash. In a bubble, the junk inside just randomly collapses as if all the bones of the object were to be removed. And then just a bit later, all the stuff regains its bones, stands up straight, and just does it all over again.

I think I’ve just tossed too much probably magical junk in here, and frankly, I probably should just abandon this room as lost, but, well, I’m not giving up on the couch.

—

As I looked at my plans earlier today, I noticed a dire lack of fun. Things that aren’t productive but that invoke pure and simple joy.

So I’ve made my own water park in the astral!

With dozens of little enchanted spouts dug into the earth, each with switches connected to a piece of string attached to a machine that continuously pulls at the very least a few. Creating a shifting pattern of water.

Additionally, I installed a hot tub and a sauna. With the hot tub being a simple matter of digging into the ice, setting up a self-healing enchant so that it doesn’t melt into pieces, and then carving a couple continuous air blasters down there.

The enchantment was incredibly easy considering its similarities to the extremely simple blaster wand. Meaning that the hot tub was an easy affair to sett up, however the sauna was a nightmare.

Due to one simple fact, there isn’t any fucking air in the astral, and if I want to be coiled in steam without a medium, then I need to be directly below it. So I had to essentially fill the room with a slowly engaging, permanent air enchantment. For the sauna to have its own atmosphere. And that’s just skipping past all the tweaking required so that I didn’t accidentally summon liquid oxygen and promptly blow myself to pieces.

Either way, I now have my very own water park, situated on the other side of the planes, placed in the middle of an eldritch void that provides more questions than answers.

My guess is that with this attraction, I’ll finally attract some interdimensional tourists with a taste for human cuisine. Obviously, while wearing the standard Hawaiian shirt, fantasies need to pay heed to reality as well

—

Entry 24, Pg.783 New Day 44

Alright, I’m done I debated making a room for sleeping, but, well, frankly I can't remember the last time I did that, and from my logs it’s been a month and a half since I made the clock. With surely more time before that, so there's nothing I know to build.

It’s time, time that I actually make a step towards getting out of this place. It might not be easy, but when you have magic on your side, what can’t you do?

/

The entire base lights up with a dazzling glare as the entire base’s enchantments are activated at once, sending pure power radiating out far into the horizon.

—

A gust of sparks burst from the forge, contrasting with the steady cold coming in from my gogo boots, which are sadly inappropriate for both the ice and the forge. But it’s not exactly like I care.

Hell, I’ve self-mutilated myself while surrounded by deadly ice; what do I care for a pair of boots? And good fashion is always worth a bit of discomfort.

And I certainly look good, my ebony skin contrasting nicely with the white of the boots and the shockingly bright red one-piece slim dress I wear above the boots, turning my figure sharp and provocative.

I grab a pair of tongs from the nearby table while holding the thin iron sheet in place. With a squint, I carefully grab ahold of the cherry-red iron and twist it until it forms a tube. Then, letting go of the edge, I pull at the edge of the metal until it forms into a cone.

Exhausted I wipe the sweat from her face and pick up the cone-shaped tube before dunking it into a nearby tank of water, the water spitting and hissing as it flash-boils from the ridiculously hot metal.

I throw the tools onto the table and promptly flop onto the floor, checking the crude laptop before groaning, quickly realizing from the article that I made the bracer entirely wrong.

—

I float, surrounded by the astral like never before. For I float in a ball of hollow ice, the outside carefully carved to allow for different states of magnification. The grand lights and blooms of the astral playing in her eyes from distances boggle the mind.

I feel my legs slowly start to painfully burn with unrelentless approach of the ice, but I resolutely ignores it, unable to stop looking at the majesty before me.

Unpeeling the cosmos, I bask in the glow of meaning, the very soul of the blooms radiating throughout this strange cosmos. Allowing me a glimpse of the entire spectrum of emotion across my entire sight.

And I smile at the astral expanse reflected in my eyes, as I see it all.

—

I kneel attached to the floor by ribbons, situated amidst a roiling, moving land of color as I slowly stitch my way through the edge of a carefully organized black suit. A project days in the making.

Wary of the shifting ribbons of my crafts room, I hunch over the unfinished suit, painstakingly hand-stitching it into the masterpiece it deserves to be.

The act is painful but yet so rewarding that a piece of my very soul settles to the bottom in contentment. I am irritated at the inconvenience, but I cannot hold it in my heart, bounded by the rising crescendo of creation and creativity, the fabric slowly forming into the image that burns within my mind.

And so I stitch, my arms moving in a methodical and wondrous rhythm, slowly bringing forth my dreams.

—

I grab the wand from the little rolling table set to my side, pushing aside the scattered magical weapons to grab what should be my weakest flame.

But as I press its button, the wand erupts, covering the target dummy in a slurry of flame, something that no other wand on the table can do.

Because there is no real air going on in the astral plane, flames should flat-out not be possible. There is no air for the heat to combust; there is no fuel or anything at all that would precipitate fire, and even if there were, it would most likely go out immediately considering the strange fluid I float in.

But that would only happen if it was an actual flame. I turn over to the other side to see a glimpse of the runes, Fire-Burst-Target/Tip-Cone, and unlike the vast majority of other wands I make, this one does not have the Permanent rune. Meaning that it disappears mere seconds after being summoned.

My theory so far is that since when I imbue an object with a concept like the Fire rune or the Healing rune. That which I summon is similarly not the actual object but rather the concept of fire. Which means, funnily enough, I grin and grab another wand before blasting the moving dummy.

Only for a tiny spurt of heat and light to be spit out before promptly dying out. That adding the permanent rune onto my weapons makes them weaker by forcing them to adhere to the rules of physics.

I, of course, need further research before I can definitively prove it. But this hypothesis could lead to a breakthrough in my weapons that might make them both more efficient, and more powerful.

Turning to my notebook, I write down, "Experiment Group Gauntlet Blaster Experiment 2 success!"

—

I sit ensconced in a flurry of pages and fabric, my enchanted chair slowly moving the fabric and ever so slightly embedding this room with chaos as my floating plans, dreams, and experiment logs get knocked out of place by my dominatrix chair.

But it at the very least gives me an excuse to rearrange the mess daily so the chaos stays, as I peer through the book of runes. It holds seven masks on it, and it is a gift from the Jwarahausa people so that I may continue their legacy. Although I am personally skeptical that it even matters considering their tribe has been long dead for presumably thousands of years.

I squirm, straining against the tight fabric as I rid myself of the thought, unwilling to entertain the notion. Before turning back to the book, I flip through the pages, researching runes that might be useful for my teleportation attempts.

I sadly flip past the majority of them considering that the book is mostly stocked with basic concepts, like healing, fire, harvest, sun, stone, art, and a whole lot of modifiers. For example, by far the easiest enchantment is either making a blaster, where you simply summon an element and hit people with the modifier of your choice, or imbuing an object with a particular concept.

These work because they essentially just summon the concept and then immediately use it. But considering that the Jwarahausa people didn’t really have a concept for space, it’s been difficult trying to make a portal.

And after my very definitive failure at making a space rune for me to base my things off of, what I need to do instead is use other concepts, and then stack on top of them a whole shitton of modifiers.

I keep flipping through the book, skimming over the pages before I see a new rune Home.

I quickly scan through its entry, growing more and more excited, before cutting free of my chair and yanking myself back into the lab.

—

My legs sway in the water as I release my body from its worries in my hot tub. The little bubbles of air continuously pushed out of the edges by a series of enchantments embedded into the bowl of ice and kept in place by a separate repair enchantment. I bask in the water, kicking my legs a little bit, able to feel the contrasting sensations of the cold ice on my arms and the hot water on my body.

You know, it’s strange to be feeling so much temperature here in the astral; it isn't exactly cold, there’s no medium to carry away the heat so I lose nothing temperature-wise. But although it means that I didn’t freeze to death immediately as I maybe should have, it does mean I’ve sort of just not felt temperature for the last who knows how long.

I let my head fall back and let go, allowing myself to truly feel the warmth of the water. I feel the tub start to get warmer, and I jerk away, unable to not remember the last time I felt warm. I grit my teeth, the enamel screeching as I scramble out of the water.

And heave nothing but air on the cold ice outside of it. My arms supporting my gasping chest, I coughed furiosly my lungs truly the awful press of the ice and the heat of my own hands, before running away, refusing to look again at my mistake.

—

I scream "Woooooooooooooooo!" with a litany of hisses in the background, celebrating the successful creation of a proper set of iron plate armour. Now floating in a bunch of tanks of water.

For this time, I have finally watched the DIY videos to completion. And not clicked away to find a more exciting video.

—

I shove away from the entrance three floating pillows, a random water tankard, and thirteen shoddily enchanted crochet needles as I walk into the junk room. The name is truly the right thing.

Heading for the couch I swim past a zone where the items randomly heatlessly melt, the functioning toilet made of wood that I found, and scooch past the error message, all to reach the prize, my beloved couch.

I push off the floor, turning parallel to the cloud in the air, before grabbing a ribbon and awkwardly pulling myself onto the couch, suffering the price of my hubris before letting out a content sigh, burying myself into the soft cushions of the couch.

The state of the junk room might be getting worse by the day, but my need for the divine softness of the couch increases by the day as well so I will brave the fray of junk again and again.

—

I kneel on the floor of the arts and crafts room, surrounded on all sides by dozens of half-finished projects as I intently gaze at the bracer chisel in my hand.

My victory over iron might be complete with me not being totally incompetent with a forge, but I refuse to wear something so dull as dark iron to battle.

My tools for carving now are much more sophisticated than the simple steel styluses I used in that miserable little room on the meat planet—an elegant chisel enchanted so that it would be imbued with the very concept of sharpness.

And I use it to slowly chip my way into the metal, one stroke at a time, in a simple flower design. For what is the use of armor if it’s not bedazzled?

—

"I pray to all the gods above. GRANT ME TEA!" I demand from the empty sky.

As I hold a cup of warm water up, earnestly praying for the even slight possibility of having something anything to drink or eat.

But eventually I put it down and rub the mishmash wood cub, nursing it with its oh so rare, oh so dangerous warmth.

I down it, still grumpy at the lack of tea but willing to go through the charade of consumption if it means that I can feel something down my throat, even if it’s empty.

—

I quickly run behind the blast shield before activating the enchantment, only for … nothing to happen. My tired eyes peek behind the ice window, yet still nothing happens. With a groan, I grab the infinite notebook, but before I can move, I see the plate shift, and then it doesn't having stayed in it's place.

My eyes snap wide open I stare at it, but nothing happens. With a hiss, I step past the blast shields, grab a 10-foot pole, and shove it to the side, but once I stop touching it, it disappears. The plate shifting back towards it’s starting position almost as if it refused to leave Home

—

I sit on my throne of ribbons, surveying my kingdom of paper, ensconced in bright ribbons floating in a nonexistent wind. All of it topped off by my elegant white suit, enchanted with self-repair and cleansing, so bright and clean from particulates that it seems to shine.

I scroll through the floating pieces of paper, a simple clipboard in hand, as I pick up ideas and either remove or add them to the days agenda, but as I do so, I am interrupted by the most peculiar sight.

A man shimmers into existence in my throne room, and I freeze as the man seems to step through a veil and pop into my room.

He is tall, with dark brown skin, and wearing a traditional African dress embossed with gold and turquoise patterns. His ears are pierced by a gold ring holding three feathers. His strange but not unattractive appearance is enhanced by some of the most impressive muscles I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty, mostly involuntarily.

But all those muscles go to waste as he kneels before my throne, saying, "Great Spirit, I beseech you, fo-"

Yet he is interrupted by me desperately falling from my throne, entangled in colorful ribbons, as I scramble towards him, yelling, "THANK FUCKING GOD! ANOTHER HUMAN BEING!"