Lori began preparing the third level for farming. Her biggest concern had originally been preparing the ground. After all, they couldn't just throw down dirt and call it a day. Well, they could, but according to the book without proper drainage their crops would fail and die from variety of reasons like root rot, loss of minerals, or simply collapsing as the ground lost the solidity to support the plant. The almanac had provided a small example illustration and a brief passage about how different-sized rocks arranged in a certain order were needed for the water to drain properly, but such rocks would need to be gathered or broken down from larger rocks.

She had tried to devise a binding to let her do it herself, to turn their stockpile of stone—or better yet, the very floor of the third level itself, since it was already where it needed to be— into smaller stone. All her ideas, however, seemed as labor intensive as simply taking heavy hammers and breaking apart big rocks into small rocks. Turning the stone into a softer consistency would let them cut out or even scoop out the stone they needed—depending on how soft she made it—but it would require her to remove the binding from the extracted piece as soon as it was extracted so that it wouldn't fuse with any other pieces. By herself, it would be tediously long and take forever, but if she had Rian find laborers to do it for her while she focused only on managing the bindings, it would be overwhelming as she'd need to concentrate on what each individual was doing, and they might need to break the rocks apart with hammers anyway if she didn't remove the binding on the individual pieces and they fused to each other.

She could also just use earthwisps to extrude slabs or rods of rocks and have people with hammers break off the extrusion, but that seemed extremely unsafe, since no matter how she thought of it the piece that broke off could only fall onto someone's toes. It was a process she could theoretically do herself, using one binding to extrude and another binding to have a large stone slab press down to break off the extrusions. No risk of heavy rocks on her toes, and she could do it herself.

Then she remembered she had an almanac, chided herself for trying to think of a solution by herself when she had a reference work, and searched through it to find any entry that was applicable to her own situation.

She found it, perhaps not surprisingly, in the section about mining and quarrying stone. Upon reading it, she found herself both vindicated in thinking of checking the book and exasperated that she hadn't come to the simpler, obvious solution mentioned.

Lori read the section in question three times, especially the part about safety measures and reminders, and set off to work.

Despite how much she had excavated already, according to the almanac Lori would need to dig even deeper, so she could lay out the drainage for her farm. Normal above-ground farms seldom had a problem with drainage, since the land was already naturally inclined to drain water down to rivers, lakes and aquifers—or so her classes on the subject at school had said—but underground, in a Dungeon, it was a different matter. Part of constructing a dungeon involved sealing up the small, almost negligible seeming cracks and fractures in the stone. If one didn't do so, one did not have a Dungeon so much as 'someplace for water to drain down to'. Above ground, these same cracks were part of the mechanism that drained water from soil, and to establish her farm, Lori would need to partially recreate this natural draining, lest her farm become waterlogged.

The process of preparing the Dungeon's floor for farming was simple. First, a layer of large rocks, which would have large opening between them. Then a layer of smaller rocks, just large enough to not fit between the gaps of the first layer. Then a third, even finer layer, and as many more layers of increasingly finer rocks, though according to the almanac three was a good minimum for most crops. Then a thick layer of mulch, woodchips or composted vegetation, though according to the almanac stone slabs would do, so long as they did not fit together perfectly, so as to allow the water to flow between the seams. Then after that, a thick layer of soil, prepared according to the needs of whatever crop.

To the side of all this was supposed to be a drainage tank where the excess water was meant to finally drain down to, positioned at the lowest possible point and regularly drained and reused for irrigation before any other water, as it would contained dissolved… things… that the soil would need. Lori wasn't exactly sure what those things were—she wasn't a farmer, alchemist or Deadspeaker after all, though she was trying to correct that last—but that wasn't her problem.

It was one of the most basic ways to set up a permanent farm in a Dungeon, suitable for anything from grain fields to orchards of fruit trees with some adjustments, as she had learned in one of her jobs during her schooling days. Other permutations involved box planters of varying sizes or dimensions, trays on tall shelves, or growing everything from the ceiling using Horotracting to invert gravity, but it all came down to drainage in the end. Drainage, efficiency, and dealing with water so that any lower levels of the Dungeon wouldn't find itself flooded. Most demesnes had long since set up their Dungeon farms according to their own designs, and were thriving, vital sources of food and resources for their economies.

Lori had never worked in Taniar Demesne's own Dungeon farm, since the demesne could afford to maintain a more experienced—and probably better paid—maintenance and work staff of laborers, wizards, undead and skilled worked to raise, prepare and distribute the food grown there, but she had worked in the city farms, the privately owned commercial equivalents in the Dungeon Capital's septants, which had been built in warehouses on the surface or, for the better funded ones, in one of the chambers in the underground district. The agricultural towns that the majority of a demesne's food came from were said to be even more extensive, enormous underground complexes of tunnels and chambers that far surpassed the Dungeon's own production in terms of scale and economy.

As she had neither the need, the population, the space, or the resources to found an agricultural town, a Dungeon farm would have to do.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

Using the advice and idea from the almanac, she set about preparing to render down the stone floor into the rocks she needed. A test, she needed to test the almanac's advised binding. She marked out a plot of floor with darkwisps, leaving three paces of space between the markings, the wall closest to the river and the wall with the stairs from the second level, and started binding the stone floor. She used earthwisps to pull up stone, leaving her with a wide, shallow depression that was two paces square that came up to her knees. Not as deep as she needed right then, but this was still just a test, after all.

Then she went upstairs and debated whether to get water from the reservoir—she needed to remember to check it in case the water had gone bad—or the river, before deciding on the reservoir because it was closer. She passed through the dining hall, which was mostly empty except for some people quickly and methodically sweeping the floor. They glanced up at her, but she ignored them, heading towards the back where the sealed hallway with the reservoir was. She passed the newer cold storage rooms, filled with blocks of solidified air so that there would no longer be any melted water among the cold meat, the doors sealed tight. Could she make more cold storage? She could try digging out the floor under the ones they had now…

Lori bound the earthwisps of the barrier blocking the reservoir and moved it aside, collecting some lightwisps to illuminate her way. Well, there was no smells of byproducts of the human body, at least. She moved the lightwisps ahead of her, revealing the pit that was their emergency water reservoir. A wary look inside found no corpses floating in the water, or anything else. Well, that was good at least.

Soon, Lori had a viscous orb of ice flowing at her side as she headed back to their third level. She had to be careful not to have the ice move too fast, since it didn't take all that much for it to start slipping and sliding, but soon she had it back into the hole she had dug. The ice flowed in, coating the bottom of the depression. Lori set the rest of the water aside—there'd be time for it later— and then poured in the rest of the stone after it. She rubbed her hands together, then claimed the firewisps the friction had created, and bound it onto the stone, moving the firewisps until they were among the ice, the binding on the firewisps deactivated.

Lori looked at the bump in the stone floor she had made and nodded. Then she turned around and climbed back to the third level again as she deactivated the binding on the ice. Immediately, the ice began drawing in heat, and the stone around it began to chill. She reached the second level and ducked into one of the alcoves near the stairs, still focusing on the binding of waterwisps she had placed. She focused on the firewisps and the waterwisps at the same time and began imbuing them with magic from her Dungeon's core.

She checked the stairs. No voids of wisps, only the little binding of airwisps she had made to properly circulate air down into the third level for her so she could breathe. At the other end of the second level, far from her, weavers spun thread and wove, carpenters made shutters for windows, and ropers made rope. All of them were far away from the staircase leading down.

Lori took a deep breath and then, before she could doubt herself, she willed the binding of firewisps to turn all the magic she had imbued into heat. At the same time, the binding of waterwisps turned all of the layer of ice into steam.

For a moment, nothing happened and she frowned.

Then there was an explosive crack that she felt through the floor. A few moments later, steam began rushing up the stairs from the third level, and Lori was barely able to bind it and force it to congeal into water as she bound all the firewisps in them and reduced their heat. She claimed the waterwisps that were now lying on the ground, gathering them all back into a rolling, viscous mass again as Lori went downstairs to see the results of her work.

There was a hole in the floor again, but this time it was surrounded by debris. Shattered rock of various sizes lay scattered all around the hole, in addition to puddles of water and more water dripping from the ceiling.

Lori sighed, and shook her head. Well, it had worked but the results… it looked like she would have to try again. She gathered together the water and fused it into ice again as she started making another depression on the ground, careful not to get any of the shattered rock get entangled in the stone she was removing from the floor. When the depression was made, Lori filled it partway with ice and poured the rest of the stone on top. Then she turned around and headed back upstairs, already wishing she had an easier way to go up. Her legs were starting to ache.

––––––––––––––––––

At midmorning, Rian came running towards the alcove Lori had taken to sitting to during explosions, which Lori didn't hear because of the bindings over her ears. On the stairway leading down, the binding of waterwisps and firewisps she had placed forced the steam from the latest explosion to condense back into water and the firewisps gathered the heat released by the water together so Lori could move it back to the next explosion.

"Your Bindership," Rian said, panting slightly. "It's come to my attention that things have been exploding. Is everything… well?"

"Of course, Rian. Why wouldn't it be?"

"So… this is like the trees exploding right after you made the demesne and is just you… enjoying yourself?" Rian said hesitantly.

Lori brow wrinkled. "What?"

"You made trees explode after you made the Dungeon's core, remember?"

"I can't be expected to remember every detail from that far back," Lori said dismissively, though it did tickle something in her mind… Ah, she remembered now! Ugh, that was so wasteful, she could have cured it for lumber! "I'm simply preparing the Dungeon's farm."

Rian stared at her. "You're preparing the farm… with explosions?"

"How else am I supposed to prepare all the rocks that we need for drainage?" Lori said.

Rian blinked. Stared. Frowned thoughtfully. Looked towards the third level. "Um… have you been checking that all the support pillars are still structurally stable?"

"Of course," Lori said dismissively. "What do you take me for?"

Rian nodded. "Well… as long as you know what you're doing… Though could I ask you to maybe block off the sound? People are getting disturbed and worried. It might make lunch late, since it's distracting the kitchen crew."

Lori rolled her eyes. "Fine, fine. If it will ensure lunch is on time."

"Thank you, your Bindership. I'll come back to tell you when lunch is ready."

Lori waved him off, and as Rian went away, she set about adding in a third binding to block off the noise and the resultant vibrations through the stone. She didn't want to miss lunch, after all.

Then, when she was sure Rian was far enough away, Lori hastily began checking over the pillars of the third level and began repairing the small cracks she found. She might have to set a wide scale binding to reinforce the stone she didn't want to break before she set off any more explosions…