Hahahaha, flying was amazing! Well, I technically wasn't really flying, but it was still fun as hell. With my improved control I could zoom around about four meters off the ground, with the drawback I could only do so when the ground was made of dirt, when I got too close to the river that the dirt became mud I dipped in altitude. I arrested the fall before splashing down but it was a struggle, which was exactly what was needed for proper training. I held position till the level ticked over to sixty-three before turning on magic sense to check out exactly how this worked and maybe refine it a bit. Hmmm, it looked like it is just sorta, held itself together before morphing into a repulsion force, changing forces mid way through the line seemed really inefficient. 

I shimmied over to solid ground before settling the platform down and pulling my magic out of it, then I punctured it with four tendrils and had the fifth one woven around them through the dirt to hold everything together. Turning it on caused four circles to be punched straight through it but it was otherwise left intact, and I was able to now go up to near five meters at full power even though I was using one less magic channel to hold myself up since I was being more efficient with what I was putting out. I Lowered my altitude for stability and slowly stood up, the energy needing to go through my legs instead of out my ass made it a bit hard but it was workable.

After a little standing practice I hopped off and wrapped the disk around my torso for storage. Now that I had several bits of metal, and maybe even more inside the bag, I want get started trying to make stuff with it, which needs clay to handle molten metal. I haven't seen any pure deposits of the stuff but I know that dirt that sticks together easily has good amounts of clay in it, I am sure there is some way to get it out without magic, but I'm just gonna magic it out. I pull up a small ball that is only slightly moist and carefully command a tendril to attach to a particle I can see and try to force it to spread through the ball while only attaching to other particles of the same material.

After a few minutes I can feel a collection of particles attached to it, I pull out a second tendril and order it to attach to everything in the ball not attached to the first one. Once it permeated the entire sphere I looked at with magic sense and it was interesting, there was a network lines flowing through it and a blob of energy wrapped around them, the tendrils themselves where identical but as soon as the first one touched the particle it changed... consistency, should be the best way to describe it. I flare both up as high power they can go and pulled them apart, all the particles slowly slurped out of the ball, in the end I only had a pinch of whatever they were which I put into a bowl I just formed.

I slowly and steadily repeated this, pulling out different kinds of material, mostly different forms of sand, when finally the first tendril attached to clay itself. A twist and a pull later I had a ball of clay and a ball of other stuff, without the clay acting as glue it was very crumbly. I tried the new technique on the clay a few times to make sure it didn't have anything mixed in and it was indeed pure clay. Using the little ball as a target I funneled a tendril of power through it and into the ground with the command to attach to more clay. Once it reached the maximum range I pulled the glob upward, it was covered and mixed with other stuff since I didn't use a second tendril to hold them down.

I fixed that with a little more magic and was now the proud owner of a half meter ball of clay, I put it on the ground and grabbed four little balls of it and funneled multiple tendrils through at the same time, flooding the ground with clay seeking power. After pulling them all up I cleaned them out with my fifth tendril and then globed them all together and headed back to base with a big ass chunk of clay. The ground was a little screwed up where I pulled it from but it should be fine. I also stacked the little sample bowls together and carried them so I could check if one of them was silica sand which could be used for things like glass. Once home I saw that the wall was about three quarters finished, just a few extra hands made the work a lot lighter with those girls.

I dropped the glob near the fire pit without being close enough to bake it by accident, I grabbed on to it with my hands to help shape it and realized it was dry clay and had to fight extremely hard to bend it with my hands. I didn't notice since it bent so easily in the grip of magic, stil it should be fine. I started by mashing part of it down into a wide base a few centimeters thick before slowly melding sides to it and adding a roof on top. A little finesse to make it so the roof was flat on top and tilted slightly on the bottom towards the back so the smoke would go to the back of it where I punched out a hole. It was now a stove top, add fire in the bottom and the top gets hot. Add a reverse funnel with a baffle to the smoke hole and voila, can cook meat on top and smoke some over the pipe.

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Now I just needed to cover the thing in fire until it turned from a tough paste into a kind of rock, luckily with all the workers cutting down trees there were a ton of branches to burn. Loading up the current fire until it was a roaring inferno took surprisingly little time, I had the soldier that was cooking continue to gather bits of wood while I watched over the fire. Once I was sure it was stable I carefully placed my clay oven into the middle of the fire, and once I did I had another idea, I focused on it commanded my magic to circulate through it while trying to make it "tough" flavoured. I kept pouring the magic on and adding wood to cover the thing entirely with flames, which eventually started to feel weird.

Since my  magic was already infused into it the heat had trouble forcing it out, it still did but it was a slow retreat as the clay transformed into something else, I know it needs more heat for ceramic but this would be good enough. I had the soldier make sure the fire stayed at full power while I closed mine and focused entirely on the magic in the clay, I did not want to just stare at a fire for an hour. Some time later after trying my hardest to hold on I felt a rush as I gained a level and my magic suffused back into the oven, following pathways the magic made during it's swirling when it was still just clay. Not sure what good it did since I could just tell that in spite of being suffused with magic I wont be able to treat it like the clay it was before, mostly that it wont be capable of being lifted magically with dirt control.

Once I was sure it was solid and not going to explode into a pieces if I stopped looking at it, I released it and churned dirt over most of the fire. Some mild magic wiggling got a platform of dirt underneath, which could lift it out of the hot zone. Now it needed to cool off to set, or something, before it can be heated up again, forget the reason why, just that you need to do that. So far this has been a success, and it only took... three hours, judging by the sun. Next up is a metal furnace, or at least part of it, I know it needs extra air to burn hotter, and that it needs to have the burn chamber elevated so ash can fall down without interfering with the burning. A flattened dome should be good for a base, it arches over the ground and the flat plane for charcoal is honeycombed to hold it up but let ash down.

Three air pipes are attached to the sides and back that can have air supplies hooked up to them later as needed, along with the pipes are the section walls which go straight up a little ways before another perforated flat spot is attached. I also made a matching door for the fuel area so it can have charcoal added and then closed to force all the heat straight up. A little more wall is added above the grate but only so it is slightly taller than the crucible I make to go with it, as well as a lid with a hole in the middle so the heat will totally encase it. My construction speed was insane since I could make dry clay meld together and bend it without breaking anything. Even with that I still ended up with not enough time left in the day to light it up and make sure it didn't shatter.

I love them but the soldiers and workers wouldn't know what they were looking for or exactly what it should look like when done. I just let it sit there since it was already dry it wont sag like wet clay would for such a tall structure. I stretched out my back and felt a faint pop, I didn't realize I was bent over for so long making sure it was put together properly. Anyway, after a couple twists of my back I headed down to see how well the girls were doing with their magic sense and feedback training. All three of them had a hand on their heads, clearly trying to ward off the bad migraine the training causes. I stood in the doorway and I coughed to announce my presence, with a blink Victoria looked up and asked how long it's been. 

I was confused since she should have had a good handle on the time with being interrupt for lunch, I asked that and it was her turn at confusion since she doesn't remember anyone telling her it was lunch time. Perhaps she didn't hear it over the training pain? She thought about it and realized she probably did only hear me because I made a noise instead of making a psychic equivalent to a cough. I had to shake the celestials a little to snap them out of their trance, after dinner they actually went right back to training without any prompting, and the two workers and soldiers molted and went out to learn from their sisters. I made sure to tell a worker to head topside and gave her an idea image of the last gap in the wall staying open.

The celestials accidentally stunted their physical growth slightly by missing lunch but they should be good to go at breakfast, where I will get to see if all this training did anything at all or if it can be removed from the regimen. After that I want to finish my furnace and try melting some coins into rings and seeing if they have any inherent differences other than just being easier to work with than super hardened stone.