Smugglers captured, kidnappers punished, catacombs sealed, church intimidated. Things would be awesome if she had a roof to sleep under, the fledgling Queen mused.
The bath was awesome. They had the bathhouse to themselves and cleaning the bathhouse was easy with the House Magic Cless had. Returning to the ruined manor and sleeping in a hastily put together stone box wasn't.
But it was a new day, and the looming threat of losing their land was a faraway dream. There would be ripples as the aftermath of the smuggler-busting operation settled in, but she wished future Cless good luck in dealing with these problems.
Present Cless wanted to settle down. She had a house to build. Everyone gathered under the morning sun on the ruined ground level of the manor to discuss their renovation plans.
"Vic, I'm borrowing [Stage Magician] to make our house. We have several tasks to do. Kurt will to use Bloom on the grass seeds that are mixed with the tilled earth so we can avoid walking on the mud when the rains come. I'll help you. Vic, you are tending the trees in the orchard. Make them healthy. I'm giving you [Woodworking]. We are going to experiment with making furniture using Xilomancy later. Venaris, you take care of the logistics and support. Lunch, water, etc.I'm sharing [Shrinking] with Kate so she can fit in the catacombs. Silverfang, Kate and Shad will go down to remove the bones. I will go down the catacombs with them to reinforce the tunnels and use golems to move the stone to the surface.
"Any doubts?"
Silverfang sniffed and reported. "Heimdall is at the front gate. Get this Skill back. A too powerful sense of smell is a bother."
Cless adjusted their Skills. She would work stone and Vic, wood. Maybe Venaris was interested in doing alchemy? Who knows. Not now. She went to the front gate and briefly opened the stone wall to bring her new employee in.
"Good morning, Heimdall." She waved a hand to him.
"Good morning, mistress." Heimdall bowed.
"No. You might have to show me proper manners when in the presence of strangers, but if it is just us in the guild, you'll address me by my given name. Cless is fine. You will be paid fourteen ducats per week and I hope your work is worth as much. You will assist Venaris the gnome today. She might have you run errands in town...
"And for that, you might need to come and go through the gate," Cless sighed.
She raised a stone wall three meters in front of the gate, running along the wall for a few meters, entirely blocking the view from the street to the rest of the property. The stone sheet blocking the gate was removed, changing into paving for the entrance.
"Your first task is to fix this gate. Go and hire a blacksmith, buy a lock and some chains, whatever works. Here's a crown for expenses. You can offer extra coin for faster service, I don't mind. If you can drop by Gerald and arrange for lunch delivery, that is awesome too. Make me proud, Heimdall."
"As you wish, miss... Cless." He smiled and Cless giggled.
The young man went on his errands with a spring on his foot. Cless looked at the gate and wished she knew metal magic. Maybe there's a spellbook for that. She made a note to visit the guild. 'I should get rid of these extra charters', she thought.
Cless returned to the manor and went down into the catacombs with Silverfang, Shad and mini-Kate. She was still two meters tall though. First, she walked through the tunnels, setting Light spells with the maximum duration she could, a little over 24 hours all the way to the catacombs under the church graveyard. She marked a line along where the tunnel crossed under the wall.
"Bring all bones from our side over to this site. We need to deposit them on the church's tunnels starting from the stairs into the mausoleum on the surface. Don't break any bones though. Carry them with care. I'll be walking the tunnels and remodeling them."
The furry ones went on their task and Cless was all alone in the creepy catacomb tunnels. Not so creepy now that they were illuminated. Her strategy was simple. First, make some stone bricks from the rock of the walls, then Summon a golem from the next wall. Order the golem to carry the stone upstairs and once it reaches the surface, dismiss it over the pile of stone of the previous golems.
This way she would bring the stone from both the bricks and the golem up. While a golem walked up, she would shape, reinforce, compact and prepare the next batch of bricks. Through [Tremorsense] she could keep track of where everyone was. Cless worked from the further tunnels forward. The first golem took more than twenty minutes to run all the way to the surface. She just carried bricks forward while she waited for the golem to reach the surface. Each golem weighted around eight hundred kilograms and could carry five hundred kilograms of rocks.
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She soon saw she was doing the wrong approach. She should work from the basement outward. The reasons were many. She would make the floor smoother and it would help move the bricks. She could also make the corridors taller, to help with ventilation and also allow for taller, stronger if not faster golems. It would get stone for working sooner, and she could finish the ground floor of the manor sooner.
She sent the third golem on his way and moved back to the basement level carrying her own load of stone. The three-meter golem weighed over fifteen hundred kilograms and could carry almost a metric ton of rock. In the smooth ground, it could move almost half as fast.
She kept working and keeping tabs on everyone else. Due to Clegane's Skill and the fact that merely walking through the tunnels counted as an inspection of her 'inventory' of bones, she could sense the furries had finished twenty percent of their task by the time Venaris came to call them for lunch.
Big Golem the Seventeenth went on his way upstairs with Cless carrying her load of stone bricks. Once aboveground she looked at the pile of rock available and again her Skill gave her an inventory. She had forty-seven metric tons and four hundred kilograms of stone to play with.
Kurt worked on creating small patches of grass evenly spaced. As it grew and spread, the grass would eventually connect but Bloom was meant for herbs and flowers. Vic had tended the fruit trees, removing some mold from the leaves and branches and a rotting disease from the trunk. Some trees were already dead and he removed those to play with making furniture.
"Cless!" Venaris shouted. "Stop moping about the work we have to do and eat your damn lunch!"
"Eh?" Cless returned to reality from her musings. She drooped after seeing the faces everyone was doing. "I guess you are right."
"Know what? Enough working today. Everyone did a great job, we are going shopping. Let's spend a lot of money, purchase some furniture, decorations, we can even hit the association and buy more spellbooks because I know you want it."
"Okay. I do need to visit the Association to get rid of these guild charters," Cless gave up. "Better do it fast. Heimdall, you stay here with Kate and Shad. I should make a hearth... where it was..."
"I know where the hearth was. I've visited this place all my life," Heimdall pointed out. "By the way, mi... Cless, I've been meaning to ask, but why did you cover the well?"
Cless popped up and down, cranking her head to face him. "I have well?" She looked very interested and held her breath.
"Yes, it is around there..." He pointed at a place near the wall.
Cless jumped from a sitting position and Blinked where he pointed. "Here?" She shouted.
"Yes! Around there!" Heimdall shouted back.
"Terrakinesis."
She moved the earth away and dug around until she found a stone formation. Round. Made of worked stone. Was it there when she first tilled the earth? Cless had no idea. She was so pissed at the high thicket that she just churned the whole thing in big patches of hundreds of square meters per casting. Cless made sure that the earth wouldn't just fall down into the well and used Stone Shape to open the stones from the top. She found a circular hole with a little less than a meter in diameter. A faint smell of sewage came from the cracks in the rock.
Cless cast a Light spell inside and surely there was water at the bottom. Some roots creeping in through gaps in the stone bricks. Can't have those. Thirsty plants should stay out of her water. Cless reshaped the whole well and knitted the stone together, making it harder than ever. She made handholds and a ladder going down on the side of the well. Climbing down, she kept working the stone for thirty meters and found brackish water. It smelled like sewage. If it weren't for her olfactory Skill protecting her from being overwhelmed, she'd have lost her lunch by now.
She sealed the well around the water and pushed the stone out, making a pocket deeper than the water level and letting the brackish water seep out. She sealed the sides and extended the well down, compacting and transmuting the stone around to make the hole deeper. Water seeped from the earth below, still brackish. She would force the earth and gravel at the bottom to the sides, converting it to hardened stone and extending the hole down. It repeated several times, the water quality getting better as she went deeper.
"I am beginning to hate this sewage seeping in. If only... Oh."
"Purify."
Long story short, at the hundred-fifty meter mark, the water that seeped into the well came entirely clean. Cless made it deeper so the bucket would have room to fall down. She would extend it only for a few more meters but something rumbled. The gravel at the bottom fell and a spout of water rose violently, overtaking the girl and rising fast. Cless panicked. She could barely see her Light spell through all the water. She tried to swim but the water felt like sucking her down. She kept holding her breath and moving around and nothing happened.
She felt really stupid when she noticed she wasn't drowning. The [Breathless] Skill was a passive one and didn't require activation. Cless held a rock and sank to the bottom of her well. It seemed she hit an underground river, not too big but with enough force to push all this water up. It was clean water, actually almost as good as what her Purify spell would make.
Now it wasn't a good time to notice that she didn't know how to swim and that she gave the swimming Skill to Vic. Or that she couldn't use her Skill to get it back or even cast spells because she couldn't speak. Or that the stone she made was too smooth to climb underwater.
It was infuriating.
She punched the stone wall but again, the stone she made was too strong and the cushioning effect absorbed most of her blow. She focused on [Tremorsense] and found people around the mouth of the well and something moving deep in the tunnels beneath the catacombs. How deep does that thing go? Soon something plunged into the water and she saw a rope with a stone tied to its tip.
A few minutes later a drenched Queen was cursing her luck on the surface.
"Seems we have lots of water now," Kurt commented. "Dry!"
A few more Dry spells and she was fine. Not her pride but that would heal with time.
Cless sighed. "I should've dug the well in the manor basement. But no way I'm doing that again."
"I told you," Venaris chided her with a smile. "We need to go shopping. Spend some money, buy some trinkets, new spellbooks. You'll come back a new woman."
Cless raised her hands, "I give up. Let's go, we are only coming back after spending a hundred crowns."