The day after my outing, Verin cornered me to float the idea of group monster fighting. With how easily I’d dealt with all the gryphons, she imagined if the other two accompanied me, it would be a steady source of experience for all of us.
While there was something calming about fighting alone, naturally, I agreed. Given that I didn’t need the help, all that Verin would really need to do was make sure to keep herself safe. I could try to protect her, of course, but there had been times where three, sometimes four of the beasts had attacked me all at once. Especially given their ability to fly and their predilection for diving down and striking from above, there wouldn’t be much I could do if a few of them ignored me and went straight for her.
For whatever reason, this did not thrill Verin. She visibly paled, a notion I’d up till then discarded as an impossibility given her chalk white skin.
Group training, she decided, would be postponed for now. Something about her needing to level up a bit more. To each their own.
This, however, left me with a problem. Once again, there was very little for me to do.
With my armor and hammer equipped, alongside my slowly rising levels in Mental Resistance and Soul Resistance, I was able to push past the general malaise that ever-threatened to sink into me. With each passing moment that I wasn’t in motion, though, I could feel myself solidifying, congealing, calcifying. An insistent tug tried to pull me back into that empty, indifferent state I’d found myself upon waking from my coma, and I knew that if I let it, I would struggle to break free from the inertia.
With some effort, I quashed the voices inside of me whispering “would that be so bad?” I needed to busy myself.
To my great dismay, the answer wasn’t non-stop fighting. It would have been a low-thoughts-required action that was actually productive, but when I returned to the mountains, I discovered them to be largely barren. The gryphons, evidently, did not respawn every day. After enough trips to and from the mountainside, I deduced that they returned about once every five days, leaving me four days of down time after I fought them.
I started running my class trials once again to keep myself mentally active, although it didn’t help all that much. To start, no time passed while I was in my class space, so I was left with just as much time to kill one way or the other.
My head wasn’t in the right place for it, either. The trials for Arcane Armory and Arcane Arsenal turned out to be shockingly like their counterparts for Bind Armor and Bind Weapon, with the first forcing me to run an obstacle course while switching between armor enhancements, and the second pitting me against waves of monsters that required different weapon enhancements to kill.
Easy in theory, but I was finding it difficult to muster up the required energy. Especially with how the trials reset my stats to 10, running dodging attacks took so much effort. What did it really matter if I got hit once or twice?
At the very least, I didn’t seem to be suffering any consequences from dying in the trials. That had been a concern back when Trauma Suppression was active. Now… Much like anything else, it didn’t faze me. A few fake deaths were just that. Fake. I couldn’t really recall why they’d affected me so much in the first place. Maybe the old version of me had been defective, too.
If not fighting and class trials, the obvious answer to my conundrum was skill training. After all, it was what the others were doing. Save for when she was fully out of mana, Verin was near-constantly practicing her ice magic, and Cal was rarely around, likely scouting or trying to uncover some manner of secret for her class quests. She seemed to spend the bulk of her time in the forest, often returning with small game or foraged nuts and berries.
The big problem there, though, was much simpler: I didn’t want to.
If something had a clear beginning, middle, and end? I could do that. I could walk to the mountain, fight everything I saw, and come back. I could run a class trial. When it came to skill training though, things got murkier.
When exactly did the monotony stop? If I wasn’t going to see results anytime soon, it couldn’t hurt to take a break, could it?
Inevitably, the break shifted from five minutes, to ten, to twenty, until I was back on the ground with an empty, heavy head. There were only so many times that could happen before I had to accept I just didn’t have the necessary willpower to push through right now.
The answer, in the end, was something far more mundane.
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You have learned a new skill: Stonemasonry.
The notification heralded the completion of my grand creation. There, seated before me, was a large, magnificent, world-shatteringly beautiful… pot.
Or, at least sort of.
Hours of chiseling the stone I’d brought back from the mountains had yielded a misshapen, lumpy bowl, thick enough that I questioned if it would even heat up properly if held over a fire. Given that I was forced to summon a mana hammer and was using a mana dagger as a makeshift chisel, the results weren’t terrible, but I was afraid that if I tried to thin it out any more, it would crack.
Reluctantly, I discarded my first attempt, and after a long trip back to the mountain to fill my spatial skill with rock, I tried once more with the benefit of my new skill. The going was slow until I remembered that I was missing something: Gloves of the Arcanist.
Imagining that earth mana was the obvious choice, I funneled a bit of it into my hands and was rewarded with a new skill variant.
Carver’s Cuffs
While carving, allows you to slightly alter a stone’s consistency.
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Reduces the chance of carved stone accidentally chipping or cracking.
Increases the final durability of any carved stone item.
+5 to Stonemasonry
Given my low level in the skill, it was the flat bonus that proved the most useful, guiding my hands towards the right spots and helping me hit the rock at the right angles. The consistency augment was also well-appreciated -- while it hardly made the stone soft as butter, it did make each hit go much further.
When at last I had a working pot before me, I rapidly carved out three simple bowls. With that, there was only one thing left to do.
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“Tess, have I ever told you that you’re a goddess?” Cal tipped her bowl backwards, emptying its contents into her gullet at a frightening pace. “Actually, scratch that. I’ve met a goddess and you’re even better. This is the best soup I’ve had in my entire life.”
I highly doubted that was true, of course. My Initiate tier augment enhanced my meals when I cooked for friends, and my Hot Plate Hands gave an extra bonus on top of that, but the soup was still far too plain. I lacked ingredients besides rabbit, gryphon, and herbs, the first two of which I still didn’t know how to properly butcher. The result was a thin broth, far too lacking in salt, only redeemed by its bonuses. Suspending the new pot over a fire had proved too difficult as well, so we’d had to boil the water with hot stones, courtesy of Summon Pebble and Flameploof.
Still, I couldn’t deny it was a nice break from skewers, nuts, and berries every day.
Verin, as it turned out, was of a similar mind. “I will admit, this was a good deviation from our standard fare, even if… difficult to consume.” She took another tentative sip, struggling with the lack of proper utensils. “I am curious to see what you will be able to create if we can remedy our current dearth of culinary options.”
It was hardly some grand accomplishment, but much like building the house, it felt… nice. Or if not nice, correct. Like I’d passed some sort of test, one step closer to the old me.
Over the next few weeks, our clearing became a mess of stone and wood as I forced myself to chase that lingering feeling.
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Woodworking has reached level 11!
Stonemasonry has reached level 4!
As it turned out, there were quite a number of things worth making once I put my mind to it. Much to Verin’s delight, silverware was first on the list. Stone spoons and ladles proved to be trivial, and while I ended up having trouble making forks without the tines falling off, I had no such issue with wood. Knives were a bit too tricky for me, but given that I could summon real ones whenever I wanted, that wasn’t much of an issue.
Cups were next, followed by mugs with handles for hotter beverages. Not that we had any, but I imagined it wouldn’t be impossible for us to find an herb that would work well for tea.
With the success of the pot, I went for a few pans as well, spending a few days carving out a crude elevated grate to rest them on above the fire. I opted to make a second pot as well, though this one was meant to be used as a cauldron should I ever wish to level my Alchemy.
Lastly and most importantly, I carved out a large hollow box with a removable lid. Periodically, I uncovered the box and cast Conjure Liquid, giving us a storage site for one of our most precious commodities. Given that I could only use the spell’s augment a few times a day, I figured it made sense to bank our moonshine when we could.
Naturally, we celebrated the box’s introduction with a celebratory shot, courtesy of three new stone shot glasses. I had, after all, focused on carving the necessities first.
Stone, however, was not ideal for everything, nor was it what I was most skilled with. Though by far the least used aspect of my Carpentry, Construction, and Carving class, furniture crafting was at least nominally a skill I possessed. One of my midterm projects had even required me to make a chair.
It only took me a single week to outfit our cabin with a no-frills table and a trio of chairs. I would have done more, but I didn’t see the point. Why make a wardrobe when we had no clothes? Why craft a bookshelf without books? Perhaps a bed frame would have been nice, but where would we get a bed?
Out of everything, that was the point that bothered me the most: I’d gone out of my way to get all those feathers, and for the life of me, I had no idea what to do with them. Intermittently, I paused my carving projects to try my hand at creating a pillow, but all my attempts failed miserably.
After all, what was I supposed to use to keep all the feathers together? Gryphon hide was out given its stony texture. Rabbit hide would have been perfect in theory, but whatever tanning process I needed to follow to make it workable might as well have been ancient Greek to me. I even tried weaving grass together into the rough shape of a pillow, but the end result alway seemed to unravel.
Ultimately, my grand crafting spree had proved a welcome diversion. In fact, at the beginning, my work had done exactly what I’d been hoping it would: keep me moving.
With each new item that I crossed off the list, though, I could feel the heaviness creeping back in. With every halfhearted smile, with every piece of forced conversation, I could feel a strain, entirely different from what Trauma Suppression had put me through, but coming to a tipping point in its own way.
I needed the activity. The companionship. They were lifelines, preserving what little part of me still felt human. At the same time, they were taxing, like overworking a freshly atrophied muscle.
I pushed back on the strain as much as I could -- didn’t we need decoration in our cabin? Figurines. We needed figurines, right? I carved out a set of penguins, one from wood, the other from stone. They were cute. I knew that. Looking at them should have filled me with something warm and fuzzy, but at that moment, all I felt was exhausted. The pressure clamped down on me, filling my bones with lead and my head with fog until I knew I would be forced to take a break whether I wanted to or not.
Not here. Not like this.
I’d been doing well! So well. Verin was almost back to talking to me in a fully normal tone with fully normal sentences. Cal was shooting me far fewer concerned glances when she thought I couldn’t see. Not that I minded much either way, but they weren’t supposed to spend all their time worrying about me. Old Tess would have been sad about that.
Feeling my heels start to drag, I rushed over to Verin as fast as I could force myself to.
“Lady Tess. Is all well with you?” Her words made her out to be concerned, but I couldn’t tell if it was her general concern for me, or if my current state was bleeding through.
“Yes. Of course. I wanted to tell you I’m going to the mountains again. I have a few skills I want to try. They might take me… a few days. I just wanted to let you know. So you wouldn’t be worried.”
I could feel the hesitance radiating off of her, though I’d made plenty such trips before, even if not quite as long. She knew I’d be safe. Right?
“I… suppose I have no right to stop you. And it is certainly true that we need to train our skills. Just come back soon, or we will have cause to worry, yes?”
I didn’t even hear whatever words left my mouth as I bolted off, chaining Spatial Steps one after another, leaving Verin far behind now that I had her approval. In something of a fugue state, I arrived in the mountains.
There may have been a gryphon or two barring my way at one point. Whether I fought them or not, I wasn’t sure.
A cave. Empty. Perfect.
Hasty stonework, more stonebutchery than anything else, and I was left with a giant slab, barely movable. Leaving only enough space for a bit of air, I blocked off the entrance to the cave.
When at last I was sure I was safe and alone, my body collapsed, and for three days, I slept.