It took Jack a few more days to finally find a way to enter his treehouse. In one of the caves, he found an elevator blueprint. He spent the next several days gathering wood until he finally collected enough resources to build an elevator. He summoned the crafting menu and selected the recently learned blueprint. He looked at the treehouse up above, and the outline of the future elevator shaft moved that way. With a thought, he gave the system a command to build the elevator. When it was done, he studied the result.
The elevator consisted of vertical guide rails and a lift platform. In other words, it looked like a very simple cargo elevator. Jack stepped onto the platform and looked around. Spotting a lever, he gave it a tug. The platform began its slow ascent. It was kind of scary. While the whole construction was sturdy enough, the elevator was just a platform and the shaft was merely a wooden framework. The elevator moved higher and higher, and a few seconds later, it entered the treehouse. Jack was finally inside his new home.
He then studied his new place of residence, slowly walking from one room to another. The huge building was built around the great tree trunk and had a round, octagon-like shape. It was composed of a few segments, each one being a room. Each room had windows to let daylight seep in. But there were no walls between the rooms yet, so for now, they weren’t separated, forming one long circular space. Later on, he might add some walls with archways or doors. Or maybe he would leave it as it was because he actually liked the current octagon-like design of his house.
He then returned to the elevator and gave it one more look. There was one thing about it that he didn’t like. While he was inside his treehouse, nobody would be able to call the elevator from outside. But when he was absent anybody would be able to take the elevator up and barge into his home, and there was seemingly no way to prevent it from happening. He had to find a way to prevent potential intruders from using the elevator when he wasn’t home.
He then pinned the location of the treehouse on the map. He gave the matter some thought and decided to name his new home the Great Tree Cottage.
In the next several days, Jack mostly collected wood and crafted various pieces of furniture, gradually furnishing the Great Tree Cottage. He also carried all the self-heating meals from the Storage Two to the treehouse. At some point, he learned a new feature: he could disintegrate any of the structures he’d built to get back some of the resources that had been used to create it. So he used the feature to destroy the Storage Two because there was no reason to keep the structure anymore. It disappeared without a trace as if it’d never existed.
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In one of the next days, he returned to the Darkwoods and visited the Storage One. It held quite a lot of self-heating meals he’d bought on day 10, and Jack wanted to bring them all over to the Great Tree Cottage. It would’ve taken him a few trips if he’d had to carry cans in his hands, but fortunately, he knew how to craft a simple cart, so he was able to relocate all the cans in one go. Since he now lived in the Great Tree Cottage in the Sungrove, he considered disintegrating the Storage One but in the end, decided against it in case he would have to spend a night in the Darkwoods at some point in the future.
Jack spent a few days trying to build small houses similar to Storage One. He didn’t need them, of course, and the only reason he built them was that he just wanted to increase his Building talent. He did almost everything by himself—hunting, cooking, and crafting. So all his skills were gradually increasing. Except, for the Building one. When he needed to build a house, he simply asked the system to do it for him. That was the reason the Building was the only talent that didn’t improve at all. At some point, he decided to fix it. All the initial houses he built were ill-constructed, but as his Building talent went up, every house he built was somewhat better than the previous one. He disintegrated all his creations right after he built them because he only wanted to increase his Building talent.
At some point, he finally learned to build small rectangular houses that were almost as well constructed as the Storage One, which had been built by the system. Maybe at some point, he would become such a good builder that he would be able to create complex houses such as the Great Tree Cottage by himself. It would be great because the system took a hefty amount of gold for every action it performed for him.
During one of the next days, Jack learned the Alchemy talent. He spent a couple more weeks wandering around the forest and collecting herbs and other various ingredients and then mixing them at home, trying to brew some potions. Most of the time, he failed to create anything, but his Alchemy talent slowly but gradually went up, and eventually, he began to understand the process of mixing ingredients. At some point, he finally learned how to brew health potions, and a little later, some other types of potions as well.
The system didn’t memorize the potion recipes he learned. As he learned more and more recipes it was becoming harder to keep them all in mind. So with the system’s help, he crafted books with empty pages to write down all the recipes he learned.
The Great Tree Cottage now had several completely furnished rooms. Jack fully allocated one of them as an alchemy laboratory. It contained everything that was needed for potion creation. There were also bookshelves as well as chests with various ingredients. But the rest of the rooms were currently empty. Jack wasn’t sure how to utilize the remaining space in the Great Tree Cottage, but he was sure he would figure it out later.