For the next few months of walking, in addition to my teleportation and flying knife practice, I also cast my Hopeful Flame spell as often as possible, so that I could harvest as much of the clouds as possible. Through this process, I happened to learn a few things about it. First of all, it was in fact safe for others to touch. When Ash got overly curious about how it felt, she didn’t think before sinking her hand into it, reveling in how soft and comfortable it was, and helping me gather some. Since that moment I’ve generally had someone help me separate the white and gold fibers.

Secondly, no one else in the party can run their mana through it the way Sophia and I can. Apparently, even though they can all see and touch the material, when they try to manipulate their magic through it, it’s like it just doesn’t exist. This could be for one of two reasons: either A), due to the fact that it was an Aspect Manifestation, it could only be used by someone who was either Marked or Titled. I had asked Sophia to test if Veronica could run mana through it, but apparently Veronica hasn’t been home in a while, so that will have to wait until she returns. Or B), Sophia could only use the thread because of the soulbond connecting her to me. Because of our current situation where I am smol weak human and she is big bad demon it can be hard to remember, but our soulbond does work both ways. Once I finally match her level of power she will begin to benefit from it just as much as I do after all, since that’s what the original intended use had been. Where this gets interesting, is how that will end up interacting with our Aspects.

As demonstrated by the night I went blind, Sophia’s Desire’s Flame can absolutely run through our soulbond, and also, once I’m a little sturdier and can handle more mana, I’ll be able to draw power from her. So, logically, I should be able to draw Desire’s Flame from her as well right? Well, actually, no. According to Sophia, both Desire and Flame were Aspects that were a little too destructive for mortals to bear. Just because they can’t affect me due to my baptism, doesn’t mean that my body can handle the sheer strain of running an Aspect of Reality through it. Maybe once I’m Titled and not just Marked that will change, but for now? No dice. Sophia on the other hand, should be able to draw upon my Aspect with no issue, the only problem being that she has no idea what it is, seeing as I have no idea what it is. Without that knowledge, apparently she can’t pull it from me.

And thirdly, I discovered a difference between the white and golden fluffs. If I had to guess, I think the gold tufts are the actual Aspect Manifestation, while the white tufts are something like the base, or the medium for it to exist. I had done all of my original tests on mainly white, due to the fact that there was so much more of it, so most of my discoveries were really only applicable to the white. The gold on the other hand, did experience mana leakage, but in exchange you could also run far more mana through it than in the white. And when you ran mana through a gold tuft when it was surrounded by white? The mana leakage from the gold would be captured by the white, then swirl around in containment.

What all of this in conjunction meant is that my project, which had been steadily working on every night while on watch with Ash, had even more potential for greatness than Sophia and I had initially thought. As for what the tool I had been working so hard on was? Well, I had a ridiculous amount of loose fibers by this point, and no real way to use them. And so the two things that I had created: A spinning wheel, and a loom. I knew the basics of how to use a spinning wheel due to boredom and access to the internet.

Fortunately spinning wheels weren’t all that complicated conceptually. You have a pedal down by your feet, connected to a wheel on an axle. You spin the wheel with your hand then continue it with your pedal, which pulls on a belt to rotate another round piece connected to the spindle, which then twists your fibers into thread. And before holding a piece of tuft to your starter thread, you make sure to properly separate it so it’s not all in one big clump, and only let it twist a little wisp of fibers at a time, keeping everything as even as you can get it. That’s why the spinning wheel had only really taken me a couple days to finish.

Looms and weaving in general on the other hand, were much more complicated. Not because the process was overly complex, as I didn’t plan on making any sort of difficult patterns or anything, just simple over and under rectangles to make sheets of usable cloth, but here’s the thing: Weaving takes a stupidly long amount of time. I’ll already probably spend months spinning for hours to get enough thread to make enough cloth for any sort of actual clothing other than my blindfold (Which will still take weeks), I don’t want to spend another month just gradually making my rectangle of cloth bigger until I have enough. I needed a way to weave threads together more efficiently, and that’s where enchanting came in. I made a set of enchanted sticks that would fly around and align all of the threads perfectly so that another hook could just fly right through before everything would get tightened, the thread would get cut, and the alignment would alternate. How did I manage all of that you ask? A shitload of trial and error.

I had tried engraving a simple spider onto a pair of sticks, hoping that a weaving sort of concept would get implanted in them, but no dice. The spider had definitely done something to connect the sticks to the cloth, but I couldn’t really tell what it was. I’d have to test that later once I get this mess sorted out.

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Another try I’d done was using arrows that told sticks how to align everything right, which did technically work, but it couldn’t alternate then. To make it an actual woven fabric I would have to rearrange the sticks every single time, which kinda went against what I was going for.

In the end what I had to do was take the arrow idea, and multiply it, so that every single stick could either go up or down. I then connected half of the arrows in an alternating pattern to one switch and the other half to another switch. I also added a cycling arrow enchantment to another switch for all of them, so they would refill themselves when I put a spool of thread onto them. I’d have to make sure all the lengths were right beforehand, but all in all that’s considerably easier than the alternative. The other big problem was that it guzzled mana like a bitch, and I would still have to regularly flip the switch back and forth to weave and tighten everything, but still: Much easier.

While I was fine with keeping the loom in my shed, I kinda needed to use the spinning wheel while I was on watch, so I had to carry it around with me while we walked. I had made it pretty easy to assemble and disassemble, but still, that was a considerable amount of weight on my back that I was walking through the forest in. Ah well, I may as well just think of it as extra exercise to get my body lookin a bit better for Sophia.

Speaking of Sophia, our game nights and sex life had sadly needed to be put on hold. Due to the fact that I had to spend several hours every night on watch with Ash, I only really had a six hour window for sleeping in the subspace. We still talked a bit before sleep though, as it was much better to actually speak in person than through the connection. While waiting to drift off into sleep, we’d talk about random topics here and there, mostly whatever stories about my old world or hell we happened to be curious about. She had asked me how I was able to fight so well when I was attacked outside of the first town, so I told her about all the various martial arts I’ve trained in since I was 5 years old, and the brief period I had made money while homeless by street fighting. I asked her about why she specialized in space magic rather than Desire or Flame like she should logically be best at, and she told me about a young girl in a world on fire, desperate to escape and find somewhere new, only to change her mind and decide to make her own place, one that could be whatever she wanted it to be, setting her desire on a world of her own design.

Aside from Sophia, everyone else had mostly been the same so far, the merchant was still polite and cordial with everyone, seeing as how we were the only things keeping him from death, Liz was still haughty and cold, Mike still running around serving her every whim. Ash was still bubbly and warm, using the time we spent together on watch to ask me about the enchantments I was doing, and making fun of me whenever I came back to the tent bearing new marks from Sophia as an unnecessary reminder to Ash that I was taken. Mike, Liz, and the merchant naturally were unaware that I was leaving for Sophia every night, so they all assumed that Ash and I were just having an affair. I’d have informed Sophia of this, but honestly? Her desire to claim me to ward off Ash was hot as hell, so I couldn’t bring myself to stop her.

These past few months of close proximity had led to me and Ash developing an odd sort of relationship dynamic, where just being near her caused me to feel strangely relaxed, but with no romantic or sexual undertones. My pulse would slow down, my muscles would relax, and I found smiles appearing on my face with unusual ease. I have never really experienced any sort of friendly or familial attachment, but if I had to guess, I think this might be what those are supposed to feel like. I’d ask Sophia but given that I’ve never heard her mention her family once, I assume that either a) demons just kinda spawn into existence without being born from parents, b) demon society puts very little emphasis on familial bonds, or c) there’s a story there that she’s just not ready to share with me. And just in case it’s option c, I haven’t tried to pry.

Ash had been inspired by watching me work on enchanting and just crafting in general to try to make things on her own as well. She ended up focusing less on the actual crafting part though and more on making everything more aesthetically pleasing. While I made my enchantments extremely simple and focused more on function than anything else, she treated each one of hers like a work of art to spend time on and make perfect, causing her equipment to end up looking far superior to mine, despite not being nearly as useful. She actually ended up teaching me some tricks with sewing so that once I had enough fabric from my clouds to actually make something with it, I could make it look rather stylish. In exchange, I taught her a bit about blueprinting and structural design, how to plan out her projects to make the shape of her equipment accomplish whatever tasks she had in mind, which I had fortunately studied in my younger years when I considered pursuing a career in engineering. Ironically, I kind of ended up there after all, just now it’s Magical Engineering in the form of enchanting.

Things carried on this way until one day while we were walking I noticed something odd off to our left. An interesting thing about infrared is that you can’t actually see through things with it like in movies or tv. Functionally all it does is make camouflage pointless, especially with how my current vision is set up where I only get the higher frequencies of infrared in exchange for purples and blues. The reason I mention this is that wherever rocks or ground are, they generally create something like visible blind spots in my view, and because dirt retains heat better than rocks do, the blindspots for both look different, so I can always tell if there’s a hill or a boulder in my vicinity. And, due to the stationary nature of both rocks and dirt, those blind spots generally don’t move…so why is there a combination dirt and rock blindspot that’s moving around about 20 yards away from us?

I let the party know what I was seeing and instantly everyone else tensed up. This seemed to be some kind of common sense thing for this world that I wasn’t yet aware of, or maybe they were just cautious that ground was inexplicably moving of its own accord. When I asked, it was proven that my first theory was correct. The merchant gave me a serious sort of look, and answered,

“It sounds like we’ve got an elemental on our hands.”