I went home, and Esmelda did not accompany me. It wouldn’t have been safe for her, and though we were technically married, we were not at the living together stage, much to Boffin’s relief. As I walked back, I thought about what that meant. My place going forward was in, or at least nearby, Erihseht. They had accepted me as a part of their community, and some of them had stood literally behind me when Otto tried to take me away. By the time I was done having tea with the mayor, the entire village had heard about the day’s events, and they were a lot happier about it than I would have expected.

On the way out of town, I’d been pleasantly accosted by dozens of unfamiliar lillits. Not all at once. They had approached me alone or in small groups or stopped whatever they were doing to wave and call out. We hadn’t had Tipple’s town meeting, I hadn’t wanted to stick around with what I had waiting for me back home, but it didn’t look like it was going to be necessary.

The little folk I met believed in me, in what they thought I was, and word that I was wedded to the mayor’s daughter delighted them to no end. If there were people who were unhappy about it in the town, they had stayed inside and kept their feelings to themselves. I’d been asked to demonstrate my miracle of the growing grass a few times, and I’d begged off. It looked like showing off had gotten me in trouble already, and I hadn’t brought any grass coins with me anyway.

Their attention had been overwhelming. One old woman had cried, telling me how she had waited all her life hoping to meet one of Mizu’s chosen. What was I supposed to have said to that? Mostly I just said hello and thank you and yes, I would be back soon. Being a local celebrity was nerve-wracking, and after the first dozen conversations, I practically ran out of town.

Once I was in the open again, I did run. It relaxed me, and I didn’t have any time to waste on a pleasant stroll. What was I going to do about Esmelda? Should I ask her on a date? We had skipped the courtship phase, but I wanted to have a real relationship with her if I could, not a marriage in name only. Local politics was one thing, but what would happen when Kevin showed up? One troll had been more than I could handle, and there were armies of them somewhere over the mountains.

I needed to get stronger, a lot stronger. Cardio wasn’t going to get me that kind of power, but it felt good to push myself, so I ran until I couldn’t run anymore, and fast walked the rest of the way to home base.

The day was almost gone, but my coffin had held through the night, so I spent what time I had left harvesting all the material that had made up the structure of my house and collecting scattered coins. I found the rest of Esmelda’s book and saved it. Absorbing the remaining pages wouldn’t have improved my Lillant much, and I wanted to give what was left back to her. Boffin had given me a book, Lichtweg, a religious text from Drom that he said I could ruin to learn the language, and I took that with me into the coffin along with my recovered resources to seal myself in for the night.

While absorbing a book imprinted the language it was written in onto my brain, it didn’t make me an expert on the contents. I couldn’t recite the stories I had taken from Esmelda’s book, and I didn’t know what Lichtweg was about, even after I’d emptied half of the pages. For that, I would have to read it.

Reading what was recorded in the logs of my status screens was a little like reading on a Kindle, only more blue. Lichtweg was exactly as boring as any religious text I’d ever perused. The beginning was a lengthy sermon about how darkness dwelled in every heart, and only the pure light of Gotte could save the souls of mankind from corruption. It gave me something to do while I listened for the troll. My eyes got heavy as the night deepened, and all I heard were the usual shrieks and moans. Maybe because they were bigger, it was harder for trolls to slip into the world than it was for the normal mobs, and it wouldn’t happen every night.

I would need to ask another survivor if I ever met one.

I didn’t have enough stone to build a real house, but I could at least give myself a place to keep all my stuff. When morning came, I started the day by replanting a section of my garden. If the troll came back, it was likely to get trampled again, but as long as I remained around the shelter I could have some crops ready to harvest before nightfall. I did a row of beets, followed by carrots and wheat, and turned my attention to the build.

A simple shelter that was ten feet to a side and seven feet tall would call for something like three hundred and fifty blocks. While I had enough, it was a significant portion of my supply. It needed to be big enough to hold my coffin, a worktable, the furnace, and some storage space. It would be a tight fit, but I could always stack stuff on the coffin, which I was using as the starting point of one wall.

There was something deeply satisfying about building this way. Throw down a coin, plip, and the block appeared. I couldn’t toss them willy-nilly, the coin had to be placed right at the center of the block I wanted it to stack with for them to seal properly and be in line. But I managed to keep a pace of about ten successfully placed blocks a minute, which gave me a shelter in what felt like no time at all.

The door was an issue. Fence gates were no good anymore, and while I could have crafted a proper door out of wood, I doubted that would have posed much of an obstacle to a troll either. Theoretically, I could also craft a door out of iron, but I didn’t have a bunch of ingots to experiment with. More complicated builds, like using pistons to open and shut a wall of stone, were even further out of the league of the resources available to me, even assuming all those mechanisms worked the same way in this world as they did in the game.

I resigned myself to having to seal the shelter with stones every night. The furnace was too heavy for me to move in its current form, but I mined it with my pick, and the resulting coin was as easy to place within the shelter as any other block.

Bill was still in his box. When I tapped on the wall and called out, he knocked back. Though his cell had held so far, with new monsters spawning and his increasing intelligence to worry about, I couldn’t assume that would be true forever. With my shovel, I dug out channels in the dirt around where I knew the cell to be before filling them in with stone. Then I climbed on top and opened up a hole.

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It was only a one-foot gap, but his hand immediately shot up through it in an attempt to grab my foot. I stepped back.

“Hey, Bill,” I said. “Do you want to talk?”

He giggled in response.

“I’m about to fill in the roof,” I said. “We won’t be chatting again after that. So if you have anything to say to me, now’s the time. I think you’re smart enough to understand me. So why don’t you just say something.”

His laughter stopped, and the hand dropped back into the hole. I didn’t come any closer to look inside, but I was at least satisfied that he was in there and essentially unchanged. With my remaining stone, I started connecting the new outer shell of the cell across the top. When I was about halfway through, he spoke.

“Nah…knock.” His voice was whispery, like two rough pieces of leather being rubbed together.

“What?” I paused. “What was that?”

“Knock…knock.”

“Jeez. Okay, fine. Knock knock. Who’s there?”

If he had meant to tell a joke, he didn’t remember the punchline. Bill continued to repeat the same phrase, interspersed with more giggles, for the next several minutes as I tried to interrogate him about it. The conversation was going nowhere, so I filled in the rest of the roof and put it out of my mind.

Just more creepy nonsense.

A couple of tokens were all I had left, but it would be sufficient to fill in the underside of the cell. I dug down beside the container and mined out the edges on three sides to replace that dirt with stone. Getting under it seemed a little dicey, but my experience digging out the cells had shown me that areas I mined with my ability retained their structural integrity in ways dirt properly shouldn’t have. I felt safe enough to dig out a tunnel beneath the cell, then connected the stone edges so that Bill would be completely sealed in a cube. The new shelter was still situated in the hole I’d dug out for the original basement, so I placed a ladder beside it to help me climb up and down. After filling the tunnel back in with dirt, I called it a morning.

Gastard showed up later that day for sword practice, and to my surprise, he brought both Esmelda and Brenys with him. The old woman was wearing yet another patchwork dress and the same green velvet hat, and she had brought a new roll of fabric with her strapped to the side of a donkey.

She hustled up to me with a murderous look on her face and poked me in the chest.

“Esmelda says you learned how to talk?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking past Brenys to see that Esmelda was watching us with amusement.

“Good,” Brenys poked me again, hard enough for me to feel it through the leather. “Then listen well, boy. Esmelda is a very special girl. Hero or not, you’re going to treat her right, or I’m going to sew your hands to your crotch.”

That was a very specific threat. I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or be terrified, as the old woman certainly seemed serious about it. “I know she is,” I said, trying to match her severity, “and I’m not going to hurt her.”

“You better not,” Brenys said. “Now where are my clothes?”

The extra set I’d made to give her had been in coin form, and I’d been able to recover them all throughout yesterday’s cleanup. I popped them out, and Brenys was shortly absorbed in examining a crafted linen tunic, trousers, and a hat. She used the back of her donkey like a table to lay them out, and the animal accepted this treatment without complaint.

Esmelda and Gastard were letting their horses graze. Fuzzu looked to be in good shape, though when I approached, she sniffed the air and backed off.

“It’s your leathers,” Esmelda said. “They have a certain musk to them.”

I hadn’t noticed, but considering what they were made from, it wasn’t surprising. “How’s Boffin?” I asked.

Her mouth quirked. “Still coming to terms with what happened.”

“You mean with us?”

“That, and everything. We still have to worry about who else may come from Henterfell, but for today, at least, I thought we could forget it all and just have lunch.”

“Sounds good to me.” It only took a few minutes for me to craft a picnic table with benches out of planks and logs, and Esmelda produced a basket full of bread and cheese, a jug of tea, and some cold meat pies.

“After our repast,” Gastard said, “we should continue your training.”

“Fine with me.” The bread was coarser than what I made, and regular food wasn’t miraculously filling in the way edibles that had been processed by my System were, but the cheese was a nice change of pace. Very sharp, and strong. I hadn’t been eating for enjoyment, raw beets and carrots aren’t exactly savory, so the simple meal felt like a feast of flavors. The pies, in particular, were delicious.

“I’m thinking about taking a trip to the mountains,” I said. “I need a lot more stone. And if I’m lucky, I might find some ore.”

Esmelda shifted in her seat beside Brenys. “There’s a quarry near Eerb.”

“Would they want me mining there? Someone owns it, right?”

“The lords own everything like that,” Brenys said, “but they hand out the rights to local people, and expect a tithe in return.”

“So I would need permission.”

“I’m sure my father could talk to their mayor,” Esmelda said. “I don’t think it would be a problem.”

“But more people would find out about me. We still don’t know who reported me the last time, but if a bunch of lillits saw me cleaning out a quarry, I’m sure someone would run to Godwod about it.”

Esmelda sighed, “I suppose that’s true. But I don’t know how I feel about you going off on your own. The Wastes are on the other side of those mountains, and the Dark Lord could have eyes there.”

“It would only be a few days,” I said. “I’ll be careful.”

We finished the meal, and the women watched while I stumbled my way through Gastard’s stances. I was back to using the stone sword, which made everything more difficult. Brenys quickly grew bored.

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” she said. “But I have a business to run. Esmelda, we should be heading back.”

“I suppose.” She stood, and I paused in the training. “When will you leave?” She asked me.

“Tomorrow.” I felt like I should do something, but what was the protocol here? I went over to Esmelda and attempted an awkward half-hug. She responded by wrapping her arms around my waist and squeezing.

“Be careful,” she said, and let me go.

“I’ll be fine. I’m a hero, remember.”

She pursed her lips, clearly not appreciating the flippant nature of my reply, and we said our goodbyes. Gastard stood still during the exchange, making no comment.

“So what was up with you and that Otto guy?” I asked. “Is there some history there?”

“We need to work on your side stroke,” Gastard said, and we did.