Mike awoke after a few hours and began the process of purifying his water. He had no desire to ingest a Level 90 parasite. Quicksilver made this process very quick and simple. He started by forming a small basin, around 1 foot across and 1 foot high, which he filled with water, which would be used to boil the water. He then built some miniature scaffolding around the basin’s edge, which expanded outwards a few inches from the bowl's edge, before pivoting inwards . With the scaffolding built up to a height of around 6 inches, he formed a larger dome with a diameter of 2 feet and placed it facing downwards on top of the scaffolding. This would be used to condense the steam. The final step was creating a ring of Quicksilver around the widest point of the scaffolding. The ring extended a full foot from the scaffolding, and around 3-4 inches further than the upper dome. When the steam condensed, the water droplets would fall along the edge of the dome and would be caught in the ring. The design was more intricate than he was trained to build in a survival situation, however, because of Quicksilver, it was not only possible, but easy to create.
His only problem was figuring out a way to heat up the basin water. He would prefer to light a fire, but without wood and trapped as he was in a hole, he felt that another situation needed to be found. The solution once again came in the form of the Quicksilver, which he had already learned had a very high conductivity. Creating 20 clumps the size of charcoal, he placed them outside the entrance to the den and waited thirty minutes until they were emanating heat from them. He then took the clumps and placed them under the lower basin and watched as the water rapidly began heating. Once steam was formed, he placed the jug with the remainder of the water on top of the apparatus to act as a heat sink, and watched as droplets began leaking out on all sides.
The process was very involved and required Mike to constantly rotate the Quicksilver clumps in order to keep it running, but as the ring of water continued to rise, Mike felt a sense of relief at having solved one of his largest problems.
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Mike recognized that the oasis wasn’t a safe place long term, and to that end, he devoted all of his time and energy to preparing to move on over the next four weeks. It just so happened that many of the tasks he needed to complete before he could do so required him to tinker around a bit, which was one of his favorite activities.
After finagling with the water purification system, he next moved on to what he considered the most important part of any homestead, the kitchen. The idea had formed as he was replacing his makeshift charcoal and wishing he had a better system to heat up the water. His first thought was to use the Quicksilver like a mirror to reflect the sunlight onto the water bed, but soon realized that that would cause the heat in his small home to increase dramatically, something he was barely tolerating. Then he thought about creating a secondary room that could cook food in without heating up his whole house. These two thoughts came together and the mirror-powered oven room was born.
The floor of the room was situated almost 8 feet underground and was 6 feet to a side. The entire room was made of metal, as was customary for all of his shelters. However, the upper edges of the wall were pivoted downward at an angle so that the sunshine was reflected into the room, regardless of its position during the day. Just that much of the construction took the better part of two days, and it wasn’t even the worst part. The part that took the longest was creating the grating system which would make up the roof of the room and needed to be camouflaged from above while also letting the light in. This he had completed by creating a grate of Quicksilver and lining the outside edge of it with sand wurm hide. The hide was just as hard to cut as he had remembered, but he finally managed it when he heated up one of his axes until it was red hot and then sawed through it. It still took an eternity, and the finished product was far from perfect, but it was serviceable. The final task was creating a door and roof cover, which he accomplished with a very thick piece of hide. The door prevented the heat from leaking from the kitchen into the rest of his den, while the roof was put on each night and prevented other animals from coming to his location. As it so happened, the stench of slightly charred wurm hide was enough to keep most animals away.
He got a nice surprise in the form of an additional level to Tinkering when the room was finished and with it, 9 stat points he could assign. After stowing his first batch of meat in the oven and setting the temperature to scorching hot, he sat down and considered where he should put the 32 stat points he had saved up. Dexterity had always been what got him out of a pinch, but since arriving in the desert where Stomach Surfing was his main mode of transportation, he required it less than before. Strength and Toughness would likely help him be able to dig faster, but he hoped that his current excavation activities would be short-term. Charisma was out, as always. No sense looking beautiful if no one else was around to see it. And Intelligence seemed as nebulous as always–he had been smart enough to find his way out of situations thus far, and he trusted he could do it again. After ruling out every single stat, he decided to just continue sitting on the stockpile he had.
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With the kitchen completed, he was able to move his water boiler out of the entryway and began cooking wurm steaks and purifying water as quickly as he could. Since the process required very little of his attention, aside from loading and unloading the room morning and night, he set his sight on creating a better bedroom. His logic was that a few good nights of uninterrupted sleep would prepare him to relocate more than almost any other activity. He was tired to the core of his bones. It wasn’t that he didn't try to sleep, it was just that he was unable to sleep well, as even after relocating the boiler, the room was excessively hot.
Foregoing any attempts at creating a fan, he simply decided to dig deeper, where the layers of earth would act as a natural barrier from the sun’s heat. He was grateful that no matter how far down he dug, the process never got much harder. He had yet to find a single rock, and relocating sand had become almost as familiar to him as rigging an enemy’s base with explosives. It was easy then, to expand his bedroom into a small workshop, and from there, dig a shoot that extended 10 feet deeper. Once reaching his desired depth, he created a bedroom that would have been small by most pre-System humans, but was incredibly spacious for a an underground bunker. He did find that the air grew stuffy rather quickly, and he was forced to create a small tube which connected back to the den’s entryway. The influx of hot air wasn’t negligible, but it was small enough that he could live with it. The first night’s sleep he got in the bunker was the best he had had in what felt like months.
With his food situation sorted out and his sleep on the mend, he decided it was time to focus on getting stronger once more. He had no way to gain experience in the Elite Zone, but he could still train his skills. The one that appealed to him the most was the Aeromancy. Ever since sensing the air currents in one of his previous bunkers, he had felt like he was getting close to a breakthrough, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to push himself to the next level.
Not wanting to make his bedroom even stuffier, he hollowed out a room halfway down the shaft leading to his bedroom. It was the largest one he had created yet, and once it was covered in Quicksilver, he had only enough remaining to create armor and weapons for himself. He was amazed that his spatial storage bag had enough room to fit all of the Quicksilver he had in addition to the meat he was carrying. He also wondered at the sheer volume of Quicksilver. He didn’t remember stowing that much away, but the events leading up to the valley’s invasion were a blur to some degree and he couldn’t be sure he hadn’t decided to shove all of it into his bag.
With his bunker finally completed, he was able to devote most of his waking hours to practicing the kata. As he had hoped, the moves came to him more easily than they ever had before thanks to his training setup and the pipes he had installed to help move airflow in a regular pattern.
His progress did plateau a week after the room was built, much to his frustration. He could sense the end was right around the corner, but he was held back for two reasons. The first was that, despite all of Dexterity, he still was unable to perform the necessary movements. The second was that he couldn’t process the final movements as fast as he needed to. He could sense them, but his brain was unable to send the message fast enough to the rest of his body. Where the starting stances required him to flow, the ending ones required him to whip out explosively like a gust of wind, only to redirect his body in a completely different direction.
Not one to do something by half measures, he decided to route some of his stockpiled points into Intelligence and Dexterity. He had 32, and he decided to put 10 into each, while holding back the remaining 12 for a rainy day. After doing so, he approached the kata again, and found he was able to complete the final moves.
[Congratulations! For reaching the end of the kata, Aeromancy has reached Level 2
+2 Intelligence]
Finally completing the requirements for a skill that had eluded him for months felt like a greater accomplishment than any skill he had Leveled Up to date–it was satisfaction that he usually only felt when biting into a perfectly cooked steak. It felt so good, that he only got slightly annoyed when he saw that the next Level required him to “Assimilate the wind.” A sudden explosion followed by pitiful squeals of pain broke him from his reverie and had him hustling to peek outside.