The next day, after a big lunch, I sit down at my desk and start to plan out exactly what I want to make for the Soul Forge. Well, it is a pretty big room, more like a floor of a building if I am being honest with myself, so there is plenty of room for whatever. What do I want… something for training would be nice, maybe I could make some sort of gym? I need to find a buyer for the gold bar I can get, so I could get some electric equipment for that, like a treadmill. I pull out the middle drawer of my desk and pull out a paper and pen, to write my planning on.

“1: Find a pawn shop to sell materials.” I write on the left side of the paper and then on the opposite side I write “Plan for Soul Forge modifications.” Below that title I write “Gym” as a bullet point.

I think that I can probably include more than just a gym for myself, so let's think… I could use a dedicated area for fighting training, maybe something like a small arena? Something for practicing fighting anyway… I could make something that I could put away, just in case I want something else to go where I put it.

I write down “Fighting arena” and start to think of something else I could add. “I am thinking too small!” I suddenly exclaim after coming to a realization. I was thinking in two dimensions! The Soul Forge is more than two times taller than it is wide, I should use that and add more floors! What I should do is make like, two more floors, one for the arena and the gym along with whatever else I want for training and the other for… Storage? I don't know, I can decide when I need something or whatever.

But that still leaves what I want for the main floor. I think hard and eventually I decide that I want to make a small one floor house, with everything walled off to make different rooms, a few bedrooms, a living room, a small library maybe and a large room for the forge.

I cross out my list and instead write out “First floor” and I start to draw a diagram, using the rough measurements of the Soul Forge and I start sectioning off areas, drawing where I want different rooms. I stop and think of how I want to go between floors and eventually decide on a large ramp. I decided on a ramp because I will need to get large equipment into the gym on the second floor, so it was really the only thing that made sense. A large elevator would be nice, but I don't want some builders coming into the Soul Forge and installing it.

I eventually ended up with something resembling a floor plan, that while a little rough would be enough for me to build stuff off of.

I then decide that I don't really need to plan anything out for the second or possibly third floor, because I don't really need to design any room placement if it is just one big area with an arena and a gym.

By the time I finished the design I had another idea. What if I built an obstacle course above the second floor and over the walls, like a full dragon warrior or wipeout style course? That would be great for training! Probably really fun too! Ok, I am doing that.

I do a little bit of designing roughly what I want it to look like and what I want to include, using three more pieces of paper as I did, before I finish enough that I can start building stuff.

I flip back to the floor plan for the main floor and summon the gateway to the Soul Forge. I step inside and immediately start going through the material rings on the rack beside the door, selecting the different materials I will be using as I do. “Let me see… Wood flooring, maybe walnut? Ok… and for walls, I think that just the stone that was in the Soul Forge to begin with is fine. For the roof, I think that I can just use walnut and have it in a cross beam pattern…” I say out loud, deciding on what materials I will use.

“Hang on, what am I going to use to light up the rooms?” I exclaim out loud, I didn't think about that. I look around the Soul Forge and observe all the torches in the room, emitting a bright light without emitting smoke…

I walk over to the nearest torch that is sitting on the wall, a few feet away from the doorway to take a closer look at it. When I inspect it closely, I notice how it works. It isn't fire that is letting it light up the Soul Forge, it looks like a gelatinous flickering and shifting globe of some red glowing material.

It looked very weird and interesting so I decided that I will use it for lighting. More specifically, I will create hemispheres of glass and add an iron mesh around it with this red glowing material inside.

I take the torch out of the wall bracket it is placed in and turn it upside down above my hand, expecting the red stuff to fall out, but nothing happens. I take another look at the inside of the torch and reach my hand inside, to find out what is keeping it inside. Ok, I will admit that it wasn't my best idea to put my hand inside a tube with an unknown material that was glowing red, but nothing bad happened and I withdrew my hand. Nothing was holding it in, but I found out that it was very sticky and it had apparently gotten stuck into the inside.

It felt a lot like jello on my hand, with none of the heat one would expect from a torch and instead a soothing coolness. When I withdrew my hand, I took a little piece out and held it in my hand, watching it ungulate and wiggle around. I just stood there and watched it for a few minutes thinking questions that I desperately wanted an answer too like; what exactly it is, how it got here, where it came from, how did some sort of symbiote soul system thing come into contact with it, what is The System?

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Before coming to anything resembling an answer I came back to my senses and I walked over to the shelf of material sample rings and grabbed a glass and iron sample and attached it to the MD ring, while being careful not to let the cool jello fall.

I really need a name for the glowing jello… Fire Slime? Sounds cool, but that also sounds like a slime monster… Cool Flames? Huh, I guess I can work with that, it really does look a lot like flames in jello form and it is a bit cold to the touch. Cool, the glowing jello is now Cool Flames.

Anyways, once I attach the glass and iron material samples, I start forcing Spirit Energy through the glass attachment and send it out in the Cool Flames in my left hand and form extremely thin, hollow material sample attachments of Spirit Energy inside the glowing material.

“Materialize!” I command, causing the Spirit Energy inside the Cool Flame to turn into a glass construct in the shape of a three part, interconnected ring. I carefully scoop out the glass and examine it closely. “It worked!” I said to myself happily looking at the bright red glowing gel that is contained inside the glass shell.

You see, I had thought about the problem of liquid ring samples for quite a while and, while I had come up with several solutions, this was clearly the best. How it works is really simple, yet difficult to achieve. It is based on the fact that the MD ring needs a set sample size to copy the material, so therefore if something is too small to copy the ring will treat it as if it was not there and go directly through it to whatever is directly on the other side.

So I did a lot of testing and practice to be able to make an extremely thin layer of Spirit Energy. So thin that the Spirit Energy of the MD ring won't copy that material and instead copy what is inside the structure, in this case Cool Flame.

Using this method, I can get liquid or semi solid material sample rings and I can already see that it will be really useful.

Now, I just need to test it. I carefully walk back to the bracket with the Cool Flame torch and I place the excess Cool Flame that I didn't use for my material sample rings. I then hold up my left hand and carefully remove the front material sample ring attachment, screwing on the Cool Flame attachment to replace it.

I concentrate and push my Spirit Energy through the MD ring, through the Cool Flame sample and out into the open air. I notice that as it goes through the Cool Flame and gets marked, it seems to condense and become smaller than usual. Immediately recognizing what that means I shout “It’s a non-mortal material!?” I was absolutely stunned at the realization and it made me start questioning how the soul forge was made and where the materials came from.

Well, unanswered questions aside this could be seen as either really good news or bad news. On the one hand it could be considered really good news because it was non-mortal and therefore, slightly magical and is probably better than most types of natural lighting. But it made it much more energy intensive for the MD ring to duplicate and me to produce in large quantities.

I mean I am still going to be using it, but it will make it a little more tiring than I expected.

Anyways, ‘Materialize!’ I think, sending the command to the ring on my left hand. At once the gel starts to form and falls to the ground with an audible splat. “I keep doing that!” I say annoyed and I reach down and peel the Cool Flame off of the ground. It took me about three whole minutes to get most of it picked up and placed into the nearest torch, but I managed to get the vast majority of it eventually.

‘Well the Cool Flame ring samples work at least.’ I think to myself as I stand up from cleaning up my mess. ‘I just need to remove the mark from the ring samples.’ I think as I sit down, taking the Cool Flame samples out of my pocket and off the MD ring as I do, preparing to wipe away the mark on the samples. I concentrate on my soul, the Spirit Energies I can feel flowing throughout it, and I call out to its power, directing and pushing it towards my targets that I hold in my hand.

As I force the energy to flush out the mark that is inside it, I feel incredible resistance. Not like the mark is somehow stronger, but like my Spirit Energy is being absorbed and used by the Cool Flame. ‘Is this because it is a non-mortal material?’ I think, desperately trying to prevent my Spirit Energy from dissolving and being used to power the material, I just need to keep it up. The mark will be erased eventually…

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Ten minutes later, the mark was finally removed. During the process, I questioned my choice to use this annoying material for lighting the entire time, but it was my best option. As I placed the Cool Flame ring samples, I thought about removing the mark on the walls, flooring and roof will be an absolute pain, doubly so if the walls turn out to be some sort of non-mortal stone…

Well, it might take a while but it will be worth it. I think.

I look up at the familiar surroundings of the Soul Forge and look down at the floor plan beside me. Let's get started…

First thing I need to do is… mark where the walls are going I suppose. I start to go through the familiar action of running Spirit Energy through the MD ring and then I channel it through the walnut wood ring. As soon as I had pumped out quite a lot of Spirit Energy, I started controlling the Spirit Energy and arranging it into a thin rectangle on the floor within the range of the MD ring, which felt really small in the moment as it only extended to less than a sixteenth of the Soul Forge floor.

As I controlled and formed the floor shape, I left out areas where I was going to place walls, to mark their location, without wasting extra materials and therefore Spirit Energy. I started feeling a headache coming on from my dwindling Spirit Energy reserves as I finished a ragged circle with a roughly five feet radius.

As I gave the command ‘Materialize!’ I nearly collapsed from my exhaustion. The amount of Spirit Energy to make something even this big was massive compared to my Spirit Energy production and reserves. It wouldn't be as much of a massive energy drain if my soul was in a better condition, which means that it will get better eventually, so that is a good thing.

Right now though, I need to get to my bed… Or I might pass out and hurt myself on the stone floor…