After an hour of work the clearing was clear of snow... And full of mud and the ashes of the trees I had cut down. The heavy fog limited what I could see, but there were still several trees burning dimly. A noticeable breeze was coming in from the forest on all sides, lifting the smoke and fog up into what was a heavily overcast sky before it was obscured by the fog. I had apparently created enough relative heat in the clearing to turn the whole thing into a chimney.

I found a stream that had been frozen solid cutting across one corner of my cleared space, and now that I had finished I headed back to it. I hadn't thawed it out on my first pass, but I did see a large fish frozen in the ice near the surface. The stream must have frozen quickly. Heating up the ice around it I easily scooped it out.

Using my power to skin the fish proved difficult, tearing instead of cutting, so I sharpened a stick into a knife, heating it to harden the edge. After that I filleted the fish and cooked it by pushing heat evenly throughout.

I judged them to be cooked when the meat turned a white colour. My first bite was delicious, the best thing I could remember tasting... Which I reflected was probably going to be happening a lot.

I should stop being surprised at new things being the best ever as not having memories means I didn't have anything to compare them to. I would have to learn what my preferences were.

So far comfortable chairs and fish were in the positive column, and cold, nearly dying, and being covered in mud were in the negative column. I should build a bath... Though that would have to be after I build a roof, it would probably snow again soon.

I found that the larger the source of heat the further away I could be and still draw energy from it. So I set about building a fire pit where I could build a bonfire. Drying out a five meter wide circle in the middle of the clearing and raising a short wall around it was simple enough. Cutting down trees was also simple for me by now. Building a bonfire wasn't, as I had no idea what I was doing.

I ended up just stacking ten meter lengths of tree against each other, about half of which were the oil trees.

With a bit of micromanagement I got the whole thing burning well. It ended up being hot enough that I could still pull energy from it from ten meters away. With a large energy source that should burn for hours I started to work.

I found that I could move chunks of mud and dirt by sinking my Matter Manipulation sense into them. It felt like soaking my power into it, wrapping every little piece, and then it would all move as I moved my power. The dirt was harder to move than snow or water was, but much easier than moving trees. Sinking more power into the mud and dirt extended the area I could move at once.

Lifting the dirt into the air was difficult, taking a lot more power, but moving it onto other dirt was easy.

Compressing it down I made a wall about waist height, half a meter wide, and a meter long, leaving a hole of about the same size. I wasn't very impressed with dirt as a building material. After some thought I decided that stone was likely the best material I could easily access, I would just have to dig downwards until I hit bedrock.

I started digging right next to my bonfire. It was uncomfortably, almost unbearably, hot, but it gave me the most power.

I started with a two meter wide by two meter long section on the ground and compressed the sides to stop them crumbling in to the hole I was about to dig. Pushing my power down twenty centimeters I scooped the mud, dirt, and several stones out, causing the whole mass to flow out of the hole like water. I spread it out over several meters in the opposite direction to the bonfire and tamped it down.

Stepping down into the square hole I sank my power back into the dirt, keeping the two meter by two meter square I moved it forward and down twenty centimeters. Scooping the dirt and stones out left me with a second stair down into the earth. Compress the walls so they don't crumble in, and move forwards and down again.

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After half an hour I had stairs that went down close to seven meters into the earth and was getting less power from the bonfire over the distance. The further away from myself I used my power the more energy it took, but I was getting plenty of practice pushing the dirt to the surface.

I decided to move back up to the step at the six meter mark and work with pushing my power down from there.

It took another half an hour to reach bedrock, at about ten meters down into the earth. Climbing back up my stairs I saw from the top for the first time the amount of dirt I had moved. A platform in a rough semi-circle five and a half meters wide and two meters high wrapped around my stairs and part of the bonfire. I had felt it as I was moving the dirt up, but seeing it was entirely different. That was a lot of dirt.

Shaking myself out of my daze I went to get a log as a portable energy source down at the bedrock. Setting it alight at the two meter square platform of bedrock I pulled and pushed heat to it to set it completely on fire. Having got it burning at an intense heat I channelled the entirety of the energy it could give me into another way my Matter Manipulation power could be used, duplicating a material.

As the energy pushed into the stone it tried to expand it in the direction I was willing. It felt as though it was trying to convert the air into stone, which wasn't working, so I moved some dirt from the wall to cover it.

The stone expanded a few centimeters, absorbing the dirt. My log burned itself out before it could change more than half of the dirt I'd put over it.

A log that would have taken several hours to burn through had just been used up in less than a minute.

To create enough stone for a building would require hundreds or maybe even thousands of trees. So, not something I can practically do with the energy I have available to me. Another problem is that it is dark down here without a fire burning... Maybe that is an easier problem to fix.

I headed back up to my bonfire, which was still burning away happily. I cut up a few more trees to add to it as I thought on the problems I had. Sitting down on my platform close to the bonfire, I pressed the bottom hem of my robe against the compacted dirt and used the energy coming from the bonfire to duplicate the cloth.

It used much less energy to duplicate cloth from dirt, but still a lot. Maybe the similarity of the materials has some affect? I collected a bunch of leaves as the closest thing to cloth I had access to and the cloth duplicated from that much easier.

But it still required me to flare the fire in the bonfire to accelerate its burning and create more heat.

I'd extended the hem of my robe by five centimeters, and it now dragged on the ground when I stood up. Using my wooden knife I cut it back to its former length and was left with a strip of cloth around a meter long and five centimeters wide. Which might be an answer to my lighting problem.

I cut a thick branch to twenty centimeters long and wrapped the cloth around the end. Cutting down an oil tree and soaking the cloth in the oil would give me a torch. In cutting down the tree I tried a different method, trying to soak my power into the tree to manipulate it directly. My power soaked in slightly, but then was pushed out again. Matter Manipulation didn't seem to work very well on living things.

Living things. Why was I trying to duplicate the stone of the bedrock when I could simply cut it and move it the same way I had been doing the dirt and smaller stones.

I cut down the tree in my usual way, soaking the end of the torch in the oil. Cutting the tree up into usable pieces I dragged some of them down the stairs to my patch of bedrock.

Cutting the stone turned out to be simple. Using the energy from the fire I built at the bottom of the stairs, I soaked my power into the stone and detached it from the stone around it. Then I could move it by pushing against the surrounding stone.

It wasn't the same as moving dirt, as the stone moved in a solid chunk where the dirt moved as a flow of grains and clumps. I cleared out a small room at the bottom of the stairs, large enough that I could cut out a three meter by two meter stone slab and still have a place for my fire to burn. I made the slab twenty centimeters thick to continue the stairs down, widened by half a meter on each side.

Moving the stone up the dirt walls to the surface took some doing, but I finally had it placed to act as a stone roof over the stairs. As I got to the surface I noticed that it was getting dark, and it had started to snow. Lighting my torch I went to find another fish for dinner.

Then I probably had another hour of work to finish getting the stairs covered. I can sleep down there tonight.