Rory eventually decided that cleaning was the worst. Cleaning your room or doing laundry was annoying, but it was simple.

Cleaning up after a snake dinosaur thing had trampled your already relatively modest living space and wrecked your shit?

That sucked.

Rory spent five days picking up and doing his best to patch up his walls, but, as the French would say, they had been royally fucked.

Well, maybe they wouldn't, but who's going to correct me?

Unable to make any further repairs than Rory already had, which was piling lumber together and slathering clay and scribbling runes into the wood, Rory finally used up the last energy he’d gained from wave ten to finish the rest of the repairs for him.

During that same time, Rory had watched his camp gradually change. The fastest thing to ascend was his campsite. In truth, it wasn’t doing much more than undergoing cosmetic changes. Still, after it had, Rory couldn’t deny that sitting around it, he felt as if he were calmer, the sort of peace one would feel sitting around a summer campfire in the valley of a pristine mountain.

Next was his shelter. It had enlarged, looking like a tree that had grown into the shape of a teepee. There were even pine needles growing from the roof of the one-room building. And a building it was now, the first thing within his camp that could be looked at as an actual building. Sure, it was small, but there was no longer mistaking it as some emergency shelter. The interior had been enlarged now that the structure was more extensive; his messy cot of moss, vines, and leaves now melded into a raised structure like a canoe opening, with a bed of exceptionally soft moss filling it. The strangest part about the new form of moss that acted as a mattress was that it grew directly from the wood, with no dirt involved. It was far softer than he expected, like memory foam from the earth, while also still retaining a degree of firmness from the wood it was growing out of. Not only that, but inside the small tree-tepee was an honest-to-God dresser. Well, perhaps ‘dresser’ was being a tad generous, but several cabinet-like slots had slowly pushed out from the wall of the structure.

I feel like an elf. Rory had snorted one evening as he went to bed, amused at his home.

Perhaps most interesting was a tiny little basin within the home, with what could only be seen as a pipe running deeper into the earth.

Is… Is this a toilet?

The sight was almost enough to make Rory cry, but he held it back. He wouldn’t get carried away until he figured out the essential details of where it went. If it only dropped a few feet down, he wasn’t about to stink up his own home.

I wonder if I can make a bidet with runes.

His forge had also begun to grow and expand, but it wasn’t finished. Rory had learned he could speed up the process by -gasp- handling some of it himself.

Ironically, given his Vocation as an Architect, there was only so much Rory could do regarding assisting with the upgrades, as his knowledge of buildings was limited.

You would think I would have been offered actual building information at some point with the vocation, but whatever, what do I know?

The forge still needed one last stage of changes, but it was mostly finished and, at the very least, usable.

This had led to Rory’s current whereabouts, sitting in front of the mostly finished forge, arms crossed and frowning.

What to do.

Now that Rory had basically been outlawed in his railgun production, he was stumped. His railguns had been his pride and joy. Sure, they were more magic than science and only barely worked, but they had been awesome. He’d even taken the corpse of Big Momma and lovingly placed the parts on the shelves within his elf home.

He wasn’t a knight; he didn’t have any martial prowess. Never been a fencer, never wrestled. Nada. Bows and clubs were the extent of his fighting know-how. This was basically to say that he knew to point the stabby sticks of flight at things he wanted dead, and if you hit something enough times over the head with something, they tended to die, hence why his weapons of choice had been bow or macahuitl.

Now? He was clueless.

How do you even make a sword?

The question was instantly met with a sudden, almost intrusive pseudo-memory showing how to fold metal and hammer it out to make a sword.

Thanks, Maker’s Arsenal.

Making his railgun had been surprisingly simple, hammering down pieces of metal flat and slotting them into places of his ‘finely’ crafted wooden frame that became his railguns. If it weren’t for the wood of this planet being hard as earth steel, it would have never worked.

But the point was that he’d done a surprisingly small amount of actual metal working in their creation, carried mainly by using rune arrays to handle all the crafting heavy lifting.

Now, Rory wanted to craft things properly. Part of his reasoning was that the more he used his runes to force something to work as he desired, the less he could use his inscriptions for proper, qualitative improvements, like increasing potency or firepower. Otherwise, to do both required him to upscale the size of whatever he was making so there was more space for inscriptions, making it use even more Pneuma and plain more difficult to lug around.

I really need to learn to forge.

Having skills explaining to him how to do something was vastly different from having hands-on experience. It was like reading directions for making a cookie versus knowing it by heart; they just couldn’t be compared.

So, Rory sat in front of the forge, thinking.

I need forging skills, and I don’t mean in the video game sense where I select it from a menu. I will need material to practice with, which means returning to the Maw to collect more metal, but I was beginning to run low on the easily collectible stuff. Also, it takes so damn long to walk there and back. Plus, limited storage means I can’t easily transport it with me.

A wheelbarrow would be excellent, but miles of forest were difficult to cross with a wheelbarrow.

Deforestation time?

If he cleared the forest between his camp and the maw, it would make travel significantly more straightforward.

But I’ll be well outside the protection range of my settlement, not to mention that’s making a direct chute to my camp. Oh, and most importantly, it will take me fucking YEARS based on my prior tree-logging attempts.

So, deforestation was out of the question.

Then what should I do?

He could try to make runes that might help, but the issue with runes was that they needed to be powered, and Rory sucked at using Pneuma on the fly without bound circles to capture Pneuma and aid in the process.

“Argh!” Rory shouted suddenly, grabbing at his hair in frustration. “What do I do?”

When his only goal had been clearing his ten-wave benchmark, things had been so much more straightforward, made even simpler when you could use a sci-fi weapon to turn monsters into meaty confetti.

Now, he was stuck. He wasn’t much of a fighter or looking to be much of a magic caster. His skill with a bow was rudimentary.

Rory was a glorified office jockey-playing action hero.

At the very least, if he could get more materials to work with, he could find ways to improve his strength through methods that weren’t inherently martial.

“I need the resources of the Maw.” Rory laid out, trying to talk through his situation one piece at a time. “But it takes a long damn time to travel between point A and point B. The forest means a wheelbarrow will be more of a hindrance than a help. I can’t use something like my railgun anymore because I will see next to zero return on energy used, slowing my overall progression; plus, they chew through ammunition like nobody's business since the rounds fired explode on impact, no salvaging possible. I’ll be wasting both the ascension energy and my time collecting materials to make the ammunition, an endless zero-sum game.”

Rory wondered how the others on the planet were doing or what they were up to. He knew at least one of them was called the Spear, so they were probably having a grand time murdering monsters and quickly advancing.

Whereas Rory was stumped. Ascensions just took so damn long. As a tier four, he could kill the monster rabbits from sunrise to sunset for months, if not years, and still not reach A5.

And that was fundamentally the problem. Each tier took ten times as much energy as the last, not including the effects of Growth. Monsters seemed to give less and less energy the greater your tier was over theirs. While he couldn’t tell directly -there were no such things as levels- Rory could tell that the monsters were akin to a tier one, cementing them as low-level monsters. Even with only his minor amounts of investment in strength, the simple qualitative improvements from ascensions made the once ferocious monsters little more than pests now, on the off chance he ran into any.

I’ve become too ‘strong’ for what I once killed, but my base strength is too low to handle higher-level beasts without proper equipment.

“Gah!” Rory shouted again, shaking his fists at the skies overhead.

It was one thing when monsters came to him; he could be a lethal force on home turf. Defensive walls and bound circles fueling runes meant he could employ serious strength.

Now, when he was the one journeying outward? That was a different story.

In essence, he needed a Pneuma battery.

Rory glanced toward the section of his wall where he’d replaced his old Beast Core with the core from the eighth-tier Iasilisk. It was an uncommon-ranked core, an improvement from the prior core, but he still wasn’t sure how to best use it. When ‘wired’ into his walls, it worked as a functional Pneuma storage, but he wasn’t sure how to remove it and have it retain that functionality; drawing the Pneuma out from it himself was just as hard, if not harder than simply drawing Pneuma directly from the environment.

Rory had come up with a few functional ‘power stations’ he could plug the core into that would allow for the core to be tapped into more easily, but that would then require him to lug around said ‘power station’ with him, which at that point he may as well go back to the wheelbarrow idea.

Maybe I’m thinking too broad, too grand in scope?

Rory paused, considering it. Perhaps his railgun inventions had colored his view, go big or go home, but maybe that was the problem—he didn’t have those skills, the know-how to make it work within his new limitations.

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Dial it in.

Furrowing his brow, Rory imagined himself taking a step back.

All right, square one.

“Weapons: Swords and the like are a bad fit for me. I’m not about to become some trained sword fighter, nor do I have the resources to forge a blade right now. Maybe if I spent a few weeks going back and forth collecting metal, I would have enough to account for any mistakes, but that’s several weeks. I need to improve my power without needing a ton of metal, as that’s putting the carriage before the horse. Also, even equipped with a proper sword, it doesn’t change that I’m not much of a melee fighter.”

Rory nodded to himself, finding no fault with his current logic.

“Though, a spear isn’t a bad idea,” Rory muttered, thinking about whomever the Spear person was. “Not much finesse is required to stab something with a stick that’s been sharpened; plus, if I go the basic spear route, you can start with a rudimentary staff with a metal tip. Much easier on metal usage than an entire sword.”

The issue was that if something got too close, he was just as likely to get himself murdered. The spear's range made it too clumsy of a weapon in close quarters when used by an inexperienced warrior.

Warrior? Me? Hah. I don’t even count as an inexperienced warrior—Office Jockey with an attitude more like.

“All right, so spear as a secondary weapon is a maybe. Macahuitl as primary?”

The Aztec weaponry had worked well for him so far. It was crude enough to be used by a novice like himself while allowing for bludgeoning and slashing damage. The main issue was that the shards of obsidian or obsidian-like stone he used were prone to shattering. That said, he still fortunately had the previous one he’d made; having not used it in the tenth wave boss battle, it had managed to survive. The runes covering it were made for the passive strengthening of its material; they didn’t actively require him to fuel it with Pneuma. Thus, the weapon was largely fine as is.

“Alright, well, at least that’s handled. Now, ranged weaponry?”

Oddly enough, he had to be careful not to try to make a weapon too powerful. First, if they were too powerful, they would be considered Artillery weapons, and he’d effectively forfeit all the ascension energy gained from kills. Second, an overly powerful weapon would undoubtedly require plenty of Pneuma, circling back to the initial problem that Rory couldn’t sustain that much Pneuma without a bound circle set up in advance.

So, like I said earlier, back to the basics.

“A bow. Can I make a better bow now than I could in the past?”

The answer felt like an obvious yes.

Or so you’d think.

He was a higher tier than when he’d made his first few bows, but their Akashic records had carried them; his skill as a craftsman hadn’t had much say in the matter. Since then, his crafting skill hadn’t changed much besides the knowledge of the runes he created.

Passive runes like the ones I’ve got on my cudgel are the route for now.

Rory realized at some point that Akashic Records had another advantage over runic inscriptions: They were less Pneuma intense to utilize compared to runes. The main issue with an Akashic Record was that there didn’t seem to be a method to predict or plan for one. Whatever Akashic record he got, that was it, assuming something he made even got one in the first place.

I still haven’t determined exactly how that works, how something ‘gets’ an Akashic Record.

“Well, putting that aside, how else can you strengthen a bow?”

The answer was engineering. On Earth, bow hunters didn’t use the ancient recurve bows of the past, just string and a piece of wood. No, they had the technology to guide their creation.

“It’s time for a compound bow,” Rory stated, staring up overhead as images of the more modern version of the ancient weapon came to mind.

It was only possible because he had some metal to utilize; he could easily fashion the pulleys and supporting system; there was nothing too complex about the most basic form of a compound bow.

“Now we’ve got a bit of a plan,” Rory sighed, a hint of excitement entering his voice.

First, he would make a new bow, more potent than any bow he’d made in the past but not so far above his station -power-wise- as his railguns. Aided with the new bow, he could begin hunting more powerful monsters without needing to lug around an entire power source for an already oversized weapon.

And what better monster than the one that almost killed me before?

Whatever it was that had almost killed him in the second cavern of the Maw; it couldn’t be that far ahead of him at this point. Taking what he’d learned from Eon’s Avatar, Rory had learned that the Iasilisk was a tier-eight beast. As close to the surface as the octopus monster thing was, it was unlikely to be anywhere close to that.

Tier six at the highest.

Ordinarily, a tier four such as himself trying to tackle a tier six monster head-on should have been near suicide, especially since he was lacking on the combat side of things.

But what he lacked on the combat side of things, he could make up for on the preparation side. He was the goddamn Architect; after all, preparing was supposed to be his thing.

I think I’m letting that Vocation inflate my head a bit much.

Feeling more confident now that he had some semblance of a goal, murder the murder-octopus that had ripped off Tolkien, Rory turned his focus elsewhere.

Going hand to hand… Hand to tentacle, whatever, isn’t likely to end well. So, I need a really damn good bow.

What Rory wanted to do then was challenge himself to make something special. Regarding what he had made during his time on Aelia, Rory hadn’t crafted anything special besides his knife. Sure, Rory wouldn’t deny that making a Railgun was an incredible feeling, and Big Momma was the true pinnacle of that sci-fi dream, but they weren’t the same. As cool as making railguns was, his railguns were bastardizations of true railguns. Ninety percent of their ‘engineering’ was carried by liberal usage of runes and magic. With only a smidge of basic science and proper engineering, he was abusing the magic of this universe to cheat his way to an overpowered weapon, which explained why Eon had banned the weapons for low-tier ascenders.

In other words, while his railguns were a cool gimmick, they were far from something a true artisan would appreciate, like the difference between a specially cooked meal made by a chef and a microwave meal.

What Rory wanted to do was create something powerful, not by jury-rigging a mimicry of something more powerful than he really ought to be able to craft, but by making something truly his own through his creativity and skill, where the skill of the craftsman and the principals involved mattered far more than the concepts and magic at play.

And to do that, I need to figure this skill out.

Essence Spark

Rarity: Uncommon. Skill Level: Low.

Manipulation of essence is tantamount to directing the unseen world of the trades. Essence comes in varying forms.

Essence Affinities: Blood

Glancing at the interface briefly, Rory dismissed it after a moment. It was a skill, which meant it should come naturally. Focusing momentarily, Rory reached for the skill, concentrating on it. He felt a stir in his gut for a moment, and then… nothing.

“Well, I can’t say I expected to figure it out on the first try.”

Rory wasn’t discouraged. In fact, he had an inkling of what had gone wrong. Reaching for a knife —a simple obsidian knife that was meant to cut living things, unlike his crafting knife— he slashed his palm as a well of blood began to spill. Simultaneously, he reached toward the skill again, imagining it activating.

C’mon, work!

The blood seemed to glow for a moment, then it was gone. Frowning, Rory could instantly tell that while he had the right idea, it hadn’t worked. The blood felt much the same as any blood felt.

Slashing his palm again, the obsidian so sharp he didn’t even feel it, blood again began to spill. Again, Rory imagined activating the skill, but rather than a single active ‘use,’ Rory instead imagined himself channeling the skill. Blood continued to seep for several seconds, a shade lighter, pinker than blood ought to look. Still using the skill, the blood turned yet another shade pinker before Rory’s entire body shuddered. If he hadn’t already been sitting on the ground, Rory would have collapsed as the sudden exhaustion hit his body. Remembering when Aelia had warned him before, Rory opened his interface, taking stock of the effect on his well-being.

“Oh shit.” Rory huffed. Besides the injured hand, he was unharmed physically, but his overall well-being had dropped massively. As in, he was down to just under sixty percent.

So, that confirms one thought.

Blood essence was somehow tied to his life force, his very vitality. While Rory had little to no knowledge of other types of essence, Rory could speculate that Blood Essence was a rather intense form. It wasn’t the volume of blood that mattered either; thanks to his increased Durability and racial status, he seemed to have far more blood in his body than a human ought to; that or his body created blood at an astonishing rate. What mattered was how much it took from his ‘lifeforce,’ which was why his crafting knife was unique; it had required bleeding himself near fainting for days on end, back when he’d barely had an ascension under his belt. Even without the Essence Spark skill at the time, simply bleeding himself that much, to such a degree, had likely resulted in enough essence gathering to imbue the tool with essence regardless.

“So, Essence Spark means I can draw Blood Essence forward without needing to bleed myself dry, but it will take a chunk from my overall health.”

Looking at the pinkish blood pooled in the palm of his hand, Rory found a small rock, cracked a divot into the center, and then let the blood pool there. Keeping it warm near his campfire, Rory rested for an hour or two. Feeling better, Rory once more slashed his palm, activated the skill, and drew out concentrated blood essence.

After repeating the process thrice throughout the rest of the day, Rory had finally gathered enough concentrated blood essence for maybe a marble's worth if it were solid.

If it were solid… I wonder.

Using a stick to draw a hasty circle around his feet, Rory drew Pneuma forward before directing it toward the blood essence. He wasn’t doing anything all that special, just using the energy to compress the essence until it solidified into an almost gemlike appearance. Perhaps because it was his blood essence, to Rory, it nearly felt like the blood essence was willingly working to his desires.

Interesting.

Snatching the pinkish blood gem, Rory examined it from the light of his campfire.

Concentrated Blood Gem

Quality: Uncommon.

Concentrated blood essence that has been further condensed into a small gemlike appearance by its creator. Has uses for both alchemy and specialized crafting. Those with matching bloodlines may also ingest it to recover stamina, vitality, and overall status.

“Okay, didn’t expect to be able to consume it,” Rory said, still eyeing the tiny gem.

That might be useful. The fact that it can only be consumed by those with matching bloodlines is probably not too different from how only certain blood types can donate or use the blood of others. Speaking of which, do blood types still exist?

Shaking the errant thought away, Rory relaxed. There was still far more to learn about both the skill and essence, but it was a good start, Rory felt. Yawning, he left his campfire, went to his small home, and plopped down in the freakishly soft moss bed, another yawn escaping as his eyes fluttered.

Hah, that’s another nice thing about using Blood Essence. It tires me out like a mother-

-------------------

Rory awoke with a start, surprised at the morning rays dimly shining into his ground-based tree house.

Stump house? What technically is a stump in the first place? Is there some classification for when something is a stump and when it's just a dead husk? Does it have to be under a certain height? Whatever, it's not important.

Clambering out of bed, Rory stepped into the morning rays, arms stretched overhead. He had a busy day of experimenting ahead of him, and his mind was abuzz—not just with random thoughts about the nature of stumps.

As Rory had slept, it was like he had an epiphany. He could see it playing out before him, inspecting different materials in a dreamlike state inside what almost looked like a classroom. Within the dreamscape, time felt non-existent, and so Rory mulled over the materials; if it were seconds, hours, or even days, he couldn’t tell until, at last, he was struck with a thought. The difficulty in channeling Pneuma through his materials wasn’t so much the Pneuma as it was the issue of the materials. Within his dream, Rory examined a tree branch and a hunk of metal, frowning at them, pondering why that was. As often as he found himself using them, they proved difficult to work synergistically with his runes. Yet, turning to a third material, Rory felt his frown lessen.

A Jackalope antler.

Their description even specified that they were good at channeling Pneuma. Crafting his newest bow from Jackalope antlers was the obvious choice, as he had done in the past.

Or he could innovate and make something even better. Even if he couldn’t fully understand the why, he could still work on breaking down the how.

It wasn’t much long after that Rory woke up, ideas brimming.

The first part of the bow he would work on would be the bow's arms. He would need ground-up jackalope antlers, blood essence, the youngest, most wiry tree branches he could find, and, most importantly, a bit of botany knowledge.

Is it botany with trees, or like, arboreal-y?

Dismissing the stray thought, Rory snagged his crafting knife and wandered into the forest. Walking through the forest, Rory had the strange intuition that if he wanted, he could clear out a large swathe surrounding his camp without lifting a finger; the trees and foliage would melt away. Where the intuition came from, Rory had no doubt it had been hacked into his mind due to his wave rewards regarding the land he’d earned but not yet ‘claimed.’

And I won’t for a while still.

Ignoring the dutiful goal of humans to destroy their environment —something humans had only recently started turning around before the end of the universe arrived— Rory instead sought out whatever tree caught his eye.

And by eye, he meant Eye for Potential.

The forest, consisting primarily of Sol’s Glory, a name he had given the strange, orange-colored, rainforest-looking trees, seemed to wait for his decision as he wandered aimlessly. Taking his time, Rory took in the potential of every branch that caught his attention, a metric that mostly revolved around their vitality. Spending over two hours wandering, Rory only stopped when suddenly his eye began to twitch maddeningly, his head on a swivel until he locked on a tree that looked much the same as every other tree. It stood perhaps a bit taller and straighter, capturing just a hint more sunlight than every other tree.

Rory frowned. Part of him had been expecting some glorious tree that outstripped every other tree he’d seen, but marginal gains were still gains. Approaching the tree, he quickly assessed its branches, finding the one most suited to his purpose. Three branches from the bottom, requiring him to shimmy up the trunk, a single wiry-looking twig of a branch stood out. Swiping at it once with his Blood Essence knife, he separated the small branch from the tree, tucking it under his arm as he quickly began jogging back to camp.

Branch acquired; it was time to put on his mad scientist hat.