Chapter 235: Chapter 217: Foundation

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Skill [Advanced Farming] advanced to level 2

I wiped the sweat from my forehead while wondering if a high endurance stat protected against sunburn. Maybe sunburn wasn't a thing to start with; a cooler star or thicker atmosphere would reduce the danger, not to mention changes to atmospheric composition.

The inverse could have equally been true, maybe if this world had no ozone layer, or the sun burnt hotter or closer, but I'd never seen Dad come home from a summer's day in the fields looking even slightly red. It was probably safe.

Also, I still had full health, and [Eye of Judgement] revealed no status conditions. It was nice being able to perform instant health check-ups like that.

I surveyed my handiwork while Cluma danced around the compacted soil barefoot, casting [Minor Harm] through her feet to kill any stray plant seeds and roots. I knew touch-skills didn't require me to prod something with a finger—I regularly used [Item Box] to remove clothing, after all—but somehow the thought of casting downwards through my feet had never occurred to me. Not that it made any sense for [Item Box], but it was a trick to remember for the future.

The next step was mixing up enough concrete to fill the holes. I'd replicated what I'd seen in Dawnhold, digging out a shallow pit covering the entire footprint of the house, with deeper trenches around the edges. In Dawnhold, the stone houses were held together by mortar, but that seemed like a strange thing to do for wood, so I wasn't entirely sure how to attach house to foundation.

Perhaps I should have taken [Advanced Masonry] instead of [Advanced Carpentry]. I'd defaulted to carpentry because of my earlier work on extending my parents' shack, but masonry might have been the better option. Never mind—no point looking back. I'd work with what I had.

Perhaps I should extend the frame of the house into the foundations prior to filling them with concrete? Would it corrode the wood? But I hadn't picked the wood up yet, so I'd have to pause for now if I wanted to try that.

Oh, another idea—since I was already blatantly doing this wrong, why not build the place out of metal? There would be practicality issues back on Earth, but not so much here. Heck, I could leave a finger just before the Obsidian Spires fifteenth floor boss and farm enough silver to build it out of in a day or two.

"Interested in building our house out of silver? Or mythril?"

"... No," replied Cluma, pausing in her weedkiller dance to flash me a look of disbelief that I'd seriously just asked such a stupid thing.

"It was just a random thought. No need to take it so seriously."

"I need to take all your random thoughts seriously, or you'll actually follow them," moaned Cluma.

"Right, time for the concrete," I said, dropping the subject before it turned into an argument that I'd doubtless lose. "Once we start pouring, we need to keep going until the entire foundation is full."

"That's a lot of barrels," pointed out Cluma dubiously. "I don't think we'll be able to mix everything up fast enough."

"It doesn't need to be continuous. We just need to pour in the next one before the previous one dries."

Cluma still looked a little dubious, but I was fairly sure that was right. We didn't have cement trucks here, so we needed to mix up and pour one barrel at a time, but I was sure we could manage it. With the foundations being shallower than a typical Earth building, we wouldn't need that many.

Hmm... Romans may have had cement, but they didn't have trucks. How did they solve this problem? My half-remembered facts had always annoyed me, but now that the temptation was there to just go to the institute and look things up in textbooks, it was a hundred times worse.

Regardless, we lined up the barrels, and once everything was in order, started preparing the first barrel. Cluma took over mixing the next while I poured the first, and we soon had a neat production line going. Not too much longer, and the foundation was full.

"Huh. That went pretty well," commented a surprised Cluma.

"Yeah..." I agreed, staring around at the site suspiciously, in case something was about to explode. There was nothing but a perfectly flat, grey, rectangular surface, surrounded by a wider area of levelled ground and disturbed grass. "I suppose now we just need to wait for it to dry."

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Skill [Basic Crafting] advanced to level 16
Class [Artisan] advanced to level 6

Oh, bonus. Just because I hadn't bought [Advanced Masonry] didn't mean I couldn't get any gains from sorting the foundation.

"How long will that take?" asked Cluma, swinging my attention back from the System message.

"Umm..." I started, thinking about it. "A couple of days?"

"Why do you sound so unsure?"

"Because I am! You don't get that sort of knowledge bundled with [Basic Crafting]."

"Didn't you ask when you bought it?"

"I didn't think of it!"

Cluma gave me another look, this one trying to imply that I was an idiot, but she was obviously struggling not to burst out laughing. The combined effect just made her look constipated.

"You still need to pick up your building materials today, so let's ask while we're there," she said, once she gave up trying to look serious.

We teleported back to Dawnhold, where a concerned merchant informed me that concrete didn't dry; it cured. Also, while it might appear solid after a day or two, I should wait between one and three weeks before subjecting it to serious stress, depending on masonry skill level. With my high [Basic Crafting], I was looking at two weeks, earning me another glare from Cluma.

"What are you going to do with the building materials while we wait?"

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"Store them in [Item Box]?" I suggested, thinking it was obvious.

As obvious as that answer had been, it wasn't feasible. I'd vastly underestimated the volume of wood I'd ordered, and it wouldn't all fit. And I still needed to visit Synklisi to pick up the forge equipment! Not to mention that if I filled my [Item Box] to capacity, I'd lose the ability to teleport Cluma.

"At least it's dry?" I tried.

"Today. Are you certain it isn't going to rain in the next two weeks?"

"Well, it doesn't matter if it gets wet, does it? I mean, it would be rubbish as a building material if the house collapsed every time it rained."

She opened her mouth to complain, but didn't have an immediate comeback for that one. "That's obviously wrong, but I have no idea why," she said in the end, turning to the [Carpenter] for help.

"The System protection doesn't kick in until you build something out of it. The boards will warp if they get wet."

"See!" exclaimed Cluma, turning back to me.

That... could be true, but houses back on Earth didn't have System protection, and they still worked. But I remembered having to paint my wooden garden fence with sealer, so maybe the wood needed some sort of treatment instead?

"I'm afraid I do need you to move it from here; I can't spare the space for two weeks," added the owner of the lumber yard.

On Earth, I could throw a tarpaulin over it, but we didn't have anything like that here. I suppose I did have a few dire wolf hides, but I'd need a lot more to completely cover the pile.

Lacking any better ideas, I made a couple of trips to shift the pile of wood, then entered the Dawnhold dungeon for the first time in a while, rushing to floor six and decimating the population of goblin riders. I didn't want to take all of them, given there was another party working the floor, but half was sufficient.

"This is actually really interesting," said Cluma, tapping a wolf on the forehead and invoking [Assassinate], killing it instantly. She wasn't even invisible.

The goblin rider lanced at her with his spear as the wolf collapsed beneath him. She caught it in one hand and yanked, dragging the goblin towards her and invoking [Minor Harm] on his neck as he fell past. The poor goblin floundered briefly on the floor, choking, as blood pooled from his throat.

"Wow. Brutal..." I commented.

"I mean, revisiting old floors shows how much we've grown since we were first here. I can't imagine getting hurt fighting the final boss now," she explained, ignoring both my comment and the gore around her feet.

With a shrug, I skinned the fallen wolf, killed utterly cleanly and hence the hide being in perfect condition. I'd observed the party we met on floor twenty of Serpent Isle hadn't left visible wounds on their prey, either. I'd assumed poison or magic, but maybe one of them had a similar skill.

It didn't take all day to collect enough hides to cover the wood, although I still needed to get a professional dismantler from the guild to cure them. Protecting the wood from rain wouldn't help much if I got blood and leftover flesh all over it instead.

That hadn't been a skill I could get through [Artisan], which implied the Dawnhold guild had a rank three dismantler since long before I came along. I could imagine the guild taking great care to ensure one was stationed at every dungeon that produced leather, given that traditional methods of production weren't known for their pleasant scents.

Perhaps no-one knew the traditional method of production, and it was only done through skills. The knowledge certainly wasn't included with my [Disassembly] or [Advanced Tailoring].

With the wood sheltered and the concrete curing, it was time to visit Synklisi. The largest part of the order was a furnace, a cylindrical structure of reinforced dungeon stone with mythril ornamentation. The door was made of the same dungeon stone, which was supposedly a higher rank material than regular dungeon stone, in the same way as mana reinforced steel was a higher ranked version of regular steel. The mythril held fire resistance and durability enchantments, and the interior was lined with fire crystals. There was no exhaust, given that it required no fuel or air.

In an Earthen furnace, the door would keep the heat in. With this one, opening the door permitted mana to rush in, igniting the fire crystals and heating the furnace. It was all backwards, but perfectly logical, given the available materials.

... Why hadn't I tried to build my own furnace? This was very obviously professional, and far better than what I'd have come up with, but the basic idea of fire crystals in a dungeon stone shell that regulated the mana intake was simple enough.

"Normally we'd build these in situ," commented the gruff Dwarf who'd manufactured it. "Not that I'm complaining; the portal fees practically double the price. But are you sure you can move it? You look a little... weedy."

I didn't need to lift it, but his description of me poked my metaphorical buttons, so I activated [Strength] and [Superimpose], then stretched my arms wide around the thing and did my best to get a grip. I managed to lift it barely perceptively before the smooth surface slipped from my grasp and it thudded back into the ground.

The dwarf sprouted a look of concern. "If you're going to need it moved, I'm going to need to..." he started, stopping when the entire thing vanished.

"Spatial mage," I said, by way of explanation. "But I'm sure I could have carried it if I had a better grip."

I could have lifted from the bottom, but with [Superimpose] only strengthening my limbs, I didn't want to risk straining my back. The door frame may have been another option. Really, though, he should have installed some handles. It would hardly be a big addition, and even if they were normally built in situ, there was no guarantee they'd never need moving in the future.

"Well... That works," he admitted, before showing me the rest of my kit. Not that there was much of it. A bucket inlaid with ice crystals that kept the contents just at the edge of freezing. An anvil of mana reinforced steel, again with mythril ornamentations, this time to hold durability and sharpness enchantments. The prevalence of mythril was interesting. Mythril and mana reinforced steel had become commonplace enough to be regularly used in goods like these, but adamantite and orichalcum were still not so widespread.

There were some smaller items, but tools like my hammer had come from Grover, and were very much adamantite and orichalcum. With rank five sharpness, it could squish regular steel like a pancake without so much as warming it first. It was just a pity I couldn't wrangle it being reforged from hihi'irokane.

Equipment safely packed, I returned to the location of my future house—or future house-shaped amalgam of wood and nails, depending how well I did—set it up, and spent the remainder of the day hammering out nails and brackets.

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