Chapter 24: [Vol-1] Ch.24 Dull Work

Alright, I know I said it's a price I'd have to pay, but I've been refining stone all day for six days now. While I do have a decent amount of the white stone now, I'm incredibly bored. I've been checking my HP and keeping track of my healing. The rate of healing the last three days has actually slowed a little bit, which has me a little worried. I pull up to check my status again, since it's almost time to sleep again today.

<LEGENDARY IMP>
Level: 45
HP: 322/426
MP: 125/125
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Mighty Imp
Magic: Stone Shaping

Well, tomorrow I want to pull off this cast that I'll have had on for almost 10 days, and look at my leg, to determine if I need another heavy cast, or if the brace will do.

---

When I wake up in the morning, I first eat a quick meal, then get to carefully removing my cast. I wasn't sure what to expect under the cast, but the fur seems a little thicker than before. I carefully begin checking my leg for pain or tenderness. After a little testing, it's still quite tender, especially where the bone broke before. I think for good measure, I should put the full cast back on for now. As much as I'd like to be able to start doing other things again, healing comes first.

I still have plenty of food so the only real concern I have is making sure that I heal enough that I don't just slowly waste away in here. Which means it's back to separating stone.

---

After three more full days of separating stone, I had an idea of something to break up the monotony. I need to repair my buckler and gauntlet. I also want to make a spear if I can. Preferably one I can wield while using the gauntlet. The additional range would definitely come in handy in the future. The only real downside I have with making a spear is that all the pieces of wood I have that will be useful for it are already set aside and sculpted for making my brace.

So until I get some more wood, I'll just fix up the gauntlet and buckler. While the buckler held up through the fight, as some point later on, either when I removed it, or when I was crawling across the floor, it ended up breaking. A large portion of it had a clean break, and separated from the rest of it. The gauntlet is in even worse condition. Both the spikes are completely broken, and there are chips and chunks missing from entire parts of the hand portion. While I can't say that it was amazing, it almost certainly made the difference between winning and losing there. The amount of blood the goblin lost through the fight from the puncture wounds are the only reason I'm here today.

That said, I do have some better material now, I can rebuild it even stronger. My plan is to replace the spikes and the connective material around them with the more durable light stone, while rebuilding the rest of the gauntlet as normal. I also want to add a support structure throughout the buckler with the light stone if I have enough of it. I want to make a wheel and spokes pattern out of the lighter stone, and fill in the difference with normal stone.

Thanks to already having a framework for both, I finish both by the end of the day, and I still have a small amount of the light stone left. I suppose all the days of refining the stone down paid off, even if it was incredibly dull work. I'm even less excited that I'll be going back to refining stone again for about six more days, until I plan to check my cast again. As of right now, the healing rate has slowed even more, and I'm starting to worry that I might not even get back to max HP before the goblin returns next time. Although, my current HP is actually above my HP from when I fought the goblin before, so maybe it's a wash overall?

<LEGENDARY IMP>
Level: 50
HP: 383/456
MP: 133/133
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Mighty Imp
Magic: Stone Shaping

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Another five full days of stone refining while I wait to heal have passed by. I'm honestly starting to get pretty good at it, if I say so myself. I'm going at about twice the pace I was when I started now. I've also made a decent sized cubby in the wall nearby the desk. If I keep this pace up, I'll have a full closet within a week.

With that in mind though, If I can actually get a little variety in life by getting rid of this thick cast, that would be great. I carefully orient myself in my bed, and remove the cast for a second time. I once again begin probing my leg. It's still somewhat tender near where the break occurred, but not nearly as bad as before. I move my leg very slightly, and it feels a little weird. I suppose I haven't really used it in about three weeks though, so that much is to be expected.

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Given my current hp is now at 438/492, I think I'm willing to switch to the lighter brace now. It still prevents most of the movement of my leg, but I should be able to do a little bit more activities on it, and it should work as a middle ground between being fully immobile, and therapeutic motion to help healing. If I notice anything wrong, I'm going right back to the heavy cast though.

I get the new brace on, and get used to using it. I'm still using the crutch along side it though, so I'm not fully mobile. Given the extra motion though, I decide I should take the opportunity to start cleaning the slaughterhouse room. Until now, I've kept my room sealed off, so I'm a little worried about the smell. The floor had a lot of viscera on it that I couldn't easily clean with my heavy cast before.

When I open my room up, I get a whiff of the smell, and it's pretty bad, and I begin the process of cleanup. The first step is moving any large chunks of viscera out. Which I either need to move one at a time, or just seal them into new buckets, and deal with the problem later. Considering it will be much faster when I'm able to carry buckets again, I opt for bucketing and sealing the viscera off. I go back into my room, and use the darker part of the separated stone to make some new buckets, and begin filling them with viscera.

It takes a few hours, but I finally get all the fleshy bits picked up. The next step I've done before, but it always feels weird, since it's only possible thanks to magic. I begin stone shaping the stone to basically mix the blood stains under the surface of the stone, and seal the top back off. How convenient.

With this room cleaned, I'm hoping the smell will go away after a while as long as I leave it open to the cavern to some degree. As long as entropy still works the same way here, diffusion will eventually dissipate the smell for me.

As much as I'd like to go to the surface for a little bit, I want to get used to the new brace before I attempt to traverse the cavern to the outside. Which unfortunately means I'm going to be stuck around here for a while longer. I'm going to try to slowly increase the amount of walking I do each day until I feel comfortable with it before I try to leave.

Since I don't have any vines or any way to make something that would actually resemble a backpack or shoulder sling right now, I basically have to carry everything in one hand, or push it with my back using one leg, which means the actually productive activities that I can perform while still injured are small.

The only one that comes to mind is moving all the corpses into a pile to burn in the future. So I suppose for the next few days that's what I'll work on, and in between short bouts of that, I'll just keep separating stone.

---

It took six more days, but I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of moving in the brace. I haven't noticed any new pains other then muscle soreness, which I attribute to getting used to using my leg some amount again. I finished piling the corpses up in the cavern this morning meaning I'm out of exercise work to do. I also have a decent amount of lighter stone again as well, probably a little less than a cubic foot of it. Tomorrow I plan on going out to get some wood. It won't be much, since I can only haul what I can grip in one hand, but I'm running dangerously low for my personal fire, and I want wood to make a spear.

With tomorrow planned out, I lay down in bed, and check my status before I go to sleep.

<LEGENDARY IMP>
Level: 72
HP: 544/588
MP: 170/170
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Mighty Imp
Magic: Stone Shaping

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