Chapter 64: High-pH Training

Chapter 64: High-pH Training

For the first month, Construction turned out to be essentially trivial to train. It seemed like every time he turned around, he had a new level in the Skill. Granted, that was mostly the result of him officially moving in to Obairlann.

While he was forced to use green wood for it all, Edwin managed to make himself a decently sturdy chair out of a few young trees, lashed together with copious amounts of rhoreed and using the same for a woven seat and backing. At Inions insistence, he made a second chair, which turned out significantly better than the first.

Edwin was able to use much the same method for a door. It had no hinges and was basically just a frame of wood with rhoreed tightly woven in the center, but it did its purpose serving as a block for wind and insects. He didnt have any sort of latch to it either, and just had to pressure-fit it all into the doorframe. Not ideal, but sufficient for the time being.

Making a table was somewhat trickier, but after a few failed attempts Edwin was able to cut himself boards and make something which didnt immediately fall apart. Despite his best efforts to try and make glue from the hooves of his hunted deer- though great for training both Harvest and Purify- it was ultimately fruitless, so he eventually abandoned that approach, and instead tried to make glue from tree sap.

While the glue which resulted from just melting dried resin and trying to Purify it wasnt great, it still worked, and rubbing in sawdust helped take care of the residual stickiness as he used it to keep his table in one piece. It still wasnt anything fancy, just a set of boards glued and lashed together set atop a frame structure similar to his chairs, but it worked well enough to keep his bowls off the floor as he slowly covered it with several layers of rhoreed mats.

His second table he set up in the elevated corner of his house to function as a workbench. While the basement might have been a more traditional place for an alchemy lab, subterranean structures had awful ventilation. Granted, the upstairs wasnt that much better in the absence of windows or most anything else, but the leaf ceiling allowed fresh air in and contaminants out well enough for the time being.

Speaking of the leaf ceiling, Edwin didnt have the faintest clue how it worked despite many, many experiments. It allowed more non-desirable gases to pass out of it but not into it, which included smoke, but managed to keep heat in quite well. It allowed light through, but was waterproof (Edwin had tested by hauling a giant bowl of water to the top and pouring it out- not a drop made it in). He couldnt fall through it, but when he was inside he could easily move the leaves out of the way to leave. Perhaps most curiously, it shed no leaves on the inside of the house, but certainly did on the outside.

Asking Inion was fruitless; she simply said that it was the magic of the place and didnt know how it worked.

Still, a month in, he had a lab bench, a table, chairs, and loads of clay bowls and pots. At a certain point, he transitioned from trying to make earthenware to actually making bricks- he still wanted a proper kiln, and bricks were the way to do it.

His first batches of brick, being as pure of clay as he could manage- Purify was happy- turned out alright. His test batch was sloppy and irregular, as he wasnt going for consistency until he had a good methodology down. At first, he wasnt firing the bricks long enough, but then found that putting them in for longer just resulted in the outside being singed?

In time, he figured out what was going on, and settled on a consistent mixture of clay with sand as a filler, mixed together and dried in a form over the course of several days. Once the bricks were dry, he could stack them inside his kiln- he could only do batches of about 10-20 bricks at a time at first- and then slowly increase how ferociously the flames burned, providing bursts of Firestarting at times to help up the temperature. Towards the end of the cycle, he had the Skill turned on constantly, producing some insanely hot flames. He never fed Mana Infusion into the mix, though. Hed get around to experimenting with it eventually, but didnt want to destroy his kiln with a stray explosion.

While the resulting bricks werent great, they were functional. In time, he built up enough of a brick collection to make a more traditional kiln. To aid in insulation, he at first kept using a pit, but dug out his former shelter to the level where the soil turned to clay. From there, he surrounded the kiln with fire on all sides and burned it as long and as hot as he could manage. The bricks helped to diffuse the heat somewhat, and while a couple cracked from the fire, the trial was ultimately a success, as he lost fewer bricks in the firing and the setup wasnt nearly as complex.

A few iterations later had him making a hefty topper to a tower-shaped kiln surrounded on all sides with fire. After a while and a few rebuilds later, that was permanently assembled, mortared together with additional clay, and Edwin kept it burning nearly constantly. Firestarting reaching level sixty meant he could keep it going almost indefinitely if he really tried, though the amount of focus it still required meant he couldnt maintain it while sleeping.

Even between batches, Edwin didnt allow whatever he was making to cool, instead fashioning himself a set of grips that allowed him to pull out the kilns contents and put in new materials without burning himself. Even then, he needed to use his gloves, which resulted in a few pieces of pottery lost due to fumbled retrievals.

The tradeoff was quite worthwhile, though, as his kiln slowly accumulated an outer wall to help contain the fires heat even better, complete with air intake and chimney.

Now that hed finally completed it, he decided to try and use his kiln for other purposes, like drying wood for the firepit inside (Obairlann letting smoke freely pass through the ceiling was so convenient) when he didnt feel like keeping Firestarting up.

It was a work in progress. Initial tests had just resulted in the wood he had loaded up catching fire and burning themselves to ashes. Curiously, Purify had lent its hand to cleaning all that out, which made Edwin wonder how far its effects spread.

While he didnt know for sure what had caused the wood to catch on fire, he rather suspected that it was the result of the interior of the kiln being within the range of his Firestarting, and in doing so making the drying wood spontaneously combust when the heat was turned up. Unfortunately, turning off Firestarting altogether didnt seem to heat the wood up enough for any significant effects, as the green wood didnt burn hot enough without Skill assistance.

It was a frustrating conundrum. He needed to somehow figure out how to exclude an area from his Firestarting while maintaining it for hours on end. Worse still, despite his best efforts, he could barely even shape the area of effect, which seemed to be stuck at an approximately 4 meter radius centered on him. Concentrating with all his might allowed him to create a tiny divot in the sphere, changing the border in a small area by a centimeter or two, which at least let him know what he wanted should be possible, just really hard.

Construction 15 44

Firestarting 50 62

First Aid 30 34

Flexibility 29 36

Harvesting 6 37

Identify 44 49

Mana Infusion 66 68

Mathematics 40 42

Memory 36 40

Nutrition 31 36

Outsiders Almanac 84 89

Packing 37 43

Polyglot 41 45

Purify 4 32

Seeing 33 37

Sleeping 32 40

Survival 39 50

Visualization 45 49

Walking 42 49