[NR] Rebuilding - Chapter 636 (Patreon)

Whatever the case might be with the wood drying too quickly, it could only benefit them. Though Courtney’s repair spell was MVP, correcting any splitting or warping. This did mean Jason ended with a lot more planks than he had been expecting.

With his honestly quite amateur setup, Jason had expected at least a third of the planks would become unusable for construction. Not that he was going to toss those out or anything. More than enough bits and bobs that could be made from such things.

As it was, Jason figured he could easily rebuild the original place and then some. Add in proper defenses and amenities. With that in mind, he was honestly tempted to skip this building and go straight to his own house.

Jason held back, though. The group needed a place to hold their manuals. That meant he couldn’t rush things either. It had to be done properly.

And that meant starting with the foundation. Jason had already done some basic work when putting up the original building, but that was mostly flattening the ground and only on the surface. With the building gone, it was clear the soil had been unevenly compacted as one side was now lower than the other.

First step? Pound dirt! Or more properly, Jason went around stomping on the ground. He wasn’t using War Stomp, but body blast. Both his stomps tended to cut things up and while the blast penetrated, it was still force being applied in one direction.

In fact, as Jason went to work on the foundation, that very penetration ended up helping. The blasts allowed him to compact deeper than would normally be possible with just stomping around. And it showed as even after he added dirt to even things out, the ground was a good hand length deeper than the area around it.

This was perfect for what he planned. Courtney had found a rock outcropping near the clearing that hadn’t been there before and it would provide the next layer of the foundation. After all, compacted ground didn’t have the best drainage, which is sort of important when building with wood.

So the three of them took a day and headed over to the outcropping. After all, this wouldn’t be the only time they needed stone. And while Jason in particular could carry a massive amount of the stuff, they needed more than pure muscle to get it processed properly. In particular, Rosha had been doing a side project to help with this step.

After all, while Jason could carry a lot, the amount he could push was much more with the right equipment. Which in this case meant a wood sledge. Now, Rosha did not need to put all that much work into the thing.

The construction was simple enough. She used one log that was on the smaller side while remaining a consistent width. Then, after removing the bark, she cut it in half and split those halves to create four pieces. Those pieces she connected with off cuts from making the planks and rounded the logs on the front..

It wasn’t the prettiest, but the rough sledge would get the job done. The job in question is that of being stacked high with stone slabs the team extracted with magic and then pushed back to the clearing by Jason. That pushing ending up being most of what he focuses on as by the time he got back, the girls would have gotten sledges worth of rock.

And what rock it was! Quality granite which could be used for proper sculptures and such. Shame that wasn’t the plan, though it would make for some nice slabs. Anyway, the extraction of rock went on for two entire days and they probably could have continued. Though they decided to stop once they had extracted all the rock that was above the ground, not wanting to bother with digging more of it up.

Besides, they had more than enough for the currently planned buildings and then some. So it was at this point that Jason began doing something to the rougher pieces of granite that would make sculptors cry. See, he needs gravel and well, there was all this rock!

Now, breaking up that much rock into gravel would normally be hard, even with Jason’s strength. Except he wasn’t going to use a hammer. As already pointed out earlier with compacting the ground, his war stomp liked to slice things into pieces. And well, that was perfect for this.

In particular, using Energy to pump out the never ending threads did spectacularly. Unlike the bloom, the threads were more spread out even at the start as well as more random. Besides, the threads lasted a lot longer when not being actively resisted by one of the three powers.

In fact, it worked so well that after the test, Jason just propped up the stones next to the foundation and side kicked them into it. By the time they fell over, the threads had done their job and it turned into a cascade of gravel. This made filling the foundation easy as no matter how strong you are, shoveling gravel is annoying.

Though Jason did end up going back over it all and stirring the gravel up. While some of it had jumbled around, there were also parts where it had practically still in place like a 3d puzzle. Kind of inconvenient when the goal is to have gaps for water to drain through.

And with that, it was ready for the actual building.

Jason frowns.

A thought percolates up from the back of his mind.

For a normal building, this was fine. But this wasn’t meant to be a normal building. This was meant to house important manuals and such. Resources as well, whenever he got around to picking them out.

It needed to be more than just a good house. This building needed to stand here and not budge. To resist when push comes to shove. For that, there was one thing he had missed.