Weekly Digest 52 - (#165 - #167) (Patreon)

Salt, Fees, Anchorage, Heat

After breakfast, Lori set about heating her Dungeon. Clearly she didn't need it, but it was the principle of the thing. A Dungeon was at the heart of the demesne, fortress and seat of a Dungeon Binder's power, first and last bastion against dragons. It was rare but not unknown for a demesne to be ravaged by a dragon so thoroughly that those who had taken shelter in the Dungeon needed to repopulate the entire demesne... and the only reason they managed to do so was that the dragon had managed to kill the demesnes around them, so they hadn't needed to worry about being invaded.

Hopefully she didn't need to worry about that. Dying by finding the entire demesne suddenly had a mountain on top of it, or finding it suddenly at the bottom of a frozen sea was… not survivable.

Even if she didn't need the warmth, her Dungeon needed to be warm and comfortable, not just because she lived there, but because the second level was an industrial area, and as someone who had worked in industries, it had always irritated her when the people she had worked for had been too cheap to pay for any sort of heating. 'You'll be sweating in no time, you'll be warm then', 'just warm yourself'… ugh. Horrid people. And they always paid the lowest rates, too.

Tempting as it would have been to not provide heating to save on expenses… she wouldn't actually be spending anything, whether beads or materials, so why not?

She had to start with feeling the cold. That had been… unpleasant, but needful. After all, she couldn't properly heat her Dungeon if she couldn't tell how cold it was before, and how hot it was when she was finished. It had been surprisingly simple, deactivating all the firewisps around her. The cold had been like a bucket of water thrown over her, the change in temperature not exactly abrupt, but the end result had been sharp. Her firewisps had half-accidentally, half-instinctively come out of her grasp, like her lungs after she'd held her breath for too long, and she had immediately warmed to a comfortable temperature, the occasional breeze from her Dungeon's air circulation a cool breeze rather than a freezing bite.

Bracing herself, she did it again, and with her braced for it, the cold wasn't so surprising. It was, she was willing to admit, annoyingly chill, the kind of cold that made one want to curl up in bed with a good book and wait for a reasonable hour like noon, when the world had finally sufficiently warmed enough.

Lori grit her teeth and set about banishing that feeling from the confines of her dungeon.

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"Ah, so warm…" Rian sighed at dinner. Lori had spent the whole day trying to balance the temperature of her Dungeon, starting with putting heat-generating firewisps among the airwisps that circulated air in her demesne—heat needed a medium, after all—and then adjusting the output of the firewisps, making sure it would only generate up to a point and not grow hotter than that. Heat built up, after all. "Well, warmer, in any case."

"Additional heating isn't necessary right now," Lori said as she set up the chatrang board. "It will grow warmer as the heat builds up."

"And you can just make it hotter if it gets colder, right?"

Lori waved a hand dismissively. "If needed," she said. "I'll need to implement a more extensive system to take advantage of the heat we're excluding from the cold rooms, but for now this solution works." It worked but it wasn't… elegant, and a bit wasteful, even if it was the simplest solution to implement right now. "What is the progress on the farm?"

"It's… happening," Rian said unhelpfully. "We have a lot more open area to plant in now, which is both good and bad. That means more ground needs to be prepared, and since you can't assist with that, it has to be done the hard way. At least being out in the sun keeps us from getting cold, though I could do without the smell from the latrine soil. But the farmers say that once they have it all planted, when we harvest it we'll be able to regularly have bread."

"Something to look forward to," Lori nodded.

"Well, before then we have to make sure the chokers don't eat any of the grain we cast," Rian said. "Or at least too much of the grain we cast, since everyone seems a bit resigned to losing some. Even with our most optimistic estimates, it will be a while before we can get started on the Dungeon's farm, and it will eat heavily into the amount of grain we can eat. We might have to trade salt for grain at River's Fork, at least if we want to eat bread andmake the Dungeon's farm."

"Make sure our needs our fulfilled first before we trade away any of the salt," Lori said.

"They might ask us to pay a toll fee," Rian said. "At least, we'll have to be prepared if or when Shana—"

"Binder Shanalorre."

"Binder Shanalorre starts charging us for the privilege of passing through their length of the river," Rian said, voice suddenly sounding tired for some reason. "Hopefully it won't come to that, but at the very least do I have your permission to preemptively start giving them salt?"

Lori stared at him. "Why would we want to do that?"

"So we can essentially set the price," Rian said. "If we wait for them to start charging a toll fee, they can set the price, and it might be a percentage of our cargo, or it can be a weight that becomes a new minimum we have to gather. If we voluntarily start giving them salt, we essentially set the price, and it can be a much smaller fraction. It will also cause fewer delays, since if they demand a set percentage, we might be delayed while they inspect our cargo and count it all up."

Lori stared at him. "That makes absolutely no sense!" That… wasn't how economics worked! "That's not how economics works! We can't just give them things! Why… why…"

"Ah," Rian said, smiling smugly. "But it's not economics. It's interpersonal relations. Or rather, inter-demesne relations. People are far less inclined to be horrible to people who have been nothing but nice, helpful, generous and friendly to them. By giving them the salt when they don't ask for it, they'll seem greedy and churlish by imposing a higher toll fee or customs duty or both. And if they do so anyway… well, we tried, and you were right."

That… that… that…

"Ugh, fine, do it if you think it will work," Lori groaned.

"If it helps, it also performs the practical function of showing them the quality and desirability of our salt, likely making them more inclined to trade with us for it," Rian said.

"Well, why didn't you just say that in the first place!"

"Because it's only the secondary purpose of doing so. Conditioning River's Fork to allow us to pass without some sort of onerous fee is the main reason to do it. I'm having the Coldhold set off downriver tomorrow towards the ocean. With plenty of water to wash with, they should be able to last until they fill the holds salt…" Rian hesitated, then sighed. "Ugh, maybe not tomorrow. I'll have to set up something so they can stay warm. Maybe some kind of brazier… well, they'll be going within the week, anyway. Will you be able to maintain the Coldhold for that long?"

Lori thought of her list of bindings to imbue. "That shouldn't be a problem."

"If it helps, you won't need to make any more ice blocks to keep food cold," Rian said. "We have salt now, we can make salted meat. It'll preserve well, having it get iridiated will basically just tenderize it, and since we can cook it in water, that won't be a problem."

"I'll take your word for it." Preserving food with salt wasn't something she was knowledgeable about.

Rian nodded. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go get our food before they beat me to it." He stood, just as Riz, Mikon, and Umu arrived and started putting down bowls of food and cups of water.

"Too late, it seems," Lori said blandly, grabbing one of the bowls and cups.

"Hello Rian," Mikon said cheerfully. "Sit, sit, we brought dinner. And I finished the filter cloth you asked for, and made a few spares as well."

"The carpenters said they'll have the shutters ready soon," Riz said as she sat down to one side of Rian, Umu settling down on Rian's opposite side. The northerner woman blinked when she saw Mikon decide to sit down next to the other weaver. "M-maybe as soon as tomorrow, they said."

Rian stood there, looking up at the ceiling for a moment before sighing and sitting back down. "Thank you for bringing the food," he said, sounding sincere but tired. "Though if you're all going to be doing this from now on, I insist I get a turn getting food too…"

Lori tuned out what was likely to be 'relationship things'. Her mothers had also had a lot to say on the subject, as if her getting into some kind of intimate relationship was a given. Really, they got ahead of themselves on a lot of subjects like that, ugh. She focused on enjoying her food and playing chatrang with Mikon, who finally seemed to be developing some sort of proper caution. She no longer sent her pieces into attack range so recklessly, at any rate.

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Lori had checked the temperature of her Dungeon again the next morning, disabling the firewisps around her. While it had been a little cool, it was certainly far warmer than it had been the day before. Lori resisted the temptation to increase the output of the firewisps she'd set. She had to let it run for a few days to let the heat grow, otherwise she might overheat her Dungeon…

With the temperature of her Dungeon resolved, she set about going over the next thing she had to personally see to, which was proper storage for their boats in the event of a dragon. Lori's Boat could easily be picked up and carried into her Dungeon, so it wasn't a problem, but due to the size of Lori's Ice Boat and the Coldhold, that wasn't an option for them. The boats would need some kind of secured structure she could seal in the event of a dragon, and it would need to be along the river so it would be relatively simple to move the two vehicles there.

She toyed with the notion of just building an enclosure around the dock to which the boats were secured, but the dock had been built close to the water hub, and building a proper protective enclosure that would encompass the Coldhold alone would mean intruding into the water hub's structure. That would mean either rebuilding the water hub or making a too-tight enclosure, which the Coldhold would have difficulty maneuvering into and out of. The alternative was moving the dock a little farther, but that would put it too close to the clay pits, which was vital industry with established infrastructure she didn't want to have to move or rebuild.

With the docks as they were currently positioned not an option, and building the docks farther upriver would put it too close to the seels, disrupting their food supply, the only option was putting the enclosure downriver, past the laundry area and the aqueduct that carried up drinking water to the demesne's basins. Well past, as she didn't want to potentially affect their drinking water's quality.

She… should probably alter that system so that the drinking water reaching the basins also came from the water hub, which had been heated to kill dustlife in the water without actually resulting in distillation. It would certainly be far safer than water from the river itself, no matter how well she had planned their waste water disposal so that it wouldn't contaminate their drinking water…

Ugh, she'd have to do that next!

One thing at a time, one thing at a time…

She walked past the laundry area, ignoring the people there doing laundry and avoiding the clothes drying on the long lines strung up on poles stuck into the ground. Some of those poles were visibly wobbling a little, piles of rocks at their base to try and stabilize them. Absently, Lori reached out through her core to bind the earthwisps on those rocks, fusing them together and wrapping them around the poles they were around, before forming a wide base to properly stabilize the structure.

Once she was past all that, Lori reached a part of the riverbank were all the ropeweed had already been harvested, the stalks cut can long trampled, the dirt hard-packed. A few of the ropeweed at the edge of the river was already starting to regrow though, small shoots rising out of the ground. It was the site where they had constructed the Coldhold.

Sighing, Lori began to mark out a space for the shelter where the boats would be kept, drawing it out with lines of darkwisps she pulled out of her clothes so that the marks would be visible in the daylight. After all, if it was big enough to build the Coldholdat, it should be big enough to store it, right?

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Ship Sinking

"Uh, Lori…" Rian said hesitantly. "I'm not trying to question your decision making, which I'm sure is backed up by things that I'm simply ignorant of—"

"Spit it out, Rian."

"This seems a terrible place to store our boats in the event of a dragon," Rian said bluntly. "At least, in my admittedly ignorant opinion. We'd basically be putting them in a shed, and none of our sheds have fared particularly well to dragons. Well, except the ones you buried, but even then, recovering it after the fact was a pain."

Lori looked over the plot of land on the river's bank, black lines drawn on the ground and in the air, and finally had to reluctantly admit the same thing to herself. Even when she'd been choosing it, it was obvious that the spot probably wasn't the best place to shelter their boats, simply the closest and most convenient. Her plan for it had mostly consisted of using excavated stone to make an oversized shelter similar to the Um and the long shelter that now contained so few people the ones living in it were fairly comfortable and not crowded. Well, there had also been the option of making the boat shelter immediately across the river, but then they' need the boats to get to the boats, and it would still have been the same stone shelter design. Perhaps if she finally made the tunnel going under the river she could move the boat storage to the other side, but for now…

She shook her head to clear it of tangential thought. "Well, what do you suggest?" she said, trying to make her tone scathingly sarcastic and even to her ears simply sounding tired at all this effort she'd just wasted.

Rain shrugged. "Nothing comes to mind," he admitted. "I just know that trying to do this by sticking our boats in a stone shed probably isn't the best idea, but I don't really have anything better." Another shrug. "Admittedly, I only came here to tell you that lunch was ready. I wasn't actually planning to get into a discussion of boat protection logistics."

A part of Lori wanted to skip lunch, to continue working on this problem until it was finished, but that part was quashed by long practice and experience. Depriving herself of food just to try to get in an hour's more work wouldn't lead to anything productive. There wasn't an immediate deadline like a test or exam or submission date, after all. She was a Dungeon Binder now. The only deadlines she had to meet were ones she set for herself.

She still hesitated before finally nodding. "Well, let's go eat then."

Rian nodded, taking one last look at all the lines drawn in darkwisps. "How about we talk about this over lunch? Maybe I can help you come up with something."

Lori shrugged tiredly. Why was she so tired when all she'd really one was walk around essentially drawing lines and taking measurements of boats? She'd needed to get her staff after an embarrassingly long time trying to properly approximate paces with… well, paces. More and more often she'd been leaving her staff in her room, as she no longer really needed the coalcharms, quartz, and wire wrapping for her to use Whispering. All she really needed it for nowadays was the length markings she'd put on it for measuring, and even that would be unnecessary once she finally learned to utilize Horotracting.

It was quite an annoying tool, really, and she always had to be aware of it lest she hit anything, and it kept falling over whenever she leaned it on something to free her hands…

Sighing, Lori sat down at her bench, carefully leaning her staff against a notch she'd hacked out with her knife so it wouldn't roll sideways towards her while she was eating. Riz was already there, a cloth wrapped around her head to keep her hair out of her eyes as she used a towel to wipe sweat from her face. She looked like she had been working, given the smell coming from her. Had she been helping with the field preparations? Next to her, Mikon was sitting just a little bit farther away from the other woman than usual. Rian wasn't there, but a quick look around showed he was at the line for food with Umu. Lori rolled her eyes at the sight, but couldn't help but be amused in any case. Apparently he'd finally managed to come to a compromise about them letting him get his own food. Idiot.

For a moment, Lori contemplated going upstairs to get her almanac, or her sunk board, but had to decide against it. She just wasn't in the mood, not with the frustrating problem of the boat storage in front of her. While the grain storage shed was outside the Dungeon, she'd had placed and design it so she could easily bury the thing in stone so it could be protected from dragons. There was the risk of it becoming something else, like metal or wood or… well, anything else, but that was true of anything and everything, and was why she covered as much of the demesne as she could with darkwisps, so that most of the danger could be reduced down to physical impacts from falling objects or random lightning.

Rian and Umu came back with food, and Lori grabbed one of the bowls and started eating.

"So!" Rian said brightly once the bowls had been distributed, "you're working on where we can put the boats? Anything I can do to help?"

"Get ready to have the area I marked dug out with shovels," Lori said. "We can use the soil in the Dungeon's farm."

Rian nodded, while next to him Riz sighed. "Let's call that the backup plan," Rian said. "You don't seem happy with it."

"Yes, well, I have no other alternatives do I?," Lori said irritably. "After all, what else can be done about them?"

"We the smaller ice boat—"

"Lori's Ice Boat."

Rian stopped speaking for a moment, closed his eyes and let out a breath. "Right, that… you could just let the ice turn back to water, and we can carry the frame inside and just rebuild it afterwards. Even with how bit it is, without the ice it's easy to carry and turned sideways it'll still fit into the Dungeon's front door."

Oh. Right. Lori had forgotten about that. "That's one solution, but we can hardly do the same to the Coldhold," Lori said. "Not easily, in any case."

"It's still easier to try to figure out how to protect one ship that two. Maybe you can bury it too, like you did with the wood storage sheds?"

Lori blinked at the odd idea. But… well, was it really that odd? Certainly, with Whispering it could certainly be done. Only… "There's no appropriate location to do such a thing," Lori said. "At least, not near the town." Which… huh. It was still technically nameless, wasn't it? The demesne had a name, but technically they had never named the town outside of her Dungeon… No, focus, not important!

"We have that space in front of the Dungeon…" Rian began.

"No," Lori said sharply. "All of the pipes bringing water to the baths pass through there. I would need to reroute all the pipes around where we would put the Coldholdjust to be able to utilize it, and I don't want to."

Rian nodded. "Fair enough, fair enough…" he said, and ate for a moment, face thoughtful. "All right, so we need to store the Coldhold at the very least, and it needs to be protected from heavy things falling out of the sky hitting it… what else?"

"Dragon born abominations," Lori listed. "Undead things. Possibly wisplings, twisted vistas, and thought-shades, though only if I'm not able to raise enough darkwisps to protect it along with the Dungeon. Though in which case it would also be vulnerable to being turned into a dragon scale."

"What are the chances the dragon will do us a favor and turn it into wood?" Rian said, sounding half-serious.

"Non-existent. It's far more likely to be turned into some kind of metal, salt, stone, or even air."

"Ah, well, there's goes that idea." A sigh. "So, it most likely needs to be protected from things hitting it really hard or trying to eat it, then? There's really nothing we can do if the dragon wants to try to change its substance."

"True, though sufficient mass around it will act as ablative to make it more likely to survive," Lori said.

"Why don't we just bury it, then?" Rian said thoughtfully. "We make a big hole, you move the Coldhold into it with water, drain the water out, and then we bury it until the dragon goes away? It would certainly give it more mass to protect it than a shed."

"There's still the question of where it would be buried," Lori said, stating the obvious since it seemed to have slipped by her lord's though processes. "We can't simply bury it now, since it would still be in use, but it would need to be a location where the Coldhold could quickly be moved to from the river once I became aware that a dragon was coming." A thought occurred to her. "Unless it was away when a dragon arrived, in which case it would be a lost cause and those on it would be horribly dead."

Rian winced at her words. "Yeah… that's a separate problem. Though if the Coldhold were fast enough…" He shook his head, then slapped his own cheeks. "No, focus, no tangents!" He shook his head again, then gave Lori an intense stare. "All right, what if we bury it in the river? When a dragon comes, we cover all the wood with ice, then you sink it under the water and cover it with more ice, and maybe anchor it to the ground so it doesn't move. If we give it maybe… uh… say five paces of water above it, the water would blunt the impact of most things falling out of the sky enough that the ice shell would be able to take the rest of the impact."

Lori stared at him.

"No, no, that's a stupid idea," Rian dismissed.

"It is," Lori agreed.

"How about—"

"Instead of using ice, we should go straight to stone," Lori interrupted him. "That way it would have the buoyancy issues of trying to cover it in ice, and I won't have to essentially rebuild the ice in the hull because trying to separate the waterwisps that the boat needs structurally with the waterwisps of the ice we buried it in would be even more laborious. Stone is also heavy enough that we can simply cover the outside while leaving the inside hollow and it would still sink, so it's unlikely to be swept away." She tilted her head thoughtfully. "The same can also be done with Lori's Ice Boat, so we won't have to struggle to bring it inside."

Rian blinked, and stared at her. "Wait, are you serious?"

"No, I'm Lori."

The chuckle that came out of Rian seemed to be involuntary. "I mean, it's actually a viable solution?"

"For now," Lori said, waving a hand dismissively. "In the long term, some sort of means to shelter all the boats would be more efficient and cost-effective, but for now, as the plan in the event of a dragon, it's certainly a more effective suggestion than building a riverside shelter for them. However, it gives me the freedom to find a better site for such a shelter, as well as not requiring any immediate action on my part beyond having enough stone set aside for both an emergency bulwark and to envelope the boats."

"So… you're procrastinating?" Rian said with a wide grin.

Lori kicked him under the table.

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Lori spent the rest of the day excavating more stone from the third level. It was already half the current size of the second level, but with a ceiling clearance twice as high, so she had technically already excavated the same amount of stone. She was getting better at efficiently excavating the level. On two of the walls that led away from the river were rows of hallways with support arches to hold up the ceiling, each of them running parallel to each other. All she had to do was keep digging deeper into each hallway while maintaining the shape of the ceiling so it wouldn't collapse. When she needed to make it properly part of a large open space, she simply needed to knock down the walls between the hallways and leave behind support pillars.

With her newly excavated stone, she tested the dragon contingency plan the next day, wrapping the Coldhold in a shell of stone while Rian stood nearby with a water clock to time how quickly she managed to do it. After three tries that had Rian wincing, she found the best approach was to create a platform of thick stone underneath the Coldhold, then build up walls around the boat, encasing it in a cube that she then began to collapse inwards to force out the air and water though holes. Once covered and the stone fused airtight, she simply added more and more stone until it grew thick enough for her own piece of mind, at which point it was heavy enough to sink. Then she simply had to move the whole thing closer to the river's center so that the water would grow thick enough to absorb impacts, as Rian had suggested.

By their tests, her best time was two hours, but they were able to cut it down closer to one by having the stone base and much of the stone mass prepared in advance and sunk under the water of the dock, greatly reducing its depth. She would probably need to adjust it when the Coldhold came back from the ocean with a full load so that it wouldn't scrape against the stone, but that was simple to attend to. Lori's Ice Boat could be encased even faster, and both she and Rian concluded they would probably have plenty of time to secure the two boats in the event of a dragon. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully. If they remembered to.

That night, Lori wrote the reminder on her wall, just in case. Her walls were becoming very crowded with reminders, but with her memory, there was no helping it.

Ugh, she really wished she'd figured out how to access Mentalism already!

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Better Farming Through Explosions

Lori began preparing the third level for farming. Her biggest concern had originally been preparing the ground. After all, they couldn't just throw down dirt and call it a day. Well, they could, but according to the book without proper drainage their crops would fail and die from variety of reasons like root rot, loss of minerals, or simply collapsing as the ground lost the solidity to support the plant. The almanac had provided a small example illustration and a brief passage about how different-sized rocks arranged in a certain order were needed for the water to drain properly but such rocks would need to be gathered or broken down from larger rocks.

She had tried to to devise a binding to let her do it herself, to turn their stockpile of stone—or better yet, the very flood of the third level itself, since it was already where it needed to be— into smaller stone. All her ideas, however, seemed as labor intensive as as simply taking heavy hammers and breaking apart big rocks into small rocks. Turning the stone into a softer consistency would let them cut out or even scoop out the stone they needed—depending on how soft she made it—but it would require her to removing the binding from the extracted piece as soon as it was extracted so that it would fuse with any other pieces. By herself, it would be tediously long and take forever, but if she had Rian find laborers to do it for her while she focused only on managing the bindings, it would be overwhelming as she'd need to concentrate on what each individual was doing, and they might need to break the rocks apart with hammers anyway if she didn't remove the binding on the individual pieces and they fused to each other.

She could also just use earthwisps to extrude slabs or rods of rocks and have people with hammers break off the extrusion, but that seemed extremely unsafe, since no matter how she thought of it the piece that broke off could only fall onto someone's toes. It was a process she could theoretically do herself, using one binding to extrude and another binding to have a large stone slab press down to break off the extrusions. No risk of heavy rocks on her toes, and she could do it herself.

Then she remembered she had an almanac, chided herself for trying to think of a solution by herself when she had a refence work, and searched through it to find any entry that was applicable to her own situation.

She found it, strangely enough, in the section about mining. Upon reading it, she found herself both vindicated in thinking of checking the book and exasperated that she hadn't come to the simpler, obvious solution mentioned.

Lori read the section in question three times, especially the part about safety measures and reminders, and set off to work.

Despite how much she had excavated already, according to the almanac Lori would need to dig even deeper, so she could lay out the drainage for her farm. Normal above-ground farms seldom had a problem with drainage, since the land was already naturally inclined to drain water down to rivers, lakes and aquifers—or so her classes on the subject at school had said—but underground, in a Dungeon, it was a different matter. Part of constructing a dungeon involved sealing up the small, almost negligible seeming cracks and fractures in the stone. If one didn't do so, one did not have a Dungeon so much as 'someplace for water to drain down to'. Above ground, these same cracks were part of the mechanism that drained water from soil, and to establish her farm, Lori would need to partially recreate this natural draining, lest her farm become waterlogged.

The process of preparing the Dungeon's floor for farming was simple. First, a layer of large rocks, which would have large opening between them. Then a smaller layer of rocks, just large enough to not fit between the gaps of the first layer. Then a third, even finer layer, and as many more layers of increasingly finer rocks, thought according to the almanac three was a good minimum for most crops. Then a thick layer of mulch, woodchips or composted vegetation, though according to the almanac stone slabs would do, so long as they did not fit together perfectly, so as to allow the water to flow between the seams. Then after that, a layer of soil, prepared according to the needs of whatever crop.

To the side of all this was supposed to be a drainage tank where the excess water was meant to finally drain down to, positioned at the lowest possible point and regularly drained and reused for irrigation before any other water, as it would contained dissolved… things… that the soil would need. Lori wasn't exactly sure what those things were—she wasn't a farmer, alchemist or Deadspeaker after all, though she was trying to correct that last—but that wasn't her problem.

It was one of the most basic ways to set up a permanent farm in a Dungeon, suitable for anything from grain plants to orchards of fruit trees with some adjustments, as she had learned in one of her jobs during her schooling days. Other permutations involved box planters of varying sizes or dimensions, trays on tall shelves, or growing everything from the ceiling using Horotracting to invert gravity, but it all came down to drainage in the end. Drainage, efficiency, and dealing with water so that any lower levels of the Dungeon wouldn't find itself flooded. Most demesnes had long since set up their Dungeon farms according to their own designs, and were thriving, vital sources of food and resources for their economies.

Lori had never worked in Taniar Demesne's own Dungeon farm, since the demesne could afford to maintain a more experienced—and probably better paid—maintenance and work staff of laborers, wizards, undead and skilled worked to raise, prepare and distribute the food grown there, but she had worked in the city farms, the privately owned commercial equivalents in the Dungeon Capital's septants, which had been built in warehouses on the surface or, for the better funded ones, in one of the bunkers of the underground district. The agricultural towns that the majority of a demesne's food came from were said to be even more extensive, enormous underground complexes of tunnels and bunkers that far surpassed the Dungeon's own production in terms of scale and productivity.

As she had neither the need, the population, the space, or the resources to found an agricultural town, a Dungeon farm would have to do.

Using the advice and idea from the almanac, she set about preparing to render down the stone floor into the rocks she needed. A test, she needed to test the almanac's advised binding. She marked out a plot of floor with darkwisps, leaving three paces of space between the markings and the wall closest to the river and the wall with the stairs from the second level and started binding the stone floor. She used earthwisps to pull up stone, leaving her with a wide, shallow depression that was two paces square that came up to her knees. Not as deep as she needed right then, but this was still just a test, after all.

Then she went upstairs and debated whether to get water from the reservoir—she needed to remember to check it in case the water had gone bad—or the river, before deciding on the reservoir because it was closer. She passed through the dining hall, which was mostly empty except for some people quickly and methodically sweeping the floor. They glanced up at her, but she ignored them, heading towards the back where the sealed hallway with the reservoir was. She passed the newer cold storage rooms, filled with blocks of solidified air so that there would no longer be any melted water among the cold meat, the doors sealed tight. Could she make more cold storage? She could try digging out the floor underthe ones they had now…

Lori bound the earthwisps of the barrier blocking the reservoir and moved it aside, collecting some lightwisps to illuminate her way. Well, there was no smells of byproducts of the human body, at least. She moved the lightwisps ahead of her, revealing the pit that was their emergency water reservoir. A wary look inside found no corpses floating in the water, or anything else. Well, that was good at least.

Soon, Lori had a viscous orb of ice flowing at her side as she headed back to their third level. She had to be carefully not to have the ice move too fast, since it didn't take all that much for it to start slipping and sliding, but soon she had it back into the hole she had dug. The ice flowed in, coating the bottom of the depression. Lori set the rest of the water aside—there'd be time for it later— and then poured in the rest of the stone after it. She rubbed her hands together, then claimed the firewisps the friction had created, and bound it onto the stone, moving the firewisps until they were among the ice, the binding deactivated on them deactivated.

Lori looked at the bump in the stone floor she had made and nodded. Then she turned around and climbed back to the third level again as she deactivated the binding on the ice. Immediately, the ice began drawing in heat, and the stone around it began to chill. She reached the second level and ducked into one of the alcoves near the stairs, still focusing on the binding of waterwisps she had placed. She focused on the firewisps and the waterwisps at the same time and began imbuing them with magic from her core.

She checked the stairs. No voids of wisps, only the little binding of airwisps she had made to properly circulate air down into the third level for her so she could breathe. At the other end of the second level, far from her, weavers spun thread and wove, carpenters made shutters for windows, and ropers made rope. All of them were far away from the staircase leading down.

Lori took a deep breath and then, before she could doubt herself, she willed the binding of firewisps to turn all the magic she had imbued into heat. At the same time, the binding of waterwisps turned all of the layer of ice into steam.

For a moment, nothing happened and she frowned.

Then there was an explosive crack that she felt through the floor. A few moments later, steam began rushing up the stairs from the third level, and Lori was barely able to bind it and force it to congeal into water as she bound all the firewisps in them and reduced their heat. She claimed the waterwisps that were now lying on the ground, gathering them all back into a rolling, viscous mass again as Lori went downstairs to see the results of her work.

There was a hole in the floor again, but this time it was surrounded by debris. Shattered rock of various sizes lay scattered all around the hole, in addition to puddles of and water dripping from the ceiling.

Lori sighed, and shook her head. Well, it had worked but the results… it looked like she would have to try again. She gathered together the water and fused it into ice again as she started making another depression on the ground, careful not to get any of the shattered rock entangled in the rock she was removing from the floor. When the depression was made, Lori filled it partway with ice and pour the rest of the stone on top. Then she turned around and headed back upstairs, already wishing she had an easier way to go up. Her legs were starting to ache.

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At midmorning, Rian came running towards the alcove Lori had taken to sitting to during explosions. which Lori didn't hear because of the bindings over her ears. On the stairway leading down, the binding of waterwisps and firewisps she had placed forced the steam from the latest explosion to condense back into water and the firewisps gathered the heat released by the water together so Lori could move it back to the next explosion.

"Your Bindership," Rian said, panting slightly. "It's come to my attention that things have been exploding. Is everything… well?"

"Of course, Rian. Why wouldn't it be?"

"So… this is like the trees exploding right after you made the demesne and is just you… enjoying yourself?" Rian said hesitantly.

Lori brow wrinkled. "What?"

"You made trees explode after you made the Dungeon's core, remember?"

"I can't be expected to remember ever detail from that far back," Lori said dismissively, though it did tickle something in her mind… Ah, she remembered now! Ugh, that was so wasteful, she could have cured it for lumber! "I'm simply preparing the Dungeon's farm."

Rian stared at her. "You're preparing the farm… with explosions?"

"How else am I supposed to prepare all the rocks that we need for drainage?" Lori said.

Rian blinked. Stared. Frowned thoughtfully. Looked towards the third level. "Um… have you been checking that all the support pillars are still structurally stable?"

"Of course," Lori said dismissively. "What do you take me for?"

Rian nodded. "Well… as long as you know what you're doing… Though could I ask you to maybe block off the sound? People are getting disturbed and worried. It might make lunch late, since it's distracting the kitchen crew."

Loi rolled her eyes. "Fine, fine. If it will ensure lunch is on time."

"Thank you, your Bindership. I'll come back to tell you when lunch is ready."

Lori waved him off, and as Rian went away, she set about adding in a third binding to block off the noise and the resultant vibrations through the stone. She didn't want to miss lunch, after all.

Then, when she was sure Rian was far enough away, Lori hastily began checking over the pillars of the third level and hastily began repairing the small cracks she found. She might have to set a wide scale binding to reinforce the stone she didn't want to break before she set off any more explosions…