Demesne 404 - Resuming Excavation (Patreon)

As much as Lori wanted to only excavate for half the day and spend the rest of the day continuing to expand her demesne, since the harvest was occurring now and they needed the space to store their grains, she didn't have the option of doing that. She would need to excavate as quickly as possible, and without any horotracting, all of the stone for the room would have to be removed.

Technically, they didn't need much storage space to store the harvest, but they'd have another harvest in a couple more weeks, and again in a few weeks after that. At least, that was the hope. So she needed to make storage space not just for this harvest, but for subsequent harvests and any other food harvested from the dungeon farm and what little more they had above ground.

However, she had to do something first.

After breakfast, she hurried outside, already claiming and binding the airwisps about their fields. She had already deactivated the binding that caused wind to blow over the village outside her village—it would be a hindrance in the harvest, and could potentially scatter the grain they were trying to gather—after she had spoken to Rian, so by the time she actually went out, along with the first of those going out to start preparing to harvest, the fields were quite hot.

Quickly, she added the airwisps to the binding of lightningwisps around the fields as Rian had suggested, forming them to so that they created a thick layer atop the original binding. She imbued the original binding as she did so, because it never hurt to keep the bindings imbued. As she had deactivated the binding that blew wind across the village outside of her Dungeon, the airwisps that she included into the binding of lightningswisps couldn't really be used to move air, or at least not as a strong wind.

She formed the airwisps to gently draw air upwards through their binding. It was necessary, as she couldn't just attach wisps that did nothing or were deactivated to a binding. It was why the wisplights she had made that also moved air had both bindings anchored to the core but were technically separate bindings. A binding with wisps that weren't doing anything in the binding couldn't be activated. As long as she kept the intensity low, the imbuement consumption should be reasonably low, and the resulting air movement wouldn't affect the crops they were harvesting.

The added airwisps raised the upper boundary of the binding, and so Lori went to get some darkwisps to add to it. The nearest convenient source was the old mushroom farm cave, since the inside of her mouth and under her clothes wouldn't have enough darkwisps. The door into the mushroom farm was closed, and there was no latch since it was possible someone might become trapped inside if there was. Instead, a foot-sized rock—which was tied to the door with a crude ropeweed cord, no doubt to keep it from getting lost—was holding the door shut, easy enough for anyone—perhaps a child—to push open if they happened to be trapped inside.

There were gaps between the planks of the door, the openings too narrow for most bugs to fit through, and letting Lori see a narrow line of the darkness inside the cave. Claiming and binding the darkwisps in the cave, she imbued binding as she made the darkwisps flow out through the slits in the door. The binding seeped out, looking like a mist that reflected no light, darker than the blackness behind her eyelids. Anchored the biding to her fingernails for convenience, she turned and started walking back to the fields.

Ignoring all the people looking behind her, Lori added the binding of darkwisps to the already established binding of lightningwisps to repel bugs—with added functionally useless but working air circulator—and slowly began to spread the darkwisps over the binding of airwisps. Without the airwisps the upper boundary of the binding would have been tool low, and as the darkwisps were completely opaque to light, the fields would likely have been too dark. With the added wisps raising the boundary of the binding, more light came in through the edges, increasing the visibility.

She was a quarter of the way to finishing spreading the darkwisps when Lori recalled that they would only be harvesting the crops at the edges of the fields, and so she didn't really have to spread the darkwisps over the entire field.

…

Thankfully it didn't take her until mid-morning to finish putting the darkwisps in place, although she did have to walk around the perimeter of the fields, which was uncomfortably bumpy through the tsinelas she was wearing instead of her boots. Once she'd finished arranging the darkwisps in a wide border around the edges of the field and assessed that she didn't need to add any lightwisps to let people see while they worked, she headed back towards her dungeon to start excavating.

The second level of her dungeon was a tall, long, spacious chamber—if one didn't count the regularly spaced stone pillars with supporting arches to keep the ceiling from collapsing—with all the walls lined with alcoves where families could stay when a dragon passed, except for where there were stairs leading up to the first level and down to the dungeon farm. Some of them were constantly occupied—the three alcoves the weavers kept their looms and spinning wheels and other equipment Lori wasn't familiar with, the alcove occupied by the ropers, the two alcoves the carpenters had kept their tools, her own alcove for research on white Iridescence that don't involve metallurgy, the alcove where the flour was milled—but there were still many, many alcoves, far more than there were families in her demesne.

Her new grain storage chamber would by necessity need to be adjacent to the second level, as the conditions there were cooler, less humid and less it was likely for water to spill on the floor compared to the third level. The second level was also a good compromise, as the grain coming from the fields outside and the dungeon farm would need to be carried there, making either trip equally miserable.

The second level had two stairs leading down to it from the dining hall, and Lori wanted to start excavating her new storage through the alcove nearest to the near stairs, since those were the ones nearest the entrance of her dungeon. Unfortunately, the first alcove on the wall opposite the stairs down to the third level—the near wall would have led to excavating under the dining hall, which Lori didn't even consider because she did not want to have to deal with those structural considerations—already contained the gristmill. While the mill powered by the water wheel was already in place and ready, until the sawmill was a little bit more complete it was best not to use it.

The next two immediate alcoves contained… well, some grain storage. It wasn't all their grain, but rather an emergency supply for when the people of the demesne had to take shelter from dragons, and thus was kept as full to capacity as possible, the grain being rotated according to… well, whatever schedule Rian and the people he'd set to the matter had devised. As it wasn't something she could move herself…

Lori had to settle for excavating the fourth alcove down from the stairs leading up to the dining hall, removing the planks that served as both benches and crude bunks, lifting them up herself and getting them out of her way since there wasn't anyone but children and some of the women who'd recently given birth at the second level. She could tell because they had infants with them that they were feeding, which she wasn't about to interfere with.

That done, Lori claimed and bound the earthwisps comprising the stone niches on all three walls of the alcove, softening the stone carefully before pushing the stone on the side of the alcove to thicken the wall. It probably wasn't necessary, but the entrance into the new storage space didn't need to be that wide. The niches on the back were collapsed as she began her excavation. She'd smooth it out later. The second level was several paces underground beneath, among other things, Rian's house and their fields of outside crops. It had been the only option, and she hadn’t wanted to excavate closer to the river, and building the second level under the river… no. Extending the second level in this direction would present no issue.

The spot for the entrance to the second level’s extension and storage space chosen, Lori began excavating.

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By the time lunch was usually served—or at least, what would normally have been lunch—arrived, Lori had managed to excavate a decently long tunnel from the original alcove. Actually removing the stone from the tunnel was the easy part, as it was more difficult to move the softened stone up the stairs to the level of the dining hall so she could get it outside the dungeon and add the stone to the stone stockpile. The more stone she excavated, the more difficult moving the stone was, as she had to worry about how its weight was distributed while she moved it up the stairs, across the admittedly short length of the dining hall she had to drag the stone through, out the front door and entryway and finally left the stone at the stockpile.

The stone walls that she left behind she made sure to seal shut so there were no fissures or breaks, lest the ground water enter the storage room and start flooding her dungeon. She had not yet had to worry about that despite all the excavating she'd been ding, and she wasn't going to let it start now! As she excavated, she anchored a line of lightwisps to the ceiling, connecting it to the lightwisps she already had in place on the ceiling of the second level. As the lightwisps were connected by wire to her core, this meant she didn't have to worry about maintaining them, so she could just focus on excavating.

By the end of the day, the tunnel she’d excavated was three paces wide and eight paces deep. While a respectable space, the arching nature of the tunnel meant they wouldn’t be able to fill the whole space with jars and barrels, at least until she’d shaved more stone off the walls so that the arch the supported the ceiling was a bit higher. It had been a lot of stone, restoring her stockpile after it had been depleted by building the foundation and river-side walls of the sawmill.

A part of her was annoyed that Rian had told her about the need for storage now, rather than, say, around the time she was building the sawmill's foundation. She'd had to excavate the third level to get the stone for the sawmill, and it had been hard to get the stone up two flights of stairs!

The next day, the work continued. She began excavating tunnels at a right angle to her first tunnel, excavating in the direction away from the dining hall. Lori started by excavating just behind the remaining alcoves, and being careful to keep from getting too close and compromising the alcove's walls. Excavated for three or four paces, she then began to excavate another right angled tunnel that ran parallel to the first. Once the second tunnel was also excavated to three or four paces deep, Lori then carefully removed stone from the wall separating the two tunnels, digging through like she was making another tunnel. The resulting opening resulted in the three tunnels combining to become a room large room with a stone support pillar in the middle of it, the curving tunnel ceiling becoming supporting arches.

With a reasonably large room in place, Lori took the time to even out the floor. It was of course for a perfectly practical reason! If the floor was too uneven, their jars and barrels wouldn't be able to stand properly, making them susceptible to tipping over, which would be a hazard!

Using her stone shaping tool—which she noticed was coming a little loose, the plank wobbling slightly on the stave—she softened the stone floor and leveled it by the simple expedient of dragging the edge of the plank across the softened stone of the floor. The result was… tolerable. It was far better than how uneven it had been from her excavating—try as she might, she could not claim in a flat plane, and could barely do a straight line—but not perfectlyflat. Well, the floor was flat enough now, so she'd leave it at that. The last thing she did was extending the line of lightwisps so that it went around the room, ensuring there were no dark spots.

The rest of the first tunnel remained, a two pace-deep alcove that she could continue excavating if she needed to expand the storage room or needed more raw material. Both were likely, and soon.

Satisfied with a job well done, Lori let out a sigh of relief, and turned to go to the carpenters to see if she could have her stone-shaping tool fixed.

…

After finding the carpenters' alcoves empty, no doubt because they were assisting in the harvest, Lori decided to just head to her room to rest.