While creating a new body for Novi, we reviewed the list of materials and selected a few I wanted to use, then bookmarked them. We ultimately decided to go with two Trivial materials and one Very Easy one.

If the Very Easy material didn't work out, that would be fine. I was expecting a large ramp-up in difficulty after Glacivein Muscles.

Before getting into anything that involved Winter, I was going to start with one that had appeared the last time I was making things.

[Whisperash Bark] Material Components: Runaspriggan Flesh + Ashenflare Leaf Process: Draincasting + Interlinking Graftfusion Mana Requirements: Nature + Cold / Nature + Sound Features: High Contact Serenity / Presence Dampening

Possible Substitution Found:

Nature + Cold may be replaced with Nature aligned with Winter for a slightly altered result. Changes to material properties cannot be calculated until the result has been consumed.

The fact that using Winter would likely improve it even further was a factor in my decision to choose this one. Several other materials also listed the same message. Not always ones with Cold Mana requirements, surprisingly, Kinetic Mana could also be replaced.

While it would be useful to use as a sail, I had also just wanted something with higher Contact Serenity because it would let me do some interesting things once I had enough Grace. Presence dampening would also be useful. Not all of us had Novi's ability to turn invisible.

Even if she sometimes had performance issues with that feature.

"Hey! That's not my fault! It had to do with my Strand. Something related to wet snow and tracks, I'm not quite sure." Novi complained, shredding apart the temporary fibres I had put in place to hold her skull together. Her bottom teeth hung limply from her head.

"Stop moving, I'm not done with your jaw," I replied, and pinched her mouth shut. The detailwork was a lot trickier than just shoving a ton of Mana into a problem like what I did to build the house.

[Rude, at least I don't have a weird hatred for flesh]

I blinked. That wasn't a System message, nor was it Novi transferring her memories to me because I could tell when she was doing that. Instead, it felt like I was recalling my own memory, despite it clearly having a different flavour. Her memories were always tinged with warmth, so I knew it was hers.

Is that how she reads my thoughts? That would explain why she isn't reacting to what I was thinking right now, if she could only read flashes. I wasn't sure how to replicate that happenstance, so I just filed it away as something to think about later.

Later probably meant never, given what she had just thought. But I wouldn't ever admit that to myself.

Finishing up, I let go and patted her on the head, "Alright, you're good."

She nuzzled into my hand, and I drew it back as quickly as if I had touched a hot stove while still human.

While she pouted at me, I brought up the instructions. Whisperash was a little bit trickier to form than Glacivein had been. Since the process wasn't just blending two materials and then freezing the mixture in place.

Draincasting was the process of removing a property from a material through a deconstructive mixture of Mana. For this specific process, I had to forcefully remove the flare from the Ashenflare Leaf, leaving it as just an Ashen Leaf.

The alternative was waiting until it ran out of inherent Fire, but my Core estimated that would take over a million years. I didn't know why it even bothered to show the option to wait.

"Can you build a water tap for us?" I asked Novi, and she nodded, then her insect body began building a sink and faucet powered by Water Mana. "Sewage main goes out through the floor. Just have it dump everything on the ground under us, it's not like we're staying here for that long."

Both of her bodies turned to stare at me as if I had said the most obvious thing in the world.

I just shook my head and grew a Scorchbranch bucket in my hand, then walked down to the oceanfront.

Once there, I dipped my finger in the water and tasted it. It was salt water, which was good. If this were a freshwater sea, I would have been surprised. It was so clear I could see the bottom as if looking through a window, and that didn't usually happen with lakes.

With the bucket, I scooped up some seawater and then headed back up to the top of the bluffs.

Once inside the house, I grew a table out of Scorchbranch because it being Anti-conductive to Mana meant it wouldn't be damaged by the spillover of whatever reactions I needed to do on it.

Taking the same route as last time, I designed a hotplate out of the same material as the table. Instead of a Fire circuit with an adjustable temperature, I used Ashenflare Leaf as a perpetual heat source this time, as I didn't need a precise temperature. I just needed to boil the fuck out of it.

Then I put the bucket on the plate.

I needed brine, so I was going to be boiling off most of the water. It was a good thing we were next to the coast. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to get salt otherwise.

I made a note to start collecting alchemical ingredients. Simple non-magical reagents were apparently necessary to make some of the Very Easy materials. For the Easy ones, I pretty much always required reagents that sounded magical in nature, like Arcanic Glass. Where the hell was I supposed to get that?

Stolen novel; please report.

Maybe I could rob a merchant. Money existed, so merchants must as well, and what would merchants in Hell even be if they didn't carry magic reagents that one could conveniently steal?

It occurred to me at that moment that I might be a bit of a murder hobo.

No, that's a ridiculous notion.

After all, I had a house right here, so nobody could call me a hobo. However, I didn't disagree that the other part was still up for debate.

There was a chance that a Greenweaver Skill would allow me to substitute some of those reagent requirements. I didn't know what was waiting for me in that regard.

Next to the setup, I built a cube made entirely of Groveheart Root, coated it with Scorchbranch except for one tiny hole to prevent Mana bleedover, then filled it with a mixture of Fire and Air Mana. I stopped when the warning message claiming I only had ten percent of my Mana remaining appeared.

The combination should create Lightning Mana.

I shook the box roughly to ensure it was well mixed. The port sparked a bit, which meant it was actually functioning as intended. I wasn't sure what the exact ratio was supposed to be, but it was fine if there was leftover Fire or Air Mana in there.

If I had to use magic lightning to perform electrolysis, I would, Gods damn it. I needed to turn that brine into sodium hydroxide somehow, and this was the only way I could think of. The Graftfusion process required me to dissolve the plant matter first, which I could do with a strong base, and this was the only one I could remember how to make on short notice.

It was convenient that we wound up next to an ocean.

The one thing I was betting on here was that Lightning Mana would act on a chemical level like electricity. I was sixty percent sure that it would work as is. If it didn't, I had another solution, but it would be annoying to implement. I had no materials that could conduct actual electricity, only Mana.

I had to allow my Mana to regenerate at this point as I'd burned through it rapidly to build the building, and filling the battery took the last of it.

While keeping an eye on the boiling seawater, I turned to check how Novi was doing.

"How did you even manage to do that?" I asked, bewildered at the massive hole in the wall where the sink was supposed to go.

"You made the walls too thin, and it ripped once I added enough weight. I bet a strong gust of wind would blow the whole building over." Novi replied, "What did you think would happen?"

I had figured my Arcana Stat was relatively high for what it should be for my level, and since that was what determined how durable manifested materials were, it shouldn't be that bad. I knew it wouldn't be as durable as the stilts I placed underneath the building, but that was just because those were stronger than steel from Earth at this point.

I placed a hand on the wall and leaned against it slightly. Making sure I didn't push so as not to break it with my enhanced strength

My hand tore right through like it was paper.

"Oh," I muttered to myself.

Maybe I should have done more than shape the least amount of Mana I could into the shape of a one-room shack.

There was plenty of space to put up walls and create separate rooms, but I just didn't have the Mana to do so at the time. Also, we weren't going to stick around all that long. We had places to be, things to see, and people to kill.

Novi sighed, "We should probably make this place actually livable. Which means doing more than the absolute bare minimum."

I could tell there was something she wanted to say, but didn't. I chose not to push her on the subject. She'd bring it up when she was ready.

"Yeah, sorry, let me regenerate my Mana, then I'll fix it up. Maybe add a ritual or two to up the durability and make sure it stays upright." I replied.

She nodded and looked around the room, then started growing something using [New Growth] in one of the corners.

I turned to the water, and while I waited for most of it to boil off, I opened up the puzzle ring. I hadn't had a chance to just sit and play with it in a while. I was still stuck on the second level, but I was pretty sure I knew how to get past it.

The level was the same estate as the first puzzle. Except that instead of having to protect the manor's valuables and its staff, I was on the side of the thieves, looting the building.

I could issue very basic commands to the group of bandits. Very basic meant things like: 'stay together' or 'surround the building', nothing that would give me any kind of advantage in this level.

Not with the defenses in place. Since it was just copying the way I had defended the manor in the first level.

The interior of the manor was completely shrouded for me at the moment, but I knew it would have a ritual plastered somewhere inside of it. One designed to liquefy anyone who crossed the threshold without a domain node on their body.

Obviously, the node's sympathetic glyph would be randomized, so I couldn't just copy the passcode onto a ring and give one to every thief. I had to get creative and bypass the array through other means.

My 'Core' in the puzzle, the part of me that held Mana, could be placed anywhere around the manor, but couldn't be moved from the spot it was placed. Neither could any artificial Cores that I could make move. Which meant I couldn't just make a body immune to the domain's magical rot effect, walk it inside, and solve the puzzle in a couple of minutes.

The first idea I had involved using a second Domain anchored to something the thieves would carry. One that would fight against the other Domain to try and preserve the lives of the thieves.

My Strand would be fairly effective in this regard. I just had to figure out how to lean into it and read it like I do Nature. Since the Argent Bastion was so fundamentally different from Nature at a basal level, it was almost a different language when drawn as characters.

I had managed to understand them while in the Inkbound Vale, but I had no force of storytelling to help me out here. Even the memory of what I had written on my staff seemed to be conveniently missing.

Just as I was starting to touch on the cold, barren part of my mind, Novi decided to hop up on the table next to me.

"I think the brine is ready," she said, peering into the pot.

I took a peek and saw that there was barely any water left, and the salt was starting to precipitate out of it.

"Shit, fuck, how did that happen so quickly?"

Novi gave me an odd look while I pulled the pot off the heat in a panic, "You've been standing there for twenty minutes. I'd hardly call that quickly."

That didn't feel like twenty minutes. I had barely even started trying to feel the Strand when she interrupted me. Checking the time, she was right, it had been that long.

"I guess I was more sucked into the puzzle than I thought?"

"Oh! I was wondering what you were doing! You should have told me you started. I was looking forward to it," Novi said, while hopping in place.

"Well… I mean, I didn't really get anywhere, so we could start together if you want. I want to ensure that we can actually create the Whisperash first, though. I'm not sure if the chemical reaction will work or not, given I have no idea if the laws of physics are the same here."

Novi nodded and started growing a long, conductive cable covered in an anti-conductive coating, leading out the door. I made a shorter one from the end of the battery.

Once she had returned and placed her end in the pot, I did the same.

The Lightning Mana in the battery violently discharged all at once, causing the water to vaporize explosively. A cloud of steam was all that was left after we were done with it.

I let out a sigh. I probably should have expected Lightning Mana to act like Lightning, shouldn't I?

I looked to where the sink should have been and let out another sigh, slightly more weary this time. After pouring the damp salt out of the bucket, I went to get some more seawater.

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