Three hours later, I had a stack of planks. I had split the thickest branches along the grain, using the stylus to follow the lines where the fibers were willing to separate, then densified each piece as I had the first branch.
The result was far from perfect. Some planks were warped because the Ether hadn't circulated evenly through them, and the stresses had distorted the wood as it dried. Others were too fragile where I had pushed the redistribution too far, to the point that the fibers had disintegrated in places. But most of them held up.
I stacked them against a flat rock and sat cross-legged in front of them. Now came the complicated part: joining them together without nails, without rope, using nothing but Ether.
I took two planks and placed them at right angles to each other. The idea was simple: create bridges between the fibers of the two pieces, Ether bonds that would mimic the bonds within a continuous material. In theory, it should hold.
I placed the tip of the stylus at the joint and searched for the points where Ether stagnated in each plank, the old channels of dead sap, the microfractures invisible to the naked eye but glaringly obvious to my perception. Then I drew them together through intention alone. The Ether in the first plank trembled, as if surprised, then began to flow toward the second along the path I was tracing, a tiny, fragile bridge between two masses of cellulose and lignin. The filaments stretched, hesitated, and connected.
A sharp click sounded in my head, nothing like an actual sound, more like two musical notes falling perfectly into harmony.
I opened my eyes. The planks were now linked at a joint where Ether flowed in a loop between the two pieces, holding them together through an invisible tension. I pushed against them with my fingertips. They held.
“Now that's a top-notch floor.”
The cave floor was uneven, with bumps here, hollows there, and stones jutting through the surface. I spent the afternoon roughly leveling it, then began joining the planks, one by one, bridge by bridge. Each connection took an increasing mental toll, like a muscle I was exhausting without mercy. By the tenth plank, I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my temples. I sat down in the middle of the worksite, closed my eyes, and the notification appeared without my asking for it:
[Atomic Precision Lv. 2: +15% modification stability]
[XP: +30 (Ingenious System: Vascular Biomimicry)]
I groaned.
“Now I understand why my head hurts.”
It took another two hours to finish. The floor formed a three-by-three-meter square, raised a few centimeters on hastily cut stone supports. I ran a hand over its smooth, warm surface. I tapped it with my fingertips, and the sound came back dull and solid.
“Sound insulation: check.”
I laid my palm flat against it. The warmth from my hand spread slowly through the wood without escaping into the cold ground beneath.
“Thermal insulation: check, too.”
I struggled to my feet, my legs trembling, and stepped back to inspect my work. In the torchlight, the floor glowed faintly, just enough to make out the Ether branches running between the planks like veins beneath pale skin. Beneath it, the stone supports left a gap of a few centimeters where cold air still lingered, and here and there, gaps betrayed the bridges I had miscalculated. But it would do for quite a while.
I rubbed my temples. In my quantum-wizard euphoria, I was missing something. The cave was all very well as an emergency shelter, a refuge. But it wasn't where I lived.
I went outside, nearly tripping over the threshold, and the icy air hit me like a sledgehammer. The wind howled between the trees, carrying dead leaves and that acrid smell of frozen earth that heralded winter.
Holy fucking shit.
My cabin stood there, pressed against the cliff like an old, mangy dog huddling against its owner. Its poorly fitted walls of rough timber let in drafts that whistled between the planks. The roof, made of branches and dried earth, threatened to fly off in the first serious gust. I placed a hand on the nearest wall: the wood was damp, almost spongy in places, and the Ether filaments churned within it without managing to seal a thing.
Insulation: zero. Weatherproofing: negative. Comfort: nonexistent.
I had spent three days healing a mountain and an afternoon laying a wooden floor in a cave while the room I slept in was falling apart. My new priorities presented themselves: separate the living room from the cave so the cold from deep inside couldn't rise into my living space; insulate the walls, roof, and floor; reinforce the whole thing, because a winter storm here could kill me very quickly if the cabin gave way in the middle of it.
I went back inside, my feet crushing scattered strands of straw on the earthen floor. The living room reeked of cold ash. The hearth, dug straight into the ground, was a miserable black hole surrounded by poorly fitted stones that let out more smoke than they contained.
“First things first: the partition.”
The cave and living room formed a single continuous space, an irregular rectangle carved into the rock and extended by the wooden walls. I needed to divide it in two without rebuilding everything. The planks would be driven vertically into the ground, follow the rough rock wall on one side, and meet the living room ceiling at the top, which I had already reinforced with salvaged beams and joints of dried clay.
I ran my fingers along the joint between rock and wood. At that precise spot, the Ether swirled, wavering between the stone, stable and predictable, and the wood, which still breathed despite weeks of drying. An ordinary partition would rot there in a single winter.
“I need two insulating layers.”
The first, thick one would be anchored in the ground and braced against the rock wall, its fibers reinforced with Ether against the moisture rising from below. For the second, thinner layer, my gaze fell on the quartz shards I had piled near the hearth, offcuts from my carving and fragments collected from the stream. They glimmered faintly in the gloom. If I could embed them in the wood, perhaps they would hold the Ether at the surface instead of letting it escape, and the wall would breathe just enough not to rot and, who knew, might last for years without showing any signs of weakness.
Then came the most urgent weak point to deal with: the living room's opening to the outside. I needed a sturdier door than a few wobbly planks propped in place. A properly massive, seriously insulated door that wouldn't blow away in the middle of winter, because a door torn off by a storm would turn a refuge into a freezing hell in no time.
I stood up and contemplated the future doorway, hands on my hips.
“Right. First problem: the hinges.”
I had neither metal nor a forge.