The weeks had passed faster than I would have thought possible.
I sat on the threshold of my cabin, my legs stretched out in front of me, my notebook open on my knees. The icy autumn wind swept into the valley, kicking up swirls of dust between the rocks, and almost imperceptible strands of Ether clung to the particles of soil before dispersing into fleeting wisps of smoke.
Weeks spent surviving, cobbling together temporary solutions while promising myself I would understand them later. The cabin, built against the cliff, now extended the cave entrance with a room of timber and dry-stacked stone that I grandly called the living room. The vegetable garden was now providing food in abundance. The well never ran dry. But time was running out. Every morning, I woke with my breath steaming above my face, and winter no longer seemed like a distant threat.
It was time to move on to the next stage. I turned to a blank page and scrawled a title in capital letters, as though bigger letters could make the problems smaller:
“DIAGNOSIS – PHASE 1.”
Problem No. 1: Winter.
The cave was damp. Too damp: the air clung to my skin and clothes. I placed my hand against the stone wall behind me. It wasn't uniformly cold; some areas were icy, others lukewarm, depending on how the Ether circulated through them.
I sketched the whole structure, adding arrows to indicate the air currents and condensation points. The cabin retained some heat, but it couldn't breathe: moisture collected in the corners, ate away at the planks, and threatened the supplies I'd stockpiled there. I grimaced at the thought of the nuts and berries piled near the entrance, already covered in a thin white film. I needed a cellar. A proper cellar, dug into the bedrock and isolated from the rest, where air could circulate without bringing mold along with it.
But not just anywhere. If I understood what I was seeing, the lines of Ether winding through the stone like roots weren't all equivalent. Some areas were more stable, less permeable, and less noisy than others.
I wrote in the margin:
Find a stable Ether node → dig there.
Problem No. 2: No overall plan.
I looked up at the roof of branches and dried earth. It was holding, barely, and that was about all I could ask of it. Nothing had been planned. I'd piled one solution on top of another as the need arose, like a kid adding floors to a house of cards without worrying about its balance.
An upper floor would double the usable space, but the wood would rot faster in the damp unless I treated it: a touch of Ether in the beams, just enough to resist decay. I wrote in the margin:
Test Ether stabilization on wood → reduce deterioration.
A chimney next, and not just for the fire. Moisture stagnated because the air wasn't circulating. A central flue of polished stone would carry the smoke away, fresh air would enter through low openings, and natural convection would do the rest.
Storage lofts, finally. Two of them: one for dry goods—nuts, seeds, and tools—and the other for winter provisions, dried meat and herbs, separated from the rest by clay partitions reinforced with Ether against moisture.
I turned the page and sketched a plan. I no longer wanted a pile of makeshift fixes, but a cabin that functioned like an organism.
[ACTION PLAN]
Dig the cellar (stable Ether node → less moisture).
Raise the floor (insulate it from the damp ground).
Add an upper floor (Ether-treated beams).
Build the chimney (polished stone + ventilation ducts).
Set up the storage lofts (clay partitions + Ether).
[OBJECTIVE]
A house that breathes.
A house that lasts.
I closed the notebook and looked at the rock face.
“We start with the cellar.”
First, I had to find that stable node, and above all, not screw it up.
My fingers slid over the rock, tracing slow circles as if I were trying to read a forgotten language. I closed my eyes, not to concentrate, but to see better. The normal world, with its gray wall streaked with mica veins and the trembling shadows of my torch, overlapped with what I had begun to call the lattice, a meshwork through which silica and carbonate atoms ran. Some glowed more brightly, others went dark in sections, like a circuit with a bad connection.
I opened my eyes. With the necklace, I could perceive the lattice without getting a migraine; with the pocket-sized quartz fragment in my hand, I could make out its patterns. I needed to record them before they blurred, and above all, mark where they were.
I had prepared three pigments: a piece of charcoal stolen from the fire, a lump of red clay from the streambank, and a handful of leaves crushed in the bottom of a piece of bark, which produced a sickly green that was at least legible. I began drawing on the rock.
Black first, where the Ether flowed in steady, almost lazy undercurrents, through areas where the stone seemed to exchange something with the air. I pressed my palm against one of them and felt a dull vibration.
Red next, for the nodes and places where Ether accumulated, spinning around itself like water in a sink before plunging down a drain to somewhere I couldn't identify. They weren't hot to the touch, but they radiated a disorderly energy that made the hairs on my arms stand up. My instincts told me not to linger here. The scientist in me wanted to stick my fingers right into one and see what happened.
“Later.”
Green, finally, for the faults, those cracks in the lattice through which Ether escaped to the outside.
I took two steps back. My cave now looked like a patient hooked up to machines on every side, and I was the country doctor trying to work out what all those beeps meant without ever having gone to medical school.
“Let's assume these red nodes are congestion points. Like blood clots in a vein.”
I reached toward one of them, hesitated, then focused my will on the node.
Local adjustment of cohesion vectors…
Nothing.
I tightened my grip on the quartz fragment in my left hand until it made my head hurt. The red nodes flickered. This time, when my fingers brushed the stone, I felt a certain elasticity, matter ready to yield under pressure.
“Easy.”
I pushed, mentally, and the boom went off inside my head, not inside the rock. A blurry notification flashed through my mind like a badly synchronized subtitle:
[STRUCTURAL MODIFICATION] → Partial success (30% efficiency)
[LOCAL STABILIZATION] → +5 XP
[Level 5] → 65/900 XP (7%)
I jumped back, my fingers numb. Where I'd touched the wall, a thin black line now cut across the red, and the Ether filaments around it seemed less agitated. I placed my hand on the altered area. The stone was lukewarm, as though some pressure had been released.
“Ether osteopath. I should think about getting some business cards printed.”
Behind me came a faint clatter. I turned around. A piece of quartz the size of my fist had rolled to my feet. It hadn't been there before; I would have noticed. I picked it up. Inside, luminous capillaries glittered like liquid gold injected into the stone, and they moved, undulating slowly.
“Uh…”
I set it down and caught my breath, trying to make sense of what I'd just seen. I'd altered the rock, not by much, but enough to improve the flow of Ether in that spot. The mountain had reacted like a system in precarious equilibrium after I'd touched a sensitive point, like a player pulling a stick from a game of pick-up sticks.
I reopened my notebook and wrote:
“Day 47: Direct interaction with an Ether node (congestion type). Result: local stabilization + generation of a quartz block (to be analyzed). Hypothesis: green faults = natural evacuation routes. Red nodes = blockages to eliminate to balance the flow. Next step: map the entire eastern wall.”
I closed the notebook, my eyes fixed on the black scar in the rock.
“We'll take it slowly.”
Because if I could repair a mountain, where was the limit?