"I'll need a little more to go on than 'wood for a house'", said Ben, owner of the Dawnhold lumber yard, wearing a wry smile. "At least tell me what sort of colour you're looking for?"

"I don't know. I thought wood for a house was, well, wood. What is it normally? No, wait, never mind. Give me a second."

ding
New skill acquired: [Advanced Carpentry]

I closed my eyes and focused on the new knowledge trickling into my brain. Alas, what the knowledge told me was that in the face of System skills, choice of wood didn't actually matter all that much. I could build the place out of cork and it would stay upright. No wonder he only asked about colour, and didn't start going on about hardwood versus softwood, or ask to see my designs.

"Fine. Let's go with spruce to start with. Maybe we'll grab something else for detailing and decoration later."

My new skill wasn't at a high level, and spruce should be easier to work with than most of the other options.

Ha. I knew what spruce was! That certainly wasn't true two minutes ago.

"Did I just miss something?" asked Ben, not being privy to my decision-making process.

"I bought [Advanced Carpentry]."

"Ah. I see... Wait. Aren't you a delver?"

"Not today," I replied with a shrug.

"Okay, and how much do you need?" he asked, refraining from questioning it any further.

I needed to pause again, not getting any input from [Advanced Carpentry] and lacking any sort of maths skill. "Umm... lots?"

"Just show me the plans," said Ben, the wry smile making a return.

I showed him my plans and watched his smile fade as his expression switched to a very careful sort of blank.

"And now the actual plans?" he tried. "Rather than a kid's scribble?"

"Sorry. They're the best we've got."

He drummed his fingers against his thigh as he continued to stare at my sketches. They weren't that bad, were they?

"What's a bouncy room?" he muttered, before shaking his head. "You're planning to build it yourself? To do all the work yourself?"

"As far as I can, yes. Cluma will help, but she doesn't have crafting skills."

Ben twitched at the name, his eyes darting around as if he was expecting a surprise hug to come from any direction. Unbeknownst to him, he was completely safe; Cluma had been discharged from hospital, but I'd teleported her to the Emerald Nest, so she could meet up with her friends there. Dawnhold was free of her very special brand of fear for the day.

"Okay then. I'll prepare beams, planks and boards for you, the minimum I know you'll need, and you can cut them to size on site and come back here once you run out and have a better idea of how much more it'll take to finish up."

"Sounds good to me. Sorry, I don't really know what I'm doing here."

"I can tell. This is... not the normal procedure for constructing houses."

Yay, he didn't use the word 'weird'. Progress.

"I'll have that ready for you by tomorrow," he continued. "How would you like it delivered, and where to?"

I looked around the neat, tidy and above all empty yard. Yes, there were a few tree trunks up against one fence, but I saw nothing that could be considered merchandise. How would he prepare that by tomorrow? Did he have a warehouse somewhere?

No, of course not. He had skills. He was a [Carpenter] himself, and [Eye of Judgement] confirmed he had [Season Wood] and [Cut Wood]. He could doubtless turn a tree trunk into building materials in minutes.

"It's going to the middle of nowhere, so I'll do the transporting with [Item Box]."

"Yeah. Definitely not normal. I wish all my clients brought spatial mages with them. I'll knock a couple of silver off the price, though, since you're saving me the delivery."

"Thanks," I said politely, slightly surprised. In little ways like that, the Law still caught me out sometimes. A merchant offering of their own accord to reduce a price below what I expected and was willing to pay would never happen on Earth.

That was the most obvious of the materials sorted, but I still needed more. Nails, for a start, but that sort of thing I could make myself, if I had a forge. A full set of blacksmithing equipment at short notice was far outside of what I could find at Dawnhold, so that order went in at Synklisi. Furnishings could wait until the shell was done. That just left my final task of the day; finding a place for it.

Given that Cluma wanted visitors and my powers of teleportation were limited, it couldn't be too far from town. On the other hand, I wanted it to be far enough away that there was no danger of expansion bringing the town or surrounding fields into view in my lifetime.

Since some of those visitors were likely to be my family, building it along the track that led back to the village seemed like a sensible idea, so I started the trek west from Dawnhold. With the trail being as subtle as it was, combined with my teleportation and the fact I didn't live in the village any more, I'd have long since forgotten the way without my semi-regular trips bringing Darren to the institute. Thankfully, the regular refresh of my System-boosted memory let me follow the little-used route.

I picked out a flat area at about the midpoint, trekked back from the trail slightly, and started marking out a plot. I didn't even need to register it. Land out here wasn't owned, so I could just take what I wanted. As long as I was actually using it, no-one would complain.

More than likely, no-one would complain even if I wasn't, being unable to comprehend me being dishonest.

The next step was levelling the plot. Even if it was mostly flat, it wasn't completely so, and it would be a few hours' work with a shovel to even it out. Assuming I could overcome such issues as not being able to tell when it was completely even. And what was I supposed to do about foundations? My parents' shack back in the village certainly didn't have any, being little more than a wooden box placed on top of the ground. At most, there were a few stakes driven into the soil. Would that work for something bigger, with multiple floors? Would I be better off building it on rock? The stone buildings of Dawnhold weren't, but I'd never looked at what they actually did.

What crafting skill covered digging, anyway? Oh heck, it was farming, wasn't it? The things I would do just to level a class faster...

ding
New skill obtained: [Advanced Farming]

Still no title upgrade. Best case, it needed nine or ten. Worst case, it needed the support skills too, or didn't exist at all.

I took a fresh look at my plot, applying my new knowledge, and did my best to ignore the skill's suggestion that I should be planting clover to improve the heavy clay soil's farming prospects. Alas, it didn't help me judge flatness. And, double alas, it helpfully informed me that the clay soil would expand and contract significantly when it got wet or dried out, which wouldn't do anything built on top of it any good.

The village was on loam. When I'd last questioned why it was so far from Dawnhold, the answer was that it marked the border of the new territory, but that only answered my question without explaining exactly why the particular location had been picked. The loam wasn't just good for crops. It was also good for ensuring that floors didn't crack.

Skills continued to be weird. Two minutes ago, I hadn't known the properties of different types of soil any better than I'd known the properties of varieties of wood, and yet here I was, suddenly worried about clay content.

Not that it was that important. With the unphysical reinforcement granted to anything made with the aid of a skill, I could still make it work. Heck, digging with the aid of [Advanced Farming] would even improve the soil. Mostly by making it more fertile, rather than more suitable for building on, but I'd get some improvement as a side effect.

I spent an hour levelling a patch of ground to the best of my ability, as well as removing grass and the occasional rock or bush. I'd need to get Cluma to go over the place with [Minor Harm] to kill off the roots before I put anything down on top of it. I still wasn't convinced, though. If it wasn't completely flat, I'd just be storing up issues for later. And even if it was now, it might change its mind in a few weeks' time, as the summer sun dried it up.

Would looking at examples on my own damage my levelling speed as badly as asking for help? I jumped back to Dawnhold and discovered to my surprise that the buildings had proper foundations, dug twenty to thirty centimetres into the ground. I'd seen buildings under construction on Earth, and I was certain they were far deeper, but that could have been either Earthen building regulations or the influence of skills meaning lesser foundations would work just as well here.

This world would be seriously screwed if the System ever shut down, and the influence of skills required its constant input. Every building in Dawnhold would probably collapse in the next storm. And I didn't even want to think what it would do to the Obsidian Spires, where the entire settlement was built vertically. Would gravity reassert itself, sending the entire city crashing to the ground? Or was the entire construct independent of the System?

Now that I thought about it, why should I be surprised at Dawnhold's structures having foundations? Concrete wasn't a new invention, was it? I was certain Romans had it, and I was fairly sure variants existed since long before them. It wasn't hard to make, and didn't require exotic ingredients. They probably had it here. And that would solve my issues with levelling the ground nicely. Now I wanted [Advanced Masonry] too...

A bit more research, and I discovered that while ready-mixed concrete wasn't a thing, I could indeed buy barrels of dry cement, to be transported where needed and mixed with water and other barrels of sand and stone. I dumped a few in my [Item Box], before jumping back and digging my hole significantly deeper. Of course, the greatly increased volume I was shifting meant that it was more than a day's work.

And shouldn't I be measuring things, to make sure the foundations matched the size of the building? And that corners were square? I certainly hadn't bothered when I'd built the extension for my parent's shack. I wasn't even sure what tools builders here used to measure things. Calling this building job unprofessional was like calling the sun a little bright, or Cluma a little clingy.

Again, it didn't really matter. I'd make the foundations, then cut the wood to match whatever size they were. As long as everything was approximately correct, it would all work out. Probably. And if it didn't, I could just demolish everything and start again. It would cost time and money, but I had enough of each, and I was perfectly happy to convert money into skill levels.

With the work for the day done, and the thought of how screwed this world would be without the System, I spent the remaining hour until time came to collect Cluma at the ark. Or rather, outside the ark. The doors remained resolutely closed, and neither my presence nor begging elicited any response. I wasn't permitted entry. I couldn't cut new children born on Earth from the System.

That was... a problem. Not an immediate one, and one I'd already suspected would crop up, but still a problem. How long until anyone noticed? What could I do in the meantime? Would one of the dragons have more luck gaining access?

Was it even a problem? Would it make Earth better? And even if not, wasn't it their fault for messing around with interdimensional portals in the first place? And if I tried my best and still couldn't do anything about it, what reason did I have to feel guilty? There were plenty of layers of justification I could give myself for not caring.

None of them worked. At least, not perfectly. I still cared, and I was still worried, but I wasn't going to let it consume me. I'd keep trying. And if Earth asked me to, I might try more drastic measures. Maybe. I wasn't going to put this world at risk to bail them out.

Putting the issue aside, I picked up Cluma from the Emerald Nest, who stared at my day's work with a look of bemusement.

"You have absolutely no clue whatsoever what you're doing, do you?" she accurately observed.

"I have lots of clues, thank you very much. I'm just not entirely certain how they all fit together."

"That's nice. Just... Please don't sell our home in Dawnhold," she asked politely, giving me consolatory hugs. "We're probably going to need it."