Oliver stretched, his limbs and magic sore from sleeping out in the open again.

He'd vaguely thought that the background turbulence of being surrounded by endless Nature had somewhat faded into the background for him, and while that wasn't entirely false, he was discovering that it had more to do with him spending most of his time inside wards designed to blunt that than anything else.

He could get respite thanks to the Staff of the New World, but he hadn't been able to set up a good workshop yet and thus was limited to simply [Scrollcast]ing protection spells around him, which he couldn't maintain while trying to cast anything else, or even if he needed to focus too much on anything else.

There was a part of him that wondered if he should set up something more permanent, but doing so would require a fair bit of extra work, and that would delay how long this trip would take... and the wards he had back at Shelter were really robust, something quick wouldn't be nearly as good.

Well, he had his plans, and it looked like Henrietta was coming over to talk to him. Maybe she'd have updates for him, whether he should be bothering to make a sleeping shelter of some kind. He retrieved some scalewolf jerky from their supplies and began idly chewing at it as he waited. It tasted awful, but it was food.

"Did you sleep alright?" The [Master Inkscribe] asked, and Oliver shrugged.

"I've had better."

"Understandable. Hopefully, we won't need to rough it much longer. Your brick molds, are you in a good place to pause them?"

He'd just woken up, he wasn't exactly in the middle of anything. Heck, they already were paused, so why was she asking? He nodded anyway, momentarily distracted by a stringy piece of meat getting stuck in his teeth and demanding immediate attention.

"Excellent. Before you resume that, I want you to assist Alyssa with getting the brick kiln started. I know you said there was some foundational work you'd need to do, and making sure she knows what's she's doing will be paramount. I want to spend today getting my inklings created, so Alyssa needs to be able to get going on her next task."

Oliver mutely shrugged in agreement, then swallowed down his tough morsel of food. "Sure, where's Alyssa now?"

"Where we're putting the kiln," Henrietta answered, and Oliver suddenly flushed as he realized the obvious answer, "Just a bit behind that outcropping."

"I know, I know," he waved off.

First Tower's kiln was going to be easily large enough to stand up inside, built up against the rocks, and with a sort-of door that was really just going to be a large-ish slab of clay not attached to the rest of it, but with a few places to hold onto such that it could be removed or replaced as needed. Though admittedly, the door would be added last, cut out of the dome-shaped furnace after the rest of the structure was all made.

Allowances would be made for airflow, of course, but by and large the area would be sealed, and should be able to hold hundreds of bricks for a single firing. Considering that particular step would be the hard bottleneck of the entire brick-making operation, it had to be large, but there was enough clay around here that it wouldn't be an issue. With his Staff of the New World, he was able to quite easily create a foundation for the whole creation - sketching out a magic circle and imprinting a couple of runes that would also help cover for any errors in the physical construction as well as designating the kiln as enough of a machine that the bricks would be properly Technological in nature by the end.

That didn't end up taking nearly as long as he was expecting, though he did appreciate the very brief and very light amount of cover it provided from the eternal sandstorm that was Nature. Still, he had other things to work on. He'd rejoin Alyssa in working on it by the time the actual dome part needed to be made, but at least she'd be close enough that she could yell if there was a problem.

With that particular obligation attended to, Oliver returned to working with his brick molds. Fortunately, his workspace hadn't been too disturbed since he'd been working on it last, with just vague evidence of various animals coming through and knocking some of his piles around. But it didn't look like anything actually substantial had been disturbed, so Oliver was able to quickly pick up where he'd left off.

For each half-log, Oliver chiseled two notches. The short sticks all got one notch on the bottom, one notch on the top, and each half of the longer pieces of wood had them both on the same side.

Once he had his first set ready – something that took inordinately long for the simplicity of the task, and rewarded him with a very annoying splinter alongside several new nicks in his hands – Oliver put them together to create a proper brick mold.

It was both simple and complex at the same time. It didn't have anything on the bottom, so the bricks it produced would be rough on one side, but the top would be leveled and flattened and the sides were held in place by the mold. The joints were a little loose, so they'd be slightly different sizes. But if it worked, and he held his breath when he tested it, then he could pour wet clay in and…

Yes!

Okay, so if the clay was too wet, then it would leak out the bottom in the gaps between the wood and the stone, but if it was wet enough to pour, but not too much wetter than that, only a tiny amount would seep out through the gaps, still maintaining the overall brick shape. Then, he took one of his spare pieces of wood – one where the partner had splintered uselessly – he could flatten out the top and… yep!

The form could be lifted up all in one piece if he gripped it by one of the longer sides, or he could easily disassemble it by lifting it from the other side, in case the wood got stuck while the clay was drying.

He didn't test that particular feature at the moment though, because to do that would to mess up the test for how long the clay would need to sit before the mold could be removed. While the kiln was the hardest upper limit for how many bricks could be produced in a day, the molds were the other limit, because those were the only two phases with capacity requirements. The kiln obviously could only fit so many bricks in it per firing, but he needed one mold per brick for however long it took this clay to dry from 'pourable' to 'self-supporting.'

So, he kept working.

It had been a while since he'd needed to do so much repetitive work, and Oliver was rediscovering why he didn't like it. All of the actual thinking work had already been done, and it wasn't time to actually put everything into practice, he just needed to process the materials he'd need for the end product. He could do it, of course, he was a trained artificer and that meant a, if he could boast to himself, fairly broad scope of tool mastery, but that didn't make it any more enjoyable.

Even when he was in school, learning how to do something by hand meant only doing it once or twice to prove mastery and to check off the 'I can do this' box for situations where all other options wouldn't work. Usually, he'd be able to utilize one of countless tools designed over the years to eliminate this selfsame repetitive drudgery.

Heck, he was starting from a much more basic level, needing to refine one of the actual ingredients into a usable state, rather than just buying (or being given) the appropriate-quality materials for whatever project he was working on.

A power saw would make this so much easier. An Orbital Carving Array would make this trivial – and be complete overkill, but he didn't care at this point. Heck, any kind of saw that was more than ten centimeters long and didn't bend in half every time he put pressure on it the wrong way would make this almost pleasant. Even that he might have been willing to put up with had it not been such a tremendous pain to make in the first place… there were better uses of copper.

But he didn't have any of those tools, and so here he was. His hatchet had dulled and bent over twice, but he'd used a couple of rocks to bring it back to functionality, keeping it as his primary tool at this point, though he was using it more as a chisel than any kind of axe.

Still, he kept at it as much as he feasibly could, even as the hours dragged on and his mind began to wander.

Man, I really hope that whatever magic this place has is going to be worth it. I'm going to be so mad if I devote however many years of my life to this place, half of it just getting me back to the levels I had before the Jump, only to end up going home with just normal payment.

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Magic was an emergent phenomenon, much like life, and as such the same basic elements could result in drastically different spell-systems across the multiverse. Henrietta's world had been about creativity and imagination, but he'd heard of others which granted intuitive control over a handful of elements, those which helped someone align themselves with a fundamental concept of reality, more than a handful with native and distinct Systems, even one which had an entirely new element to work with. And because of the way the Jump exposed and integrated the new magic within them, it only added to their existing System, for exponentially more power and utility when combined.

Sure, the individual magic types eventually made their way into the wider System... but the skills based on linked world's magics were like taxidermied animals. Incredible to look at, very impressive craftsmanship, but ultimately dead and flat in comparison to what the 'original' magic could do. Perhaps one day, the System would expand to transplant entire magical types in much the same way it could copy over spells and magical knacks... but that day was a very, very long ways away. It had been made to democratize a singular type of magic, and he knew very well the kinds of fundamental rework that would be necessary to turn the entire discipline of Ferrothurgy or cramming the mechanisms of Updrafts into a skill.

Far better to get ahead of the curve and-

A sharp pain dragged his attention back to the here and now as he accidentally bludgeoned his finger. He sucked in a sharp breath, then slowly released it to release the tension from the minor injury. It was just a minorly bruised finger, and it wasn't even as bad as hitting it with a hammer.

The nice thing was, he had a bit of a routine by now, so things were going quickly. A couple of solid thwacks would create an initial v-shaped cut into the wood, and then a bit of cleanup to make it squarer and easier to slot together. Were he not doing it over a thousand times, it wouldn't be bad. But each one still took him a couple minutes, and that added up quickly.

While he waited for his finger to stop throbbing, Oliver looked around the area a bit more. Henrietta was near the riverbank, sitting cross-legged and meditating intensely, with Alyssa still working on piling up clay for the kiln.

Neither looked like they needed much help, so with Oliver's finger mostly feeling normal, he returned to his form creation. Ironically, this was something that could really stand to be done with automation, but getting Henrietta to make an inkling for it would just be a waste of time. Not that it mattered, because the minor injury had flipped something in Oliver's attention such that he could stay focused just the right amount on his current task, such that the rest of the construction passed quickly and uneventfully.

When he finally finished, Oliver nearly doubled over as his legs tried to give out from underneath him as he stood, and only narrowly avoided faceplanting into the rocky ground. He'd been sitting on rough ground for too long, apparently, and sore muscles combined with pins and needles into something that sent him staggering. The lunges and small relocations to make sure he could still reach his materials wasn't enough to keep his body limber.

He stretched, mostly just glad to be done, and meandered over to where Alyssa kept slathering clay into a dome that never stood any chance of supporting itself, and as such kept collapsing.

"You know," he smiled, "It would be better if you put clay on the kiln, rather than yourself."

She responded with a rude gesture, but Oliver gambled that it was all in good fun as he pressed on. "So wait, was that your hand making those shapes, or is that just how much is stuck on you at this point?"

"Laugh it up, Oliver. Do you want me to make fun of you when you're working?"

"I mean, if I ever look more like a mud elemental than a human, I think I'd deserve it. Seriously, are you picking up twice as much clay as you're putting down?"

"Are you going to help or just snipe at me? This isn't as easy as you made it look."

Oliver shrugged, "How would you want me to help? I don't want to get in your way, I think you've had enough of that just from the earth around you."

"Don't help, then."

"What? I'm just saying that-"

"Smith!" Henrietta's voice interrupted him again, and Oliver cut himself off.

"Sorry?" He didn't think his jokes were so extreme. "Anyway, what do you want my help with? Seriously, this time."

"How do I do this?" Alyssa asked, lifting up a handful of clay. "It keeps falling."

"That stuff is a bit wet for what you want," he explained, "When you were lower, it didn't matter as much because the walls could slump and just reinforce themselves. But now that you're getting to the point where you want to curve it over, you'll want something more self-supporting. You might remember the smelter used reeds as a structure?"

Alyssa nodded. "Is that what we should do here? I tried-"

"No," Oliver shook his head, "It's too big for that to be a viable strategy. What we want to do instead is to get some firmer clay, like this see? And then roll it up like so, and now we can put this on top of what you had, and now we can layer that up with each layer being slightly smaller than the one before it. That won't work forever, though, and at that point we can get some of the reeds and use them to prop it up from the inside, like this. Now, that might also eventually get too tenuous, and if that happens, then we can call it for the day and let it dry out some before we continue."

"Aren't you supposed to do everything in one go? I don't remember much about making pottery, but I took one weekend course years ago and I think I remember that being a thing."

"Normally, yes." Oliver shrugged, "But that's when you care a lot about it being one cohesive item, which you would for most hobby work. Something like this, though, it just matters that it holds the heat in, and if it's sort-of two different pieces incompletely joined, it's irrelevant. We do want to smooth out the different layers, though. Stacked tubes don't cohere very well, but smearing it out does…."

It took three more days before the brick-making facility of First Tower was up and running, between testing and fixing non-obvious problems, but considering how long it took humanity to make their first fully-automated factory, measured from when humans first tamed fire of course, Oliver thought they were doing pretty well for themselves.

The first stage of the operation was an inkling Henrietta had made from a 'notter', an otter-like creature with spindly, webbed hands and feet. It was dexterous enough to hold a clay bowl between its paws while it dove beneath the river's surface, scooped up a bunch of very wet-but-pliable clay from the bottom, and then climb out of the water without spilling any.

From there, it brought its harvest to the first drying station, where Oliver's molds were laid out on every mostly-flat surface available. The wet mud was poured into those, excess water draining away while the clay was mostly caught by the flat sides of split wood. There, they sat for about a day and a half before the second inkling, a different kind of pseudowyvern with more prehensile wings than the coastal type, removed the form – rebuilding it if needed – and carried it to a small-but-growing pile of dry but not fired bricks near the kiln. Those bricks would then wait… ideally a couple of weeks, but during testing it was just a day. That meant they broke a lot more bricks, but it was fine. This was just proof-of-concept, and the wait time would inherently increase as the backlog grew.

Every so often, that same inkling would remove the 'door' from the kiln, really just a square of the wall roughly a meter to a side, and place it in a hole in the floor to block where the copper fire-ring sat. Once the kiln was cool enough to not damage the inkling, it would unload the hundreds of bricks stacked inside and place them in a final pile of actually finished bricks. When the kiln was emptied, it would be refilled with unfired bricks and the door would be returned to its original position, starting the two-day-long firing of said bricks.

Right now, most of the bricks that were being made cracked in half or outright exploded, something that meant the stacks of bricks inside the kiln (arranged in such a way to allow almost complete airflow around each of them while maximizing capacity) sometimes toppled over, when too many bricks in a single layer failed… but it was definitely totally alright. That was just because of there being too much water still trapped in the clay, which wouldn't be an issue forever.

The failed bricks went in a different pile, which could be later ground up to act as a filler and strengthener for future clay products, but they didn't yet have the sophistication needed in their setup to allow for grog additions.

The kiln was about as sophisticated as they could make it, and even that was limited to having a channel entirely underneath the primary furnace area as a way for the fire enchantment to get continual fresh air without needing a chimney at the top of the kiln. Really, it was constructed a bit like a hot-air balloon, with the fire being entirely underneath the 'main' portion of the kiln, and just a hole to the side and near the front allowing the heated air inside. There was a corresponding hole in the far side as well, but it was likewise at the bottom and thus would only let out the coolest air, theoretically.

There were a lot more question marks in the overall function as to how precisely and effectively the entire setup would work, but even their current 5% success rate would add up over time, especially given Oliver knew that the rate would innately go up as the bricks were given more time to dry before firing.

"Good job, both of you," Henrietta congratulated them, as they stood atop the First Tower spire, as Oliver wrapped up a bit of prepwork for the tower's eventual foundation. He was in a good mood, because it looked like just three to five meters would be plenty tall for the tower, once he got the First Flame properly installed. "We've done good work here. Now, let's head back to the shelter. There's a lot more yet to be done."

"Yeah," Alyssa agreed, then shaded her eyes, "I have to ask though, does that look close to our shelter to you?"

Oliver turned, then took a step back at the sight. A column of golden light, lined with blue-green brilliance, pierced the very heavens, a wickedly potent wind tearing at the trees around it, visible from even here.

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