To get ready for Al's house project, I took out three sets of wood building spells. One I gave to Mahya, and the other I placed in Al's lab, right in the middle of his main work table. That was the most likely spot he would notice them first. Before learning them, I reread the descriptions.

Bind Timber For 50 mana, joins two wooden beams together seamlessly without nails or fasteners.

Swift Joinery For 50 mana, seamlessly connects wooden beams, planks, or logs as if expertly fitted together, reducing assembly time.

Rapid Framework Temporarily stabilizes wooden frames or scaffolding, preventing collapse and enabling faster construction. Mana cost depends on the structure's size and complexity.

Stacking Aid For 50 mana, causes bricks, stones, or wooden beams to hover slightly, making placement faster and more precise.

Mass Lift For 120 mana, raises multiple stones, beams, or planks at once, allowing workers to position them with ease. Mana cost scales with weight.

Auto Alignment For 80 mana, adjusts misaligned walls, floors, or frames, ensuring they are level and properly positioned without manual correction.

Going over the spells reminded me of the upgraded reinforcement spell I had, so I went to channel it into the house. Nothing happened. I started the spell and felt the first few units of mana leave my hands, but that was it. The flow stopped like someone had turned off a faucet, and there was no change in the house.

I poked the spell name on my Profile to see if I had missed something.

Perpetual Reinforcement

By channeling mana, continuously strengthens and fortifies a completed structure, enhancing durability, resistance to wear, weather, and physical impacts. The spell reinforces weak points, solidifies joints, and adapts dynamically to structural integrity. Unlike the original version, this spell no longer functions as a single cast, but instead consumes mana as long as it is sustained. While highly effective, the mana cost is extreme, making it impractical for most casters. Multiple casters can channel mana together to share the burden of reinforcement.

No, everything was as I remembered it. There was no mention that it was meant only for stone or anything like that. Standing there, scratching my head, didn't bring any insights. It was probably a block from the core, but that didn't make much sense either. I was the dungeon master, after all. I wanted to reinforce the house, told the core I was reinforcing the house, so what was the problem? After standing there for five minutes and looking at the house, I realized no answers were coming, and went back to studying the blueprints of the kitchen I hadn't learned yet.

In the afternoon, we went to see if the spells would work with an enchanted house. First, Mahya engraved the runes on two planks, then held them together at a ninety-degree angle while I cast the binding spell. Once the planks fused, I carefully balanced the V shape on its tip, and she crouched down to engrave the connecting runes right at the joint, adding the lines between them. I let the contraption drop to the ground and stepped back. Mahya joined me, brushing sawdust from her fingers.

"Everything looks fine," she said, tilting her head as she examined the runes. "But I wonder how we can check if the mana actually flows as intended."

"I can flow mana into the runes to see if it's flowing right," I offered.

She nodded. "Go ahead."

I sent a trickle of mana into the first rune. It flowed as intended, but some runes on the other side flared and burned out.

Both of us hummed and looked at the planks.

"I don't think it's the spell's fault," she said, crouching beside the wood. She pointed to the end of the plank where the last few runes had blackened. "Only the final runes in the sequence burned. The mana pooled here and had nowhere to go." She tapped the joined section with her finger. "This part worked great. The spell held perfectly, so we can definitely use it instead of nails. As long as the circuit is complete, the mana will keep flowing and won't pool like that again."

"Yeah, that's what I thought. So I'd call it a success."

She nodded with a smile as she dusted off her hands. "Yes, definitely."

I told Mahya my idea about the reinforcement spell and what had happened when I tried it. She tapped her chin, thinking it over for a moment.

"Maybe take out the core and then channel the spell?" she suggested, glancing up at me.

"Yeah, good idea."

Unfortunately, it didn't work. The result was exactly the same—the spell started and then cut off mid-flow.

"No go," I said with a sigh.

Mahya crossed her arms and stared at the house. "I think the house doesn't need additional reinforcement. It's already over-enchanted. Even without the core, the enchantments are still active because of the crystals and your upgrade with enhanced mana absorption." She turned to me, raising an eyebrow. "We might be looking at your house the wrong way."

"What way?"

She pointed at the structure. "I think we should stop treating it like a house and start treating it like one giant artifact. You wouldn't try casting spells on an artifact, right? I know I wouldn't. I'd be too afraid of damaging it."

"Yeah, you might be right," I admitted.

She smirked and gave me a playful nudge. "Of course I'm right. I'm a genius."

I chuckled and shook my head.

Al returned in the evening on the third day after he left.

I was barbecuing fish outside when he landed. "How did it go?" I asked, flipping a fillet over the flames.

"I shall tell you over dinner. At present, I am absolutely famished—I have been flying the entire day," he said, and headed toward the house.

When the table was set and Rue had his steak and crab in front of him, I tried again. "So? How did it go?"

Al took a sip of water before answering. "I found a refrigeration unit and a baking stove. However, we shall need to make a few adjustments. The refrigeration units available here lack a freezer compartment like you have, but I assumed that with Storage, it will not be an issue. For ice, I purchased a separate device that produces ice cubes that we will need to install."

He paused for a moment, then added, "I also have other news. The war is over."

Mahya blinked. "Who won?"

"No one. They signed an agreement to cease hostilities. From what I understand, such things occur here on a semi-regular basis. They fight, then sign an agreement, and eventually one side breaks it."

"Idiots," Mahya and I said at the same time, then exchanged a glance and grinned.

Al looked between us with a raised brow. "What has changed?"

Mahya shook her head. "Nothing."

I glanced at her, but she was pointedly looking away.

"We had a conversation and cleared the air," I said.

He looked at me, clearly waiting for more.

"You should talk with him too," I told her telepathically.

She gave a slight nod and turned to him. "We'll talk after dinner."

"Does the news regarding the war affect our plans for my house?" Al asked, setting down his fork.

The three of us glanced around the table, making eye contact in turn.

"I don't think so?" I said, not fully sure.

Mahya nodded. "Yeah. We promised to help with the house, and this place is as good as any." She gestured around with a flick of her hand. "Forget that. This place is perfect. Nice weather, solid mana levels for regeneration, and no one around to spy on us. I don't see a reason to move."

She looked between us. "What about you two?"

Al nodded.

"I'm cool," I said, leaning back in my chair.

Al studied me for a moment. "I assumed you might wish to continue traveling this world now that the hostilities have ended."

I thought about it for a moment. "Nah. This place kind of got ruined for me."

I looked at Mahya. "What about you? You had dealings with the Magitech Guild."

She rolled her eyes. "No, I'm good. They're super secretive, even with guild members. You need a mountain of points just to access crumbs of information. I gave them a ton—blueprints we got from the dungeon, my own designs based on Earth's appliances with mine and Lis's upgrades—and got, like, five points. That earned me access to a few basic books I didn't even need."

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She leaned forward and made a face. "Couldn't copy them, couldn't take them with me, just sit and read, and they were so low-level it felt like a joke. Oh, and some helper of the guild master handed me two runes I already knew and acted like he was giving me the keys to the kingdom."

She leaned back with a huff. "Like I said, not worth it. We'll find better Magitech guilds in other worlds, and I've got all the stuff I bought to disassemble and study."

"Can't you study them without taking them apart?" I asked.

She sighed. "Sadly, no. I'm not even sure I'll be able to study them after I disassemble them. With the level of secrecy here, and the amount of money the guild makes off everything they produce, I'm sure they've built in protections to stop curious people like me." She crossed her fingers and held up her hand. "But I've got my fingers crossed I'll be able to learn at least something."

"What about the Dungeon Engineering guild?" I asked her.

She shook her head and made an even more disgusted face. "Lost cause. They refused to even talk to me without the appropriate class and official guild membership. At first, they thought I wanted to become an apprentice, so they humored me. But once they found out I was a Magicaneer, they stonewalled me and acted like I was some criminal trying to steal their secrets."

My shoulders slumped, and I let out a sigh. The dream of a pond-side paradise felt further away than ever.

After dinner, Al showed us the stuff he got. They sure looked different from what I expected. The fridge was a chest of five drawers, each about twenty centimeters deep. It was made of wood, metal, and another material that felt like springy plastic, but my senses told me it was a naturally occurring one. Processed tree sap? It was a possibility, but I wasn't sure about it. It had a slight resinous sheen and a texture that reminded me of polished amber, only far more flexible.

The stove looked like a mini version of a pizza oven with three levels. Beside each door were two buttons. Black and white. I pointed at them. "Activation?" I asked.

"Yes," Al said. "Black is on. White is off."

"Where's the temperature control?" I asked.

"The bottom level is high heat. The middle is medium. The top is low."

I stared at it and couldn't figure out how you could bake without more precise temperature control. There were no knobs to adjust the heat, no option for convection, broil, or setting top versus bottom heat. I shook my head. It didn't really matter. I never saw Al cook or bake, so if he ever decided to learn, he'd have to do it using this strange three-level system. Maybe he'd just roast meat on the bottom rack and call it a day.

The cube-making machine was just a big square box, made of metal and glass. You poured water into an opening at the top, channeled mana into the appropriate formation, and after three minutes, ice cubes began to fall into a tray at the bottom. This one was obvious. But looking at the stove and fridge, I couldn't figure out how they worked.

Mahya also circled the fridge and stove, inspecting them from every angle. Her fingers brushed lightly along the seams and edges, tracing for hidden marks. "I don't see the mana connection."

Al tilted the fridge sideways to expose the bottom. Mahya and I crouched and looked at the underside. Sure enough, it had a magical circle drawn on it, with connection and flow runes. Some looked a bit different from the ones I knew, but it was obvious those were the same runes, just with some lines drawn differently, and some other lines compensating for the difference. The intent behind the symbol hadn't changed, just its form.

It always surprised me that runes were universal in a way. Despite stylistic differences, the structure and function often pointed to the same magical outcome. Lis had a theory that since magic was a constant, its representation in material form was the same. According to him, if mana always behaved the same way across the multiverse, then any efficient system for directing it would eventually converge on similar patterns. He believed it was like mathematics—no matter where you came from, two plus two still equaled four.

Malith, on the other hand, believed that originally, Travelers spread the knowledge about runes throughout the multiverse, and that was the reason for the extreme similarities. Over time, even if cultures forgot their origins, the underlying system remained intact, passed from world to world like an inter-universal language.

Both made sense—and didn't—at the same time, in my opinion. I didn't have a better theory to offer instead, and honestly, part of me wondered if the truth was some combination of both. Or something else entirely.

Al took out a big, round metal plate with a thick copper wire connecting it to a smaller metal plate. He held it out to us and opened his mouth to speak, but Mahya raised a finger.

"Wait, let me figure it out."

I stepped in to inspect it with her and got it right away. If your house wasn't built with a core to power them, the large plate went under the fridge or stove, and you'd channel mana into the smaller plate to power the system. It probably had crystals inside to store the energy and release it gradually. Mahya came to the same conclusion and said so.

When we were done with the inspection, Mahya turned to Al. "Can we go talk?"

He gave a short nod.

They walked outside and sat by the lakeshore, the last light of day casting long shadows on the water. They talked for about twenty minutes. I watched them from the window, careful to stand at an angle where they wouldn't see me. Mahya looked uncomfortable while she spoke. Her posture was tense, shoulders hunched, and she kept fidgeting with her fingers, twisting them together in her lap. A few times, she gestured vaguely toward the house or the lake.

Al sat with his back straight, arms resting on his knees. He looked stiff, but nodded occasionally and kept his eyes on her, listening.

When they were done, they stood up. Mahya reached out first, wrapping her arms around him. Al returned the hug, his movements awkward and hesitant, but he didn't pull away. Based on that alone, I hoped the talk went well.

Before they came back inside, I slipped upstairs to my bedroom. Didn't want them to know I'd been watching from the window, pulled in by my accursed curiosity.

The next morning, we started on Al's house. For some strange reason, I thought it would be easy. It wasn't. Mahya had some experience from building my house with Lis, but that was about it. Al and I were pretty much hopeless. Our experience upgrading my house didn't help much. We hadn't taken it apart and rebuilt it. We just disconnected specific parts while keeping everything else intact, which was a very different kind of job.

Al wanted a two-story house like my original one. Well, he actually wanted a different one, but with our expertise level and the fact that we had a blueprint for that specific shape, he had to concede. The bottom floor was meant to be a living room, kitchen, and spell room, while the top floor was meant to have three bedrooms.

Around mid-morning, he stood back, hands on his hips, squinting at the blueprint. "I wish to change one bedroom to a greenhouse, with glass panels, similar to what I have in your house. The other shall be my laboratory."

Mahya gave him a look. "You're changing the plan already?"

"I have to take my needs into account," he said. "This arrangement reflects them."

I shrugged. "We haven't built anything yet. Might as well."

The wood spells helped, but only most of the time. Every now and then, something went wrong for no clear reason. Bind Timber worked well enough for connecting beams and planks, but Mass Lift was tricky. The first time we used it to move a few beams at once, they floated up in a wobbly mess and slammed into the half-built frame. Mahya had to scramble to anchor them before they crashed, while I rushed to cast the joining spell like I was racing against a countdown, and barely kept things together before it all fell apart.

We used Auto Alignment to fix the crooked sections, but it didn't always align things the way we wanted. Once it shifted an entire wall ten centimeters to the left and messed up the measurements for the staircase. That one left the three of us scratching our heads, at least figuratively. Shouldn't an alignment spell align things right?

Rapid Framework saved us more times than I cared to admit. Whenever something started to lean or creak in a way it definitely shouldn't, Al or I had to scramble to cast it—usually while the others shouted for support or tried to hold something steady with both hands. I lost count of how many times we caught things just in time.

We stopped often, not because we wanted to, but because we had to. There was always something that didn't fit, didn't line up, or just made no sense once we actually had to do it. We huddled over the blueprints, scratched our heads, argued a little, and then figure out a workaround. Sometimes we could fix it. At other times, we had to tear down a section and start again. Nothing went exactly as planned, but piece by piece, mistake by mistake, the house was starting to take shape. Slower than we hoped, but I was pretty sure it was faster than building the "normal" way.

The greenhouse idea turned out to be our biggest headache. Al wanted the walls and ceiling made entirely of glass, like the one in my house. Sounded simple enough. Not. In my place, we just fed the core some glass and told it to build the greenhouse. Done. But here, we didn't have that option.

Our first attempt was to feed metal into my house and tell it to create the frames for the glass. That went ... badly. I wasn't sure if it was my lack of experience with metal or if the house simply didn't have a reference for what a proper frame should look like. Either way, what came out looked more like warped scaffolding. None of it was usable, and Mahya ended up having to forge the frames herself.

The problem? She was still a beginner when it came to metalwork. Most of her experience was in melting down scrap and casting small parts for her future ship. This was the opposite. Big, awkward, structural components that had to be uniform, strong, and straight. Let's just say the results were creatively uneven with a strong flavor of modern art.

Eventually, we gave up on the metal idea and switched to wood. We figured out how to build the frames using reinforced wooden beams. They had to be wider than metal ones to carry the weight, which meant they blocked some of the sunlight, but at least they held together.

The next hurdle was the glass itself. When I fed sand into my house, I did get glass in return. That part worked. I even told the core a few times that it was amazing—mentally, of course, so the others wouldn't think I'd finally lost it. But no matter how I phrased the request, I couldn't get it to produce glass panels in exact measurements. They came out close, but never quite right. And when you're trying to fill a frame with glass, "close" didn't work.

"We need a cutting spell," Mahya said, arms folded, frowning at a panel that was four centimeters too wide.

"I checked in the Guidance and didn't find anything," I said.

"I shall do it with chisel and heat," Al offered, sounding way too confident for someone who'd never worked with glass in his life.

To his credit, he figured it out after breaking only seven panels. He etched a scoring line with a mana-infused tool and gently heated the edge to guide the break. It wasn't perfect, but it worked well enough. The cuts were mostly clean and we finally had glass panels that could fit the frames.

Then came the next hurdle. Between two main support beams for the glass wall, we had to fit five panels with a wooden plank between each one. Sounded simple in theory. Not so much in practice. It didn't take long to realize the only way to make it work was to remove one of the support beams entirely, then build the stack from the bottom up—panel, plank, panel, plank—until all five levels were in place. Only then could we slot the beam back in to hold everything together.

The problem? They kept dropping and breaking. Even with Stacking Aid giving us a bit of lift and control, it wasn't enough. Mahya tried anchoring them with temporary bindings, but the glass wouldn't stay put. Every time we got a couple of panels in place, one would slip and break. Al and I were both getting increasingly frustrated, and Mahya looked ready to explode. Her whole body shook with it, her fists clenched at her sides, and I could practically see the Herculean effort it took her not to scream at Al and his stupid greenhouse.

"Go take a walk to cool off," I told her mentally.

She snapped her head toward me, eyes blazing, shoulders tight. For a second, I thought she might blow anyway. But then she took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, gave a sharp nod, and turned on her heel. A minute later, she was gone.

I went swimming to unwind, diving straight into the lake to let the frustration bleed out in the cold water.

"I shall go rest in my room," Al announced, though I suspected he was actually sneaking off to look for his comfort food—namely, the cookies he still insisted he wasn't eating.

Finally, we called Rue over to help. With him, we had just enough telekinesis to make it work. Al and I each held a panel in place, Mahya guided the planks between them, and Rue floated the next panel over with surprising precision. He was thrilled to be included, tail wagging as he kept exclaiming, "Rue help build house for Al!" over and over in our heads.

And… of course, there was another problem. The guiding lines between the runes didn't always fit precisely. In this case, the precision was even more important than the measurements. One crooked line could mess up the entire flow. That was the last straw. We called it a day and just stopped. Too many problems packed into one day were just too much.

While I cooked, my mind finally unwound, and somewhere between flipping the meat and seasoning the vegetables, an idea took shape. By the time we sat down to eat, I was ready to lay it out.

"I have an idea," I said, setting my fork down. "It might seem complicated, but I think it'll make things easier in the long run."

Mahya raised an eyebrow, pausing mid-bite. "What is it?"

"I think we should build the greenhouse with plain wood and glass first. I'll cast the reinforcement spell afterward to make the whole thing much more stable, and only then we start enchanting it."

"It'll be a pain to enchant the upper parts," she said, pushing her plate to the side. "You can just hover, but we need the swords. They're not built for floating."

"I'll handle the upper sections if you take care of the bottom."

Mahya leaned back and hummed in thought, then gave a slow nod. "Alright. That could work."

I turned to Al, who had been listening quietly, dabbing his mouth with a napkin.

"You are the enchantment experts. I would concede to your wisdom," he said, and somehow managed not to sound like a smartass.

That worked. Hovering for hours and enchanting the whole thing was a pain, but it worked, and that was what mattered. Once the greenhouse was finally done, we turned our attention to the kitchen.

This part, surprisingly, was easy.

"We need to draw new magic circles to support the fridge and stove," Mahya said, tapping at the blueprint with the back of her pencil. "The blueprints are wrong now that we swapped appliances."

I gave a theatrical bow and swept my hand toward the floor. "Do your thing."

She grabbed her engraver and got to work on the floor. She even added another small circle we could connect with a wire to the ice maker.

Al watched, arms crossed. "Excellent work."

"Of course," she said without looking up.

We still had a second floor to finish, a lab to plan, and the extremely complicated project of the spell room. But for now, we had a working kitchen, a glassed-in greenhouse, and a solid reminder that blueprints didn't mean much when three noobs were the ones following them. Still, for the first time in two weeks, I actually thought we might pull it off.

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