Oliver whispered a divination to supplement his arcanoception as he traced out the magic circle. He was using an actual compass now, having gotten entirely sick of freehanding circles and loosely cursing himself for not realizing how easy the tool was to make earlier. It was just two reed fragments spliced tightly together at an angle, absolutely trivial to accomplish. But he'd just skipped over the possibility of making one because he hadn't known how to make it adjustable nor precise enough as a compass he was used to.

Not that either of those things mattered when he could make a hundred of the things for any radius he might want, and the alternative was freehanding the circles.

Though also in his defense, he hadn't been making very many circles in clay before this, so he would have still needed to freehand the actual carving, but it also wasn't that much of a defense. Maybe the complete destruction of their shelter had been something of a blessing in that regard. Starting from scratch with more experience and a fresh perspective was absolutely what he wanted, and totally made up for him losing his precious, lovely Everflame Brazier.

...it didn't. Not even a little bit.

He was trying to not even think about the loss of the First Flame that accompanied it. There was a tiny part of him that hoped that maybe somehow it was still salvageable, that he could send Alyssa back to retrieve the Brazier and hope that the flame had not only survived but retained its potency...

But realistically, it wasn't going to work. There were too many ways it could have gone wrong, between the exposure to the wild magic storm and spawning a salamander and... Yeah.

Well, it was just a failure. It did make the tower... way more annoying than it would have been. He'd been hoping that he could use the Significance generated by the First Flame to only need to make a platform three or four meters tall, but that definitely wasn't happening. He'd need to figure out something else for that.

Oliver shook off the annoyance, though. Henrietta had encouraged him lately to focus more on the positives and less on the crushing pressure that had fallen upon him like a landslide after all their progress had been reset and they were back to the wilderness.

He was really, really trying.

The uh… the brick-making factory was working well? Their success rate was fifty percent higher than it was before, with seven bricks per hundred making it out of the kiln wholly intact. Considering it had only been a few days, that was actually huge, and confirmed that one of the big problems really had been them not letting the bricks dry long enough before firing. In other circumstances, he might have paused the use of the kiln altogether while he let the bricks dry out for a couple of weeks, but because the entire process was automated by the inklings, it genuinely didn't matter if they had a failure rate of 93%, because that 7%, if they got to their theoretical maximum of averaging a thousand bricks per day, would still give them hundreds of perfectly functional bricks over the weeks that would have otherwise been giving 0%.

Automated factories were great. He needed to make more of them. Sure, they wouldn't be truly excellent until they finished the tower, when he could pick up some additional skills and subskills, but there was bound to be some particularly repetitive task he could properly automate.

Not this, though. Not that this was repetitive, but there was no way that he could automate the creation of these circles, let alone in a way that would save him time.

Their new hut had gone up quite quickly, now that they'd made one. And this time, it wasn't in a place and orientation that made protective enchantments far harder to apply! He'd been able to use his Staff of the New World to set up a truly stellar Nature-repelling ward, one which this time even kept insects out! He'd also managed, basically because he could, to set up a magical Shadow ward on it. That had been really, really simple with just a bit of help from Henrietta, and not only served to shelter them from the everlasting daylight of this world but also to enhance their sleep by concentrating Shadow mana inside, making them sleep deeper and more restfully than they otherwise would have. It was able to provide superior darkness while retaining ready airflow, something that slathering the entire outside of the structure in mud wouldn't accomplish, and was probably the single-greatest boost to their sleeping arrangement since they landed.

Of course, there were limits to how deep they could sleep, but that thought had inspired Oliver and had gotten him to look at improving their sleeping situation even more. It was a fair bit more indulgent than a basic Shadow ward, yes, and was quite possibly the most sophisticated enchantment he'd made since the Jump, but Oliver believed in himself.

And in the impressive, almost intoxicating combination of his Staff of the New World and the little workshop he'd made with its help. But mostly himself.

The fact it felt like he hadn't gotten a truly good night's sleep since they arrived certainly spurred him on. And while Henrietta was still trying to make cloth, Oliver wanted something a lot more immediate to help with his sleep. The better the sleep, the better rested he was, the better his ideas were, and the less time it would take him to think of things like making a compass to draw magic circles with.

So, in the interest of doing his job better, he was trying to make a pillow. Out of clay. As an enchantment.

He'd never done anything quite like this before, but it should be possible.

The first function of a pillow was just to keep the neck comparatively straight, which you could accomplish with a rock if you were particularly desperate, but Oliver wanted to also have his pillow be comfortable to sleep on, so it should have some give and flex.

It was a tall order for someone whose workshop consisted of a sharpened stick, a crude staff, and a copper knife, but in some ways those could potentially be boons. Such as the way he needed to constantly make himself new wands - a process he was getting faster at with every passing day - and in so doing could create fairly purpose-built foci for each of his new enchantments... though, of course, they still needed their testing.

[Cogniprint]

"I speak to the Tapestry and announce myself as Oliver Smith the [Erudite Enchanter], that it may know my name and mark my passage, heeding my changes as I bend the world to my will with my wand and this stylus as I have before. I beseech you take heed of the instructions I have graven upon this tablet of earth grasped within my hand, and speak forth the legacy graven thereupon. Return unto me the acknowledgment that I seek of your hearing and grasping of that which I present to you."

Hellow Oirld.

Oh heck yes, he actually managed to get a proper reference enchantment working. Not only would that definitely shorten his wand calibration tests, and confirm that a spellbook would indeed be possible - not that he'd thought it wouldn't be, but he'd learned to never take anything like this for granted - but it was also potentially incredibly useful for his pillow project.

Yes, the fact that the return was garbled wasn't great, but it still gave the return, which was most of the point.

He was just going to assume that the issue lay in the reference tablet for now, instead of a mistake in the wand, and fix it later. With the wand activated, it wouldn't last long enough for him to firmly debug the other circle, create a new tablet, fire it, then test it again… nah. He was going to just attempt his enchantment and if it failed, ah well, it wasn't like it used any particularly expensive ingredients.

Actually, while he was thinking about it, he really ought to create multiple of these tablets in one go. Unlike his wards, which was something he absolutely knew how to do, making a magical force-pillow would take a fair bit of refinement even if he got all of the runework perfect.

It was a bit too late for this wand, because he only had a single tablet prepped, but he definitely could make more before this one was able to enter the kiln. That way he could do a batch of six, twelve different approaches in one go and parallelize his experimentation process.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Actually, now that he was actually working with the Clay tablet, he already could think of a bunch of ways he could improve it. Most obviously was that he didn't actually need wet clay for inscribing. Sure, magically speaking it mattered what stage of the production process something was enchanted, but he could compensate for the ways in which it was just different, and longevity… well, longevity… maybe didn't matter?

In some ways it definitely did. Had he not put so much effort into ensuring the stability and longevity of their first shelter's wards, they might have failed when Jacob and Clark needed them. But for something like a pillow, it didn't really matter.

No. It definitely doesn't matter, he told himself. He needed to be firmer with himself about required and target quality standards. Mission-critical stuff would still get his full attention, but plenty of other things really didn't. His wands were sort of in a weird middle ground where some needed to absolutely be as high-quality as possible, but their longevity didn't matter nearly as much.

The active wand in his hand sparked to his arcanoception, pulling Oliver's focus back to the here and now. He brought the wand to his wet-clay tablet in one hand, his stylus in the other, the surface easily denting underneath the slightest bit of pressure, and he began his enchantment.

"May the Tapestry hear my voice and know my presence. I am Oliver Smith, the [Erudite Enchanter], and from this lump of clay, which I drew from the earth with my own hands and shaped with my own fingers, I create a place of rest. An object which shall cradle my head, a block that can conform to my skull just as this tablet conforms to my magic and my touch."

With the ease of the compass-drawn circle long behind him, Oliver silently bemoaned all of the other rune-drawing tools that he didn't have here, but couldn't allow himself to get distracted, both because he needed his full attention to make sure the enchantment was shaping up the way it was supposed to and because the mere act of getting distracted stood a solid chance of ruining the attempt altogether. Just like – oop.

"Join together in unity, ye threads of the world, become a coherent and cohesive whole under the loom of my guidance. I shall weave you into something far greater than you could ever manage upon your own efforts, coordinating you as a whole far superior to the sum of your parts. Read the scribe of my stylus, trace the pattern of my wand. Purple feathers flock joyfully. And up, and up, and up, and up, and up, and a little to the left, and cling to my fingers, rest within the earth, rest, rest, rest, rest within the earth. Gesundheit."

This enchantment was definitely going to turn out on the rough side no matter how well the theory behind its actual construction was. He'd almost lost it several times, and a sudden clatter of rocks from up the side of First Tower had nearly thrown off the entire thing. His workshop was sheltered from disturbances in the Tapestry propagating through and interrupting delicate work, yes, but it wasn't soundproofed and that meant noises from the outside could echo in through entirely nonmagical means and mess him up that way. It mattered whether you said the words, yes, but it frequently also mattered whether you could be heard saying the words. But things were on track to recover, so he didn't need to abandon the attempt just yet.

"Like the soft clay you are now, I beseech you to remember your existence, that when I call upon your assistance in the future the echo of that which you are now may yet be brought into being and be useful once more, even as your form is fixed forevermore…"

The enchanting process went on for quite some time, and featured many more sudden corrections as things nearly slipped out of his control, be it because of external influence, personal missteps, or simply the tools he was using not being a high enough quality to prevent the enchantment from acting up.

But nonetheless, by the time the wand he was using completely gave out and needed to be thrown into the river before it could blow up and take Oliver's hand off, he had managed to wrangle something theoretically functional for himself.

The enchantment was Force-based, of course. But, being inscribed in a solid Earth substance, he was trying to lean on that element's properties slightly, to create a block of force around the tablet which could be deformed as easily as soft clay then keep those deformations. Raw Force on its own, was harder than almost anything physical, but hardness didn't mean it couldn't be deformed.

It might be interesting to try and recreate that particular enchantment on his next go-round, when he was using dried and pre-hardened yet unfired clay, but he expected he could draw on the memory of it having once been soft just as surely as he could try to preserve the active state.

But he'd see! This was a new project for him. Attempting to make soft Force constructs was entirely novel for him.

Now, though, all he could do was wait.

And about ten million other things on his to-do list.

It took about three days before Oliver returned to his pillow project, motivated by a particularly bad 'night' of sleep to put it as a higher priority than the bowls and jugs he otherwise needed to make. It helped that the clay tablets he'd set out to dry near-ish the kiln were nearly hard enough to work with, and that the schedule of brick-firing indicated that there'd be a new batch going in shortly before he'd next be sleeping.

Armed with additional scribing tools he'd made from splitting reeds, like a straight-edge and smaller compasses, he set about making a full suite of variations. Three more still used the same 'clay hardness' technique of the first one, four new ones were made more akin to a magnet, where it would simply repel anything too close to it away, but he designed it to funnel things to the center rather than to the edges.

He also tried one that was based on water, and while he kind of doubted that it would work the way he wanted it to, the magic circle he had developed for the clay-type projection could be tweaked to accommodate other elements, and there wasn't a ton of reason to not try. Water beds existed, why not water pillows? It wouldn't even be proper water, just Force doing its best to mimic how Water behaved.

Another set he made more akin to sand, so that the force-projection would be capable of sliding over itself every which way without being fully liquid, something that would almost definitely fail when he was eventually able to complete the tablet.

Sand was perhaps one of his better current approaches, but unfortunately the development of that one was a lot triciker. Because none of them had a Sand-based class, and he couldn't just lean on the tablet he was working on being made out of sand like he had for Earth, he had needed to get creative.

Specifically, he'd created a series of reference tablets, much like his Hello World reference table, each of which only did a single very simple thing with their mana. The first cycled Water mana through a large lump of Clay to get it to 'drag along' a bit of Earth like sediment, and was then passed through a Fire enchantment, where he'd intermixed them in a way that, if he squinted, might almost be called very crude alchemy. The goal there was to chase off the water, leaving only 'particulate Earth', which might be able to substitute for Sand thanks to their Associations.

Overall... it was of the most complex and fidgety enchantments he'd made since the Jump, and he'd be amazed if it even worked, but… well, it did seem like a good idea to try. It was a shame that he couldn't iterate faster than he was doing now, though.

If he could just iterate with unfired, or even wet clay tablets, this particular stage of creation would be so, so much easier. Alas, none of them were appropriately Technological to function even with his enchantments. It was only thanks to the elemental refining he had set up in their kiln that the end results even stood a chance of working.

Heck, it was even harder than just that thought made it sound. Everything about it needed to go right to work. He needed to cast some appropriate harvesting spells when pulling the clay out of the ground to start the process of separating the clay into discrete chunks rather than broken parts of a whole.

Then, he needed to do some basic enchanting while forming the clay into tablets, doing a lot of busy-work that mostly amounted to him magically severing the clay from its past and purifying it of Elemental contamination, as well as adding reception-to-mana in a way that changed depending on what he was generally going to be using the end product for. It was wide enough that he could probably re-use any of the tablets he didn't use for his pillow experiment as… well, not nightlights, because that was pointless, but other items involved in resting, once he thought of some. Maybe insulation, as a blanket proxy?

Once that was set in place, only then could he do the actual main enchantment. Once it was fired, he'd need to give it another pass-over of enchantment, both to fix anything that had been damaged or broken during the firing process as well as to properly finalize the enchantment, because only then would the Technology aspect of his mana be able to solidly grasp hold of and interact with the tablet.

Even that had required some fixes to the kiln, because without specialized enchantments it wasn't processing the clay in the right way to make it an actual 'item,' and the ones that Oliver had put on it when first making it had turned out as a weird combination of too specific and too general, where it only really made bricks well.

Only after that post-firing enchantment would the tablets actually be functional. Before then, they might be magical, but not in a useful way. Or at least, not in a predictable way. Oliver had almost panicked when he dropped a tablet as he was placing it in the kiln, but it stopped dead two inches above the ground, then slowly floated down to the ground. He didn't want to repeat the experiment, given both his arcanoception's feedback and what he could glean from indirect [Appraise] usage, namely that it was an "Incomplete Erratic Basic Tablet of Feather's Touch."

What was really puzzling was that the tablets shouldn't even have any overt effects at all, because their finished form would require a spell to activate, but… he really shouldn't be surprised at this point.

Now all he could do was wait, iterate, and hope.

...which he'd start on after repairing the kiln, because there should not be fire coming out of it there.

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