A proper home required proper climate control.
Austin stood in the center of his main cabin room, arms folded over his chest, inspecting the golden pine walls. The scent of curing pine resin was thick and clean, mingling with the dry bite of high-altitude mountain air. The interlocking tongue-and-groove joints had choked off the draft that had whistled through the old shack like a split tea kettle. The studs were plumb, the rafters bore straight, and the heavy sub-floor didn't give a fraction of an inch under his heels.
The only remaining eyesore was the windows.
Whoever had lived in this body before him had covered the rough pine casements with scraps of cheap, yellowed oil paper. Most of it had rotted into greasy ribbons that flapped against the cedar jambs whenever the wind kicked up off the ridge. Every morning at five-thirty, harsh mountain sunlight blasted straight through the torn parchment, searing Austin's eyelids while he was trying to bank eight hours of rested sleep.
Worse than that, an open aperture was an invitation for pests, wind-driven moisture, and thermal loss.
"Can't maintain an unsealed building envelope," Austin muttered, tapping his knuckle against the rough sill. "You bleed twenty-five percent of your conditioned air through sloppy rough openings. In winter, that doubles your firewood consumption. I need dense, wind-tight coverings with real blackout properties."
He snatched a pair of heavy iron tailoring shears from his tool chest, walked onto the porch, and approached the freight cart holding the bolts of **Celestial Dragon-Vein Silk**.
Across the Southern Cloud continent, patriarchs waged bloody clan wars over a single yard of this cloth. Woven from the molted cocoons of thousand-year void silkworms, grand sects reserved it exclusively for imperial robes capable of deflecting high-grade flying swords, dispersing curse hexes, and tanking fourth-tier lightning tribulations.
Austin unrolled three yards of the shimmering silver-white fabric across the black courtyard flags, pressing his thumb against the weave.
"Good hand-feel," Austin murmured, running his palm down the smooth selvage. "Thread count looks north of twelve hundred. No slubs, no thin spots, tight warp and weft. It'll hang clean without puckering."
He took out a notched pine stick he used for rough measuring, marked the drop length against his knee, and lined up the heavy iron shears.
*SNIP. CHUNK. SNIP.*
He squeezed down with his plasma-reinforced grip. The iron blades sheared through the immortal dragon silk like a warm knife through softened lard, kicking up microscopic static sparks that tickled his knuckles like dry wool. Austin cut three matching rectangular panels, then took quick, measured snips along the bottom edges to true the hems so they wouldn't bunch against the rough cedar sills.
He carried the panels inside. Using the butt of his screwdriver, he drove four heavy iron masonry nails into the headers above the frames, strung a taut length of salvaged copper wire between the nail heads, twisted the wire ends with pliers until they sang like guitar strings, and hung the drapes. He rubbed a pinch of beeswax along the copper wire so the silk grommets would slide smoothly without binding.
The change was instant.
The harsh midday glare vanished. Filtered through the dragon silk, the sunlight softened into a pale, pearlescent glow with faint violet undertones that filled the room with quiet, cathedral stillness. Any stray negative miasma or wandering demonic hex drifting within thirty yards of the cabin dissolved on contact into crisp, alpine pine air.
Austin stepped back to the middle of the room, hands on his hips, checking the reveal. He tested the pull cords, sliding the drapes open and closed twice. The cloth glided silently on the waxed copper.
"Clean finish," Austin said, nodding in satisfaction. "Cosmetic rating went up by thirty percent. Looks like an upscale timber cabin instead of an abandoned hunting blind. Zero drafts, full privacy from wandering mobs, and no glare in the bunk."
He wiped his hands on his trousers, walked back out into the sun, and stopped in front of the five massive slabs of **Imperial Spirit Jade**.
Each piece was six feet long, three feet wide, and four inches thick, quarried from the deepest ancestral veins of the Kunlun Spirit Mines. They glowed with an internal, cool emerald fire, pulsing with spiritual qi so rich that tiny crystalline moss buds were already sprouting around the cart wheels.
Austin scratched his jaw, glancing past the corner of the cabin toward the small outbuilding thirty paces away.
His outhouse.
"The grade between the rear sill and the privy is pure red clay," Austin muttered, his brow furrowing as he recalled his fundamental contractor law: *keep the damn mud off the clean floorboards.* "One heavy rainstorm turns that clay into axle grease. You step outside in the dark, sink to your ankles in red muck, and track wet silt right across the pine floors. Not happening on my watch. A hardscaped walkway is essential site infrastructure."
He didn't just dump the stones in the dirt, either. Austin knew better than to lay finish stone on loose muck.
He fetched his iron hoe and a wooden shovel, clearing the walking path down to hardpan. He stripped the greasy topsoil away, hauled three wheelbarrow loads of coarse decomposed granite from the cliff edge, and raked it into an even two-inch leveling bed. He took a flat scrap of pine two-by-four and screeded the gravel dead flat, giving it a slight outward crown.
Then came the heavy pavers.
Austin bent his knees, got his fingers beneath the first two-hundred-pound slab of sovereign jade, and hoisted it against his ribs like a concrete patio paver.
He marched around the cabin to the prepared bed.
*THWACK-CRUNCH.*
He set the jade slab directly into the tamped gravel. Austin hopped onto the center of the stone, stomping his straw sandals down with heavy, rhythmic thuds to seat the paver into the aggregate. He dragged his hoe along the edges, packing dry granite dust into the seams so weeds wouldn't sprout between the joints. He checked the line with his eye, ensuring a steady two-percent drainage slope toward the downhill brush so rainwater would sheet off instead of pooling.
He walked back to the cart, grabbed the second slab, and hauled it over.
*THWACK.* *THWACK.* *THWACK.* *THWACK.*
Ten minutes of heavy lifting later, Austin had laid a straight, level, emerald-green walkway stretching from his back threshold to the outhouse door. He walked the length of it twice, testing for any rocking or lippage at the joints. Every corner sat flush. Dead flat.
Austin stepped back onto the porch, wiping sweaty palms on his work apron.
"Zero mud on the sandals. Solid footing even in a downpour. That’s proper hardscaping. If you don't control the grade, the site controls you."
Twenty paces away near the fence line, Li Xiaoyao stood frozen in place.
His frayed bamboo broom slipped through his numb fingers, clattering loudly against the obsidian courtyard flags.
The boy's pupils were blown wide, black as ink, trembling with cosmic shock.
*The... the Celestial Dragon-Vein Silk... cut up with sheep shears to keep the morning sun off his pillow...* *And the Imperial Spirit Jade... the sovereign stones emperor clans use to inscribe their dynasties and build ancestral thrones... laid face-down in the pig mud as stepping stones to the privy...*
The boy dropped onto both knees in the dirt, clutching his ribs as tears of profound spiritual awe tracked through the dust on his cheeks.
*The Master's Dao is vast beyond the starry void!* Li Xiaoyao wept silently, his entire body shaking. *To Him, the grandest treasures of the mortal realm are nothing more than gravel and straw! By paving the path to the latrine with sovereign jade, He is carving the ultimate truth into the bedrock: that all human pride, cultivation rank, and worldly glory are as fleeting as bodily waste before the silence of the Great Dao!*
Austin glanced over at the sobbing kid, clicking his tongue in mild annoyance.
"The emotional logic on this follower NPC is completely fried," Austin muttered under his breath. "Every time I lay fifty feet of paver stone, he has a religious breakdown in the dirt. Hopefully the next server restart flushes his cache. Good companion AI shouldn't start bawling over basic exterior hardscaping."
Austin strolled over to the cedar table on the front porch.
Resting beside his tool box was the third item from the morning delivery: the cut-crystal jug filled with **Thousand-Flower Divine Dew**.
Austin pulled the beeswax stopper with his thumb. A clean, crisp fragrance blossomed into the mountain breeze, smelling like crushed honeysuckle, tart green apples, and morning frost. He tipped the rim to his mouth and took three long, greedy gulps.
The liquid hit his tongue with an icy, sparkling fizz. It tasted like carbonated elderflower cider laced with wild mint and clover honey, sending a cool rush through his chest that instantly erased the fatigue in his lower back and shoulders.
A bright amber window flared across his eyesight:
Austin lowered the jug, wiping a drop from his chin as an intense wave of stellar warmth ignited in his lower belly.
Deep in his core, the micro-plasma spark flared like an industrial arc-welder striking heavy plate steel. Its spin sped up, humming with deep, gyroscopic power as its surface temperature breached thirteen thousand Kelvin. A faint snap of static electricity danced across Austin's knuckles. His vision snapped into hyper-clear focus—he could pick out individual pine needles shivering in the breeze three ridges away, and the smell of ozone, hot quartz, and wet moss was as sharp as ground pepper.
He pulled up the new blueprint: `[Thermonuclear Earth-Melter (Trench Mode)]`.
"A perimeter trench cutter?" Austin grinned, his tradesman instincts clicking into gear. "Now we're talking. Every decent base needs perimeter drainage and crowd control. If those griefers from the valley try to raid the cabin again, a twelve-foot drop trench with vitrified walls will catch them before they touch the fence."
He grabbed his iron hoe from the porch rail and rolled his sleeves up past his elbows.
"Time to dig some real foundation trenches."