Year One, Spring: 2+1 Villagers (02)

The instant I released Manual Combat Mode, fatigue crashed down on me alongside a ravenous hunger—and with my mana drained to the dregs, it felt as though holes had been punched clean through my body.

Judging by the red haze bleeding across my vision, I'd burst blood vessels in my eyes from forcing the magic. So firing three at once really was pushing it. I'd somehow squeezed out two, but the final ice arrow I'd loosed to take down the fleeing merchant had apparently overloaded my brain. My sight would stay tinted red and my eyes bloodshot for a few days, but it was nothing serious. No permanent damage—this kind of thing healed on its own.

"Hah... hahh..."

Watching the boy tremble violently as he clutched the door in terror, I exercised my right as village chief and bestowed a name upon him.

"Your name, from this moment on, is Chunsik."

Ah. This is going to take a while.

Living with scarlet-stained eyes for days on end wore them out fast. I kept conjuring ice in my palm for cold compresses whenever I found a spare moment, but recovery came slowly—an injury born of overdraining my mana, it seemed, didn't respond to ordinary treatment. At least I'd been spared permanent brain damage; my intelligence and reaction speed were intact.

In any case, we had brought this village's second raid—its first true raid—to a close without a single casualty, and collected our reward: Chunsik.

Normally, upon discovering a new person, you could accept them as a resident if they asked to join the village—or, failing that, capture them and make them a slave instead. That's right. In the end, Chunsik had escaped the clutches of a large-scale slave trader only to be snatched up by our small-time slave village.

A regular villager had to be treated on equal footing with everyone else so they never felt discriminated against, and every little demand they made had to be accommodated. Slaves? None of that. You had to provide food, clothing, and shelter to a reasonable degree, but everything else could be settled with a simple threat. Better yet, a slave couldn't betray you from within, so the standard play was to demote any resident you couldn't trust to slave status and squeeze some use out of them. Granted, managing slaves required keeping their Slave Spirit stat above a certain threshold, which meant periodic brainwashing or fear conditioning—a minor chore.

"Heeek!"

Between the shrieks and the full-body trembling every single time our eyes met, there was clearly no need to inject any extra fear.

Twang—

"Not bad."

I tossed the crude shortbow and upgraded my weapon. An arrow had snapped mid-fight, but shafts were something I could always make myself—all I actually needed from the old ones were the heads, so I recycled the arrowheads and fletched seven fresh arrows.

The first chore I assigned Chunsik was building the fires for our meals.

Fwoosh!

As it turned out, this Chunsik character was an apprentice mage of the fire school. While I had to crouch over flint and suffer for thirty minutes at a stretch just to get a fire going, the guy simply plucked embers out of thin air the way I pulled ice.

"Tsk."

I'd dragged this slave in for the sake of my own comfort, so why did I feel so cheated? I handed the other odd jobs over to him as well. Whether he simply had more talent for cooking or fire magic happened to be efficient in a kitchen, I couldn't say—either way, he outclassed me at the stove.

Physical labor didn't seem to be his forte, so I just had him assist Elena while she diligently sowed sorghum seeds and pulled weeds. Being a slave, Chunsik had been half-heartedly pretending to help with the farm work—but the moment he watched Elena scatter seeds any which way and then yank up plants wholesale afterward, he clutched the back of his neck and cried out.

"No, why would you pull those up...? Ha... that's not how farming works!"

His Farming stat was a 2, sure—but that number reflected a body that couldn't keep up, not an empty head. He clearly had some real experience under his belt. In the end he pushed past Elena, declared he would handle the fields himself, asked me for wheat seeds, and was soon sowing them while sweat poured down his face.

Elena, meanwhile, had crossed the river carrying the stone mattock I'd made her and was busy breaking ground over there. Every patch she touched ended with the seedlings turned inside out, so Chunsik had begged me to get her away from the crops—he'd take over, just please. Elena still insisted she wanted to farm, but I decided this was a job for Chunsik: he would manage the vegetable garden, and she was sent off to clear new land instead.

"Three people really does free things up."

Granted, the freedom came from Chunsik shouldering fire-starting, farming, cooking, childcare, and cleaning all at once. Either way, breathing room was a good thing. We couldn't wander around like primitives, hunting and foraging, forever; civilized people farmed and provided for themselves.

And with that spare time in hand, it was finally time to start on everything I'd been putting off.

"First, we relocate. After that, I scout the area for supplies and check whether there's another village out there worth trading with."

As temperatures climbed, the slapdash buildings I'd thrown together for winter were crumbling bit by bit. The higher the rainfall rose, the more the leaf roofs drank in water and rotted, and the untreated timber walls had been punctured with holes here and there or caved in entirely. So—now that my Construction skill had grown as well—I planned to build a proper residential district this time.

First order of business was rebuilding the shacks I'd thrown up haphazardly against the rocky hillside. I dismantled the walls and pulled out the wooden beds.

"Useless."

Perhaps because I'd made them back when my Construction skill was pathetic, every last one was shoddy. Worse, I'd fitted each bed's legs to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the bumpy ground, so set on level floor they wouldn't balance—the whole thing listed sideways.

"Tch. Firewood, then."

I swung the hammer and smashed every bed down into kindling.

Fssshh...

I pushed the leaf roofs—rotting away all winter under snow and spring rain—into a corner and cleared them off, then tore down the walls to turn the structure into one large warehouse. And since its entrance sat flush against the Glacial Stone mine, it became a natural walk-in freezer. Refrigeration, sorted.

Our actual home, though, wouldn't be perched on the hillside this time. I intended to raise it on properly open ground. I hauled out every scrap of lumber left in the warehouse, stacked it in a pile, and picked up my hammer.

"Alright... time to get myself a proper house."

First, the blueprint. We had three residents and I had no plans to grow that number for a while, but as the village developed and its technology expanded, so would the labor it demanded—I'd build with room to spare.

The most efficient early-game setup is a military-barracks arrangement—beds crammed into one big shared space—but... I hated that idea.

BANG!

I set to work, hammer ringing. When I'd first arrived in this world, my low Construction skill had made every movement slow and awkward. But the experience banked from raising the village and crafting its facilities had paid off—now I could hammer with practiced rhythm and knock a building together in no time. I raised the posts first, filled the gaps between them with timber to form connecting walls, and once every wall stood complete, I climbed a ladder and began on the roof.

Using a method I'd once seen in a documentary, I built the structure so the timbers interlocked with one another—the roof beams weren't nailed down but slotted together, held fast by their own weight.

THWACK!

About halfway through the roof, the hammer started feeling lighter and lighter—so light, in fact, that it seemed to fly wherever I wanted on its own. No, it wasn't just a feeling. When I shifted to reach a nail driven just beyond arm's length, the hammer sensed my intent, launched itself across the gap, slammed the nail home with a BANG!, and flew right back into my hand.

"Oh ho?"

Unbelievable. Archery and magic—the skills I'd sweated blood practicing—were still stuck at 3, and Construction had hit 5. At this rate, wasn't I turning into a professional builder?

THWACK!

With my Construction stat past 5, the roof work gathered real momentum: I could hurl the hammer to any spot my hand couldn't reach, and it would seat the nail perfectly before returning to my palm. Is this what holding Mjolnir feels like? Curious, I threw it at a bird flapping past overhead—only for the hammer to veer off somewhere completely random and clatter down, leaving me to trudge over and fetch it for nothing. The ability, it turned out, only activated during Construction work.

BANG BANG BANG BANG!

This wasn't some Excalibur... or an Excaliblunt... no, what should I call it—an Excalihammer? With a Construction-only power that drove nails without my hands ever leaving my sides, the log house was finished in a flash. And completion, as always, bred greed. Human nature, after all: stand long enough and you want to sit; sit and you want to lie down; lie down and you want to sleep. Everyone hopes life will keep improving. You can't live like this forever.

Right—might as well make some furniture while I'm at it.

One by one, I floated in the pieces of furniture my current skill could produce and arranged them through the rooms. Normally you'd have to plan the layout in your head and build to fit, but with my authority as chief I could preview blueprints inside the house in advance, so deciding what went where was easy.

"We can't crouch around a bonfire eating every meal for the rest of our lives."

I placed a table and chairs into the interior design and threw the hammer.

BANG!

Each flight of the hammer raised a table leg into position; the tabletop settled on top; a few more throws and I had a four-seat dining table.

"Woodworking is the best!"

I built a cooking table for meal prep, framed out separate window openings for ventilation, and set the windows into place. Then, with timber partitions, I put the slave room toward the back and gave Elena's room a slightly more generous layout as well.

"The finishing touch, of course, is the bed."

The single greatest factor in a villager's comfort is the quality of their bed. Which was exactly why I'd saved it for last—only now, with my Construction stat built up as ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠high as it could currently go, did I finally start making them. When I'd first arrived I'd jammed together mismatched planks of the wrong sizes and hammered in nails; now I could work in an intricate internal structure. Compared to that first bed, the build was flawless—and by stacking the wooden slats layer upon layer, I even gave it a slight spring-like bounce. Not perfect, but it had genuine give to it. At Construction 5, this kind of trick was possible.

"Mine's done. Next up, Elena's..."

Unlike before, the blueprint didn't surface translucent—it flickered into view, turned red, and vanished.

"...Huh...?"

I was out of lumber.

"I only needed a little more..."

Scraps remained, but every piece big enough for a bed frame was gone. Absorbed in construction, I'd let the sun slip low without noticing; the beds had to be finished fast, before Elena and Chunsik returned from the fields. Even the rickety old beds would have carried us through one more night—but I'd smashed them all for firewood the moment work began.

Ah, wait a second...

Beds weren't made of wood alone. I gathered up the stones Elena had cleared into one pile while opening new ground, carried them over, and raised my hammer. The blueprint reappeared the moment I did, so I hauled the stones inside and got straight to building.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Wait—a jackpot? Here of all places?

A higher Construction skill did improve the odds of a masterpiece, but those odds were supposed to sit below 0.1 percent. Wasn't Construction 7 or so the point where masterpieces even started showing up?

"Ha... never thought I'd pull something like this."

As I stared at the jackpot of a stone bed I'd somehow produced, still wondering what on earth to do with it—

Whoosh.

—Elena, who had been hovering behind me the whole time waiting for her opening, dove onto the bed first. She'd been peeking in from outside since earlier, and the moment she spotted something that looked like her own bed, she'd apparently been unable to hold back.

Thud.

She cracked her head against the stone surface, then clutched the swollen lump on her forehead and glared at me with accusing eyes.

"That one's yours."

Five stars or not, I drew the line at sleeping on stone.