The next morning, I brought up Eleonora’s suggestion with the rest of our party over breakfast.
“Miss Eleonora is spot-on when it comes to my instructional plans,” Rosenberg said. “You are very much ahead of schedule, so there won’t be a problem with you spending more time on infrastructure projects. I recommend it, in fact. It would make for a nice change of pace.”
“We’re all going to keep scouting out the mountain anyway. It’ll be easy to mark places that are easier to walk.”
“My only concerns are for you, Ryoma,” Hudom said.
“Right! You’re going to be busy, busy, busy!” Miya chimed in.
They all seemed enthusiastic to help, only hesitating for my sake.
“I’ll be fine,” I reassured them. “We mostly finished measuring the cursed energy yesterday. We’ll do a quick retest before cleansing, but I’ve been told we don’t need to be as thorough as we were yesterday. That was the most physically intensive task, and construction won’t be too arduous with the use of magic.”
I made a mental list of things I wanted to accomplish while we were here: study cursed energy cleansing; learn more about and possibly recreate the lost curse-breaking magic; explore methods of having Korumi interact with people outside of the village. The last two on that list were my bigger priorities, and I’d need to study hexes to accomplish that. Without a solid foundation of hexes, I wouldn’t be able to derive complex applications—even if I could, there could be flaws in my spells that I wouldn’t even catch until they were too late. That was why I’d asked Rosenberg to make the time for me. It might have seemed like I had a lot going on, but it all came back to me studying hexes. I wouldn’t be multitasking, but executing a series of tasks. Since half of the cleansing was done yesterday, I even had some extra time to play with. With Rosenberg recommending it, there was no downside to moving forwards with improving the mountain’s infrastructure. Not only did it make my life easier while I stayed here, if it also made me look better as the duke’s engineer and prevented future annoyances, I’d be killing three or four birds with one stone.
“You’ll all be helping me, and so will my familiars. I’m going to take shortcuts wherever I can,” I said.
“If it looks like Ryoma’s pushing himself too far, we can stop him,” Hudom pointed out to the group. That seemed to quell their concerns, so we moved on to discussing specific plans.