“Everyone ready? Then let’s get to work! Safety first!” I announced. My goblins snorted enthusiastically in reply.
On the morning of the third day of my testing ground inspection, I deployed the entire roster of goblins in my Dimension Home to the flat stretch of woods on the eastern slope of the mountain where we were planning to work. Armed with metal slimes and iron slimes in the form of axes and saws, the goblins rolled out to clear this area.
I had already scoped out the area that needed clearing the day before, taking care of the underbrush and testing out this method of felling trees. I didn’t anticipate them hitting any roadblocks, but if something were to go awry, I’d know right away through the Taming magic. They even had a designated break area.
“Shall we get started?” I asked. Us humans were going to build out a mountain path that would double as a firebreak. Rosenberg was holed up in the cottage to read through the documents on lost magic, but everyone else had joined the construction team today.
The path would slope up the safe eastern side of the mountain from the foothills to the cottage. The mountain sloped down from northwest to southeast, and the cottage was built slightly above mid-slope towards the southern side of the mountain. Because of this, we planned to build the path so it would resemble a sideways S on the map, connecting to the travel road that came up to the bottom of the mountain. In order to make it easier to maintain the woods and the firebreak, as well as transport materials on the path by carriage or wagon, the path was going to be long and gradual. It was going to cross the entire width of the mountain, too, so the path would also look like it was splitting the eastern slope in half once we were done.
“Let’s begin, as we planned,” I said, and the group agreed enthusiastically.
We began work a short distance from the cottage. All of the preparations had been made yesterday, allowing us to get right into work. “We’ll start with the side of the path that faces down the mountain,” I explained.
Commanding a soil slime, I manipulated the earth with slime magic. Digging up waves of dirt, the slime began knocking down every tree in the designated area. Despite the loud impact of timber landing, the soil slime was safely merged into the ground and working at a distance far enough from us that there was no chance of any trees falling in our direction.
The adventurer team would move aside any trees that were in our way, to be collected later and used for something—lumber, firewood, or perhaps for beds to grow mushrooms on. I dug up the soil for our path, compacted it, and set up a space for a retaining wall.
Rocks and pebbles on the ground were left where they were. I sent out a huge rock slime that ate those rocks and created an L-shaped wall connected to the foundation of the path. Each wall—about a meter tall and one and a half meters wide—only took the slime twenty seconds to create. It would have taken human machinery so much longer.
“Our first one is set up,” I said.
“I’m on it!” Miya volunteered, and jumped into the gap between the wall and the ground.
We’d be backfilling the gap later, but for now, I’d asked my team to set up burlap sacks over the drainage holes in the wall to prevent any mud from leaking out.
While the sacks were being placed, I moved on to digging up the next section of the path. Each wall wouldn’t be buried too deep, but chaining them throughout the road would protect it from mudslides and double as a curb.
“It is astonishing how quickly this goes... Even though I expected it thanks to yesterday’s trial run,” Eleonora exclaimed as she kept record of our progress.
“It still feels like cutting corners,” I admitted. Because I was using tools that weren’t available on Earth—like slimes and magic—to simplify the construction process, there was a chance that cracks would show down the road. Of course, if that ever did happen, I’d figure out the flaw and rebuild the path without it. This mountain was our testing ground, after all. Constructing the mountain path was just another experiment—one to utilize slimes in large-scale construction.
We worked on the mountain path for a while like that until Hudom stopped me. “Oh, hold on a minute.” He pointed to the grove of trees ahead of the path. “We’re almost at the baobark grove.”
“That’s the tree that stores water, right?” I asked.
“That’s the one,” Hudom confirmed. “I’d expect the ground to hold more moisture too.”
The kind of digging we were doing today shouldn’t hit an aquifer or anything, but uprooting all these trees would loosen the ground. I slowed our work a little, being careful not to cause a landslide. “Come to think of it, I didn’t get a good look at the baobark yesterday,” I said.
“We had to prioritize scoping out today’s construction sites. And I was the one who collected baobark branches to use as rods... Why don’t I show you right now?” Hudom jogged over to a baobark tree and hacked off a branch with the hatchet he carried on his belt. He returned and handed me a branch that was decently thick and heavy. “When it’s freshly cut, it’s still waterlogged. If you leave it out, it’ll dry pretty quickly. Like this—Exudation.” With that casual incantation, Hudom’s magical energy enveloped the branch and water flowed out of its cross section as forcefully as a faucet. There was enough water to have washed my hands with it, had I anticipated it coming out.
“I sped up the dehydration process with magic, but I didn’t add any water—that all came from the branch,” Hudom explained.
“It’s a lot more than I had anticipated... And I’m just as curious about your spell,” I said.
“It expels any water in plant material. I can’t say it’s a common spell, but it comes in handy more often than you think. For example, I would use it to find water while I was traveling, and my old man would drain water from lumber to make it easier to handle. My mother and little sister used it to dry fruits and flowers. It’s not efficient for mass-producing dry goods, though, since you have to spend magical energy.”
The spell was fascinating. The only plant-based magic I regularly used was Grow, which helped my plants grow faster.
Then, I heard the dried branch crack in Hudom’s hand. “Oh,” he sighed.
“Are you okay? Did you get any splinters?” I asked.
“No, no. These trees break so easily once they’re dry that you’d rarely get any splinters.” Hudom handed me one of the broken halves...and sure enough, it crumbled in my hand. Not only that, but the branch had shrunk in width to about a third of what it had been when it was filled with water.
I inspected a fragment, and I could see how much of it was hollow like a dry sponge, showing where the water was stored. Another look at the standing baobark tree, and I could see that it looked round like a balloon.