That afternoon, Rosenberg and I resumed the clearing of the lumberyard while the adventurers went exploring on the west side of the mountain.
First, I decided to cut down the trees that were still standing with slime magic.
“You make quick work of them,” Rosenberg remarked. “And clean work at that.”
Cutting down the trees in the same direction felt as satisfying as knocking down a huge row of dominoes. I kept working while I explained how the slime magic worked to Rosenberg, since he hadn’t been able to see it in action that morning.
Once all the trees I wanted to fell were down, the clearing seemed a lot more spacious than it was—a little larger than a baseball stadium. It was common in Japan to describe the size of a large area by calculating how many Tokyo Dome stadiums could fit in said area, but that analogy never gave me a clear idea of how large the area really was. I decided to perform a proper survey of the area at a later date.
“Okay. I’m counting on you guys!” I said to the goblin team. Now that I’d taken care of felling the trees with slime magic, they could all focus on hauling the trees away. I even took away the dirt around each stump they left from this morning’s felling, so I had them drag those to one pile as well. Once the stumps were removed, I would refill those holes with slime magic and level the ground...but it would take the goblins some time to carry them all away.
In the meantime, I decided to dig a well. I picked a spot in the center of the clearing. When I scouted out the baobark groves with Hudom, I had a water slime search for aquifers and pick out spots best suited for a well.
Boosting his strength with magic, Hudom moved some fallen trees out of the way for us. “How’s that look?”
“Perfect. Thank you,” I answered, looking at the open space where we could dig a well. Just as I’d done that morning, I brought out a huge rock slime and a soil slime.
When it came to well-digging without the help of heavy machinery, methods like the Kazusa-bori (a traditional Japanese well-digging method that used the force of springy bamboo) came to mind. My plan, once again, was to take full advantage of my slimes and their abilities.
First, I showed the huge rock slime where I wanted to put the well, and had it extend a cylindrical appendage under itself.
“The location is good,” I said. Making sure that we were lined up to the spot correctly, I had the soil slime soften the ground under the huge rock slime so it could push its cylindrical body farther into the ground. In the process, I had the huge rock slime ingest the dirt in its way and spit it out aboveground.
“As the duke’s butler, I have witnessed various public work projects,” Sebas said. “This method revolutionizes well-digging.”
Instead of the traditional method of digging a hole and then placing a pipe, I was taking away the soil from under the pipe so I could sink it farther into the ground. This was closer to the caisson method normally reserved for building massive underground structures. Sebas had a point that this was revolutionary—I was using a method concocted in a world full of heavy machinery.
“It looks like it won’t take longer than five more minutes,” Sebas added.
“Based on yesterday’s research, I found an aquifer about five meters underground,” I said. “The huge rock slime can extend itself up to thirty meters or so, and we could dig that far down, but I’m glad we don’t have to.”
The reason aquifers were more easily found in baobark groves was probably that baobark trees grew more easily when an aquifer was near the surface. Even looking at the dirt that was being brought up now, I could see that it was very moist and claylike. After a while, I noticed that the soil was becoming wetter. I shared my senses with the huge rock slime and saw that we had dug enough. I had it stop digging and hollow out the center of its cylindrical appendage to make it into a pipe. After putting in slits along the well walls to siphon water from the ground, I called the slimes back into the Dimension Home, asking the huge rock slime to detach itself from the well pipe portion of its body. Once it did, I just had to attach a hand pump I created earlier.
“When did you build that?” Sebas asked.
“Last night. Don’t worry, I didn’t give up any sleep over it,” I said.
As someone who had read plenty of isekai novels before living out the real deal, I obviously knew the structure and construction method of a hand pump. With the help of alchemy, it had really taken me no time at all to throw it together. Even if I had to make some adjustments to the pump after setting it up, I wouldn’t feel bad because I’d barely spent any time making it. A hand pump itself wasn’t a new invention to this world—my guess was that a previous traveler from Earth had popularized it—so building one myself didn’t shock the others too badly.
“Now I’ll test it out,” I announced.
Using water magic to prime the pump, I started cranking it. With every metallic creak of the handle, I felt the pressure build. The creaking soon turned to burbling, and muddy water poured out of the pump’s spigot. “Okay. It works.”
The handle of the pump felt a little stiff, but I hadn’t really used anything like this since I was a child on Earth. Water flowed out of it without issue, so it must have been normal to feel a little weight against the crank. So was the mud in the water, I assumed. It should gradually clear up if we let the water flow out. If it didn’t, I’d attach a filter slime to the spigot to catch any mud.
I set up a container to catch the muddy water with a mud slime to drink it so it wouldn’t overflow.
Then it occurred to me to dress up the well a little bit. Right now, it was just a lone well with a hand pump sticking out. Someone could be working in this area and easily run into it. Making the well more noticeable would prevent such an accident.
I asked the huge rock slime to cover the ground around the well with doughnut-shaped pavers until there was a paved circle a meter and a half wide with the well at its center. Furthermore, I enclosed the well with a simple gazebo with arched openings in each direction. Finally, I built a water basin to catch the water coming out of the pump.
“How does that look?” I asked, pointing at the ground.
“There is nothing more I could possibly think of to add,” Sebas said.
“The well looks great,” Hudom agreed. “But what do you want to do with all this dirt? I’ll clear it for you, if you like?”
“Oh, you can leave it,” I said. “It won’t get in the way of hauling lumber, and I’ll feed it to my soil slimes and mud slimes later.” Some of them particularly liked clay, so I’d save some for them. In fact, I could dig up more soil until they evolved. I assumed they would evolve into clay slimes, but I had to record my hypothesis and their actual results against my expected ones.
Judging by the mud pile, though, the soil here retained even more moisture than I’d thought. I’d have to conduct boring surveys at other locations to confirm, but we might have to perform additional construction to drain the extra water from the soil, or else we’d need to make this place into paddies instead of farmland.
We were rapidly clearing up the flatlands of the mountain. By nightfall, our clearing was ready to test out the moonlight ritual.