Chapter 17: The Crimson Spire

Potions had been the very thing that allowed Serayne to amass the materials to expand her Hearthhold, and since elixirology was the branch of alchemy dedicated to their brewing, it was hard to imagine any reward offering a more immediate, practical payoff.

All those other disciplines remained enticing, but they could wait until she stopped producing a tonic whose defining feature - aside from restoring mana - was the taste of rusted scrap metal.

Even so, she hovered her finger over the display for a fleeting second, casting lingering glances at neighboring titles as if saying farewell to tomes about to be yanked from right under her nose. Then she set her jaw and confirmed her choice before she could second-guess herself.

A leather-bound tome materialized on the retrieval panel, and Serayne let out a long breath.

“Done. No point agonizing over it now,” she murmured, picking up her prize and running a thumb along the embossed edge of the cover.

She flipped through a few pages, taking in the chapter layout and diagrams. At a glance, they looked far more structured than Avelra’s personal journal. Satisfied, she closed the volume before she could accidentally lose the rest of the night to it.

There would be plenty of time for a deep dive in a minute; while she was still sitting at the console, she wanted to check the requirements for the next upgrade.

Before she could navigate to the tab, however, a new prompt caught her eye beside the Hearthhold designation.

[Hearthhold  -  Level 2]

[Name: Unassigned]

[Once confirmed, the name cannot be altered. Choose wisely.]

Serayne studied the warning, glanced up toward the ceiling of her newly added floor, and slowly curled the corner of her mouth.

This time, she needed neither a shortlist nor a pros-and-cons analysis; the name sprang to mind almost instantly, laying bare her ambition.

She typed in The Crimson Spire and confirmed her selection, utterly unfazed by the fact that her domain currently stood at only two floors.

Not long ago, she had stared up from the rain-slicked pavement at glowing high-rise windows where people slept in warmth and safety, wondering whether she’d even survive until dawn beneath the awning of that locked clinic. A sanctuary of her own perched high above the forest floor meant far more than just a roof and four walls.

Two floors for now, but nowhere does it say I have to stop there.

Bolstered by that comforting thought, she opened the requirements for Level 3 - which wasted no time reminding her that lofty ambitions carried a very tangible price tag.

[Hearthhold Upgrade to Level 3:]

[Wood ×25,000]

[Stone ×1,000]

[Vines ×5,000]

[E-rank Monster Cores ×100]

Serayne stared at the digits in silence, scanning them once more to ensure the extra zeroes weren't just hallucinations born of fatigue.

Ten times more… Fantastic. All it took was giving the place a grand name for the system to hit me with a luxury tax.

If requirements continued scaling at this rate, subsequent tiers promised to be utterly absurd, though she wasn't about to treat that assumption as an established law just yet.

What puzzled her far more was where all that timber actually went. The expansion involved hollowing out more interior volume inside the colossal trunk, yet not a single splinter of excavated wood had piled up outside her door.

Naturally, she could rationalize that the system was reinforcing walls, layering load-bearing floors, or doing something arcane beyond her comprehension. Still, twenty-five thousand units of timber made it sorely tempting to ask if the system was building a few extra houses for itself on the side.

“Right. I'll worry about that later. First, let's inspect what I've already paid for.”

She closed the panel and glided over toward the workshop, which had been partitioned off from the rest of the ground floor by timber walls, forming a cozy ten-square-meter room.

Inside stood a sturdy workbench fitted with tiered shelving for tools, while below a porthole window rested an iron pedestal. She didn't have to guess its function for long; focusing on it brought up an appraisal window.

[Apprentice-tier Alchemical Pedestal  -  Rank E]

[Effect: Enables engraving a custom alchemical matrix using mana. A cauldron may be placed atop the prepared pedestal.]

[Description: Apprentice alchemists are a fascinating bunch. With astonishing regularity, they draft matrices whose ambition vastly outstrips their skill. A solid iron pedestal will do nicely - at least nobody will shed tears when it blows up.]

Serayne read the final sentence with an increasingly deadpan expression, then shifted her gaze back to the seemingly innocent slab of iron.

“Can you seriously not describe a single thing without insulting beginners?”

At least she now knew where part of that expensive iron ore had gone. Still, the pedestal's presence didn't solve everything; the gulf between sketching charcoal runes on a board and engraving a fully functioning matrix involved several intermediate steps she definitely shouldn't skip.

After the mention of explosions, she had significantly less desire to just copy diagrams out of a textbook and pray for the best.

She inspected the workbench, tested the reach of the shelves, and noted with relief that she could finally organize reagents without piling them around her bed. Leaving the workshop behind, she peeked into the adjoining bathroom.

At first glance, it had almost everything she needed: a basin, a mirror, a showerhead, and a partitioned toilet stall. But right at that last fixture, her satisfaction came to a screeching halt.

It was a squat toilet.

Serayne stared at it, then down at her paralyzed legs, and then back at the toilet, trying to determine whether the Worldheart had genuinely overlooked such a vital detail or simply possessed a far nastier sense of humor than she had given it credit for.

“Should I take this personally? Do I look like someone who can pop a squat?”

She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. After all the excitement of unlocking a bathroom, she’d still have to rig up some kind of seat or support frame. Even so, a dedicated room with running drainage, fresh water, and a lockable door was a monumental upgrade.

She didn't need to solve everything this very second, so she shelved the problem for later and returned to the ladder to see what had changed upstairs.

The formerly windowless room now opened up through expansive glass sliding doors onto a semicircular terrace. At the sight of its sweeping proportions, any lingering regret over splurging on the largest option evaporated on the spot.

Alright, at least here you didn't shortchange me.

She slid the door open and stepped - drifted - outside. The night breeze caught her hair and the loose fabric of her dress; she pressed the hem down against her thighs on instinct before taking in the new extension of her home.

Roughly a third of the terrace was sheltered beneath a canopy of woven creepers slanting down in two overlapping tiers, while the rest lay open to the sky - providing ample space to set out herb-drying trays or bask in the daytime sun.

Examining the living canopy, Serayne noticed that the vines rooted directly into the giant trunk rather than serving as withered cuttings strung over a trellis, allaying her fear that the whole thing would dry out in a few days and shower dead leaves over her head.

Guiding herself along the handholds, she drifted toward the side railing. From there, she could look down at the workshop window and an adjoining wooden tank affixed to the bark - its purpose clicking the moment she leaned over and nudged the lid open.

The water reservoir was bone dry.

“So utilities are strictly self-service too,” she muttered, lowering the lid and immediately thinking of the two filled buckets waiting downstairs.

She hadn't genuinely expected the system to conjure infinite free tap water, but for one brief, naive moment, she had harbored the sweet hope that the word "bathroom" meant she was done hauling buckets from the creek.

Yet glancing back at the expansive terrace doors offered a solution to a problem that had seemed far more aggravating than topping off a tank.

Since she could access the upper floor from the outside, she wouldn't have to wrestle her mattress through the narrow ceiling hatch by the ladder.

The relocation took several trips and a measure of patience. Featherstep still didn't lighten handheld cargo, so she ferried the bedding up first. For the mattress, she braced herself against the exterior vines and hauled it upward in measured stages rather than attempting to hoist the entire bulk at once.

When she finally dragged it across the terrace threshold and settled it against the wall beside the glass, she slumped down onto it with a contented sigh.

Her books and lantern joined the upper room next. Straightening the sheet and plumping the quilt was all it took for the space to transform into a bedroom where someone would actually want to stay.

She had originally planned to start another batch of potion tonight, but the cauldron still held plenty of brew awaiting bottling, Serava's vial deliveries couldn't keep pace with her yield, and the newly acquired Fundamentals of Elixirology lay nearby with the tantalizing promise of answers she refused to postpone until morning.

Above all else, she had a bathroom. Having spent one of her three precious amenity slots on it, she was damn well going to use it before doing anything else.

She filled the reservoir with the stored water, saving the remainder for later, and arranged a secure seat beneath the showerhead so she wouldn't have to hover in midair or worry about slipping onto the wet floorboards while washing.

The water was still chilly, but as the first streams ran down the nape of her neck, Serayne found it infinitely easier to bear behind closed doors - free of mud underfoot and predatory growls breathing down her neck.

She lathered her shoulders and torso, her slick palms gliding over the soft curves of her small breasts where delicate bubbles of foam clung to her skin, washing away every trace of charcoal, sweat, and the gritty exertion of renovating her home.

This time, she could take her time rinsing her hair thoroughly instead of flinching at every snapped twig. And while a ten-liter reservoir didn't invite reckless indulgence, the brief shower still felt like an obscene luxury.

Drying off, she made her way back upstairs, curled up beneath the quilt, and cracked the book open, letting the world shrink down to lantern-lit pages and the tranquil rustle of turning paper.

Down on the Regional Channel, the crowd waiting for details on her upgraded Hearthhold had thoroughly lost their patience.

More than half an hour had passed, and Serayne had neither shared details nor acknowledged the barrage of mentions tagging her name.

[Give it a rest, she's busy. Do you really think she's going to answer every single one of you?]

[Of course not. She’s got her materials, so now she can play queen.]

[I'm never buying from her again. She won't see a single unit from me.]

[You think repeating that enough times will make the rest of us spit on her too?]

[Won't buy? Great, more potions for the rest of us.]

[Who do you take us for, freshmen college girls you can spoon-feed whatever you want?]

[Elyra Voss, the hell do you have against students? I'm in university and that doesn't make me stupid.]

[I'd be wondering if someone's slipping them materials under the table to bark like this.]

[Relax, let them talk a bit more. I worked undercover back home, and let me tell you, this looks like someone laying groundwork to squeeze Serayne for a favor later.]

[Ivara, you worked undercover?!]

[Why, think I'd make that up?]

[Brilliant. Took coming all the way to Elyndra for you to admit it. Now let's talk about our old mutual friends.]

The conversation veered on a dime. Inquiries about Ivara’s past flooded in faster than demands for house tours ever had, as the chance to interrogate someone about undercover work proved vastly more entertaining than flaming an absent merchant.

It wasn't even clear how much truth lay behind the claim and how much was another running gag, but that didn't stop users from chiming in with their own suspicions, accusations, and old grudges. 

Soon enough, Serayne’s name was completely buried beneath the chatter.

Meanwhile, plenty of arrivals simply logged off, concluding that staring at someone else’s Hearthhold wouldn't build their own.

The grace period had an expiration date, and nobody could predict with certainty how drastically conditions in the forest would shift once it lapsed. 

Upgrading one's shelter remained one of the few tangible goals that provided any sense of preparedness against the looming unknown.

Back-of-the-napkin calculations were already circulating in chat suggesting that seven days was plenty to hoard basic materials - provided one combined Gathering with manual labor and didn't sleep through the mornings. 

Yet even those optimistic projections assumed relentless daily grind and zero mishaps.

One still had to scavenge food, fetch water, recuperate, and make it home before dusk. A single sprain, illness, or botched foray could rob them of hours they simply couldn't spare.

Above all, while wood, stone, and vines could be harvested with steady predictability, the requisite monster cores remained a hurdle that waking up early could never solve on its own.