Let me tell you about the past month and a half.

  Actually, let me not, because most of it was reading and trivia quests and daily quest grinding and flux practice and the particular flavor of monotony that sets in when your entire world is five by five and your primary social interaction is arguing with a formal but occasionally strange system interface about whether adjacent and nearby mean the same thing in the context of flux density gradients. They do not, for the record. I was wrong. The system was right. I have made my peace with this.

  The broad strokes: I finished volume seven of the flux control manual this morning.

  Seven volumes. I started volume two on day seven, which means I have spent the better part of six weeks reading extremely dense technical literature on my bedroom floor — I'm calling it a bedroom floor now, it's a floor I sleep on, that's a bedroom — with no desk, no chair, inadequate lighting courtesy of Gerald, and a hunger situation that I've managed into something approaching routine. Eat Igo meat when I feel too hungry, wash it down with water, spend the following days regretting the texture, move on. I have not found a better solution. I have accepted this.

  The flux control manuals were worth it.

  Volume two gave me flux diffusion — intake, absorption, the ability to actually refill my reserves instead of just managing what I had. Volume three gave me flux cycling, which is the difference between having flux and using it efficiently. Volumes four and five were the hardest and covered flux density manipulation and field generation, which is how the flux overlay skill works, which I now understand and can almost use correctly. Volume six covered flux integration with external materials — which is the theoretical foundation for fabrication, welding, and approximately everything useful. Volume seven was the capstone and covered advanced field mechanics and I will not pretend I understood all of it but I understood enough.

  My flux bubble is almost perfect now. Almost. It has the occasional structural irregularity at the poles that I'm working on. But almost perfect is significantly better than the wobbly ovoid I was producing six weeks ago that couldn't hold its shape for more than three minutes.

  I have been doing trivia quests and daily quests with the focused dedication of someone who understands that drift points are the only currency that matters and that grinding them is the unglamorous infrastructure of everything else. My total this morning, before today's expenditures: 9,847.

  Today I was ready.

  The blueprint tree had been open for six weeks and I had spent that time learning it the way I'd learned the flux manuals — thoroughly, systematically, with notes in my memo tab and a clear sense of what I was building toward. The tree divided roughly into two branches: Upgrades and Utilities, with the important caveat that several utilities were prerequisites for upgrades, which meant the order of operations mattered.

  The hull reinforcement had been first — I'd done that already, or rather I'd almost done it, I had the blueprint and the processed aluminum and iron that I'd extracted from ore using a method I'm going to explain in a moment, and the hull reinforcement was complete, and the box is now measurably sturdier than it was, and the system awarded me something I hadn't expected:

  TITLE UNLOCKED: NOOB BLACKSMITH Effect: Smelting time reduced by 10% The system acknowledges this was not the intended use of the flux welding skill.

  I read that last line three times. I choose to take it as a compliment.

  But I'm getting ahead of myself. The ore problem.

  Six weeks ago I had aluminum ore and iron ore in my inventory and a hull reinforcement blueprint that required processed aluminum and processed iron. I had no furnace. I had no heat source. I had a flux welding skill I'd bought three weeks in as insurance against hull damage, a flux bubble I was getting better at holding, and a chemistry education that I would generously describe as functional.

  I knew ore needed heat to become metal. I knew impurities separated out at different melting points and different densities. I knew — vaguely, from some chapter of my actual education that had apparently survived the memory wipe better than everything personal — that iron ore was heavier than most of its contaminants.

  I did not know precise melting points. I did not have a thermometer.

  So here is what I did.

  I generated a flux bubble — the same kind I'd been practicing for the flux overlay skill, a contained field that I could pressurize and heat independently of the surrounding environment. I put a portion of iron ore inside it. Then I pointed my index finger at the bubble and pushed concentrated flux through the tip — which is the entire mechanism of flux welding, it turns out, just flux under enough pressure and direction that it generates heat — and I used my finger like a Bunsen burner.

  This took several hours. I stopped every few minutes when the heat was starting to burn my finger. The ore heated slowly, then quickly, then dramatically. The bubble kept it contained — mostly. There were a few moments of structural concern that I will not dwell on. Gradually the contents of the bubble separated, the way things separate when they have different densities and the option to do so — the heavier material sinking, the lighter material rising, the whole system reorganizing itself by weight in the way that heated substances do when they're given room.

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  I am not a chemist. But I knew iron was heavier.

  I let the dense material at the bottom flow directly into my inventory. The system counted it as molten iron. I let the lighter material follow — the inventory identified it as carbon and molten aluminum, which was more than I'd expected and less surprising in retrospect given that iron ore does not come alone. The impurities went to their own inventory slots, labeled and organized, because my inventory does that.

  Then I waited for the molten iron to cool, which the inventory tracked with a small temperature indicator I hadn't noticed before, and which took longer than I wanted it to and shorter than I feared.

  Processed iron. Ten units. Exactly what the blueprint required.

  The blast furnace blueprint had cost me 800 drift points, which I had authorized under the category of necessary infrastructure. The material requirements were Igo bones — I had plenty — and processed iron, which I now had. The fabrication process was straightforward in principle: supply flux, maintain steady output, allow the blueprint to guide the materials. The items pulled from inventory automatically. All I had to do was hold the flux steady.

  I managed this for approximately four hours before falling asleep.

  I am not proud of this. I woke up with my face on the floor and the half-constructed blast furnace sitting in the middle of my box like an accusation and the system displaying a neutral note that said FABRICATION PAUSED — OWNER UNRESPONSIVE with the particular non-judgmental neutrality of something that had decided not to have opinions about this.

  I finished it the next morning. Two more hours, full attention, steady flux output, and then something in the process clicked into completion and the fabrication skill released and there it was.

  A blast furnace. In my five by five box.

  It was approximately the size of a small microwave, which I noted and chose not to examine too philosophically. It ran on flux — everything ran on flux, I was beginning to understand that flux was just the word this universe used for power source — and it had come with a manual.

  The blast furnace manual was fourteen pages long. It was organized like a recipe book. It had sections on dwell time for different materials, optimal flux input levels, expected output grades, and a troubleshooting appendix that mostly said increase flux input as the solution to every problem, which I respected for its simplicity.

  I processed all remaining ores over the course of one afternoon. Aluminum — done. The remaining iron — done. The blast furnace was significantly faster than my flux bubble improvisation, which tracked given that it was purpose-built for this and my previous method had been creative in the way that things were creative when you had no other options.

  Then I did the hull reinforcement.

  Two days of fabrication, interrupted by sleep and flux absorption and daily quests and the usual business of existing in a box in space. The hull reinforcement applied itself to the box's exterior in layers I could feel rather than see — a thickening, a densification of the flux woven through the metal walls. The hull integrity readout climbed from 94% (Some dumb space rock flying through space unnaturally fast slammed into the side of my box) to 100%

  HULL INTEGRITY: 100% (REINFORCED)

  Hull Integrity Ceiling: Upgraded

  Resistance to flux-based damage: Significantly increased

  I looked at that for a while. At the word reinforced sitting in parentheses next to the number, modest and functional and meaning that what had been torn open six weeks ago was now harder to tear open than it had ever been before.

  I pressed my hand flat against the wall. The metal was the same temperature it had always been. Gerald hummed above me.

  "Better," I told the box.

  The box did not respond. The box never responded. But I had long since stopped requiring responses from things that didn't offer them and started finding the consistency of them restful.

  I opened the propulsion section of the blueprint tree.

  The basic propulsion system blueprint sat at the top of the branch, accessible, glowing with the particular quality of things that were available rather than locked. It cost 1,000 points. I bought it without hesitation.

  Three blueprints unfolded in my vision simultaneously:

  BASIC PROPULSION SYSTEM — COMPONENT BLUEPRINTS:

  1. Internal Propulsion Module

  2. External Propulsion Module

  3. Basic Radar System

  I read through the material requirements with the focused attention of someone who had learned to take blueprint requirements seriously since the chair incident. The materials were manageable — more processed metals, some components I'd need to fabricate from smaller parts, nothing that seemed impossible given my current resources and equipment.

  Then the system added a note.

  NOTICE: Blueprint recipe access requires prerequisite knowledge. The following reading requirements must be completed before propulsion blueprints become available:

  NEW QUEST: Engineering Prerequisites

  Read: Basic Space Engineering Vol. 1-20 — 0/20

  Read: Basic Physics Vol. 1-5 — 0/5

  I looked at that.

  Twenty volumes of Basic Space Engineering. Five volumes of Basic Physics. The system, which had apparently been waiting for me to unlock propulsion to spring this on me, manifested the books in the corner of my box with the quiet efficiency of something that did not understand why this might be unwelcome.

  Twenty-five books. Each one, based on the spines, approximately three hundred pages.

  Seven thousand, five hundred pages.

  I looked at the stack. The stack was substantial. It occupied a corner of my box in a way that suggested it was aware of its own significance. I looked at my flux reserves — full, because I'd done my morning absorption. I looked at Gerald. I looked at the window. I looked at the seven thousand five hundred pages of prerequisite reading standing between me and the ability to move through space with intention.

  "Right, even in the void of space I can't escape physics. " I said.

  I lay down on my floor.

  I closed my eyes.

  Day fifty-three was going to have to wait until day fifty-four, because some things needed to be processed horizontally, and this was one of them.

  Gerald flickered once, which I had started interpreting as sympathy.

  I was asleep in four minutes.