After gnawing on a piece of dried fruit and thinking it over, Caius felt much calmer. Could he do this sort of thing on purpose, or was it random? And maybe there was a limit on how many times it would work. After all, only one rock was glowing.

  Considering his needs, Caius decided to try doing whatever this was to his shoes. Walking on top of snow would be infinitely preferable to trudging through it. The only question was how?

  "Uhm... shoes? Could you spread out my weight over a larger area?"

  Talking to his footwear made him feel more than a little ridiculous, but the next moment he felt something happen. Both shoes flashed with an inner light, brighter than the rock. But then the leather dimmed.

  Now that he had examined the process closely, Caius felt stupid for not realizing that was what caused the flickering the day before. Then again, our assumptions color our perception. He hadn't expected things to glow, so he had assumed he was just seeing wrong.

  Experimentally, he set his foot down on what little remained of the snowbank he had tossed the rock into before. The snow settled a bit, but held. Eventually he put his full weight on the foot, but the snow continued to support him.

  "Whatever this is, it's incredibly useful. Best not to look a gift horse in the mouth." Caius thought aloud. Then he realized that whatever was happening seemed to involve what he said. Maybe he should watch his words.

  He snorted in amusement. As if he didn't already weigh every word he said when others were around. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, at least in the immediate future. He would just have to treat inanimate objects a bit like people for now.

  Anyway. This had been a lengthy distraction from his goal. In fact... Caius quickly scaled up his ambitions. Sure he could heat water with the pretty rock, but he could think of all kinds of applications for a magical heat source.

  Caius carefully emptied the water and other rocks out of his pot, dropped the pretty rock inside and repurposed one of his tripod poles into a sort of long handle. Sure, he could dig a hole in the snow to use for a bathtub. But he could also melt one for a fraction of the effort!

  The ideal location would be that massive snow drift he had tunneled into for that now-collapsed shelter. And with his newly magical shoes, walking around was much less effort. So he crossed the stream and set about melting a larger hole in the snow. It took a while, the melted snow had a tendency to freeze again rather quickly. At least that meant the bottom might be able to take his weight?

  Of course he realized he didn't know how big to make the hole and had to walk all the way back to get the blanket. In the end he had a hole that was about the size of a large washtub. He had just finished carefully laying the blanket into the hole when he realized that he was kneeling on the snow.

  Shouldn't his knees be sinking into the snow, like his feet would without the shoes?

  After some experimentation, he discovered that apparently whatever he had managed to do to the shoes worked even if it wasn't the shoe touching the snow. Unless he intentionally tried pushing into the snow, the surface would support him.

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  Caius had a dumb idea. Which he would try while standing somewhere the snow was thin, so he wouldn't sink into the drift if it didn't work.

  Turns out that as long as he was holding at least one of the shoes, the effect worked no problem. Which was incredibly useful. Caius was firmly in favor of not looking gift horses in the mouth, but things really seemed too good to be true at the moment.

  Well, he still needed to fill the washtub.

  Maybe Caius was getting a bit cavalier with this whole physics-defying abilities thing. The pretty rock alone definitely violated the laws of thermodynamics somehow. Maybe he would start referring to all this as "magic" and stop worrying about it for now.

  So he grabbed the uglier of the two wooden bowls and considered his words carefully. "Bowl, please you hold more volume than you should for me. Ten times more, maybe?" Making the second part a question might have been a mistake. Regardless, it worked when he tried it. There was a faint glow to it, much fainter than the rock.

  While filling the tub with water from the stream would get the job done, his newly magical bowl only held two or three liters. Probably about ten times what it did originally. Probably for the best that it wasn't larger, it didn't do anything about the weight. Caius found himself scooping snow into the tub like a child on the beach with a toy bucket.

  Fortunately he remembered to dump the rock into the hole from where he had set the pot down on a corner of the blanket. It rapidly melted the snow, in fact it was quicker than Caius could scoop snow in. Which probably meant the water would be warm by the time he finished? That would be nice, he was working up quite a sweat.

  No soap, unfortunately. Maybe for the best, Caius thought he remembered something about medieval soap being made out of ashes and lye? The idea sounded unpleasant.

  After managing to undress without sinking into the snow, Caius indulged in quite a long wash. He was grateful for it, he felt extremely gross. The bowl came it quite useful for that since the tub was far too small to lie down in. He did eventually feel clean after enough scrubbing himself with his hands and fingernails.

  Somehow Caius only accidentally brushed against the still boiling hot rock four or five times during the process. He probably should have just fished it out somehow and put it back in the pot, but it kept the water nice and warm despite the cold air leeching the heat out of it.

  The water was too dirty to wash his clothes in, so he ended up washing them in the stream. And the blanket too.

  Caius said a few words of thanks for the fact that no one and nothing was around to observe him during the process. He was mostly at peace with his physical appearance, but that didn't mean he liked the idea of others seeing him naked in the woods.

  He didn't actually wash the outer clothes, those were still fairly clean. All the sweat was caught by the thinner linen shirt and pants he wore next to his skin. Quite clever, actually. When all your laundry was done by hand you'd want to avoid washing everything every day.

  Actually... while he was making everything magical he might as well make his life as easy as possible.

  "Can you two please soak up grime, then give it up when I wash you?" He addressed the linen clothes.

  They glowed briefly.

  One more dunk in the river and suddenly both looked like they'd just come back from being professionally laundered.

  Caius decided that was more than enough. He'd already used this power much too frivolously. From now on he would only use it for essential things, if at all.

  Essential things like making his footwraps keep his feet dry. And turning the little cookpot into a piece of non-stick cookware that put the modern equivalent to shame. And turning one of the coin purses into a heatproof container to hold the pretty rock.

  "I don't seem to be very good at using magic responsibly." Caius observed aloud. Fortunately he didn't spot any telltale flash of light, maybe observations didn't trigger whatever magic this was?

  Regardless, he packed up and set off. It was much easier and more comfortable now.