I hurried to the shopping district. I had to buy copper if I were to make an air pump. I had the iron ingots that would become the magnets with some more processing, but I was lacking the windings. My feet moved fast, and I reached the shop I was looking for.

  “Good afternoon, may I ask you to show me what sort of copper do you have?”

  “Any you may want.”

  “Give me the reddest copper ingots you got.”

  “Ugh… Why’d you need that soft and ugly copper? We got better bronze or more orange, yellowy ingots. Ones that don’t just turn green.”

  “Give me what I asked for… Does it matter what I’m going to use it for as long as I pay you”

  “Alright, kid, how much do you want to buy?”

  “Give me enough for one gold coin.”

  “Bwahaha… Good joke kiddo, have you even seen that kind of money?”

  I pulled out a gold coin and lifted it above my head. “My copper. Now!” I accelerated my aether flow slightly to pressure the shop keeper. He scrambled and brough up front a big crate with 32 ingots inside, each with a weight of a kilogram.

  “Is this good, sir?”

  I looked down in the crate and admired the ingots. The copper bricks caught the dim light of the shop, reflecting it in a red-orange sheen, contrasting with the dull iron, around. I brushed the ingots with my fingers. They were cool and dense, the perfect conductors I needed.

  “Just a tiny bit off of what I need…”

  “This is the best we have considering your request.”

  I nodded. “That’s fine, a gold coin for the whole crate?”

  “The crate isn’t in the price…”

  I furrowed my brows at him. “But it isn’t every day that we get such a large purchase, so you may keep it…”

  I smiled, the frown melted in a serene and thankful expression. “See? It’s not that hard to be respectful.”

  I threw the gold coin at him. Reinforcing myself with aether, I hoisted the crate. I had to take a few steps back and forward to balance myself.

  Over thirty kilograms of copper… Even if I wanted to use aether to stay stable it was difficult. The crate was over half my weight. ‘Should have brought Magnar…’ One step after another I carried it to the tower. Tilting the crate a bit to forward I had to take several rapid steps to regain my footing and balance.

  If I tilted it backwards, I had to take several backsteps… And so, two steps forward one step back I made my way home.

  My lungs were burning, and my back hurt as I reached the gate of my courtyard. I placed the crate on the ground and stretched myself. Pops, like firecrackers, could be heard as I stretched. ‘I really have to learn how to use aether to increase inner joint pressure.’

  I opened the gate and lifted the crate again. I was soon done and with the copper safely stored inside the tower, under the stairs. The die for wire drawing was still in the kiln, getting baked. I turned my attention to another project I had considered for a while.

  I started working. First, I needed to make wooden, cage gears. I took a larger beam and made holes in its ends. I brought two grindstone stands closer and connected the axles to the holes made. This way I had a makeshift lathe to turn the square beam in a round one.

  The roughing gouge bit in the wood, I felt each of the fibers in my hands as the wood spun, the vibrations traveled up my tool, through my wrists, and shook my shoulders. The wood shavings flowed like potato peels and gathered on the ground, prime material for fire starting.

  The wood cracked sharply as the tool cut deeper, bringing it closer to the desired shape. It took an hour to have it all uniform and smooth. Then I divided it in segments. The total length of the beam was four meters.

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  I delimited two and a half meters for the main hub and half a meter for gear supports, then started spinning the beam again. From the rest one meter I made thinner pieces, that would act as teeth for the cage gears.

  After getting the material for every piece sorted out, I started to do more cutting. I needed to cut a ring off of the main shaft. I delimited five segments on it. One to be buried in the ground, being the foundation, and the rest to be cut and taken off one by one.

  I took them and split them by thickness, meaning distance between the flat faces. I made wooden bearings, in which I fixed part of the wooden cog teeth. I used a simple trick to identify where the holes had to be made.

  I drew a circle on a square tile of cinder stone, then on the cinder stone drew To further fix them in place, I made an octagonal support and made the outer layer an octagonal box.

  Repeating this three times, I obtained the segments of my training dummy. I place spacing rings in between the wooden bearings, which held the segments at a certain distance from each other. I disassembled the structure.

  With some lard melted and the bearings disassembled, I put the wood to rest in the resulting oil. I burnt the outside of the gear teeth and also coated them in oil. Then I cut thin slices of lard and wrapped them around the teeth. I took care of the inside, inter level gears too, then reassembled everything.

  “You’ve been working on that all afternoon, what is it, boy?” Vex came and asked me. He was leaning against the tower wall as he brought his hand up, his mouth opening in yawn so big, it looked painful

  “A training post… Actually…” I paused a little weighing whether it was worth asking him for help or not.

  “Help me get this fixed in the ground. I’d like to get the base surrounded with either hardened ground or cinder stone.”

  “Alright, Hargrave bored my bones to death anyway.” He came after me.

  I led him to a point to the right of the tower in the back. I marked the spot and Vex took care of the rest. With my stand fixed I could give it a try! I stepped forward and I hit the middle arm with a thwack. The other two levels turned to hit me.

  It was slow, the friction was high, and the system was losing strength, but the concept was sound. I struck again and again. The wood was holding up well against my hits. But the spin was losing power. Too much friction in the bearings. The only way to get it to have a smoother spin is to just spin it. So, punching.

  “So, you just punch and answer to your own punches? But if you hit the top one, and stop the middle one, the bottom won’t hit you… Wouldn’t it be more effective to make them keep spinning?”

  “Perhaps, but I’d need to think of a more complex design. For now, this will do. At some point I’ll make one that spins by itself. I first need to train my coordination. I can’t fall behind in aetherless combat, my injuries are enough of a handicap already.”

  Vex shrugged. “You got a point. Well, you do you, but that thing’s slow.”

  “It will get better after some use.”

  Even with aether reinforcement, impacts were impacts. I still felt pain from hitting the dummy, so at some point I stopped. I took off all the other arms of the stand and let behind only one in the middle section to push it around.

  I leaned my weight against the protruding arm and began a steady, circular march. It was the same mind-numbing rhythm used to grind flour at a village mill—one heavy step after another, tracing the same path over the stone floor.

  Each rotation forced the wooden bearings to rub and heat, using the repetitive friction to burnish the internal fibers into a smooth, polished glide.

  “You’re really perseverant…” Vex admitted, looking at me push.

  It wasn’t hard, there wasn’t a lot of resistance, but to a single impact meant to create an impact, it was too much. Grinding wood against wood did take time, but it also ensured that it would last much longer as fibers got condensed, not necessarily cut away.

  “If you want quality things and wealth, you can’t expect to do it through sleeping… Well at the very least not at first…”

  “You’re blabbering too much. If hard work solved everything, I wouldn’t be stuck at the fourth stage…”

  “Well, maybe if you didn’t give up after a few failed tries you wouldn’t be here to mope. You’d still be failing but moving closer to success. Like I am.” I shot back.

  “What do you even know, boy, you only lived for what? Nine years?” He retorted angrily. “You’ll see how the real world is.”

  ‘Oh, I know, but I also know that a sharp mind and unyielding attitude will get you farther than sleeping on it.’

  Vex left, going back to Hargrave. I continued my pushing. They left soon after, their steps light tap on the stone. The sun was setting, darkness flowing, pouring like a tide over the world. After I made sure they’d be far enough, I restarted the formation. I was not going to use aether, but the jing refinement was a good enough benefit.

  Aether twirled, sucked up from the ground, flowed up though my legs and joined the swirl in my lower dan tian. It squeezed through the array casting outwards a ripple that brought more aether in, then continued its flow up and left through my head and hands.

  Warmth followed it, a tingling sensation of power as the flow ceded energy to my body. I felt my body shake under the flow, slowly adapting and becoming a better conductor while I spun the dummy. ‘Hard work leads to easy work, as long as you use your brain!’

  I showered then meditated and went to sleep, pleased with my progress for today. Throughout the night the array worked, making my body vibrate and buzz, humming with aether.

  Next morning I woke up feeling more refreshed than ever, each of my steps felt light. I misaligned the shards and went to the mandatory assembly. A minor delay before working on the motor. I had power, now I had to make use of it.

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