"Time for me to go," Talia said softly. She straightened, looking at the construction crew in front of her. "Do you have a draft for the basement? If not, I'll just start clearing and we can tidy it when you have details."
"We'll have it in under two hours," the lead architect said. Determination made his voice steady despite his exhaustion.
"I'm coming with you," the Professor added. "I want to check the stone composition. If it's weak layering, we'll need more support arches."
"Good reminder," Talia said. "I want to try something anyway. Might change the way we build."
She thought of the ditch in the grass, the dent in the cliff. If she could move stone, could she compress it? Pack it tighter? Reinforce it from the start?
Only one way to find out.
Grinning despite herself, she jogged toward the cliff face, a curious little cohort trailing—Professor, a couple of builders, Theo falling into step at her side.
The rock rose up sheer, dark with mineral veins, still damp in places from waterfall mist. Up close, it smelled of iron and old earth.
Talia lifted her hand, called the terraforming map, and focused on the wall in front of her.
Tap.
Stone rippled, shuddered inward, forming a shallow notch. She switched hands.
Push.
The notch deepened, becoming a small, square-edged cut, the displaced rock mass settling invisibly into the surrounding structure.
Tap, push. Tap, push.
She fell into a rhythm—hand, thought, stone yielding—not effortlessly, but steadily. The ground vibrated faintly under their feet. Dust rained in thin curtains from the new edges. The Professor stared, eyes wide, as the wall slowly opened like a book.
After a few minutes, Talia stepped back, breathing harder but not spent.
A four-metre-wide entrance gaped in the cliff where there had been only featureless rock. Inside, the beginnings of a corridor sloped back into the mountain, its walls unnaturally regular.
Talia walked forward and pressed her palm to the fresh-cut stone.
Smooth. Cooler than the air. It felt… dense.
She took her spear off her back, set the butt, and drove the tip into the wall with a sharp thrust.
Metal screeched, the sound knifing through the air. The spear jutted back, vibrating in her hands. When she lowered it, the stone was unmarked.
She flexed her fingers, wincing. "Okay," she said. "That's promising. Also going to make interior redecorating a nightmare."
Theo stepped up, laid his own hand over the place she'd struck. No cracks, no flakes. Just solid, compressed rock.
He looked at her. She looked back.
Then, together, they turned to face the construction crew clustered behind, eyes round.
"Design this cliff home well," Talia said, voice carrying over the hush of the waterfall. "It's going to be our safest haven for a long time."
The crew—tired, dirty, hands stained with ink and charcoal—straightened. One by one, they nodded, something like pride sharpening their gazes.
Talia eased her hand from the cliff face, stone dust clinging to her fingertips. The first shallow cave opening—more a widened pocket than a real room—glimmered in the dim light. She stepped inside and inhaled. Cool, stale air. A damp mineral tang. The faint distant whisper of water threads somewhere deeper in the mountain.
"Good start," Theo murmured behind her, checking the airflow with a strip of cloth. It fluttered inward. "Better than expected."
She didn't answer. Her eyes were already drawn to the sloping wall to the right—the spot she meant for the first stairwell. If she carved downward carefully, she could shape the basement without destabilising the mountain's ribs.
Glancing back at Theo, waved as she said "I'm going to work for a while. See you later."
She braced one boot against the stone, lifted her hand, and tapped the terraforming interface. A dip rippled through the rock. She pressed again, shaping, deepening, smoothing. It was like pushing clay—if clay could weigh as much as a small house and hum with ancient pressure.
She worked by instinct, guided by the general basement floor design in her mind, carving the beginnings of a stair shaft, then shifting sideways to open the basement entrance. Every section she touched bent to her will—just enough to form rough shapes. She'd refine later.
By the time she cleared the first three rooms, piles of displaced stone were already forming peaks behind her—automatically shunted by the system into a corner of the basement.
The construction crew arrived with the blueprints. Theo and system approved. She flipped through them, matching each room's intended placement: cold storage here, general storage opposite, emergency shelter deeper, water tank along the far-left ribs.
She knelt and traced airflow paths, marking where vents needed to connect. She mapped water channels from the waterfall's pressure line to the reservoir. She calculated wall thickness in places the stone felt "looser," her fingers detecting a faint give that the others couldn't sense. She logged warnings for natural caves—a small hollow pocket she'd have to reinforce, a hairline fracture in the rock that she sealed with a deliberate compression tap.
After six straight hours the work blurred into something hypnotic. Tap, shape, smooth. Stone shifted under her will. Walls bowed and corrected. Floors levelled.
Then a flat-handed push traveled wrong through her arm. The cliff wavered. No—her vision wavered. Talia blinked hard and felt something warm drip from her nose.
Dav's voice hit her like a thrown spear. "Talia!"
Her knees almost buckled. Someone grabbed her arm. Someone else cursed. When she looked down, there were red flecks on the newly smoothed floor.
"Okay," she said faintly. "Maybe… I should sit." She was marched, not guided, back to the tent.
"Tomorrow," Theo said. "If Dale approves you to work, only four-hour shifts with two hours forced rest."
"It was just a small nosebleed," Talia muttered. The glare sharpened. "Right. Four-hour shifts. Sure."
The next morning, Dale gave his verdict: mild over-exertion, fatigue, dehydration, and the classic symptom of "your body is human, stop pretending it's not." With his approval—grudging—Talia returned to the cliff, rested and rehydrated.
She kept her promise. Four hours work, two hours rest. Repeat.
With Theo coordinating everything behind her, the camp began to settle into the first rhythm of actual civilisation. Departments moved into temporary tents arranged in neat rows. Schedules were drafted. Hunting rosters confirmed. Patrol rotations posted. Housing priority rules pencilled out—families first, vulnerable elders next, communal halls after.
By the second day, the mountain responded to Talia's touch more smoothly. She understood its pressure lines, weight pockets, compression tendencies. She carved the water chamber—huge, two floors tall. She shaped storage corridors, squared-off the emergency shelter, and began smoothing the long central walkway that would connect everything.
On the fourth day, as she tapped the wall the stone parted with a crystalline screech. Something shimmered within—silver-blue veins weaving like frozen lightning.
"Oh," she breathed.
"What is it?" A hovering engineer asked.
"Don't know" She responded "Leave it till later." and she pushed the whole vein sideways—just enough to place it behind a future wall.
She had an amusing thought that when she built the upper floors later, she'd divert the ore upward to make a corridor of sliding doors. A museum of minerals. A teaching tool. A mining exhibit for children.
She smiled at the idea. A corridor of little surprises. Copper behind one door. Mythril-sheen ore behind another. Iron webbing behind the third. A hallway of possibilities.
On the sixth day she stepped away from the basement entirely, letting her exhausted mind recalibrate. She turned her attention to the entrance. The raw cliff had been carved unevenly during her earlier experiments; now she smoothed it into a clean, sloping ramp—1.5 metres tall, 6 metres wide—leading directly to the new main door.
By afternoon, she installed the stone sliding door—a massive compressed slab on a simple counterweight track. The thing hissed like a living creature when she moved it. Satisfyingly secure.
On the seventh day, she returned to the basement's final touches. Everything was shaped: walls, floors, ceilings, corridors, vents, chambers. Time to finalise.
She reached into her storage and pulled out the blueprint scroll. It shimmered faintly, and she touched it to the construction slot.
The room shifted. Hallways straightened. Floors changed texture—some to stone tiles, some to a smooth concrete-like surface, one to dark wooden planks that smelled faintly of resin. Door frames standardized to system-perfect measurements. Airflow softened; the cold damp smell evaporated. Vents aligned. Temperature stabilised into something crisp and clean.
Excess stone formed stacks and appeared neatly sorted in the main storage room.
"No furniture yet," Talia noted. "But plumbing's in. Good. That would've been a pain manually."
She exhaled deeply, feeling the ache of seven days in her bones.
"Resources well spent," she said, looking at the decrease in Territory wood stock piles. "I give it shape. The blueprint gives it purpose."
She wiped sweat from her forehead. "Time to give a tour."
The family and leadership team descended the stairs behind her. She tried not to grin as they stepped onto the first landing.
The basement's scale hit them like a shockwave.
To the right: a colossal water tank, sealed in stone, spanning two full levels. A cavern inside a cavern.
"Full capacity gives us fifty days of water for six hundred people," the Professor murmured, awestruck. "Double that if rationed. And if the flow stops… this buys us time."
To the left: the storage district. Corridor after corridor of rooms—grain, preserves, cold storage, trade goods, medical supplies, resources, armory.
"You built a pre-apocalypse shipping yard," Cael said. "Underground."
One level down, they reached the emergency shelter.
It was vast—one enormous chamber with adjustable partitions, clean wooden floors and walls, airflow vents humming softly. Off to the right hand side: bathrooms, a medical corner, small isolation rooms, two side offices for emergency coordination.
The left side: A kitchen and multiple sleeping bays. Rows of stone bunks lined the walls—enough to hold a thousand people if needed, though comfortably it would house far fewer.
To the back, a sloped chute led deeper into the mountain, toward the future septic and composting chambers beneath the internal farming district. Once the agriculture team prepared the safe composting substrates, the waste pit would begin its cycle..
Grandma Elene crossed her arms. "Well, I'm moving in here. Clean air. Warmth. No rain. No night winds. Anyone with sense will too." Mum and Brielle nodded emphatically.
"Easier for me," Talia muttered. "Less walking to work."
Dav shrugged. "I'll stay outside for now. Keep an eye on those who prefer tents."
Cael smirked. "I'll follow Mirana." The single crew threw a look sharp enough to cut rope.
Talia raised a brow at the men behind her. "Don't start." Dad and Grandpa both closed their mouths at once.
The group continued through the chamber, marvel growing with every step.
When Talia finally walked back outside, the sunset stained the cliffs copper-red. She looked up at the mountain—her mountain—and felt a deep rumble of satisfaction in her chest.
The carved shelter hadn't even dented the one-kilometre radius the system had granted her.
Land wasn't the problem. Time and muscle were. But for the first time in her since the apocalypse started, Talia felt she had both.