His clothes were the first problem he solved.
What was left of his school uniform had been disintegrating for weeks. The shirt was more hole than fabric. His pants were torn at both knees and fraying at the waist. One shoe was gone — had been since the fall — and the other was held together by stubbornness and a strip of bark he'd tied around it.
He'd been making do. Wrapping himself in bark strips, layering dead leaves, generally looking like a feral child raised by a compost heap. It was fine when he was alone. But "fine when alone" had a limit, and Yuki hit it on the morning he stood up and his pants finally gave out entirely.
He stood in the dead zone in his boxers, holding the remains of his school trousers, and decided that this was the moment he learned to make clothes.
Mana can become fire. It can become force. It can become wind. Can it become fabric?
In theory, why not? Mana reshaped itself to match whatever he visualised. Fire was energy. Wind was moving air. Fabric was just... solid material arranged in a specific pattern. If the image was clear enough, the mana should follow.
He started simple. A flat sheet. He held his hands apart and pictured mana solidifying between them — a thin, flexible plane of condensed energy, like a pane of glass but soft.
What he got was a brittle wafer that shattered when he bent it.
Too rigid. Mana wants to be solid in one piece. Fabric isn't one piece — it's thousands of threads woven together.
That was the key insight. He wasn't trying to make a solid object. He was trying to make a woven object — thousands of tiny strands interlocked in a pattern, each one flexible on its own, collectively forming something strong and pliable.
He'd never thought about how fabric actually worked before. It had always just been... fabric. Stuff you wore. But now, sitting in the dust in his underwear, he found himself thinking very carefully about thread count and weave patterns.
He started with a single strand. One thin line of solidified mana, barely visible, stretched between his fingers. It glowed faintly — a pale, translucent white. He bent it. It flexed without breaking. Good.
He made another. Laid it across the first. Then another. And another. Slowly, painstakingly, he began weaving them together — over, under, over, under — building a tiny square of mana fabric one strand at a time.
It took four hours to produce a swatch the size of his palm.
He held it up. Pulled it. Twisted it. Tried to tear it. The material flexed and stretched but held firm — tougher than cotton, tougher than denim, possibly tougher than anything he'd worn in his life.
This works. It's just painfully slow.
Speed came with practice. Over the next few days, he learned to weave multiple strands simultaneously — first two at a time, then ten, then dozens. He found that he didn't need to manually place each thread if his mental image was detailed enough. If he pictured the finished weave pattern clearly — every strand, every crossing, the full structure — his mana would assemble it automatically. Like the difference between laying bricks by hand and pouring concrete into a mould.
By the end of the week, he could produce a metre of mana-woven cloth in about twenty minutes. It was dark grey — the default colour of his condensed mana — with a faint, barely perceptible shimmer in direct sunlight. Smooth to the touch. Flexible. Nearly indestructible.
He made himself pants first. Then a fitted long-sleeve shirt. Then a jacket with an upturned collar because — and he would admit this to absolutely no one — he thought it looked cool. He based the designs on fantasy game characters he'd liked. Functional, fitted, dark-toned. Nothing flashy but nothing sloppy either.
He stood in his new outfit and looked down at himself. No mirror, but his hands told him enough. Clean lines. Good fit. Material that could probably stop a blade.
First time in weeks I look like a person instead of a disaster.
He packed away the shredded remains of his school uniform. Not in a "I might need these later" way. More in a "this is the last piece of my old life and I'm not ready to throw it away" way.
He didn't think about that too hard.
Metal came next.
He'd been sensing the ground beneath him since the early days — pushing his mana awareness into the soil to understand the terrain. Mostly it was dirt, rock, clay. But scattered through the deeper layers, he'd felt pockets of something different. Denser. More structured. Material that pinged against his mana sense with a sharper resonance than the surrounding stone.
Ore deposits. Metal, still locked in raw rock, waiting to be extracted.
He found his first vein about thirty metres below the dead zone's surface. Iron, or something close to it — a thick seam of dense, dark material threaded through a layer of granite.
Getting it out was the challenge.
He'd gotten decent at moving earth, but pulling metal from stone was a different beast. The ore didn't want to separate. It was bonded to the surrounding rock at a molecular level, and his early attempts just ripped out chunks of everything — iron, granite, dirt, all fused together in useless lumps.
I need to be selective. Pull the metal, leave the rock.
He spent two days working on this. The trick was sensing the difference between materials — feeling for the specific resonance of metal versus stone and targeting only that frequency with his pull. Like tuning a radio to one station and ignoring the rest.
When it finally clicked, raw iron oozed up through the cracked earth like dark syrup. Thick, clumpy, riddled with impurities — but unmistakably metal.
Refining it was easier than extracting it. He already had fire magic down to a fine art. He heated the raw ore until it glowed white, burning away slag and impurities, then compressed the remaining metal with force magic — squeezing it into a dense, clean ingot.
His first iron bar was about the size of his forearm. Dark grey, slightly rough, warm to the touch. He hefted it in his hand and felt the weight of it — real, physical, made by him from raw earth.
He grinned like an idiot for about ten minutes.