The walls were up. The house was built. The water flowed. The bath worked.
And the homestead was still ugly.
Yuki stood on his roof on a clear morning and looked out over his domain — and felt nothing. The dead zone was functional. Defensible. Spacious. But it was also a grey, lifeless husk of land that looked like the surface of the moon. Pale dust from wall to wall. Skeletal trees too brittle to serve any purpose. No colour. No movement. No life.
He'd walled himself into a graveyard.
This isn't a home. This is a bunker. A very large, very depressing bunker.
The perimeter walls solved the monster and encroachment problems. Nothing was getting in without his permission. But walls around dead land didn't make it liveable. He needed green. Trees. Grass. Flowers. Something that made this place feel like somewhere a person lived instead of somewhere a person was sentenced to.
Step one: make the soil worth planting in.
The dust was the core problem. The chain reaction had drained everything — not just mana, but moisture, nutrients, organic matter. The ground was sterilised. He'd already transplanted forest soil for the farming plot, but that was a small patch. To revitalise the entire homestead, he needed water — lots of it, everywhere, for a long time.
Canals.
He already had the main channel from the western stream. What he needed was a network — branches splitting off the main line, running throughout the homestead like veins, carrying water to every corner of the dead zone. Not deep channels. Shallow ones — irrigation ditches that would seep into the surrounding ground, slowly rehydrating the dust and giving transplanted soil something to work with.
He spent two days on it. The work was meditative — walk a line, split the earth, shape the channel, line it with thin stone to prevent erosion, move on. He designed the network in a rough grid, with the main channel running north to south through the centre and secondary channels branching east and west at regular intervals. Each secondary line was shallow enough to step over but wide enough to carry steady flow.
When he opened the gates — simple stone blocks he could raise or lower to control flow from the main channel — water crept into the network and spread. Within hours, the grid was full. Thin ribbons of blue water running through pale dust, seeping outward, slowly turning grey to brown.
It would take weeks for the soil to recover. Maybe longer. But the infrastructure was in place. Water was flowing. The land would heal.
Now it needs things growing in it.
The forest had everything he wanted and made him fight for every bit of it.
He'd started with a scouting run — pushing past the perimeter wall and into the tree line, mana sense extended, looking for candidates. Pretty trees with broad canopies. Fruit-bearing trees — he'd found several species during his hunts, round things that tasted like tart apples and oblong ones with sweet, dense flesh. Nut trees, their branches heavy with hard-shelled clusters. Grasses — thick, green, the kind that would carpet the dust and make it look like actual ground. Flowering bushes that caught his eye with bursts of colour he hadn't seen in months.
Finding them was easy. The forest was absurdly lush. Every direction held something worth transplanting.
Getting them out was the problem.
A small bush? Fine. He could dig it up with earth magic, roots and all, carry it back by hand. Grass patches? Same deal — cut a section of turf, lift it, haul it home.
But trees — real trees, the ones with broad canopies and established root systems — were a different matter entirely.
He found his first candidate about half a kilometre into the forest. A fruit tree, maybe eight metres tall, with a thick trunk and a crown of dark green leaves dotted with those round, tart fruits he liked. Good size. Good shape. It would look perfect near the house.
He sank his mana into the earth around it and started digging. The root system was massive — a sprawling web that extended three or four metres in every direction, tangled with the roots of neighbouring trees, woven into rocks and clay. Extracting it without killing it meant getting all of it — every major root, enough of the soil around them to keep the system intact, and the trunk and canopy above.
It took an hour of careful work. By the end, he had the tree free — a huge mass of roots, soil, and trunk, hovering slightly above the hole he'd dug, supported by a cushion of earth magic.
Then he looked at the path back to the homestead and realised his problem.
Half a kilometre of dense forest. Tight gaps between trunks. Low branches. Undergrowth that came up to his waist. And he was holding a tree that was eight metres tall with a root ball the size of a small room.
I can't carry this back. I can barely move it without hitting something.
He tried. He managed about twenty metres before the canopy snagged on an overhead branch, the root ball clipped a trunk, and the whole thing lurched sideways and nearly crushed him.
He set it down. Stood back. Thought about it.
I need to move this without physically carrying it. I need it to float.
Telekinesis wasn't a stretch. He'd been moving objects with mana since day one — pushing rocks, lifting earth, shaping metal. But those were all contact applications, or at least close-range. What he needed was sustained, precise levitation at a distance. Hold the tree in the air, move it through the forest, navigate around obstacles, all without touching it.
He started small. Lifted a rock with pure mana force — no contact, just a field of directed energy gripping the object from a distance. It rose. He moved it left. Right. Up. Down. Smooth, responsive, easy.
He tried a larger rock. Same result. A fallen log. Heavier, more awkward, but manageable.
He turned back to the tree and wrapped it in a field of telekinetic force — a cocoon of mana pressure, evenly distributed across the trunk, canopy, and root ball. The tree lifted off the ground. Slowly, steadily, rising until it cleared the surrounding undergrowth.
He walked. The tree followed, floating behind him like a bizarre parade float. He steered it around trunks, tilted it to clear low branches, adjusted altitude to avoid snagging on anything. It was like piloting a very large, very unwieldy drone through an obstacle course.
It worked. Awkwardly, slowly, with a lot of stop-and-adjust — but it worked. The tree made it back to the perimeter wall, over it, and into the homestead without losing a single branch.
He planted it fifty metres from the house. Sank the root ball into a pre-dug hole, packed enriched soil around it, and connected a small irrigation channel to the base. The tree stood in the grey dust, green and alive and absurdly out of place, like a single brushstroke of colour on a blank canvas.
Yuki stepped back and looked at it.