One down. This is going to take forever.
He made four more trips that day. Each one was the same — find a tree, spend an hour digging it up, spend another hour navigating it back through the forest with telekinesis. The levitation was getting smoother with practice, but the travel time was killing him. Half a kilometre each way through dense undergrowth, moving at walking pace because anything faster risked smashing the tree into something.
By the fifth trip, he was standing in the forest next to a gorgeous nut tree with a spreading canopy, looking at the path back, and thinking: There has to be a better way.
The thought arrived fully formed, the way the best ideas always did.
Teleportation.
He'd cracked dimensional storage weeks ago. That spell worked by folding space — creating a pocket, a bubble, a separate little dimension he could store things in. It was complex. It required sensing the spatial fabric, warping it, folding it over on itself, stabilising the pocket, anchoring it to his mana signature.
But teleportation wasn't folding space into a pocket. It was connecting two points. Tearing a hole here and opening it there. Same realm. Same dimension. Just a different location.
And now that he thought about it — really thought about it — that should be simpler than what he'd already done. A dimensional pocket required creating an entirely new space, separate from the normal world, with its own stable geometry. Teleportation just required connecting two points that already existed. No new space. No separate dimension. Just a bridge.
I've been doing the hard version this whole time. The easy version is just... a shortcut.
He closed his eyes. Extended his mana sense. Felt the spatial fabric around him — that subtle tension underneath everything, the framework he'd learned to detect when developing dimensional storage.
He picked two points. Here — where he was standing, next to the nut tree. And there — the homestead, near the house. He could feel both locations through his mana sense, though the homestead was faint at this distance.
He focused on the space between them. Felt the fabric stretching from point A to point B. And instead of folding it into a pocket, he just... pinched it. Brought the two points closer. Pressed them together until they touched.
Then he pushed through.
The air in front of him tore. Not dramatically — no flash of light, no swirling portal. Just a split in the visual field, like someone had cut a slit in a painting and there was a different painting behind it. Through the slit, he could see grey dust and the corner of his house.
His homestead. Half a kilometre away. Visible through a hole in space the size of a doorway.
Holy —
He didn't step through. Not yet. He wasn't an idiot. Teleporting himself through an untested spatial tear was exactly the kind of thing that sounded cool in fiction and ended with you materialising inside a wall.
But the nut tree didn't have that concern.
He wrapped the tree in telekinetic force, lifted it, and pushed it toward the tear. The root ball entered first — passing through the slit and emerging on the other side, in the homestead, as smoothly as stepping through a doorway. The trunk followed. The canopy. The whole tree slid through the spatial bridge and landed softly on grey dust, half a kilometre from where it had been a second ago.
Yuki let the tear close. It sealed silently, the two points of space separating back to their normal distance.
He extended his mana sense toward the homestead. The nut tree was there. Intact. Roots, trunk, canopy — all present, all in one piece. No damage. No distortion. No weirdness.
It works. It actually works.
He wanted to try it on himself immediately. The urge was almost physical — step through, appear at home, skip the thirty-minute walk back. But caution held him. A tree couldn't tell him if something felt wrong during transit. A tree couldn't report that its atoms had been rearranged slightly, or that the spatial bridge had compressed something that shouldn't be compressed, or that there was a half-second gap in existence between departure and arrival.
Test more. Test a lot more. Then try it on yourself.
He spent the rest of the day teleporting things.
Fruit trees. He found a grove of the tart-apple trees and sent six of them through in quick succession, each one emerging on the homestead side perfectly intact. He varied the distance — close range, medium range, long range. All clean.
Soil. He carved out massive cubes of nutrient-rich forest earth — the dark, loamy stuff packed with organic matter — and teleported them directly onto his land to be spread evenly. Tonnes of it, delivered in minutes instead of hours. The irrigation grid suddenly had something worth irrigating.
Stones. Decorative ones, flat ones for pathways, large boulders he liked the look of. He scattered them through the homestead with the casual precision of a kid arranging a model village.
Flowering trees. A species with pale pink blossoms that smelled like honey and something citrus. He sent four of them through and planted them in a line near the house. Another species with deep red flowers and waxy leaves — two of those, flanking the front door.
Bushes. Low, dense, flowering things that would work as ground cover. He teleported whole clumps of them — roots, soil, and all — and dotted them along the canal banks.
Grasses. He cut entire sections of forest turf — thick, green, lush — and teleported them in patches across the homestead. They landed on the moistened dust like puzzle pieces, vivid green against pale grey.
He kept going until the light started to fade. Trip after trip. Tear, push, seal. Tear, push, seal. Each teleport was faster than the last, the spatial manipulation becoming almost routine.
By dusk, the homestead looked like a different place.
It was still mostly grey. The canals still ran through pale dust. The walls were still stark granite. But now there were trees — dozens of them, scattered across the landscape in deliberate clusters. Fruit trees near the farming plot. Nut trees along the southern canal. The pink-blossom trees by the house, already catching the evening breeze. Patches of green grass spreading between the channels. Flowering bushes adding spots of red and white and yellow to the monotone palette.
It looked like a park being built. Unfinished but alive. The dead zone was waking up.
Yuki stood on his roof as the stars came out. The canals reflected moonlight in thin silver lines. The transplanted trees were dark silhouettes against the grey dust. A faint smell of flowers drifted on the air — the first natural scent inside the walls since he'd built them.
He pulled a dragon steak from dimensional storage, cooked it over a mana flame on his rooftop, and ate while surveying his work.
I tore holes in space to landscape my garden. That's either the most overpowered or the most mundane use of teleportation magic in history.
Probably both.
Tomorrow he'd do more. Fill in the gaps. Transplant more grass. Find some of those tall, silver-barked trees he'd seen deeper in the forest — the ones that caught the light and looked like they were made of metal. Maybe find a climbing vine for the walls. Something with flowers.
And at some point — soon — he'd have to try the teleportation on himself. The spell was stable. Every test had come back clean. Trees, soil, stones, bushes — all transported perfectly. There was no rational reason to keep avoiding it.
But rational and comfortable were different things. And stepping through a tear in space was the kind of thing you only got wrong once.
Soon. Not tonight. But soon.
He finished the steak, climbed down from the roof, and went to bed in a house that was starting to feel like a home.
Outside, the transplanted trees rustled in the night wind. The first sound of living things inside the dead zone since the day he'd arrived.