Chapter 166 - It’s Time
My shovel bit into the ground and I heaved the separated earth up and out of the way. Even as cold as it was, sweat ran down my face briefly before freezing to my skin.
Pulling the shovel back down, I slammed it into the hardened ground once again to repeat the action.
The line of dirt leading away from me was longer than it had been yesterday, and that was all that mattered. No matter how little progress I made in a day, it was being made.
Starting construction at the beginning of Winter wasn't the smartest idea, but it was all we had. It beat sitting around and waiting for the ground to thaw as that was months away.
The ground ate up tools almost quicker than we could forge them. Shovels needed a hardening treatment so good they matched some of the swords we were putting out in durability. I even had to put runes on them in some cases.
A day's worth of work would usually see them bent and disfigured before they were dropped off in a pile for the Blacksmiths to work on. Me included.
We didn't have enough Blacksmiths to shrug the work off onto someone else and even when my days were filled with hard labor, it continued in the forge after the sun went down.
The reforging and adjustment of shovels was almost instinctual by now and wasn't something I thought about often, but it was the reason my spirit ached from overuse.
My strength, particularly, was hard on the tools. Any amount of design altering or adjustments to the materials wasn't enough to keep it from deforming and I was not about to use precious metals for making a shovel of all things. Without the ability to make it stronger, I had to resort to other means.
Which was constantly reinforcing it with my spirit. While cumbersome and exhausting, it got the job done.
One thing I did notice with the constant use of my spirit was I had more of it than before. I was used to running out during long fights during the tutorial but now that I was using it all the time, I noticed differences. I had done something to increase how much of the energy I had.
It felt more robust and I could use it for longer compared to before. How this happened, exactly, was a mystery but I chumped it up to constant use.