Progress at a Snail's Pace

I split the group into three smaller ones.

"Teo, Bock, Orin, and Bella, you are the food and hides team. You will go hunt so we can eat and make the balloon." This group was made of predator-horn naturals, who were naturally more inclined to hunt. Plus Orin of course.

I gave them all bows from the compression spheres and sent them on their way.

"Vincent, Ward, and Jerod, you guys are going to be the array team. You will establish a teleportation array around the airship so we can escape if we are discovered." All of them were spatial mages in some form so it wasn't a big deal.

"Ben, Devin, John, the Knights, and myself will work on the airship." Nobody moved for a second "Get going!"

With all of the groups working on their perspective projects, I addressed my team.

"John, Devin, and Ben, you start a woodpile while I repair the Knights."

They gathered axes and went on their way.

'Now, Fultz, shut down.'

The golem obeyed and I got to work. First I repaired him, which was very easy. Then I upgraded his efficiency at the cost of speed.

"There, he should be able to work for 9 hours now." I woke up Fultz and worked on Plien.

The work felt like it took minutes, but it took two hours, and by then the woodpile was big enough to get started on the hull of the airship.

"That's enough for today guys, Plien and Fultz will help us tomorrow and I'm almost out of Eneru." I announced as they felled their sixth tree.

"But we only just got started!" John complained, a tree in his arms.

"If you want to keep working, cut the branches off, they make it hard to store the tree without a compression sphere. Just don't do anything so intensive you will be sore tomorrow."

John gave me a look of resignation. "Fine."

He stripped the tree for the rest of the day while the rest of the team rested and sharpened their axes and saws.

Soon the hunting team came back with meat and furs ready to go.

I started on my routine of cutting up the animal, only to be stopped by Bella.

"Stop immediately, you are wasting much of the deer that we could use."

"You know what you're doing?" I asked.

"Yes, now give me the knife and a bucket."

"Ok, no problem." I used a bit of Eneru to make a wooden pail.

"Put it under the deer."

"Why? Are you saving the blood?"

"Yes, it goes well in sausage and makes good pudding." She cut jugular and blood flowed into the bucket.

"I'm gonna not watch this, meat really isn't my thing." I turned around and waited.

"Ok, now I need a pot and some water." She said behind me

"Sure thing." I pulled one out of a compression sphere and tossed it behind me.

I heard the strike of a stone and fire. She dropped snow and the fat from the deer in there.

"This will make good oil. I won't need anything else, you can go do whatever now." She pulled a cleaver from the compression sphere and started to cut up the meat.

I left and got to work supervising the array team.

"How is it going? I asked Devin."

"It's going well, but we could use your help to erase some of the mistakes we have on the spirit paper."

"Sure thing, just show them to me."

Devin pointed out the errors and I corrected them quickly.

"Be careful about errors, we only have so much Eneru ink. Speaking of which did you get my horns? The ones that Nurse Nalep cut off I mean."

"Yeah, they're in the second compression sphere."

"Well, I found my project."

I walked off and collected my horns.

'We have one liter of ink left and fourteen spirit pages, so I will dedicate one and a half of my horns to ink and the last half to spirit paper.'

I conjured a mortar and pestle using some living wood nearby and started to grind up my old horns.

'This feels so weird, crushing my extra bits for Eneru powder.'

Regardless, I continued until I had a bowl of fine Eneru dust.

"Pretty simple from here, just mix it into water and soak paper into it for spirit paper, or put it into an ink solution."

I separated my dust and poured 1/4th of it into a pot of boiling water, then started stirring it. After a minute or two, the water had a slight glow, almost imperceptible.

'It should be ready.'

I drenched the paper in the Eneru-infused water, but they didn't dissolve like they normally would in water, instead, they shrunk slightly and gained the glowing veins typical of spirit paper as the water cooled. I started on the ink, heated it, and dropped some of the Eneru dust into it. The water in the ink slowly evaporated but I added more at almost the same rate.

'Just five more seconds...'

"Done!" I turned off the heat and corked the bottle.

"Just four more to go. We are up to one and a half liters now though" I worked until sunset and went to sleep with two and a half liters of Eneru ink put away and one liter out by the array.

Every morning everyone got to work at their jobs without being asked. Each one of the groups had gained a leader organically.

The food team was run by Bella, Devin ran the array team, and I ran the airship team. It took a few days, but the adults showed up. They all joined the airship team.

Several days passed before the airship had a hull good enough to start packing our stuff into. Nearly a month later, we encountered a problem. During one of our daily meetings, the hunting team had something to say.

"We spotted some humanoid footprints while we were hunting today. We should probably leave."

"That should be really easy, array team, what is the status of the array?"

"It's really big, so it took us a while to finish, but it's done as of yesterday."

"Good timing, we're going to activate it now, everyone, pack your things."