Exploring with the wheelbarrow led to me getting lost, exactly as I’d expected.
However, thanks to Kuro and the others, I always managed to find my way back to the house. This meant my exploration range had expanded remarkably.
About five days into these excursions, I came across a river.
It was a classic mountain stream, the kind where the water tumbled over jagged rocks. It was perhaps five meters wide. I followed the bank upstream for a short distance until I discovered a large rock face with a waterfall cascading down it.
It wasn't a sheer vertical drop; instead, the water rushed down a cliff at roughly a sixty-degree angle. Still, it was quite high—perhaps seven or eight meters. It was a magnificent, beautiful sight.
I reached out to catch some of the spray; the water was biting cold and looked perfectly clear. Now, if only it were potable...
Kuro, who had accompanied me today, was already lapping it up, so it seemed safe enough. Once he finished drinking, I asked him which way the house was. Without a moment's hesitation, he turned his head to point the way.
I shifted the Universal Farming Tool from a wheelbarrow into a Hoe and began swinging it in the direction he indicated. I intended to link the waterfall to my home with a proper road.
While the sun was high, I worked with the Hoe; as dusk approached, I switched back to the wheelbarrow and returned home. Since I could always find the direction of the waterfall by asking Kuro, I started plowing from the house toward the falls the next day.
Between this and my other chores, it took about fifteen days, but I finally cleared the path. The waterfall sat roughly five kilometers west of my house. It was quite a distance.
The river itself meandered quite a bit, but it generally flowed from the north toward the south-southwest. I wondered what might lie downstream, but that was a question for another time.
My primary goal in building the road was to secure a reliable water source. While I’d been using the Well for drinking water and irrigation, its low elevation made hauling the water a chore. The waterfall, however, offered a significant advantage in height.
If I could construct a Waterway from the top of the falls, I could secure a massive, gravity-fed supply. I could use it for watering the fields and for Water Paddies. And, finally, for a Bath. I’d been wanting a Bath for a long time, but the sheer volume of water required to fill one by hand from the Well had forced me to put the idea on the back burner.
However, piping the water directly into my living area presented a challenge. Even with Kuro and the others around, the Forest was full of dangerous beasts. If I built a Waterway over the Moat and Log Fence, it might serve as a bridge for intruders.
To solve this, I decided to dig a massive Reservoir outside the Log Fence and Moat surrounding the fields. I made it a hundred meters square—roughly the size of four of my field plots. I dug it into an inverted pyramid shape, reaching a depth of five meters at its center. Balancing this with my other responsibilities, the excavation took about ten days.
Next, I dug a drainage Waterway into the ground. This was relatively simple, as I only had to slope it toward the downstream side of the river. It took a few days, but I eventually finished the connection. I installed a wooden Sluice Gate between the Reservoir and the channel. With that finished, all that remained was the main Waterway itself... but how to build it?
I needed to draw water from the top of the falls to ensure it would flow via gravity, which meant I had to construct something with significant height.
Option one: process wood to make it. The pros? It would probably be easy to make. The cons? It would be fragile. That wouldn't work. Even if I could process the timber with the Universal Farming Tool, I’d have to assemble it myself. I lacked the nails or rope needed to build the scaffolding and supports. I had to deem it impractical.
Option two: process stone to make it. Pros: durable. Cons: difficult to construct. This also seemed like a stretch. While I could line up rocks and carve a channel, hauling enough stones from the waterfall to the Reservoir was unrealistic. Before I’d plowed, this was dense Forest; now, it was flat ground. There weren't any large rocks around. Even the stones I used for building material were mostly less than a meter tall. Maintaining the necessary elevation for a Waterway over a five-kilometer distance would be nearly impossible.
Option three... soil? What if I built it out of earth and then hardened it? If I struck the ground with the Hammer form of the Universal Farming Tool, the soil became as hard as concrete. That was it! Soil was everywhere, and I already had plenty of it left over from digging the drainage canal. It seemed like a brilliant solution.
I set to work immediately. It was the beginning of a long, arduous project.