Ravi woke up to the sound of furious pounding on his door. It wasn't the polite knock of a serving girl. It was the rhythmic, angry slam of a fist that meant you owed someone money.
"Open up, you wall-breaking, tub-cracking vandal!" the innkeeper's voice roared from the other side.
Ravi sighed. His brief period as a moderately wealthy adventurer was about to come to an abrupt end.
He carefully unbolted the door and opened it. The mustachioed innkeeper stood there, his face the color of a ripe tomato, pointing a trembling, sausage-like finger at him.
"The washroom!" he bellowed. "It's flooded! And the tub looks like a giant sat on it! That's coming out of your pocket, you... you..." He seemed to be searching for an insult worthy of the crime. "...F-Ranker!"
Ravi didn't bother arguing. He just counted out five of his twelve shiny new silver pieces and dropped them into the man's meaty palm. "For the damages."
The innkeeper's fury vanished, replaced by greedy surprise. He'd clearly expected a fight, not a handful of silver. He bit one of the coins. "Hmph. Well. Don't let it happen again." He stomped back down the stairs, appeased.
Ravi shut the door. He was now the proud owner of seven silver coins and a serious problem. He couldn't afford to live anywhere. The normal world was not built for him. Everything he touched either bent, broke, or shattered.
He needed a place that was already broken.
He spent the morning wandering the less reputable parts of Aethelgard. The city's splendor faded quickly once you left the main thoroughfares, replaced by narrow, muddy alleys and sagging timber-frame houses that looked one stiff breeze away from collapse.
He was staring at a notice board advertising rentals—most of which specified 'NO ADVENTURERS' in bold letters—when a familiar voice cut through the street noise.
"Lost?"
It was Lyanna. She was out of her armor today, dressed in a simple traveler's tunic and trousers. Without the gleaming silver plate, she looked smaller, more approachable. Still stunningly beautiful, of course, but human.
"Looking for a place to live," Ravi admitted. "The innkeeper and I have come to a mutual understanding that we're better off seeing other people."
She raised a perfect silver eyebrow. "Let me guess. You broke something."
"Multiple things," he confessed with a sigh. "I'm a menace to public infrastructure."
A small, genuine smile graced her lips. It changed her whole face. "You're not a menace. You're just… clumsy." Her tone said she didn't believe that for a second. "What you need is something sturdy. Stone, maybe. On the edge of town, where your 'clumsiness' won't bother anyone."
She clearly had a place in mind.
She led him away from the crowded city center, toward the old eastern wall. Here, the houses were squat and built from mismatched blocks of fieldstone. Weeds grew between the cobblestones. It was quiet.
"This is the Old Quarter," she explained. "Most people prefer to live closer to the market. But it's solid ground."
She stopped in front of a small, forgotten cottage. It was set back from the lane, surrounded by a low, crumbling stone wall. The roof sagged in the middle, half the wooden shutters were missing, and the front door hung crooked on one rusty hinge.
It was perfect.
"The city owns it," Lyanna said. "Seized for back taxes decades ago. They'll probably sell it to you for next to nothing, just to get it off their books."
He walked up the overgrown path. He pushed the crooked door. It didn't budge. With a normal person's effort, it would have stayed shut. With Ravi's gentle push, the rusty hinge tore free from the frame with a groan of tortured metal. The door collapsed inward with a final, dusty thud.
Ravi froze. He looked back at Lyanna, a sheepish grin on his face. "Termites?"
She just shook her head, but he saw the amusement sparkling in her eyes. "Let's just say it needs a little work."
Four silver coins and an hour of baffling bureaucracy later, Ravi was a homeowner. He stood alone in the center of his new living room, clutching a deed of ownership that was probably worth more than the house itself.
The air was thick with the dust of ages. Cobwebs like funeral shrouds hung from the rafters. A single, rickety table and a broken chair were the only furniture.
He was finally alone. No one to watch. No act to maintain.
"Right," he said to the dust motes dancing in the sunbeams. "Let's get some air in here."
He went to the window. It was a single, grimy pane of glass in a heavy wooden frame, swollen shut by years of damp. He put his hands on the frame and pushed.
The frame creaked. He pushed a little harder.
The frame, the glass, and a dinner-plate-sized chunk of the surrounding stone wall exploded outward, showering the overgrown garden with debris.
Ravi stood there, his hands still in a pushing position, staring at the jagged hole he'd just created.
"...Okay. Cross-breeze it is."
He decided to try something less structural. Sweeping. How could you mess up sweeping? He found a crude broom in the corner and gripped the handle.
Snap.
He was now holding two shorter, much less useful pieces of wood.
He tossed the remains of the broom into the corner and glared at the last piece of furniture: the table. It was small, wobbly, and covered in what looked like fossilized bird droppings.
"Don't you start with me," he muttered at it.
He decided to move it against the wall. He gripped the edge with just his thumb and forefinger, lifting as gently as he could.
The wood didn't break. It just... disintegrated. It collapsed into a pile of dry, rotted sawdust and splinters at his feet. It had been holding its shape through sheer force of habit.
Ravi stared at the pile of dust that used to be a table, then at the hole that used to be a window. He was standing in a ruin he had somehow made even more ruined.
"This is impossible," he sighed, running a hand through his hair. Frustration was starting to bubble in his chest. He wasn't a god. He was a bull in a world made of tissue paper.
Then an idea sparked. Maybe he was going about this all wrong. Maybe the answer wasn't to try and be weaker. Maybe it was to have more control. Absolute control.
He walked over to the hole in the wall and looked at the pile of stones on the ground outside. He didn't need mortar. Not if the fit was perfect.
He picked up one of the fallen stones. It felt like a piece of Styrofoam. He focused, using his immense strength not for force, but for precision. His fingers became calipers. He found a second stone. He pressed them together, his knuckles white with effort. A tiny piece of stone on the edge flaked away under the pressure, leaving a perfectly flush surface.
It took him an hour. Stone by stone, he rebuilt the wall around the window opening. It was slow, meticulous work. He didn't use mortar; he used pressure, shaping the edges of the stones with his bare hands until they fit together like a perfect, seamless puzzle.
When he was done, the new patch of stonework was ugly as sin compared to the weathered old wall, but it was solid. More solid than the rest of the house, probably.
He stood back, admiring his work. It was a small victory, but it felt monumental. He wasn't just breaking things. He was learning how to build.
A soft knock came from the doorframe.
Lyanna stood there, holding a loaf of fresh-baked bread and a bottle of something that smelled like wine. "Housewarming gift," she said with a smile. "Thought you might be hungry after all the... renovations."
Her smile faded as she stepped inside, her eyes locking onto the new stonework around the window. She walked over, her fingers tracing the impossibly perfect seams.
"The window fell out?" she asked, her voice quiet.
"Whole frame just crumbled. Guess the old mortar gave out," Ravi lied, his heart thumping. "I just stacked the rocks back up to plug the hole for now."
She ran a finger along a seam where two large, uneven stones met with the precision of a master jeweler. "You... stacked them?"
She looked from the wall to his hands, then back to the wall. The cogs were turning in her mind, he could practically hear them click. There was no dust, no mortar, no tools. Just a perfectly interlocking stone mosaic that should have been impossible to create without immense force and superhuman precision.
She didn't call him out on it.
Instead, she just smiled again, a thoughtful, knowing kind of smile that made the hairs on his arm stand up.
"Well," she said, holding out the bread. "You're a fast learner. Welcome home, Ravi."