"Sounds like a plan."

Ari decides to see what happens if he sets a tree on fire. He's awful at fire evocation proper, but just starting one is pretty easy.

The tree catches.

When a substantial fraction of the tree is on fire, the whole thing collapses in a rain of cubes. The cubes are not on fire.

"If you want a merchant to move in, you will need to gather plenty of money. 50 silver coins should do the trick!" says Wyatt.

Excellent. Ari will be doing that, then.

He can't just throw around gouts of flame like some off-brand Gandalf, but he can maintain a flickery little peach-sized ball of flame and whisk it around through the nearby trees, hovering long enough at each for it to catch. (It wouldn't work on anything but dry wood, but these trees don't seem to have much going for them in the sap department.)

Soon he is surrounded by conglomerated wood-cubes. The trees don't leave holes in the ground, or stumps, or roots; just bare circles of green moss. It is unsettling.

Wyatt goes quiet, perhaps because Ari hasn't interacted with him in a while. He wanders in a small aimless circle.

Once Ari has conglomerated enough wood-cubes, he makes a shelter. It's closer to a proper house than a temporary shelter, really; the ceilings are much higher than either occupant needs. Wyatt deserves a nice place to spend his fleshbot days.

"Do you need a bed, or anything?" he asks. "Also, how do I make a bed?"

Wyatt halts his aimless wandering when addressed.

"To craft a bed at a sawmill, use: Fifteen wood. Five silk."

"...Take that as a no, then."

He wanders over to the workbench to see what else he can make besides wall paneling. He kind of likes this weirdo crafting magic. He wonders if he can take a workbench and some wood back to Winter when Belinda gets him.

With the wood in his inventory, standing by the workbench, he can make:

1 Wood Platform (1 wood)
4 Wood Wall (1 wood)
1 Wooden Door (6 wood)
1 Wooden Chair (4 wood)
1 Wooden Table (8 wood)
1 Wooden Sword (7 wood)
1 Wooden Hammer (8 wood)
1 Wooden Bow (10 wood)
1 Wood Fishing Pole (8 wood)
1 Wood Helmet (20 wood)
1 Wood Breastplate (30 wood)
1 Wood Greaves (25 wood)
1 Sign (6 wood)
4 Wooden Fence (1 wood)

...Ari decides against the armor set, because wooden armor kind of sounds like garbage. He does make himself a bow and fishing pole. And a door for the house, which he puts in an appropriate spot.

(And a hammer.)

He remembers something about ores. He elects to see if he can map out the area to see where to mine for them, because it's not like he's got anything better to do. He places some cubes and crumbles them into sawdust with a sandblastery sort of evocation, then arranges it in a complex diagram with a cube of dirt in the middle. (This was his most recent project with Belinda; he's pretty sure he knows it, but he triple-checks his work just to be sure.)

He commands the sawdust to rise into a map of the ground below, and to let him know any metallic or mineral deposits nearby.

There are several metal deposits underground nearby!

Also, everything is made of cubes. This was already somewhat obvious from the way cubes of wood work, but all of the minerals come in little clusters of cubes surrounded by cubes of dirt and stone.

"This cube stuff is going to give me a headache," Ari mutters.

Platinum, silver, various gemstones... shiny, but he should probably concentrate on workable iron. He can swing back for ritual materials later. He heads for the nearest iron deposit, using earth evocation to shift the dirt out of the way. (Kind of tiring, but definitely better than trying to singlehandedly dig a tunnel with a pickaxe. He'll have a big lunch.)

It turns out that when you shift a dirt block farther than about an inch out of alignment, it spontaneously becomes a small cube of dirt. Dirt cubes work much like wood cubes.

There's a small silver deposit directly between him and the iron, which he might as well pick up while he's going through it.

Cube physics makes tunneling almost insultingly easy. He isn't complaining, though. He adjusts his digging style accordingly, tugging gently at great swathes of dirt instead of shifting a few pounds behind him at a time. He can actually just walk along like this, showering cubes in front of him every few seconds.

When he reaches the silver, he decides to see if he can use the same tactic on different materials. Tug?

Convenient! Ari will see what workstations he needs to make this into a chalice later. Chalices are handy. (Maybe he can get some of those gemstones too.)

Strolling through the earth, he reaches the iron quickly and does the same thing to that. He elects to dig straight up and climb the walls to reach the surface, since something gives him the impression that turning the roof of his tunnel into a floating block won't collapse it. Possibly the fact that it's allowed to exist at all, which a conventional system of physics would have some problems with.

Oh, good.

Once he reaches Wyatt, he waves hello. "How can I smelt ores and turn them into useful things?"

"Torches?"

(He did collect a good amount of stone, on the basis that it'd be handy for evocations.)

"Once you have a wooden sword, you might try to gather some gel from the slimes. Combine wood and gel to make a torch!" he repeats in the exact same tone.

A round green blobby thing hops past. It takes some rather magnificent hops - easily six feet into the air every time.

Ari looks at its flight path, then carefully places a stone block and makes some adjustments.

The slime lands on a wickedly pointed stone spike.