She's rather lost track of time at this point but suspects her free week in the wilderness has run out. Probably she should have planned this a little better. She should, hmm... actually, she should go demolish her prototype cathedral-ziggurat, because she doesn't want whoever eventually finds the real one to have been spoiled for the full effect by seeing the badly positioned one made of worse materials. She sets off to do that, writing more books along the way. Hopefully when she passes by civilization again in the other direction, no one will feel moved to murder her and steal all of her stuff.

Nobody does!

(Civilization update: The obsidian walls are now mostly gone. There are some new dirt islands in the sky. On the way to her prototype, she'll notice an island being flattened to sea level by a green creature labeled Awesamdude, and a small campsite of logs that's sprung up.)

Ooh, flattening. She bestows an approving smile on the green creature, which the green creature probably can't see from this far away, and then heads out to her prototype and. Well. Flattens it.

She now possesses a truly staggering amount of her least favourite block, namely cobblestone. Perhaps she should prototype something else with it? Or should she first try to find Dream to fulfill her bargain? No, Dream has proven fully capable of finding her whenever he feels like it. She heads back in the vague direction of civilization, trusting to her map to let her wander around in circles without getting lost, and finds a reasonably flat stretch of shoreline and flattens it a little further and starts building a fiendishly complex stone pyramid.

Nobody bothers her. As busy as civilization might be, people seem mostly uninterested in venturing beyond it.

She can probably stay lost in the tension between too much and too little symmetry for days if nobody interrupts her.

She gets two days before Dream pays a visit. 

“Sorry I’m, uh— Sorry I’m late. I got kind of busy and figured you were, y’know, you were in the wilderness somewhere, and you probably wouldn’t mind a bit of extra time alone before I came along to bother you, so I guess I just, uh. Yeah. …You’re still going to explain how you killed me, right?”

"Yes," she says, continuing to lay out the next level of her latest pyramid. (There are two other smaller pyramids in a sort of trail leading to this one. She has been having a very architectural couple of days.) "I keep my promises."

Another few cobblestone blocks finish off the current section, and then she turns to him and draws her knife from her sleeve with a rapid motion. "This," she says, spinning it in her hand, "is a knife. In the local parlance, it's not a weapon or tool but rather a part of me. Used effectively, it can kill in a single strike; with less skill, it usually only wounds. I'm not the most effective knife-wielder I've ever met, but I managed to get lucky the first time. Does that answer your question?"

“Huh.” He sounds genuinely fascinated. “I—you know, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who had a weapon as part of their—them. That’s so cool. What can you do with it, how well do you fight, I can spar with you if you want? That’s so cool, what.”

"There was a lot less murder where I came from so I don't have a lot of practice! Maybe I'll spar with you sometime when I'm less busy." She resumes laying stone on her half-finished pyramid.

“Sure. Just, y’know, let me know when you’re available. 

What are you building?”

"Pyramids!" She gestures sweepingly at the trail of them. "I haven't found a design I'm satisfied with yet."

“Well. They’re pretty cool. I’m, um, I’m not really a builder, but your pyramids are neat.”

"Thank you! I try. When I've got something I'm willing to put my name to maybe I'll build it a little closer to civilization."

“I’m looking forward to seeing it! I guess I’ll… go, now…? I don’t mean to interrupt your, uh, wilderness building time.”

"All my time is wilderness building time these days. See you around!"

“Bye. Let me know when you’re less busy?”

"Perhaps I will!" she says, waving farewell with a sunny smile. She doesn't want to make commitments. Instead, she wants to make pyramids.

It turns out when she finishes this one that she's dissatisfied with some aspects of the design; she starts an even bigger one farther along the beach, then has to sleep partway through laying the foundations.

No one interrupts her. She can build as much as she wants.

(Back in civilization: large red vines have started to spring up in a few places. The skeleton of a blackstone-and-obsidian box appears where Sam had been flattening the beach.)