Chapter 102: Day 137 – Blue

I had no intentions of trying to set up an electrical infrastructure. There was just too much stuff I either didn’t know, didn’t remember, or took enormous amounts of effort to duplicate. Besides, I was managing to do a lot of the things I wanted with just mana and dungeon abilities. But there were things that I didn’t know how to do with mana or that would be a lot easier if I had access to some electrical current as well as magic.

That was why a grumpy The Hurricane was energizing an electromagnet with magical lightning while Shayma pounded on a red-hot piece of steel to make me a permanent magnet that I could use to repeat the process. It wasn’t like I couldn’t make turbines and didn’t have enormous amounts of steam and flowing water to fuel a generator. I was actually a bit low on copper, but I was hoping if I got into it I might find some magical alternative. The best thing would be if I could use myself as a conduction and capacitance medium, rather like how I could pipe around liquids and such.

Shayma’s forging caught Ansae’s attention, which made me think she had magnetoception senses in addition to everything else. She perked up, watching it through the rock walls, and shook her head slowly.

“I probably shouldn’t be surprised that you can just…” Ansae’s tail lashed once. “Just make lodestones. How does that even work?”

“That’s more of that knowledge you told me not to tell you.” I didn’t think she was wrong, entirely, about some of the more esoteric knowledge and how it might end up being a bad thing if just thrown out there for people to pick up and play with. But it was pretty amusing that she was about the only person who saw it aside from Shayma and kept asking even though she’d already told me to not to answer. “I’m probably going to be doing more of it in the future, too. Not like I can do spells, and since it seems like I can give things I make to Companions in some ways, best to make as much as I can.”

“Mmm. You’re right, but it’s a little disconcerting. I can casually do magic that most mortals can’t dream of, yet you casually do things I didn’t know were possible.” Ansae chuckled, showing her teeth. “It’s wonderful. Clearly there’s an entire world of knowledge I hadn’t stumbled across yet, and I do want to sink my teeth into it.”

“Well, at some point I do have some advice on that.” Although I wasn’t sure what effect the scientific method would have in a realm where intent affected reality by way of mana. Especially since Ansae had so much mana. Someone like Taelah would have a better chance of managing to keep everything stable than a powerhouse like Ansae. “It’s going to have to wait until I get a few things done though. Maybe a lot of things done.” Magic seemed to make physics squishy. Or rather, there was normal physics at the bottom of things, but then magic built up overtop of it and obscured it. It was there when magic failed, but outside of that it was difficult to see.

Shayma quenched my new steel magnet and The Hurricane scowled at her until she gave the fourth-tier permission to go deal with the weather. She had been completely uninterested in the forging process and immediately darted outside to zip up into the sky and start pushing around air currents. I’d found out that even after restarting Tarnil’s mana the weather was completely messed up. I couldn’t actually reach up that high except on the mountains and my storm Affinity needed something to anchor to, so I couldn’t get at the layers I needed to. Fortunately I had a temporarily tame Storm mage that could hopefully fix that up. If not I’d need to do some deep thinking, but with the rest of the land moving and working like it was supposed to, more or less, I figured getting the atmosphere moving properly wouldn’t be too bad.

As ridiculous as it sounded, if it was a serious, permanent issue with the local weather, I could relocate Tarnil itself. It wouldn’t be a fast process, but it’d be more than possible. Infact, the stone that I’d been skimming off the top of my mountain gave me an idea for one of the things I knew I needed to do for Anton’s Village. It was a pretty heroic mountain, even if it wasn’t the largest around, so there was enough room for me to clear out a circular caldera at the top about twenty kilometers across and a kilometer deep. Sure, I had to chop off the peak to do so, but I’d been eating that up anyway. The end result was a truly ridiculous amount of stone, hundreds of thousands of tons and more units than I cared to count, packed partly into various storage areas and mostly in the caldera itself. It took all of my newly-leveled [Mana Finesse] to push my mana frameworks to snap between the walls rather than following them down, but once they did I had full perception and reign over the place, filling the full volume of the caldera. It was a nice sheltered location to start feeding all my plundered stone into for Expansion.

A one-hundred-magnitude expansion.

That would end up being three-and-a-bit million square kilometers, somewhere around ten times the size of Tarnil when it was done, and one-hundred-kilometer tall walls meant I could do basically anything and it’d still be hidden from any perspective but directly overhead. Despite whatever atmospheric silliness went on with spatial workings, it’d also give me enough sky to generate my own storm systems and the like, which I assumed I would be able to do once I put in a bunch of Climates.

It’d also take absolute ages. This wasn’t going to be an instant expansion like with my dynamos, since even I couldn’t generate mana fast enough to push out that level of expansion and that size field at any real speed, not to mention all the stone it was eating already, slow as I was going. Slow as I’d have to go. This was monumentally large, but probably worth it because it’d hopefully bring me level ten and I wanted the area to play around in.

That was where Anton’s village would go, and that’s where I’d put Ansae’s new lair. I bet she’d love having millions of kilometers of airspace, and a hundred kilometers up, at that. I could also shove together Climates in various ways and, since I was going to have to start getting into politics, I could think about official buildings aside from my audience chamber. Some part of my dungeon instincts were itching to get this “floor” solidified, which I agreed with, but it wasn’t going to be anything like what the Great Dungeons did and my dungeon-self was just going to have to deal with that.

Shayma missed most of the early work since she was asleep, and Ansae didn’t seem to be that interested in it, instead messing with some of her artifacts. It actually reminded me of me, a little bit. She was immortal and more or less stuck for the moment, so she had her toys to play with. Though I was sure she had better toys than I did, all in all. My Overlay just said she was messing with something called [The Great Slate Of Battles] which didn’t mean much to me but she was engrossed.

So I worked in peace through the night and watched The Hurricane fly about hither and yon, piling up clouds behind her. I was a little surprised she wasn’t creating her namesake to just slam into the country, but she probably had a better idea of what was necessary than me. Or maybe she was just playing around. This time she wasn’t going to run away though, so I let her do whatever while I went about my own business.

In spite of spending a bunch of time working at it, apparently making my own magnets didn’t unlock anything, nor did putting together a small turbine generator. Possibly because there was no magic or special dungeon stuff involved in them, even though lightning seemed to be in the portfolio of Storm. Of course, I hadn’t gotten anything special with gears either which made me think there was something I was missing to get purely physical unlocks. Or maybe there wasn’t; [Customization] covered a lot of ground and physically complex machinery might not be part of a dungeon’s métier. So far, my really complicated things didn’t have any actual moving parts, just lots and lots of magic.

By the time Shayma was up I was ready to start asking Taelah some questions. The series of emergencies had sort of kicked the Bargain with Anton’s Village down the road and considering the one I’d made with Iniri I wasn’t sure they still wanted one of their own. I really hoped they did; it wasn’t like I was going to share my special stuff with the public at large. Besides I was rather starting to like Taelah so it’d be pretty disappointing if they up and left.

I needn’t have worried.

“Of course we still want to,” Taelah said. “I suppose Blue taking care of Tarnil is better than leaving Queen Iniri to fend for herself, but it’s still just going to be Tarnil. It’s not going to be getting the sort of things I’ve seen here, is it?”

“Not at all,” Shayma agreed. I had put out quite a lot of flowers, but they were widely scattered despite the sheer amount I’d placed and didn’t have nearly the mana throughput to start forming Sources. I figured I’d either remove them or put them underground eventually, depending on how Tarnil’s new mana flow developed. “Blue said that he doesn’t want to displace the native ecology, but there’s also the issue that a lot of this stuff is very powerful, and he can’t expect every single citizen of Tarnil to treat it appropriately. Plus, he wants your input on some things he’s been thinking about.”

“Oh? I thought he’d be too busy.” Taelah wasn’t being nasty, seeming genuinely surprised, but I still felt a little bad.

“I’m busy, sure, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make time for her.” For some reason when Shayma relayed that Taelah was immensely gratified, smiling broadly.

“Well, what does he need to know? And if there’s time, I’d like to stop by and pass on that Blue is taking care of Tarnil, just so people don’t worry.”

“Plenty of time,” Shayma assured her. “They’re long term plans.”

The two of them strolled around Anton’s Village, which was pretty quiet in the wake of everything that had happened. There was no actual threat to them, but after recent events people just didn’t feel very boisterous. Taelah didn’t go to everyone’s house, but she did visit the Elders and a few of the family matriarchs, leaving it to them to spread the story around. I wondered idly how much it’d mutate in the telling, but I wasn’t all that worried. Anton’s Village already more or less liked me.

I was going to have to go forward with that Bargain as soon as I carved out some extra time. While theirs was rather smaller than Iniri’s, I was sure there’d be some unforeseen side effects that I’d have to deal with. Not to mention Taelah deserved to have my undivided attention for a while, when the time came.

Soon enough their circuit came back to Taelah’s house and she poured Shayma a glass of something that wasn’t tayantan juice. Some sort of beer that probably came from Meil. Although I definitely had seen some local stills, and with magic and Skills it might not take much time to make the stuff. Though it wasn’t like I could appreciate alcohol, I did make a mental note to see what came out of fermenting not only the tayantan fruits and berries, but whatever else might come out of my Climates. Booze tended to be an excellent export.

“So, what did Blue want to ask me?”

“Well, he’s making a new, more permanent area.” Shayma called on [Liminality] to display an illusion of the mountaintop caldera from what I was feeding her, with the current farming chamber overlaid on it. “He’s making a sheltered spot for you and maybe others who might come along, as well as his experiments. It’s going to be…” she waggled her fingers demonstratively, and the caldera expanded while the farming chamber shrunk, representing the two proportions. “Rather large,” she finished.

“That’s way too big,” Taelah said, her eyes wide.

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“It’s bigger than Tarnil,” Shayma agreed. “Anton’s Village isn’t going to need more than a small pocket, but he’s going to have all this area to play with his Climates, so he was curious if you had any suggestions. Which is kind of unfair to ask without knowing what his Climates are like, so he wants me to take you on a tour of them.”

“I also have the Coastal Climate, which I haven’t actually used yet,” I told Shayma, both for her information and to pass on to Taelah. “Plus the Conservatory Climate, which is what I’ll put putting over Anton’s Village since it seems to be the one that’s good for crops and such.” I had to wonder if the Climate would stack with Fields. [Verdant Light] and [Growth] could result in some truly ridiculous effects. Or even [Verdant Growth], since if I had someone to actually curate the plant life, like, say, a village of farmers, mutated stuff might be useful. It had taken forever to domesticate wheat manually when I last did it and I didn’t want to wait around that long.

For all that I continually marveled at what magic-enhanced humans could manage, I’d completely forgotten that Taelah wasn’t so magically enhanced. She couldn’t handle going off the road in either the Volcano or the Glacier Climates, and even the roads wouldn’t be safe if I hadn’t wrapped them in field barriers, keeping them from roasting or freezing people alive. Which was a shame, because those were probably the most exotic Climates I had. That still left big, big chunks of other Climates for her to inspect, in one of my new-model dynamos under Duenn.

I’d arranged them as a sort of diamond-pyramid using normal sphere packing, with the volcano and the glacier on top of the other four, but that didn’t actually matter since they were just linked magically rather than physically. The hundredfold expansion did a wonder for the overall mana density too, as an enormous amount of various affinities were actually very close together in real terms, but in spite of all that I didn’t get any evolutions for my chrystheniums.

The Forest Climate didn’t have anything truly massive, even if some of the trees promised to get that way eventually, but the Climate grew two-story trees pretty quickly. Like with Fields, I had some control over things. I could exercise some control over how it populated itself, like pushing it into massive old growth forest or crowded new growth, but for the purposes of the mana dynamo I’d left it neutral. Taelah wandered through it, paying close attention to everything and collecting bits and pieces here and there. According to her, there was nothing particularly mana-rich aside from the tayantan berries, which she and Shayma practically shoveled into their mouths, but she noted that one of the tree species would make for excellent building material so I made a big stand of them. I’d need it for rebuilding Anton’s Village.

She took one look at the swamp and declined. Apparently, it smelled really bad, an opinion seconded by Shayma. I should have realized that due to the whole Rot Affinity thing. Grassland had only the most common weeds, but the desert had lots of interesting small things. Taelah’s [Plant Identification] Skill was really useful for all these new entries. Apparently the desert had some really spicy plants: peppers and leaves and some hallucinogenic cacti, though apparently it would need a lot of distillation to affect higher-tier Classers.

The thought of The Hurricane tripping on anything was more than a little horrifying. Maybe it was better to leave the intoxicants unrefined.

“I think that the forest is the best basis for a new village,” Taelah said after returning to her house with pouches full of reagents. “Grasslands does have very good soil, but we’d be dependent on Blue’s generosity or trading or a very long trek for basic necessities. We’d rather be able to cut what we wanted for timer or to make new fields of our own accord.” She wrinkled her nose. “Plus it smells the best of all of them. That swamp was horrendous.”

“Sounds good to me.” I actually had been thinking of setting up some sort of clearing with custom planted stuff for them, but in the long term that’d require me constantly tweaking things. Using a Climate was better – though I’d have to see if I could double up on Climates so I could still use Conservatory.

It turned out that Climates worked a lot like Fields, which was pretty unsurprising in hindsight since I deployed them like Fields and they had a lot of the same nature from a mana point of view. When I overlaid one on the other they started to fight a bit, but I linked them with my brand-new [Mana Geometry] boosted [Mana Logic] and got combination Climates out of them.

The interesting thing is that unlike Fields these weren’t new Climates. They were just two Climates linked together in complicated ways. Just like I had some mental dials to customize how Climates manifested, I had a bunch of control over how the linking happened. It was a little bit of by-guess-and-by-god, but [Blue’s Sagacity] actually gave me quite a bit of insight as I explored the options of connecting different climates.

Volcano and glacier, for example, could mix together to create pools of boiling water that dug tunnels through the ice, or a cryovolcano that spewed out subfreezing vapor and water to condense on icy slopes. Forest and grassland could end up with fertile meadows surrounded by dense woods, or a grassland populated by oversized flowers and weeds. There were more than just the two options, of course, but those seemed to typify my available range.

Conservatory didn’t do what I originally thought. Instead of supercharging the growth, it locked in the way the other Climate was. Picked plants would regrow in the exact same place, trees would regrow from stumps, and stone would repopulate from my stocks. Most of this came through mentally feeling through the Climates, though I did use a LAE to fell a few trees and watch them start to regrow from the stump upward.

It wasn’t like I was just limited to two, either, but the more the Climates overlaid the harder it was to reconcile them even with my upgraded [Mana Logic]. I could figure out a reasonable expression for glacier-volcano-desert, since frozen deserts absolutely existed, but glacier-volcano-swamp absolutely stymied me. Some of the potential landscapes were incredibly hellish, and it occurred to me that a normal dungeon would probably have accompanying monsters to go along with them. For me, they just served as mana generation and fodder for crafting or trade.

I reported some of the results to Taelah and Shayma, and they talked over some other possibilities. Taelah had a few suggestions that helped me reconcile some of the weirder combinations, like volcano-forest and swamp-coast. Ultimately the combined forest-grassland was what I planned to use for Anton’s Village, rather than Conservatory. While regrowing trees and plants could be convenient under some circumstances, never being able to actually clear new land would be a problem.

One of the things I’d decided about the time I realized how much I’d have to sink into the caldera was that there was no reason not to go exponential. Every time my biomass and mana ticked up far enough, I went ahead and built another set of mana dynamos into the mountain range. I spaced them out a little bit, but I had kilometers and kilometers to segment out areas for my stacks of fifty-meter spheres. Ultimately my caps were what really mattered, but having more iron income was definitely welcome, and the extra mana generation meant I had more margin for any Fields I needed to deploy, aside from the one mega-Field of the caldera.

Unfortunately I ran into an issue. It wasn’t a hardcap this time, like with my storage crystals, but the beginning of a sort of mental strain once I closed in on a hundred Climates. It was similar to the slowdown I got if I let my attention get split too far, but with a little more dungeon-self feel, which made me rein in my expansionistic tendencies. For the moment I really didn’t want to take any chances, and ten new-style dynamos was a hell of an income. I did wonder about the strain though, whether it was level based or it was just from building too much too fast.

There were clearly some hardwired limits, like the speech thing or the ANATHEMA and breeding station lust, all of which overrode my better judgement. But aside from that I seemed pretty damn adaptable, taking the fugues in stride, since I could incorporate new senses and enormous amounts of new body with basically no trouble. Maybe given some time I’d be able to keep adding onto the dynamos, or perhaps it’d take more levels.

That took most of the morning, and it was really nice to have at least a brief period of time just taking it slow and finding out things. I would have liked to have more time to do that in the future but I wasn’t all that hopeful, considering my list of things to take care of was still pretty damn long. Such as the army that was still wandering around in the four hundred square kilometers of Lost Woods, now completely separated and in no way any closer to their goal. Some regiments were still together, but there were at least a hundred individuals who’d gotten peeled off from the main body, and of course the supply train was in a completely different area than the soldiers.

I was very seriously considering stealing most of those supplies for myself, or at least, for Tarnil. They were travel rations, true, but considering that some of the containers in the wagons were themselves magic those travel rations included fresh meat, cheese, wine, beer, grain, and all the other trappings to make a long march more bearable. But first I wanted to consult with Iniri and, more urgently, Keri. Iniri would have a better political angle into the process of giving them an ultimatum and putting them back on the border, but considering several of them shared the same name as Keri and she was from Nivir, I hoped she’d have some personal insight.

This time Keri was run a little less ragged than before, since some other healing types had been swept into the general evacuation into Meil and they were helping with the casualties from the battle. Annit was still playing fetch-and-carry, and if the Depletion was slowing her down she refused to show it. Of course, gaining a few levels helped with that. I wondered if she’d realized that she’d gotten a good four levels just from the battle alone, since there weren’t any handy Status sigils around.

Of course, Iniri hadn’t shown any sign she realized she had leveled too, and she’d shot up to level seventy. I was sure whatever benefits the levels came with had been masked by everything else that she was dealing with. She had the thankless task of trying to bring all the occupied cities back to heel, as well as getting in touch with all the scattered settlements that hadn’t been hit by either Vok Nal or Tor Kot. Which meant Shayma had to catch her at lunch.

“Blue mostly wants to know if you want to see whoever’s in charge of the army,” Shayma told her. “He can pack them off to Nivir easily enough, and he will, but there’s some rather high leveled individuals including Tekaomi. Not to mention some people who might be related to Keri.”

“Cheya?” Iniri glanced at her [Spymistress].

“Oh yes, they’re related. Keri Esox is a rather wayward child of the royal family.” Cheya said. “Nowhere near the throne, a distant second cousin, but she did flee to Tarnil with her partner rather than deal with the court. An arranged marriage, pressure to join this or that faction, the usual.”

“And Annit?” Shayma asked curiously.

“Oh, she’s exactly what she appears to be. She was a boat brat, connected to nobody in particular, but I haven’t gone digging further. The south is rather far afield even for me.”

“Tekaomi is not a surprise,” Iniri added thoughtfully. “When she’s with an army, they don’t get tired and they don’t stay injured. They can fight forever. But she doesn’t have much offensive power, and from what I hear she’s a fairly nice person. It’s just a shame she’s loyal to Nivir. I’ll talk with her before you send them off, but I rather like the idea of snubbing the general when you send him back. Are you going to, what, teleport the entire army?”

“That’s the idea. Though they’re not enjoying themselves at the moment, since they don’t have access to supplies and they’re completely lost.” [Lost Woods] was really living up to its name. It was actually rather entertaining to watch from my perspective, since someone not paying attention for a few seconds, or getting caught up in the surprisingly tangled underbrush, could result on them heading off the opposite direction they had been going without them knowing they had moved. “Okay, Shayma, could you go get Keri and Annit?”

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