Author’s Corner: Hey all, sorry for the slowness of releases. Been a lot of RL issues cropping up lately, health-wise. Good news is, I am going to try to do at least two chapters today!

After five days, I had managed to acquire twenty people from the interviews that would be joining the crew. From what Sharon and Celeste said, the two of them together had gotten another fifty. It was not really a surprise that more people went to get interviewed by the girls.

Anyways, right now I wasn’t doing the interviews. Why? Well… this is pretty much what happened.

“John.” A familiar voice called out to me from outside the tent door, before Sharon made her way inside. “Come on, we’re stopping early today.” Though she said so in a way that left no room for argument, she seemed somewhat happy.

“Uhm… what for?” It had been about ten minutes since my last interview, since people weren’t exactly lining up for it anymore.

“We’re going on a date.” And with that, she left the tent.

Thus, right now I am in one of the high elf cities, accompanied by Sharon. When she said we were going on a date, I had half expected Yin to be coming with us. However, Sharon told me that they had worked it out, and Yin would have her turn tomorrow. At the moment, we were sitting at a large restaurant, having a frosted dessert in the shape of a pyramid. It was surprisingly sweet, and tasted like a mix between apples and strawberries.

“Are we doing the right thing?” Sharon finally asked.

“What do you mean?” Was she talking about the date? We had pretty much come straight here after arriving in the city, so I didn’t exactly see what could be right or wrong about it yet.

“With what we do. On the ship, I mean.” She had a conflicted expression on her face as she clarified.

“We’re saving worlds, aren’t we? Not really sure how that could be considered wrong.”

“We’re saving some, yeah. But how many are we missing? So far, we’ve been at this for over a year, and we’ve managed to actually save only two races. I’m not counting the robots, since they might destroy themselves with what we gave them. But in that time, how many races might have been wiped out because we weren’t there?”

I reached over, putting a hand on top of hers. “Sharon, we can’t be everywhere at once. You know that, so what’s wrong?”

“I just…” She looked up at me, with a somewhat sad expression. “I want to do more. I know I came with you as more of an impulse decision, but being out here, saving people… I want to do more to help. I know it probably seems silly, right? I mean, what more could there be than saving entire races from extinction…”

I shook my head, smiling slightly to her. “You’re right, it is a bit silly. Come on, you help me out all the time. I’m not sure where I’d be right now if not for you.”

At that, Sharon could only grin. “Probably sleeping with Yin, Yang, and Celeste. But seriously, John. I want to be able to help more… But I just don’t know how. No matter what we do, it feels like it’s not enough, knowing that for every race we save, five die because we couldn’t be there.”

I nodded, thinking about her words. “I understand. But again, there’s not much we can do about it that we aren’t already. The technology to travel faster doesn’t even exist yet. The materials to make it don’t even exist.”

She sighed, understanding but obviously not happy that I was right. “I know… hopefully we aren’t the only ones doing this.” Suddenly, she lightly slapped herself in the face. “Sorry, I invited you out here for a date, then went all mopey on you. This is supposed to be a happy day, so let’s be more happy about it. We can worry about that other stuff some other time.”

Saying that, she quickly got up and dragged me out of the store. As for the bill… well, Maeve told us that she’d take care of any expenses we had while here, since there was no way we’d have their currency. Our next stop surprised me, because I soon found out that Gerin had a facility similar to old movie theaters of Earth. Though they weren’t using holographic videos, it was still rather enjoyable.

Unfortunately… the movie itself left me somewhat depressed. It was a dramatic retelling of our adventures to save Gerin. In it, I was portrayed by a particularly muscular elf, and several facts were… altered. For instance, rather than cautiously destroying the monsters from orbit, in the movie I bravely fought toe to toe with a dragon. Dragons are scary, you know?

After the movie, we continued to wander around for a little while without running into anyone we knew. Sharon was back to her cheerful self in almost no time at all, making it seem like the talk from before had never happened. To finish off our date, she even told me something that surprised me quite a lot.

“Hey John, Priscilla told me that you asked her to look into making it possible for travel between groves?” She looked at me curiously, but with a tinge of excitement in her eye.

“Yeah, was she able to come up with anything?” She’d been looking into it for about half a year… even though it didn’t really feel that long.

“Actually, she did. I told you that I let them make their own groves after they fully evolve, right?” When I nodded, she continued. “Well, Priscilla put together a research group to solve this problem, and they think they’ve got something worked out. After we leave in a couple days, she wants me to pull her out to talk about it with us.”

“Ah… alright.” I was expecting her to do so right now, but I could wait a couple of days.

From there, we decided to head back early, since we had already spent several hours in the city for our date. My date with Yin was… well, I can’t really sum it up too easily. It was honestly the happiest I had ever seen her, even though all we did was walk around one of the other wood elf forests and get dinner. When I asked her what she wanted to do, she said it was fine to let me decide. Well… she didn’t say it in that many words.

Nonetheless, it was good to see her so happy. Unlike Sharon, she didn’t get depressed halfway through, though I did ask if there was anything important that she wanted to do in life. The answer I got back from her was, honestly, not that surprising.

“I want… to take care of Yang.” She smiled as she said that. I knew that Yin would probably want something like that. I mean, she watches after Yang almost all the time as it is, like a big sister. She didn’t have a complex emotional issue like wanting to save the galaxy, she just wanted to take care of her little sister.

While walking through the forest, we gathered several new and interesting fruits, but most surprising was that we found a green, heart shaped apple. Although it was quite a long time ago, I remembered what this fruit was. It certainly didn’t hurt that Yin’s eyes practically sparkled when she saw it.

“I never thought that the lovebird’s favorite fruit would be from the Gerin system… though I guess it makes a bit of sense, since it was elf territory where I first found it.” I still had a couple trees in my grove growing these fruits, so we didn’t really need to gather any. Though, Yin still plucked one and ate it happily, loving the familiar taste.

Like that, the last days on Gerin passed pretty peacefully. In total, counting my parents, Tessa, and Beth we recruited just under a hundred people from Earth. Naturally, most did not have any useful skills for running the ship, but there were a few mechanics. The rest could be slowly trained up. At the very least, with this the last of the facilities on the Ariadne finally had crew assigned to them!

All facilities aboard the Ariadne filled. Conditions needed for further upgrades have been met.Additional Features option enabled.

Reading that, I happily opened up the new menu I had for the ship upgrades, to see what the options were. There was one to design a custom room, but I’d need Celeste and my tech people to work on designs for that. Maybe a better hologram room or something. However, there was one option that caught my eye immediately.

Matter ConverterCreates an additional cargo hold where stored matter can be broken down into its base materials, and altered to create new materials. To create mana-rich materials, it is necessary to supply the facility with the needed mana.Time for completion: 1:11:24:3:12:19

Seconds, minutes, hours, days, months…. It would take nearly two full years to get this upgrade!? Well, going from the description, I had no doubts that it would be worth it eventually. But right now, I wasn’t ready to just jump in for it yet. The important thing was still strengthening the combat power of the ship itself, so I bought an upgrade for our main cannon instead. Lately, Celeste has been working quite a lot with the new ‘Upgrades Department’ to continuously research new levels of tech to put in with the upgrades.

Anyways, I had an important meeting to take care of, once we left. But first… “Everyone, our next stop is a planet we set up for training purposes. I have a mission I need to take care of while we are there, and I don’t know how long it will take. So, until we are ready to leave that planet, I want everyone to begin working together and becoming acquainted with each other’s skills and abilities. If anyone is able to completely conquer one of the dungeons on the planet, that would be best.”

After leaving the message, I went to meet up with Sharon and Priscilla in my room. I was a bit excited to learn of the possibility to travel between groves, and wondered just what it would take to achieve. When I got there, Sharon was already sitting on my bed, talking with the bunny girl maid who was on a chair across the room.

Hearing the door open when I came in, they looked at me. Sharon smiled, being the first to react. “Nice going with the broadcast. Wonder if any of the people from Earth have even fought in a dungeon before.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Don’t know, but they’re going to start eventually. Only a few of them were crafters, so most of them need actual combat to level up.”

She nodded her head at that, and then looked over to Priscilla. “I guess we’re ready, Pris.”

She fidgeted a bit awkwardly at the nickname. “Yes, Mistress. As I told you before, John asked me to do research into groves when he taught me Enchanting. Since then, my group has devoted themselves to this task, specifically how to move from one grove to another.”

“As you should know, a grove can be considered a tiny universe contained within our souls. However, each grove is separate from any other, so travel between them is normally impossible. We even attempted to have two people establish their groves together while circulating their mana through each others’ bodies. However, the result was just the failure of a grove being established for either of them. In the end, we managed to come up with something, and it has shown some… limited success.”

Seeing that we were both patiently listening to her, she continued with a bit more confidence. “As you know, a grove is established with the use of an item known as an Essence of Nature. This essence is created with the fusion of multiple elemental seeds, from the light, fire, water, wind, and earth elements. For our experiment, we made a somewhat modified version of the Essence of Nature, which we are calling the Essence of the World.”

“This new essence instead uses all seven primary elements. However… we found that doing it this way, the Essence of the World was not able to help a druid establish their grove. Actually… the person that tried it was killed, his body exploding with the raw power.” She looked regretful as she said that.

“After that, we abandoned the idea of refining the essence internally, and that was when we hit our breakthrough. We discovered that, by having two or more people simultaneously refine a single Essence of the World while they already have their grove, a link will be formed between them. The owner of the grove can use this link to see into the grove of the other parties, though he cannot influence the other grove. He can also create a physical structure within his own grove, and pass the link through it. With this method, we formed a gateway between two groves.”

She then took a deep breath and explained one last thing. “However… this can only be used effectively once. Each time a new essence is used to set up more connections, the new connections are unstable, and materials that try to pass through them are lost. Furthermore, there is a range limitation. The bridge will only function when the owners of the two groves are within a kilometer of each other.”