I think over my interaction with the smith. There was a lot he was restricted from saying. Though the very activation of such a barrier would eventually have costs to him given I was inside it, it increased a little what he could tell me. And although it was in a roundabout manner, having access to something like the inner world, put me as a contender for a true apprenticeship.

The rules about apprentices were unknown to me, but if half of what he implied was true, it was a massive boom. If I managed to become an apprentice to him, the system rules apparently would not apply to me. It would still take a lot of work, but at my current pace, apparently, I had a decent chance of managing it.

The class blacksmith calls me faintly, and although it would probably help a lot, this was not the only thing I wanted to do. I also could get a better one if I experimented a little more. What I had was only the basic one. Both Li Wei and Jack had higher rarity classes, and with them almost being able to forge +3 items, it was clear the advantage it provided.

The mental conversation is put aside, not like it’s the first time I have thought about that in the last days after our talk. I leave another load of copper tubes just a hundred meters from the last one along with an addition of mine, a relay.

Not far behind me is another pair of people laying down the tubes. The actual Earth mage and two of the helpers laying down the line in place. They are not slow, but there are teams along the line to accelerate the process. Running from my place to the village takes little more than an hour, and taking stuff out of my inventory every hundred meters only adds a few minutes to that, their task is quite a bit slower.

Luckily the mages are not the constraint. With a few levels and skill levels they can use their spells on the little Earth they have to ‘liquify’ almost continuously. Their primary occupation till now was roads. But there was some work on the walls and defenses of the village that was of immense help. For now, only the one from our village to Sarah’s village is completed, but even the incomplete ones are a small help.

Given the level increase, along with our 8 Earth mages, I had expected them to finish the road earlier. But it was completed, and trade had started to boom. Now, trade wasn’t just about expensive items, like weapons and engraved plates. The low-margin metal we had been selling now could be carried by the cartload making it quite worthwhile, and even infused wood might become an option.

One of the most striking changes, was when someone figured out how to make a good pedal-powered carriage. When we started the project, most people had in mind that we either would figure out how to pull it with magic or more likely beasts. The only problem is that even our highest-leveled beast tamer variety class could only tame smaller animals. The biggest animal so far was a wolf with less than 150 pounds. That is far from the biggest wolves which already were not the ideal circumstance.

A few people were working on making a mana-run carriage, instead of the current pedal-powered ones. It had a lot of promise, but for now the ‘mana engine’ was too inefficient.

Two strong riders could easily keep a 20 miles an hour pace pedaling with about a ton of cargo, but most people would prefer to simply put in mana and drive it around like a car. The mana cost was too high even for Merlin, the person with the highest mana in the village. Over a thousand points and he is not even that high leveled.

Even he could only run the mana version for about an hour at the same pace as two strong riders. There were advantages to the mana carriage, it can go quite fast for short sprints, for example, but until we get better tires, anything beyond 25 to 30 miles is too dangerous.

And that is the other major hurdle which we were only now making some headway on. The people working on better tires had tried a hundred different approaches, the only thing that seemed to be any good was quite strange.

We did not have access to any kind of rubber or latex. And that pretty much put to bed any kind of traditional tire. What seems to have worked best was a fairly expensive and labor-intensive runic design.

The design was a steel wheel with thin strips of copper-plated steel weaved in a criss-cross pattern roughly forming a tire shape.

Given the materials and manufacturing shortcomings, this same wheel would be nearly useless back on Earth. But we had access to magic, and in the process of getting an engine working, a quirk from a specific rune combination was discovered.

With nearly no mana consumption, it could operate similarly to a magnet. With a little clever engineering, we had a wheel that worked wonders, at least at slower speeds. Using a couple of mana points every hour needed to be taken into account, but compared to the usefulness, it was well worth the cost. All the mana had to do was keep all the other runes inside repelling each other, and the shape of the tire was kept.

For now grip was achieved by gluing leather from one of the higher level beasts to the strips. But it was not a very good solution, and people were trying o come up with something better.

I stop thinking about the latest invention and concentrate on my next kata on a particularly tricky jump. I could go around the obstacle and would cost me no time but any excuse to do another mid-air pose and hasten ever so slightly the next stat point. I had continued to increase it a lot in the last few days, but the difficulty was slightly increasing as they grew. Not a lot, but what took me an hour the first day was taking me a few of extra minutes now.

When I told the smith about my ability to increase stat points like this, he was flabbergasted. He was aware of a couple of methods of going beyond the soft cap, but almost every single one was a jealously guarded secret with onerous usage conditions.

The one he could even hint at how it worked was very similar. Something akin to what I was doing existed, but it used so much Aether, that it could probably be considered another method altogether.

The major ways in which people with access to the system before the time had advantages were in knowledge, leveling, and Aether access. I only really had one of these advantages, but properly leveraged, it might be enough.

Even if I failed at keeping Earth out of nearly direct council control, there were levels of control. Would we be at their complete mercy, or just forced to give a part of our best resources?

In about 15 minutes, I arrive at my house and place the first battery on the ground. A well four meters deep and a meter in the sides has four rods that go all the way through in the ground. I start to drop the thick disks battery discs aligned with it.

Taking them from my inventory is so convenient I’m finished in only a couple of minutes. I connect it separately to the storage system for my own mana, and to the new defenses to the house. So far, nothing too impressive, but it had a few fireball gauntlets that would not require somebody to activate.

As long as I was here, anyone coming to rob the place would be sorely disappointed. And even if I wasn’t, there was the mana shield to get through. I finally connect it to the maze of mana around the house this was something we came up with to avoid the obvious connection cutting that anyone would do first thing when attacking. As long as they knew about the mana conduit.

It was not perfect, but unless they managed to find the main connection, which was deep and started a mile away, they would be forced to cut a lot more. Dozens maybe even hundreds of deeply buried, and more protected channels for the mana and communication.

For someone very well prepared, it was nearly useless, as they could scout out the main connection and only cut it minutes before an attack. But for anyone without more specific knowledge, it could put a big crimp on any attack. And in the future, with more ‘main lines’ even that would become difficult.

Barely an hour after getting home, I try connecting to the village as I see someone coming up the clearing. The only exposed part of the setup is what I touch, a big plate, like a table in the middle of my room. In a few seconds, I not only feel the connection established, but I also hear Merlin’s voice.

“Nash, is that you?”

“Hey, Merlin. Everything ok?”

“Yeah, yeah. How is the state of everything there?”

“Baterry and defenses all installed. Is the battery charge showing up there?”

“It’s about a thousand below the limit.”

“So everything is ok. I used some of the mana to make everything look undisturbed after finishing the installation. ”

“I’m gonna send mana through the conduit, to see if it’s stable. Sending 5 mana per second.”

Slowly but surely he increases the amount of mana sent until it bottlenecks just under the expected throughput. It’s still over 12 mana. We spend the next half hour trying different things, but everything checks out. Even the remote activation of defenses. We didn’t have any decent visual transmission capability, but a mana scan could help in locating any enemies, and sound interaction could always provide a backup to confirm if a friendly was where they weren’t supposed to be.

A magic camera however was still next on the list, and they were hard at work on it. I quickly run back to the village, at unprecedented speeds. I follow the mana conduit, even if it isn’t a straight line, and as I have a security rune, every hundred meters, I take a dozen mana points from one of my relays.

That allows me to run faster than almost any animal on Earth, and the 47 kilometers track that would have usually taken me at least an hour and 10 minutes, with the help of over 6000 mana points is completed in about 40.

If one of the highest leveled people specialized in agility and endurance tried the same they could surpass me even without any mana. But I still felt like the fastest person around. The few points I got from my levels weren’t put in anything physical, instead were put in willpower. But even that didn’t change how I felt.

I enter the village right behind one of the pedal-powered carriages, though this one only has a single person pedaling. Given the lower speeds, it needs to maintain with so many people around. Using my own mana, I jump over it and continue running at a reduced pace. Before I get to the center, where the battery ad command center is, I notice something different around. People are excited. In a few moments, Alex approaches me.

“Man, why didn’t you tell me you can yield Aether.” He says in a slightly hushed tone.

“Later,” I reply. “What is the commotion about?”

“Ohh, that. Greg hit level 50 yesterday on a hunting trip of his. He just came back and now everyone that is level 48 or 49 is trying to get better weapons or armor to repeat the feat before the attack.”

“Is the bonus that high?”

“Partially so. He managed to unlock not only a subclass, which gives 50% of the stat benefits of a class but also upgrade the rarity of his old class by a tier. All that doesn’t even account for the 20% multiplier to all attributes from a class. Not only does the percentage increase, but the fixed stat points also increase. I don’t know all the details, but he must have around double the stats from before he hit level 50.”

I think it over, apparently, it was no quite as hard to get one of these subclasses as I feared, though he did it at a much higher level. Thinking for a few moments, I invite Alex over to lunch at the restaurant, and he accepts eagerly waiting for me to tell him about Aether.

When we are seated, and nobody else is around, I pull a small device from my inner world and put a hundred mana in. A shield not unlike what I experienced on the smithy shows up around us and makes any eavesdropping attempt much more difficult.

“You knew I can use Aether, but how could you tell I was using Aether that moment?”

“Well, I can see magic or rather Aether.”

“Interesting, Aether is a wonderful resource. The only reason I haven’t tried to teach anyone else is that there are a few system limitations in place making it hard to learn, but if you can already see it, maybe…”

“Yes, absolutely, anything...”

His enthusiastic voice is all I need to hear. Now I have a pupil in the art of Aether.