I sit on my throne, just meters away from the people negotiating. I pretend to just be a smarter than average dumb brute and let Charlie play his games.

He thinks that he holds the advantage, and in many aspects that is completely true, but it’s not nearly as overwhelming as he thinks.

I have nearly 6000 troops at my disposal. Sure, only about 3500 are properly blooded, but the others are not chaff, and if he thinks I had nothing else up my sleeve he is deeply mistaken. I have layers upon layers of contingencies.

That does not mean I am going to just act the dumb brute all the way to my grave. The little exercise he has us participating in, especially if the rable are not aware of it, will not hurt the troop's morale. It gives me time, which contrary to his expectations, is good for my position. In the next day or so we would lose little, and gain quite a bit, while they gain almost nothing. There was another couple of villages that should be joining my little empire over the next 24 hours.

Two hundred elite soldiers and 300 new ones are on their way to conquer more. They would have to be fast and skip most of the villages. They wouldn’t contribute with troops, not unless Charlie delayed for days, but targeting the weakest villages will increase my territory, and that is a very good development, one of my surprises is dependent on the size of my territory.

I just needed to get past this hurdle, and the vulnerability from spreading myself thin will be worth it if this is the only price to defeat this alliance. If I can just crush them here, with the terms they are setting on the contract, I would be able to easily sweep up the closest 50 to 100 villages not belonging to their little alliance. After that, I may start to encounter properly organized resistance, but by them, I doubted anyone will have the resources at their disposal and they needed unity to resist my advance.

So just like Charlie predicted, I won’t send out my forces. That would be stupid. He has all the initiative. If I had improved the level of stealth of my forces more, we would see another dynamic, but I didn’t manage to do so in time. That precluded direct surprise attacks. There are a few assassins that may be able to get in undetected, but Charlie has access to many types of magic and is very good at integrating the advances they made into practical applications. Even if the assassins killed ten times their numbers, they would die for certain afterward. They would be better served if held in reserve for a strategic play.

I could send a couple of long-range attacks their way, but let’s keep this and a few other cards up my sleeve. I will only use them if necessary, after all, the stuff they are asking in the terms of surrender are the wrong things. If the cost of fighting was too great, ‘surrender’ may be an option. Charlie may be a lot of things, but apparently, he is not a lawyer and the other villages were very eager to get me to sign this contract. They don't want a long and costly battle. Most of the villages would agree to pretty anything just to avoid any losses to their armed forces and equipment.

-------------------------------------------

“So this village or any other, directly or indirectly under lord Max’s, wouldn’t be allowed to initiate an attack. The only attacks allowed would be in retribution to attacks perpetrated against his territory. Furthermore, during skirmishes, the rules will be laxer.” I hear while from our side with my tap in the comm line.

“In principle, we agree, but there needs to be proper definitions for what constitutes skirmishes and guidelines for the recompense we are allowed to distribute. We may be entertaining this pact, but we can’t allow other people to trample upon our honor without a proper response.”

Through the connection I faintly hear someone on our side snorting and muttering:

“Honour? Bunch of….” The rest is garbled, so I can't make out the exact words. Though I wager a gold coin I could make a decent guess. And I have to admit, I shared the feeling.

I’m also finding it funny that they are even entertaining the idea. Maybe Max isn’t just the brute he pretends to be. He knows that attacking us is a bad idea. He will probably try to maneuver the situation so we are the ones attacking, or maybe he is counting on the clauses of the contract that will preclude any further attacks on our part if it becomes clear that we would lose with our current forces.

Still, it's almost strange the dichotomy of action and thought. We are standing less than a mile from the village with an army and could at any moment attack. But the discussion often turns to things that have nothing to do with our supposed goals here.

It almost looks like both sides are delaying. I know our side wants to delay, but why do Max’s people want the same?

The question nags at me, but I find no answer and slowly stop questioning it before throwing my full effort into the roots I’m growing.

An hour in I stop the frantic pace and greatly diminish the amount of mana that Pando’s seed is handling. Adding both of our draws we stay at a constant 40 mana per second. Lines of people donating their excess mana recharge my battery, but their regen without meditating can’t keep up with us.

The battery in my inner world is approaching a million mana points of capacity, but even that massive amount already had a good chunk bitten out of it and even at my reduced pace, I will still be using a little more than what the people around can supply.

Most people had meditation below level 30, and that was less than a 30% increase in regen of resources. Most of the soldiers focussed on physical stats and skills more.

That said, I can't complain, I have more mana than ever, and spinning significant amounts of my Aether is having amazing results for my skill levels. The last few days have seen me spending a lot of mana, but what I’m handling today puts all the previous efforts to shame.

A quick peek at my skill levels focussing only on the ones that should have seen a significant increase, and I’m not disappointed.

Mana Manipulation

Lv. 99

Free Form Magic

Lv. 22

Deep Meditation

Lv. 99

Water Manipulation

Lv. 70

Earth Manipulation

Lv. 68

Nature Manipulation

Lv. 91

Runic Language

Lv. 82

Telepathy

Lv.41

I look at both mana manipulation and deep meditation and find it strange that they are both at the exact same level, 99. Is there another soft cap, maybe even a hard cap because I’m didn’t gain a class yet?

Not concerning myself too much, I return to my current endeavor and make full use of not only the 99% bonus of the deep mediation but also its hidden multipliers. Without moving I get another 49,5% on top of that, and I get another 30% for how deep my meditation I was going.

Multiplying everything results in nearly a 300% increase in regeneration rates. Quadrupling my mana regeneration is… exhilarating. I can’t go much deeper while doing mentally intensive tasks such as growing the roots and the paths for runic formations. I have on occasion managed to reach what I estimate to be 700% increased mana regen, though unless the numbers were steady, and I went very deep for the entire time, measuring precisely is impossible.

Perhaps I will eventually find an answer, but for now, anything beyond 500% is only an educated guess, rather than actual measurements. The small runic formation continues to transmit audio from the negotiations in my thick cocoon. I don’t want anyone wielding a greatsword simply stabbing me….. again.

I idly keep the information I hear in the back of my mind, but what before had been normal negotiation, is slowly growing into a convoluted contract. It feels more intended to be confusing, rather than to be thorough.

The hours pass, and as night arrives a few people at a time go out to hunt the wolves. I idly hear people complaining of the number of wolves being low, and I wonder if they have already depleted most of their “allotted” number of spawns, or if there is some other system mechanic in play.

Regardless of the reason, I file away the thought and with everything already in place, I just focus on sending mana to the ground and growing everything fairly uniformly.

The roots have grown under the narrow path, and from there grew under the village. I kept them deep enough and with mana so spread out that any mage would have a hard time spotting them without consciously looking for them.

The redundant lines connect the formation meant to protect me and the coalition of the villages, to the one under Max’s village and just outside it. This connection is already redundant, so the only thing to do now is to focus on increasing the passive speed of the growth of the very roots in place, adding strength and mass to them.

With the leftover mental capacity, I come back to my new rune. I continue to experiment with it, though I don’t head in any direction that would take too long. A few of the mages that came in the expedition are already hard at work on the more repetitive and slow part of the process.

Optimizing the supporting runes and many other details can be done by them over time. What I feel is a better use of my time is making another aspect of this work.

At first, I fail, but as the hours tick by and my Aether cycling slowly ramps up, I manage to get something halfway working. Succeeding on this task, without having to create a new rune is like nothing else.

A small formation that is meant to store information, something akin to a micro-film or a sdcard depending on how you look at it. In it is stored the logic representation of letters.

It takes me a long time and a lot of effort, but finally, through blurry, indistinct, and nauseating apparitions, I can make out something in the distance. I continue with no pause as the time limit looms over the horizon.

After experimenting a little, I start to believe I can make them as small as I want, but any such attempt will have to be manually guided. To store more information I will just have to spend longer creating the “memory cells”.

My new sense comes in handy as I start trying to shrink the runes. The sharpness and focus with which I can perceive everything around and within my inner world is almost eerie. Nothing escapes me. Even if my eyes can see details smaller than this new sense, that is only after taking into account the improvements in perception the system brought, and there were advantages to this sense.

How the information is transmitted to my brain gives me a familiarity I never thought I could achieve in a cursory inspection of an object.

It's like I can taste, feel, and intimately know whatever I focus on. Thinking about it, I may not even have been able to grow so many simultaneous runes without this capability.

Each line I lay is filled with a dozen cells for every inch. Every foot or so, I turn in the opposite direction like I’m doing crochet or something. When I have a 1-foot square piece, the third axis comes into play and I start on another layer. My goal is to form a cube.

I strain my capabilities, even letting go of the other stuff I was doing and focusing on hitting my maximum rate of production. I can form 5 cells easily enough. So I start to push, first 10, then 15. I start to have trouble, but I continue to push. Even after a few minutes, I can’t hit 20. With a push of Aether, I get over the bottleneck, and I stabilize there.

I continue on this seemingly simple task, focusing all of my mental power.

Slowly, as I get used to it, I add everything I normally do to the back of my mind. A grin unbidden forms on my face. A grim so wide, if anyone could see me inside my protective cocoon, they may think I’m crazy.

Holding this expression in my face is not only effortless, I don’t even notice anything wrong with it. The one thing I still haven’t figured out is how I’m gonna connect all of this to my book.

Withdrawing it from my special inventory, I place it into my inner world wondering why I haven’t done so before, but nothing magical happens as a result. Something to note, however, is that my new sense can faintly make out the text in the book. Given the lack of texture difference on the page, I need to pay close attention to read it, but I don’t mind, maybe something good will come of it.

As one of the mages approaches, I stop my mental rumination and we share the discoveries each of us has made in the last couple of hours. I show him the runic working, though the inefficient design for taking information and showing it directly to someone.

After a minute, he pukes in my general direction and I find it slightly strange. It seems I may have a slightly higher threshold for dizziness or something, it didn’t seem that bad to me.

Well, you guys have fun figuring out how to make it work.