BONG!

I look up as I hear the bell rang. A quick glance out of my hut shows me all I need to know with a look at the clock and then up at the sun.

It’s noon.

After closing the boxes with ink samples, I stack them neatly in the inner world. From there I raise the flying craft we will be traveling on through an opening in my roof before sending a couple of mana points so it can levitate without the help of the roots and move in the direction of the central square.

Hanging from the flying craft, I arrive in the central square to see the group of earthmover mages ready to travel. Each of them beside their own small vehicles fully prepared. In the end, as I look at them there is not a single one that comes from another village and though I didn’t want to be judgmental, I’m grateful we won’t have to worry about the problems trying to integrate other people may introduce in the short term.

I nod at them and run over to Merlin’s office in the academy, but before getting there, I find an assistant of his I recognize, and with his help, it only takes me a minute or so to get the remaining detectors in the inner world. Each of them meter long and palm wide boxes of copper with silver inlaid in the center of the runic formation on the critical runes.

Running back, I look at the last iteration of the larger flying craft I carried the scouts on. No sign of any of the slight damage it suffered after its numerous reductions over the trip and the attack. At the back, I had extended the craft and added receptacles for all the ten other craft to snugly fit in while leaving plenty of space for us in the front.

On the pilot seat I see the scout I invited getting comfortable with the controls. He will try to remain awake the whole time, like I had done the last time, to see if there was some type of benefit. Though I had called on him mostly so he would pilot instead of me having to split my attention. The mages were available to pilot the flying craft, but only for part of the time.

“Ok everyone, fit all the flying craft in here at the back.”

The mages help each other fit all the smaller craft in their place, though they were not as small as my first bike, more like flying cargo bikes. Lifting each one into the ten recessions and pushing them forward allows the craft to hide most of their bulk inside with only a narrow gap and a small protrusion. As each of them is put in place, I raise thin mana shields to smooth out the surface and allow at least most of the aerodynamic benefits from the carefully designed shape.

The scout approaches me and asks: “Why don’t you just put them in your inner world?”

“Ohh, I will after we leave the area.”

“But doesn’t the larger size needed to accommodate the make it heavier and slower?”

“The areas I modified have little in the way of runes and with most of the structure being made of roots still alive, I can modify it quickly. This time there will be more space to move around inside. The only things that would make it more mana consuming would be adding too much weight or having a larger frontal cross-section, not simply by making it longer.”

He shrugs and enters through the airplane-style door on heading straight for the controls at the front. After everyone is inside, even before they are seated, he touches the controls to pull mana from the small batteries in the craft as it moves upward at a steady but decent clip. I connect the inner world batteries to the ones powering the craft, otherwise, we would fall from the sky in about 50 seconds or so.

No sense in adding heavier batteries if I could provide all the mana needed and even save a few points of mana from the weight savings. The propulsion runes responsible for accelerating us through the air will still pull the same amount of mana to propel the craft through the air, but the repulsion runes responsible for keeping us in the air need power proportional to our weight.

As we gain altitude, I get the distinct feeling from when an elevator starts to move making me feel heavier. As we start accelerating forward we notice the more common variety of acceleration like we were on a train on top of a perfectly smooth track.

I look as he keeps his hand on the thrust lever and as we stabilize and we take his hand from the altitude knob on his left. In a few seconds, we speed over the walls and away from the village slowly approaching speeds that most cars couldn’t reach… on level ground.

I wait around for a minute to get a little distance from the village as everyone gets comfortable in their seats and move all the small flying crafts into the inner world before closing the holes with a thin layer of wood with a similar finish to properly seasoned wood backed by the more common variety on roots for structural support. With more space and swiveling seats, we all sit in U shape looking at each other with me being a dot at the top of the letter.

“You all have an idea about what we will be doing and know not to be stupid about it, but …”

The scout interrupts me:

“Umm, Nash, where exactly are we heading to?”

I frown at his comment, but in a moment I realize what he means.

“You are thinking of cutting in a diagonal instead of heading straight to the closest point of the HLZ?”

“I mean unless there is a reason not to?”

“Nope, no reason.” I didn't need the perception field up to realize the size of his grin as he banks the flying boat and makes a fairly sharp turn pressing us all to the flat floor, before leveling off in the new direction. I smile before continuing also for his benefit:

“Everyone will need to keep a healthy distance from the HLZ to avoid the dangers from it. We are already pushing our luck by staying so close for thousands of miles placing the detectors, no sense in getting sloppy.”

“I thought that nobody else went missing after we discovered that they can leave the HLZ for short periods.”

I nod at his comment, before saying.

“Yes, except we don’t know how that will progress. A month ago even poking our heads in wasn’t really dangerous, as just crossing to this side of the line meant safety but that changed. For now, keeping to our side of the line seems to be safe, but…” I trail off.

“Are you going to want to as you put it… poke the bear.” One of them asks me.

“No, not alone, maybe later with support from Greg and a couple of other people, but none of you has much experience or a class suited for this. And that brings me to the first point I want to heavily emphasize again. Stay away from the HLZ as much as possible. Each of your flying craft has the latest generation of the navigational compass, which is the same model found here. That along with the connections they can establish with the positioning transmitters should provide enough precision that you will know where the HLZ is down to a couple of meters in the absolute worst-case scenario.”

They all wait attently to each my words.

“Now this is very important. Even with that precision, never get closer than 50 meters from the line. And so you won’t get lost, I grew roots spiking out from the ground bright red-colored to mark where each of the detectors will be deployed. With the runes to interface between the root network and the detectors it should be nearly ‘plug and play’. With your classes, you can easily dig underground to hide them. I can assume you all have enough engraving knowledge to handle this?”

They all nod and one of them asks: “How deep?”

“Five meters. I didn’t do anything fancy, but the pair of runes will allow the detectors to join the mana stream easily.” I say as I grow in a couple of seconds a copy of them, and from their gazes, I pretty much confirm they are all familiar with runic work.

We spend another few minutes running through it until I’m satisfied and to finish I say:

“Now I’m done, the scout can show you the intricacies of piloting and operating the nav compass for anyone not familiar with it.”

With this taken care of, I move to the back and sit now with much more space. Mana was much less of a constraint this time around given I would not leave the vicinity of the tendril, but I genuinely only did so because the extra couple one hundred kilograms the craft weighed would minimally affect the total mana consumption.

I sit down and cross my legs into a half-lotus position to enter a light meditative trance. In my lap, sits the book I bought and prepared redy for the long session I have before me.

We all zip along with the skies with my perception extended to the limits, now sitting at slightly over 56 meters in radius. The blurry airy leaves and solid matter from the trees are present in the background, but the lack of definition I accept in the longer ranges is not present in the 30 centimeters diameter sphere encapsulating the book.

The contents are still as inscrutable as when I started, but if before I could not even notice the difference in color, now I was getting closer to being able to perceive individual words even while outside my inner world. A long way from seeing individual letters, but it was a step in the right direction and I take it.

In my mind, I run through everything I know about how to increase my stats and start analyzing the perception stat. Is there some type of training that I could do specifically to increase it?

Richard had a note or two coming from his experiments, but advances came so slowly.

With the question burning in my mind, I start cycling between different things just like the last time I was making the trip around the instance. Scanning the air, the tree crowns, the craft, the scout and mages, everything in my inner world, and then back the book.

A moment to breathe and the cycle begins anew, sometimes in the same order, sometimes not, but one thing is constant, the book is the Alpha and the Omega. The very first thing in the cycle and the very last one.

Hours upon hours pass and I start noticing a change in the others.

Thinking it’s time to take a break, I stop and look at what they are doing.

In their hands are small balls of dirt floating and slowly spinning.

“Try this,” says one of them to my left. He gazes intently at the two lumps in his hand, which added together wouldn’t get to the size of a baseball, and with a thread of mana, they touch each other. As the steady outflow of mana leaves his hand, he holds both the lumps melding them together.

As he reaches a fairly uniform lump of dirt and I expect him to stop, that is when he starts for real, and with a much more pronounced mana stream, around half a mana per second flows into the sphere, which gets smother and smother as he wiggles his right hand over and around it.

After almost a minute has passed, what he holds in his hand is no longer the dark brown soil the others were playing around with, but a perfectly smooth clay ball of a lighter shade, though that might just be because the surface was dry.

The runes in which is mana shape themselves are the same extremely complex shape I came to expect from the active skills of the system reliant on mana. Something beyond even Merlin, but that can still teach us something. The real change however came in how he used it.

“What did you do?” Another of the Earthmovers takes the words out of my mouth, and I patiently wait for his answer, not having understood what he was doing as well.

“Something hard, but possible without any alterations of the runes and skill we use to connect to the ground. All you have to do is modify the intent you are sending.” He replies.

“We all do that. Be more specific” The other mage insists.

Before he can answer a third mage chimes in: “Is it cosmetic, did you make some type of alchemy, did you just separate the materials, or did you fundamentally change them?”

He looks at everyone, even with a little more information given my perception field, still don’t know how he did that.

“Here, it will be easier if I show you all.” He grabs both sides and with a sharp pulse of mana, the sphere shear in half and he quickly tilts both of them upward, as a few grains of sand in the very core of the sphere fall to the ground.

“I separate the materials that were always in there. Not sure how useful it will be, and you saw the mana expense, almost 30 mana for a pound of dirt, but can you see the different layers?”

Everyone gets closer, even including my line of sight, but I can still make out better than any of them.

“The outer layer of clay, and an inner layer of a different type of clay. Probably has different chemistry or something. Then comes the organic matter, and inside the sand. Now I still haven’t experimented with a lot of things, but I’m pretty sure it must have some use.” He continues letting everyone see the halves sheered in his hands.

“Well, teach us already.” Another mage asks.

“You know how our main skill can make the ground liquid and make any road fat something much easier and less mana consuming?” He explains.

Everyone nods, including me as he launches into a long and detailed explanation, which I mostly follow over the next half-hour break and I attempt to experiment with it. Not sure if I will use it a lot, especially as I didn’t have the exact skill, nor was I someone who could use Merlin’s Metamagic needed to replicate their skill, but I could approximate and bridge the gap with skill and lots of mana. Not something to take on lightly, but it was just another small reminder that classes really do matter. Just as I thought I was catching up in the Earthmancer skills enough to match them, they pull more functionality out of their current skillset.

As the explanation dies down and they come back to training, studying runes, or just goofing around, I look at the inhabitants of my inner world. It’s been a while I haven’t spent some quality time with the rabbits and I call Aster to come outside and sit on my lap as we communicate.