Metal, paper, wood sheets. Ink or holes for the markings. If I go the metal route, copper or maybe tin are the obvious choices, or maybe alloying them into bronze.

Would it be better to pursue mechanical or optical ways of storing information? Before I hadn't thought that anything optical would even be possible, but I was looking at it again and it seemed feasible.

Making a complex system to recognize each of the letters in the written letters, even the regular precisely quality of printed letters is not worth it, but something binary is so much simpler.

Sitting in the pilot seat, I continue hearing the badly sang tunes from the scout.

“The magic man is a techy.

He loves computers more than trees.

He can’t shut up about it….

I tune out his needling, something he has taken over to do the last half an hour since I started to work on his idea.

But as time pass, even if I can make a lot of progress, I realize that this project is too big to work alone, so I make a comm rune and call the village during one of our stops as we with for the others to catch up.

“Who is calling?” I hear from someone in the MRI before I can get a word in.

“Nash, get me someone that I can discuss projects with if you please.” A few moments later, I hear the voice from a junior researcher I vaguely remember, Though I wouldn’t have remembered his name even if we meet in person, let alone over the comm network

“Hi Nash,” I hear as he pulls up and gets in front of the camera so we both can look at each other in the call.

“Hi, I have something that will interest you guys.”

“Ohh, shit. More?”

I frown exaggeratedly at his antics, though they had of late been hard at work on so many other projects, and I am about to dump a new one on their laps.

“Yeah, more. I don’t have it all worked out, but I found two ‘solutions’ to the storage problem.”

“Ok, let me note it down.” He pulls a pad and a pencil and starts jotting down as I speak.

“First, something really obvious, we don’t need to only restrict to using powerful runes to store information.”

“I think I heard someone suggesting that, but we haven’t come up with anything economic enough, and with so few engravers free...” He trails off.

“That is why we would provide a little training and some type of tool for people that aren't currently engraving anything. Imagine selling copper sheets, smooth to the touch, and deep steel styluses with sharp tips to scratch them. They will turn out very weak engravings, but we don’t care about that. All we need is someone willing to work even if they only have a level 5 skill or something.”

“Interesting, the stylus may not even make it faster or good training for better engraving, but it would make it a little more accessible.”

“Yes, and the shared idea we have of the mana and other proceeds from the library would also include the storage systems independently from where the data is coming from.”

“It’s worth a shot. Even if we realize we overlooked something later, reducing our share of the profits, it will get at least a little more space to store information.”

“And another method for storing stuff wouldn’t even rely on the limited numbers of engravers we have to reach scale.”

“Like the printers?”

“Exactly. We would just need an initial creation.” I say, but cut myself short and ask about the printers. “And how are things coming along with them?”

“Just fine, we worked most of the kinks out, and after we started to recut the borders of the paper more precisely the page storage and retrieval system is coming along nicely. A few more days and we should have it up and running.”

“Good, good, it will save some time for my next idea depending on the direction you guys take it. In short, permanent storage that is not reliant on magic besides for the initial of the machinery. It can be anything from storing black dots in printed paper or holes in cards just like computer and machinery used back in the day.”

“Now that idea I hadn't heard about, but what about…” I grin as he starts to try poking holes in my idea, and I launch into a more defined outline for what I have in mind.

Another ten minutes go by, and my grin only widens as even with his best efforts, my idea is just taking shape and growing more robust. We both realize that even with its drawbacks it would be an amazing addition and I ask him to put it in motion.

“But what about the budget? We are scraping by and barely have enough to go around as it is with all the people and the materials we need to buy.”

“Tell Burges I’m approving a 20% increase in the budget, this is a priority,” I say.

“We are going to have to start letting more people immigrate to our village to keep this expansion.”

“Aren’t the other villages getting pissed about that?”

“Yeah, no one wants to lose population, but Charlie is handling it, most of the time we find someone that wants to go the other village and he pays ‘compensation’.”

“Doesn’t really seems fair that we have to resort to these methods.” I sigh

“It’s not that expensive in the grand scheme of things, the only problem is that we ran out of people wanting to emigrate from our village weeks ago. Still, it’s worth to keep the peace, or so I’m told.”

“Mehh, either way, keep on and pass all this to Burges, I will call the bank and tell them I’m authorizing an increase in the MRI budget.”

He shuts off the connection as I look back at the scout and everyone outside.

“Are you done?” says one of the mages behind me.

“Ye, but I want to connect to the forge for an hour or so,” I say.

“We were going to ask you for a stop so we can catch at least an hour of sleep.”

I look outside and nod glad that they will make good use of the time as I give a glance at the sun getting closer to the horizon. Enough time for my work on the smithy. As I connect fully to the network and start sending my awareness further away, I'm pulled back by a question from one of the mages:

“Can you do us a favor?”

“Umm, sure? What?”

“We are tired and don’t want to make it somewhere to sleep, can you make a hut like the one you have back at the village?”

“Sure,” I say and with expert dexterity after long practicing, I pull on all my skills and push my entire mana pool to the endeavor.

Nature Manipulation

Mana Manipulation

A few touches of Earth and water magic along with my newest skill:

Creation

It all melds into a single action that I don’t need to consciously think about and using the different skills simultaneously becomes a single action, just like like moving 20 different muscles became a single movement.

I wanted to automate some aspects of magic even more, just pass over entire swathes of the skills using up my mental capacity to my autonomous systems, but even how much it came naturally to me and other magic users was already incredible. I connect with the forge and though it’s hard work, I manage to last long enough for both weapons to be made even through the connection from thousands of miles away.

After a minute finishing to check on the village and the others send their own messages back with the help of the comm rune I grew underground, we set off again and the cycle continues. Every 5 kilometers one of them goes stays behind to set up the detectors in the region and every 50 they all catch up rinse and repeat. They rely mostly on the mana that I put on their craft each time we meet, but the charging pads which I have spread through the network are still needed.

A network in which we cross with one other flying craft. A lightweight steel frame with marks that identify it as coming from our village, heading opposite to our direction.

I don’t stop them to ask what that is about, but even with the slower craft that I saw them on, with the mana savings that allow, they are still consuming a lot so whatever they are doing must be important. The village didn’t have an infinite budget, even as so many other villages provided mana to us, we didn’t have the coin or goods to waste it.

As they cross, I stop reducing the range of my perception field miffed at its limited range. With just a dozen more meters I could have scanned the other craft without even having to change course.

I lay back for a moment and start a simple routine during the break to stretch all my muscles. A few minutes after connecting with the roots in my body and improving a few cells from it while absorbing a silver pellet and the last remnants of a gold coin to improve its magic qualities as much as possible.

So far even with almost the entire mass being a battery, and having consumed a lot of silver and an entire gold coin, all it could store was about 0.6 mana points. I could add pounds and pounds of roots and that would allow me to store much more mana. But I didn’t want to make my body any heavier and be forced to carry any more weight around and that is what I keep about a hundred grams as my limit.

If the current strategy is not enough, perhaps I wouldn’t just rely on silver, and gold, I would start on even more expensive materials… as soon as I had access to them.

Looking at the lump of silver, I put it back into the inner world and focus only on the gold coin trying to push it a little further.

In the next event that I lost all access to my resources for at least the briefest of moments, I could do something. It would be not that much, but it is my best for now.

My vigor control had improved immensely and with my training, it was something that wouldn’t ever leave me, but even with the training I did on the outside trying to control the equivalent of Health and Mana, the environment outside was not conducive to the training.

Without returning to the trial environment, it would take me centuries with the meager progress for me to get control of these resources.

Everything else is much slower inside the trial, but that was just an impression. The learning speed of the trial was the real learning speed, and the instance with its time manipulation and the system's help just made increasing skill levels and learning things much easier. The problem was that the system didn't help, and it passively hindered me from getting access to the resources. Making its version of Mana and Health so easily accessible and so similar to whatever I may come up with put a new ‘strain’ in the mind that made progress outside the special environment of the trial nearly impossible.

Even with all I had learned from my book, there was not a hint about how the trial had limited my use of mana and health or how I could replicate it.

Forcing me to improve on this particular avenue is not the trial goal, but I would definitely grab the opportunity on the level 50 trial to unlock my class up to level 100. Most other people even if took them a while didn’t have this problem, but I already had enough exp for level 200 or something. The only thing holding me back was my development and the timer.

Even if I didn’t care about anything, to take the class trial again I would need to wait 30 days after my last attempt. But I couldn’t waste the opportunity and risk lowering the class rarity. Especially not after the automaton had warned me about its importance.

I sit down again and begin to use my Aether working in my fine control of it and forming runes. This time I focus entirely on the best approaches that the people on the MRI had found for expanding my inner world, though I would need to actually test them and the hundreds of iterations that each of the dozens of variations had this exercise seemed to clear my mind so I could focus and learn a little more about the runes and the logic behind them.

If I could use my intrinsic understanding of runes to someday whip up something to increase my inner world by dozen of times it will be worth all the training and more. There was always the stat limit and stuff, but I doubted that would be the limitation any time soon.

Over the next couple of days, I stop in the afternoons so everyone can get some sleep, talk to the village and allow my connection back to the forge. It does add a few hours to our trip, but I don’t mind that too much.

Sitting in the ground when we are almost finished I pull a small seed, something different than most of the previous ones. This one with a new design with a tendril thinner than what I had seen from the slimmest of tubes inside other plants, but wide enough to present minimal capillary action.

I put the dark brown seed in the soil and instead of letting nature and the fraction of a mana point inside take hold, I put a full point of mana in it and actively extend the tendrils to maximum length. Only three tendrils instead of the more common 6, 8, or even more from other types of seeds, but this one was all about increasing the area I can reach in the surroundings of the HLZ.

Extending almost a hundred meters over the next ten minutes, though I need to be very careful, as one even in the soft soil around here the tendrils are extremely fragile and I even lost one of them. Something that I don’t need to concern myself too much given that I can fix the break but no sense in making more work for myself by sloppy.

But even as it reaches maximum extension, I look back through the thousands of miles already covered in the new seed design having the advantage of an already fully connected line with any that does find the network not just becoming a larger isolated island, but actively expanding the area I can cover with my senses.

Packing up after we finish the last few detectors, which just as we expected is a few kilometers after covering half the circle of the HLZ.

We make our way back to the village without stopping for anything else except for about an hour for me to send my mana to the forge.