The scenery to the north and south didn't change much over the next two hours of running to the east. To the north were the mountains, and to the south the white trees of the forest. The moon continued to rise into the sky. After two hours the mountains turned into hills, and an hour after that the forest cut out in a straight line to the south.

To the east of the forest was a continuous sheet of ice, and that is the direction that my guide pointed me to. It seemed the winter realm had a direct relation to the biomes of the neutral realm, and we had just passed one of the four places where all four biomes met. The sheet of ice is what became of the ocean biome in the winter realm.

There was no snow on the ice, which made it an easy run, and we headed in a mostly south easterly direction. After another half an hour of running at forty kilometers an hour a structure became visible. It took another ten minutes before we got close, the structure seeming to grow from the ice the closer we got, towering up into the sky.

There were glowing points of light moving around the structure, which turned out to be stacks of hexagonal cells placed on top of each other. Each cell was five meters wide and tall, and the structure was twenty cells wide at the base and at least one hundred cells tall. From the direction we were approaching I couldn't see how many cells deep it was, but it was a truly impressively large structure. And the whole thing was swarming with wisps, each a point of blue light.

As we got to within two hundred meters from the hive a translucent wall swept towards us. I stopped running and began to slide over the ice. I was still going pretty fast when the wall, which turned out to be made of ice, swept over us. A section of it separated to wrap around me, matching my momentum, and tried to freeze me in place. It only took a small amount of heat pushed into my armour to melt it and break the freezing effect.

"Ah," the wisp said. "That was the passive defences of the hive, reacting to your heat. I should have gotten you to stop further away, now they're going to try to drive you away..."

A dozen wisps had started drifting towards us as I finally slid to a stop. A haze was forming in front of the wisps as they approached and my guide floated out of my hand and above where it would hit.

"You might want to run away," the wisp said.

I shook my head and settled into a comfortable stance, pushing heat into the surface of my armour in preparation. My armour instantly chilled as the front wave of the haze hit me, and if I hadn't preheated myself it's possible that it would have snap frozen me. But with my preparation I was able to push more heat into my armour to counteract the extreme cold.

"Could you ask them to stop attacking?" I asked. "I'm here to talk, not to fight."

Though if I did want to fight, heated throwing blades would take down all of the wisps attacking me in short order.

"You're threatening the hive by standing so close and putting out heat like fire," the wisp said. "If you want them to stop attacking you should be doing the opposite, suck the heat out of yourself so that no heat can be seen coming from you. I'll go get the archwisp."

More wisps were coming out to attack, already more than thirty of them. They were surrounding me at a safe distance and sending waves of increasingly colder air against me. I allowed the outer surface of my armour to freeze and began heating the inner surface, pulling the heat back before it could affect the outer surface. It was almost exactly the same exercise as I did with my orb from so long ago.

Not putting out any heat didn't stop the attacks from the wisps who continued to send the waves of cold at me. Three minutes later the attacks, which had yet to affect me, stopped. I pushed some heat into the outer surface of my armour so that it wouldn't crack when I moved it and then stretched in a full range of motion, looking around.

There was a larger wisp floating down towards where I was surrounded and it was glowing a pink colour, compared to the blue of every other wisp I could see. The pink wisp had its own escort that was orbiting around it as it approached, and in front of them coming to float in front of me was another wisp. The wisps mostly looked the same, but I took it to be my guide.

"This is the archwisp," my guide said. "They are asking why you can't hear or be heard."

"Could you translate for me?" I asked.

My guide bobbed up and down in front of me, which I took to be agreement.

"I am immune to magic effects from people that I haven't adapted," I said.

"But you can hear us if we speak through this one?" The archwisp asked. "Yes, I see that you can. What is your purpose here?"

The tone of the voice from the wisp who was my guide was different than this new voice, which I took to be the archwisp somehow projecting through my guide.

"I need a guide to show me to the snow man progenitor that is attacking the neutral realm," I said. "I came to offer your people a place in my Fortress in the neutral realm. Anyone who joined me would become my vassals, and they would need to work for the betterment of all of the people of the Fortress. And whoever their leader would be would need to have their race upgraded."

"And this offer is an offer, and not a demand?" The archwisp asked. "The other heated one who was a similar shape to you made an offer too, one we were forced to accept."

"It's an offer," I said. "The Instructor forced you into the alliance with the snow man progenitor?"

"The Instructor, yes, that is what it called itself," the archwisp said. "We do not wish to have a lord over us. But access to the neutral realm without coercion would be something we could be interested in. How would you propose getting people to the neutral realm?"

"I have portals that allow travel between the realms without requiring the Winter God's permission," I said.

"Portals..." the archwisp said, the voice drifting off. "Ah, this one knows of what you speak. It also has knowledge of mana being used as payment, and has seen large mana crystals you use."

The archwisp drifted closer to me, its escort picking up speed in their spinning around it.

"In return for access to the neutral realm, a promise that your people will not attack my people, and payment in full mana crystals, I will send someone to lead you to the snow man progenitor," the archwisp said.

"Travel through my Fortress Portal Network isn't free," I said. "It costs Fortress Coins to use it. I will set up a portal and a Fortress Presence here for your use."

"What does a Fortress Presence do?" The archwisp asked.

"It will give your people access to the Fortress Store and Fortress Jobs," I said. "The Fortress Store will allow your people to buy goods and services, which includes using the Portal Network, and the Fortress Jobs will allow your people to earn Fortress Coins."

I was basically adopting the wisps. Being within the winter realm they didn't need to be saved from the end of the world that the winter god was bringing about, so they didn't need to physically be in my fortress to become my people. An economic annexing.

"You would have us be dependant upon you for our access to the neutral realm?" The archwisp asked.

"You would be dependant upon the Fortress," I said. "When you had Fortress Coins you would have access to the Fortress services without having to go through me. Acting to benefit the Fortress would give you Fortress Coins. You could easily buy a mana crystal from the Fortress Shop and then post a job to fill the mana crystal. With access to an Inventory, which can be bought from the Shop, you would be able to have your mana crystals filled and delivered to you in exchange for whatever Fortress Coins you or any of your people had managed to earn."

"Access to the neutral realm, a promise not to attack wisps, and payment in full mana crystals," the archwisp said. "Your Fortress this and Fortress that sounds like nothing more than a trap for my people."

What I needed was a taste, a way to hook the archwisp. I pulled a pair of thread portals from my pocket portal and set one up as a presence, putting it on the front of a stone pillar one meter wide by one meter long by two meters tall. The other portal I set on the side of the presence, leading to a portal room.

"Stop," the archwisp said. "What are you doing?"

"Showing you how your access to the neutral realm would work," I said. "Think 'Fortress Shop' while near the Presence. The Fortress services work a lot better with an Inventory, so we'll start with that. Go to 'Items', and then select 'Bag of Holding, small'."

I pulled out ten Fortress Coins from my Bag of Holding while the archwisp was muttering discontentedly. I placed the coins on the ground and the archwisp scooped them up with a tendril of fog that was coming from its body.

"Place five of the coins in the slot," I said.

It did, one after another, and then the doors on the presence opened to reveal a small Bag of Holding, which it picked up and sank into itself.

"Now you can use the Portal Travel option of the Shop to travel through your portal to any other portal in the network," I said. "If you open the 'Items' section again and buy a small mana crystal it will appear in your inventory. Then open up 'Fortress Jobs' and create a job to fill the mana crystal with the mana crystal as the material and a tenth of a Fortress Coin as the reward."

I sent a ping to Chantelle asking her to complete the job as soon as it appeared, just in case.

"All of this just so one of my people can guide you," the archwisp said.

"And to give your people access to my Fortress, and an incentive for you to help my people in whatever way you can think of," I said.

The archwisp pulled out its mana crystal from the fog of its body and held it up.

"This is enough mana to comfortably feed any one of my people for a week," the archwisp said.

"That's good," I said.

I wrote up a quest for a wisp to guide me to the snow man progenitor with a reward of five Fortress Coins and sent it to the archwisp.

"Yes," the archwisp said. "This one that we are using will guide you."