Milthree is a gift from heaven when it comes to understanding the new inhabitants of the HLZ. Before now, we didn't have a hint that anyone but the HLZ beasts occupied over there.

They both talk in my hut with the ever growing number of people as more translators in the inner world arrive.

And that is not all, the Arch Shaman has a lot more leeway in what he can discuss all aspects of magic. Most of it doesn’t translate well for us humans, but it is a couple of steps up the ladder in deciphering theirs compared to simply trying to decipher their runic working that relied integrally on chanting to complete the circuit and make ‘things’ happen.

But as awesome as all that exploration sounds, we focus on the Goblin village for now. Milthree was on the lowest rung of the ladder, but even that is much more than we knew. Even seemingly unimportant things, like culture will have a deep impact eventually, even if not immediately useful, by helping to provide context for us to understand their actions and movements.

The last thing he runs through is the main goal of their village, three spots they need to protect. A goldmine in the heart of their village and a pair of flowers nearby.

“Why didn’t you start there?” I ask excitedly.

“Ohh, the flowers don’t seem all that important and I thought that you knew about the Gold mine.” He sends back through the telepathic link, even as the translator team takes a careful note of each of his words. After all, he is not restricted in what he can tell us, at least in the sense that he can simply ignore all the warnings from the system, though not all punishments from the system are so immaterial.

I look at the Arch Shaman, ignoring him for just a few seconds the gold I could gain. Even he can only slightly bend, perhaps this is just a case of sheer ignorance, but just as likely this is something extremely rare.

Our instance seems to be different, perhaps, not just villages… but entire instances also had the tendency to attract similar kinds of people, and we had an unusually high percentage of talented troublemakers.

The automaton was assigned to come to our village. We have both Merlin and Alex, besides plenty of other talented people at the level that whole instances may lack.

Even Blackwood’s seems a lot more constrained than the occasional minutes that I take to watch other blacksmithy’s work, after all, he is not a talentless hack, or noob propped up to the position by the system, but instead someone that got forcibly drawn down the ladder a lot.

The system could be doing this purposefully and although it saw the confluence of people in this place and send the automaton to keep a personal eye on us. But in the end, it might as be luck that all these people were working with similar goals in mind.

I shake my head and start thinking.

Another 3 kilometers after the farthest tendril, If I understand his distance measuring correctly heading straight east with a slight tilt north from the center of my ‘invasion’. While the two other plant locations were dozens of kilometers away and only protected by rotating small squads.

The plants I knew I could… deal with, but the village… I will need time and effort to slowly expand it. It will be uncomfortable, but using Life I might be in a good position to remain stealthy, given that I only need a thin tendril to connect the to the mass of roots already in place. With some work and given my much greater understanding, I have a shot at remaining hidden. Something else I can do that should be impossible, for even an Arch Druid or something similar. They would require loads of mana continuously running to repeat my actions.

My connection to plants precedes the system and perhaps that is another small way in which I’m different, though exploring the system was helping me deepen that connection. For all, I know this is not inherently from myself, but a skill I got from Pando with all that entailed.

I look at my Health stores and shift my gaze so that I will see only my Life. In a general sense, people tended to think of these resources as simple things, while they don’t leave their pools, they are something closer to raw willpower with only a flavor of mana, stamina or health.

Pools of potential to be converted into a useful form of energy and only after leaving do they become active. That is the very reason that pulling mana out of one’s pool is the greatest strain one can put and even pulling it from a battery, the effort the mind takes trying to switch it into something compatible with the caster…

That mental strain limits how much mana someone can handle in a sitting or a day.

Though I guess that emptying someone’s own pool would put a greater strain than just shifting ready mana Mana from someone else into a useful form.

Very little of that is even hinted at a single one of our books we bought or the research from other villages and though these concepts haven’t been terribly useful. It is another piece from one of the puzzles I’m trying to assemble while trying to understand the system.

I pull a tread of Life and that strain of transformation echoes in minor ways around the entire pool and I notice the regen rate that had returned to normal a few moments ago going down again. So while messing with it on the Qi side of the equation can lead to higher Regens, Life takes an opposing stance… Given that I can freely absorb Vigor back into my pool, at least when it comes from Aspen, and even the slightly greater regen that I find in the forest can be stuffed back in the bottle, that just indicates that the rules for Life would be different.

They each are different resources and I need to stop thinking about them as replacements for the system’s resources with small quicks to them. For as slow as Life’s regen may be, at least the resource is potent, extremely potent and that adds another dimension to my fights.

With a little less of a deft hand, given I don’t have all year to slowly grow this gap, I put the Life on the furthest tendril in the HLZ and push it forward.

If before the hundreds of miles felt slightly like being squeezed in a tunnel were uncomfortable, without crossing into claustrophobic, crossing the firewall makes that ten times worse. The sheer weight atop my chest makes breathing hard and my mental muscles have to be both stronger and limber than ever.

I push and push until that is all that echoes in my mind.

All the world reduces to the straw, the ink’s reservoir of a pen as I try to push the ink forward, ever forward. Slowly, even as the exercise gets harder, I learn. I grow. I become that who can overcome this challenge.

I try to extend my will through plants that the system doesn’t recognize as being a part of Aspen’s network and therefore has no reason to warn the goblins about, and I succeed.

Each step is arduous, like hauling a truck loaded with rocks up Everest with only rachets straps. Certainly possible, but such a monumental task that it doesn’t even bear consideration, at least not before the system, now…. People are probably gonna try stuff like that.

Thousands of points of strength along with mana and stamina lifting trucks and maybe even small ships. We didn’t know the limits of the system, but I doubt what we saw was all there is to learn. We were kids, that saw a poll and thought that is as large as a body of water can be. Maybe it is, but I doubt it.

We need to find our path, and though everyone else was focusing on magic occasionally mixed to very low levels of ‘engineering’ the very fact that the system interferes with technology, hints to me that going that route is a viable path. If I can figure out how to stop its interference. Even the most basic of our flying machines, just a kite with pieces of string attached still get interference from the system so they won’t fly.

The only alternative at our disposal for flight is the lucky find of the repulsing rune, which only works at a set distance from the ground, pushing someone up to roughly 3 times the size of the engraving itself, and even that didn’t scale well for larger engravings.

We could probably extend that a little with by adding a similar set on the ground, but that will also eventually run into limits.

With just what we learned until now and very small leaps of logic, we could add tremendous capabilities to our tech tree back on Earth and make real spaceships with basic shields and everything, not very impressive at first, but real spaceships, not tin cans with atop giant mildly controlled explosions.

Even getting to orbit could instantly become an order of magnitude easier.

Why does the system limit our actions, and how can we counteract those effects?

My mind keeps grinding at the problem, even as all my active willpower is on the mind numbing task of driving deeper into the HLZ.

My willpower starts flagging, but I’m getting closer. I push and push digging my way through the dirt as if I am the root tendril reaching for the promised land.

Minutes, hours or days pass, I have no idea for time has little meaning in the struggle, but eventually, a new sensation arrives.

A piece of home, something that is more alive than any of the flora that the system placed here by an order of magnitude and I relax.

I taste the similarities and differences. Something slightly alien. The same desert I had grown used to, but with a different sweetener. I widen the connection, and it is like I poked my head into the fresh air after breathing only dust in an eternal tunnel.

Instantly I'm half ok. I can’t stretch my legs given the connection all the way from my body, but at least each lungful doesn't accumulate ounces of dirt in my lungs.

How does the other half lives?

Everything is mud and rough leather. Hand broken pieces of wood for structural material and a tribal feel. The stereotypical goblin village.

I pass my perception field all around, circling the entire village, before coming to the central building. Though there are no grand palaces for the chief or worship places for the shaman, that is simply because something else takes that spot and they sit around it. In the precise middle of the village is an entrance. A raised dais of carved rock inviting everyone inside. But I do not rely on vision, instead, the perception field already created a mental picture of everything inside down to the grains of sand.

I look at the small mine, this one with only a single round room about 5 meters wide with a total wall perimeter that is not even half of a silver mine

But the all important gold fills its walls. That metal that could take so many of our high level engraving efforts to the next level is sitting undisturbed.

I take a final snapshot of the whole place before starting my way back.

But a strike interrupts me.

I take a deep breath, even if my stamina is not down by any appreciable amount and calm down.

It is ok, everything is ok.

PAIN.

The world becomes pain.

There is nothing beyond deep searing cuts across my soul. I reach deep within myself, trying to find the small island and tuck myself in it but my willpower is foggy and laggy and not only from the intense and constant signals.

Seconds afterward, it is over.

I marchal my will and try to look inside my soul.

Below me, deep cracks let me see familiar lights from underneath, inside the place that I think of as my actual soul, but I watch it from the outside. Above there are also cracks letting me peek at my resources. This confusing shared place is not what I had grown used to. All of it is part of my soul.

That moment of realization is gone and the injuries remain.

I stare and try to draw the walls in to heal, but they are… too strong. Soon, a strange effect shows up, making everything more malleable. The cuts start healing nearly on their own, and I use my remaining willpower to speed up the process. Something reaches the outside walls and slowly perfuses it making it ever so slightly more malleable.

Healing. The entire wounds are hundreds of meters away and the cracks are only some ten meters across. Above and below, are the other places I found within myself depending on my type and depth of meditation… If I was in the black void amidst light any transformation should be nearly impossible.

The strongest ping ever comes from the system, and even the mere wonder about what it is makes the prompt show up.

Unknown damage type affected the user’s soul. No detectable entity attacked the user’s soul. Monitoring situation.

What the hell??? If you don’t know what is causing this…. what can I do?