The wind picks up from the pinprick in the epicenter.

I knock my bone staff against the ground and try to extend my proto domain out. Mana rushes out as I fight a storm. The only things missing are water and lightning. Though those are most of what makes a storm, so perhaps nothing like a storm.

I try to glean anything from the portal with my magical senses at this distance. Today it has opened a bunch of times in relatively quick succession. Sometimes it stays on for longer, other times the other side is a little clearer, but it is time that I don’t just observe it, but interact with it.

I have no idea how this is supposed to work and my council of mages is even more clueless than I am, but my ignorance doesn’t reduce my fascination.

Sending a weak magical skeleton marching forward to stand just a foot away from the precise spot the portal forms. Standing so close, it will likely be destroyed if anything goes wrong with the portal, but this is the only way of reaching out that won’t expose myself or anyone else to danger. While common skeletons were much easier to make and a lot more disposable than my few magical troops, they couldn’t wield any magic.

I reach out, from deep within me and I assume control of the avatar.

My field of Death pushes out and even the few wisps of life nearby all fled. The next portal opening takes a lot longer.

Did I wait too long and now only tomorrow will they turn it to again?

No, I need to be cautious. The common skeletons I send were worse than useless and even if it costs me a magical undead slot from my army, the risk is worth it.

I reach out in earnest, watching its eyes and feeling through its mana sense. There are no other sensations. Nothing from its skin or tongue, for it has none. Even its sense of hearing is so muted as to be useless given that I can hear the wind better with my own ears a hundred feet away while in indoors.

Magic can make up for a lot, but to give all the senses to an undead…. That is a tad much for someone like me just starting out on this path. I’m only level 150, still stuck there as I wait for anything decent to show up as a subclass.

The next portal comes as I work on my mana control, some twenty minutes later. I pay attention, but this time it seems different somehow. The way it stabilizes is strange. Not a uniform dome, but just one side being reflected.

My mage skeleton senses nothing but faint wisps of mana. A moment later, strong light shines through. Like a projector hitting the ground and I look downward. A warped projection slowly comes into focus.

Instantly the fraction of a mana point per second going into my aura becomes a lot more.

By the time the portal closes, only a larger rune in the middle and a few English words are legible.

I keep grinding the weaker bones in the pile nearby into dust with my aura and reshaping then into a rune. I reach as deep as I can and make it into reality. The magic and the engraving skill take hold as only I can do without using the slow process of tapping with a chisel a sheet of copper.

There were other methods, but none useful beyond the simplest of tests.

As it takes hold, however, my suspicions are revealed to be true as its effects are simply absent. I will need a little bit of testing and the rest of it to make it work.

Just seconds later, my skeleton mage drops to its knees and starts carving on the packed dirt ground the symbol overlaying it with the image.

Thirty seconds in total and the portal blinks out.

I wait with batted breath for what is going to happen, but as the crackles of space start, I know that it has come again, the next piece even before the overlaying, and this time a little more of the picture comes into focus.

It may not work on the first or second try, but I will succeed.

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

Nash’s POV

“Are you certain?” Burges asks me.

“Yes, we only need the barest of breaches for the comm rune to work, and it doesn't even need to be particularly well tunned with the amount of mana we are pumping out. We may have sent text explaining its purpose, but the first few tries without someone personally showing you how a rune operates are a bit funky. You know that.”

“But we can at least increase the time window and make the portal a little larger.”

“Look if in another 10 minutes he hasn’t contacted us, we can discuss changes I don’t want to waste any mana without the need. His bone dust runes may be mana expensive, but it’s fast.”

“I say we wait an hour…” Burges starts

“Hello.” The words echo just as the portal opens up once again. “Anyone?”

The comm operator takes his hands off the controls so we can respond and with everyone silent as mice, I say in the most nonchalant tone I can muster up:

“Yes, the Magic Man.”

“No, you are not.” He answers in a knee jerk reaction “There is only one with that title. But with magic like this, you may hold a candle to his blaze.”

I hold back a snicker, but instead of debating my fellow Pando enthusiast, even with the couple people around that knew of my moniker back on Earth. So I just enjoy the joke without halting the communications. We will have time for more later.

“We claim the title of prime instance, as the first one reaching others, do you have any preference?”

Chuckles reach my ears. “You can have it, I have no idea what you are doing. You must have found an even more amazing legacy than mine, to be gifted such a class.”

I imagine how to unpack what he meant but instead choose something else.

“Let us leave such discussions for later, especially given the mana costs for us to talk. I have a couple of things to say that you can relay to your village heads or whatever form of authority there is in your instance, though don’t get too caught up in my wording, I’m not a diplomat, just a curious person.”

“You are already talking to the right person.”

I nod slowly, though he won’t be able to see it, and just continue also choosing not to unpack this second statement. He and Charlie can deal with the other villages in his instance.

“We are peacefully reaching out to other instances. You are actually the first we managed to talk with. We seek trade, at first only knowledge given the limitations of our magic, but eventually, I hope to fix up the bugs in our portal and more should become possible. Knowledge and learning are concepts I hold very dearly and I hope our instances can develop closer to each other. We have a lot to discuss, but for now, let us leave it just at that. On the next topic, I would like you to replicate another runic working that will help make communicating much easier and less mana intensive.”

“Ok.”

“Be back within the hour. Signing off.”

The mana after just two minutes of talking hit 100 k if I’m reading the printout correctly. Not all that bad, but for so little interaction it is a shame.

Just as I turn around I realize… I didn't even ask his name.

Well, we can get to that in time, for now, there are designs to create and modify. Also, Charlie should be here for the next contact. I’m just the inventor, he is the actual diplomat.

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

My work goes at a lightning pace. So far each and every smidge of progress forward seemed to have been fought tooth and nail and this is no easier, but while we won’t suddenly be able to cross physical matter to the other side, analyzing the changes to his instance and comparing notes on the magical phenomena on the other side we can learn a lot opening multiple avenues for improvement on our current designs.

Which is not an entirely foreign concept to me, if my perception field could encompass what I was making in the relevant fields, I could progress much faster than usual and reach greater heights and insights than anyone else had any hope to.

The precise shape, any distinction and micro cracks forming, the temperature of each particle, and even the size and orientation of the grain in the metal. Contaminants and other invisible concerns all become clear as the day for me as I see everything to a precision that no technique from back on Earth would have been able to achieve without a lot of time and destructively altering the piece being tested.

Every meaningful realm that a physical piece of metal touched, my perception field could SEE.

But mana was inscrutable and magic was not its domain… yet.

I was working on that and when I cross that barrier, my creation field would stop being a fun little addition and become a practical tool and could help Merlin reach whole new heights, let alone myself, but it was not here yet. Though the information we glean from Straugan, a bonified necromancer watching the portal from the other side is still invaluable.

Though even after learning to see Mana, I would need to filter out the interference that space subjected my perception field to so I could make sense of the flow.

Perhaps that is an even more important aspect that I should try to acquire with haste. I pull a rough notebook and note it down on its fourth page along with my other developments for the Perception field I want.

Coming back to the task at hand, I look at the others and then at the portal.

Merlin had the immediate task well in hand, perhaps my efforts would be better served coming up the next step.

I poke a single hole in my hand and extend roots just under the surface just in case using the carefully cultivated magical properties would have any impact. Dropping a few pounds of silver and a few droplets of Life, a profound transformation occurs in the process. The roots drink in the metal orders of magnitude faster than usual. I get excited that the prospects given the sheer speed, but soon I realize the limitations.

Instead of the carefully balanced and perfectly attuned version of the roots inside my body, these broader brushstrokes may be faster, but they are also inherently imprecise. I stop a lot sooner at around half concentration in seconds, instead of full saturation years or even decades for a mass this large. Going for too much too fast is risky. Though I should be fairly grateful that even this much is possible without causing harm through some of the system’s bullshit.

Over the next half an hour, I draw on our limited supply of gold and make two tiers of living base materials to ‘engrave’ with showing the best magical handling capabilities of its class.

I wonder what the actual best way of handling things would be.

I suppose with my other bullshit skill, Create, I could simply conjure up slivers of mithril but unless they could last at least an hour for us to have the time to mold, they would be of little help.

Qi is the answer.

Qi sometimes breaks rules, what could it do with this aspect of the Create skill. I knew that it helped the ‘creation field’, but even that was subtle.

I draw my power and concentrate on making a sliver of mithril, a hundred points, a thousand, three thousand then I cut off the flow. Before me in my hand is air, a spot with nothing but air.

Well, shite. I couldn’t expect everything to go my way, but for Qi to have no capability to Create. Could I make something less impressive than the wonder material?

Learning that sounds important.