“Nash. You have to see this.” Merlin gets to me as soon as I leave my mud hut and stroll to the research center.

“What?”

“Pictures that your steam rockets are sending the HLZ have taken.”

I let out a snort. Well, this is probably one of the better names that I didn’t come up with myself.

Steam rockets.

Flying bicycles that go a lot faster and use less mana per second than most forms of flight as long as the trip is long enough to justify getting up to speed and altitude.

“What is it? I already saw the goblin villages, no… the goblin cities further in.”

“No, it is something else entirely. A castle.”

He pulls out a holographic picture frame and with a pulse of mana, I feel the connection to the network as it pulls the information from elsewhere.

The image stored in the ‘cloud’ loads barely a moment later to show me the castle atop a mountain. Nearly gleaming white stone as wide as our village, so about 300 meters wide and nearly that tall.

“Holy….” A structure like that is impressive even compared to the skyscrapers back on earth.

“I know. Richard and the others are thinking about exploring it. Especially after the goblins started their push to dominate the HLZ.”

“And considering the increasing level of the other HLZ beasts. While we may be able to protect ourselves on our side, the possible level 200 and something HLZ beasts are an absurdly scary tough.”

He reaches with his mana, shaping it like a master craftsman with quality clay. He surpasses even the high standards of the Meta Mage after having broken through with his skill.

“Everyone that has crossed the level 100 barrier in class with something better than a common class is grinding their skills past our old limits, while level 200 beasts are a scary prospect, we just need to catch up skill levels and prepare, I don’t think we won’t be caught off guard this time.”

“Even in our instance only 60 percent are still here and the average in the ones we came across sit at some 40 percent with fewer trials than we had. Even with three of us who can Wield Aether pushing it is not enough for any overwhelming advantage, not without time to build on that. The numbers are soon going to start dropping like stones. And neither you are likely to pull some miracle running out of Aether nor I now that I’m preparing to leave given … everything.”

“Well, we only contacted three instances so far. Still too early to tell and I think the trade after we get it up to scale will bring a world of possibilities. Now about the palace? Even if you don’t want to get too tangled, having you along would be an enormous weight off our backs given that brain of yours and the shenanigans you can pull.”

“I will think about it, but you could very well go without me. Still… it shouldn’t take long.”

“It will be good for you to take a short break. With you driving a steam rocket at top speed we could be there in three hours. In and out quickly while your perception field would help to avoid ambushes.”

“Let’s get the portal working properly and we can discuss that later.”

We walk in companionable silence, even if I know that he knows that I know he really wants to convince me. But while Merlin is probably one of my closest friends, he is not me and I need to stay the course and not be distracted.

Though … 6 hours, most of which I would be free to meditate or whatever as I let one of my seeds or one of the passengers drive the flying vehicle don’t sound so bad.

We walk to the facility arriving just minutes before the main test at noon.

Nearly a hundred meters off, even without my consciously drawing it in, the runes leap at me from the ground formed by silver infused roots and I walk closer and closer, eventually getting hints of gold. Our second raid on a goblin village took the full efforts of nearly 4 thousand people, but it paid off. Our side end up with plenty of injuries from a brief clash, though luckily no Deaths and we made out with enough ore to smelt about ten kilograms of pure gold and the plant specimens they were keeping guard over though that would have been trivial if I had just extended my roots in their direction.

A raid like that isn’t something we can schedule every other day of the week. It is expensive in its own right given that each of those people was paid commensurate to the ever climbing number that skilled jobs in the village paid, dangerous, and precluded a few of the more seriously injured from working for days and even a pair had limbs chopped off. Though even that would regenerate over years as far as we could tell.

Consciously drawing in the visible part of the portal, a wireframe tesseract within a tesseract of runes is carefully aligned with a small focus made of delicate gold strands. Gold was the only metal capable of handling the amount of mana we expect it to be ale without screwing things up that we had access to, and even then it was acting just at the edge of its capabilities.

I take one last look even as the engravers finish their checks of the intricate runic fractal patterns, repeating it over and over ever smaller, to achieve better results than simply using their runic language skill as a blunt tool.

“Let’s go?” Asks Merlin already on the way back. I spun down my very light creation field to stop the drain of others on my senses and walk to the control room some 50 meters away, the farthest it could be while close enough for most mages to influence the outcome.

Entering the reinforced bunker, with walls thicker than the village's, though much lower, the spatial mana shields turn on. Powered by the main battery in a redundant fashion and backed by gold-laced silver alloys in all the key points, the barrier feels less sturdy than many other shields ot the untrained eye, but instead of a thick wall of nebulous force, ours is more condensed and therefore effective against higher leveled effects that might be able to cut most shields like butter.

I basically ignore all the sounds around me, as my brainchild spins up. Others helped to design, and construct the portal, but this was my main concern for the last two weeks and I could feel my way of thinking touching just about every single aspect of this project.

I will not be denied.

The familiar mana draw blinds mages from miles away, is just part of the normal sequence.

Hundreds of thousands of mana points, closing on at a million mana per second for this test. A dangerous prospect given the results last time, but I came prepared.

My Qi is ready, with portals reaching all around it. This isn’t a long term plan, just a way to get it working and learn as much as possible, accelerating the development a hundred fold. With a clear conscience and nothing weighing me down after all the safety precautions we took, I try to draw both places together.

Two sides of a portal, a connection drawing from the other connections. Dozens of comm runes attuned to each other on both sides, perfectly balancing the mana, though I have to accomplish that for Qi manually.

I meld my own resources and leverage it sweeping up and focusing the portal beyond what our current understanding of magic could accomplish.

Three seconds in, and I still haven’t made the connection, but that is within our expectations. I reach with my sense of space and brush against the self perpetuating vortex that the system is inducing with weak spatial muscles that don’t rely on any resources. Just my willpower, if even that.

I can’t do much, but I smooth out the edge of space spinning wildly in a torus…. and it clicks.

Two places are one, automated sensors activate a tiny mass launcher shooting out a packet from our side to theirs and a fraction of a second later, another shoots back.

Nearly 300 milliseconds later, the power to the portals is cut abruptly, like a breaker that just tripped, for that is essentially what happened.

“3.6 seconds total, just over 3 million mana from the main bank.”

I almost grimace at the expenditure, though we will eventually figure out how to improve that in both time to stabilize and consumption per second. I reach with a pair of portals and teleport the tiny seed, though one without a consciousness into my hand reaching for the space inside. There is not much, while I managed to pull some shinanigans to let them access the space inside slowly, I didn’t want to risk sending a living being last time around given the untested nature of the transport method.

Inside the returning bag, I open it myself given that no one else could access it without the proper runes or the help from my seeds before I dump out the contents.

I hear a voice behind me euphoric at the 30 kilograms of gold, a small portion coming from coins with a single blue tinted silver metal from a single coin in the midst.

“We send over a small bonus. It is the least we can do after you gave us the precise location of a dozen enemy villages.”

I look back at the holographic screen as the lone being exuding a death aura stands talking.

“Well, we have plenty more to trade and I have a set of bones that aren’t much use for us, I send over just a splinter, tell me if you find it useful and we can talk,” Charlie says.

As he continues looking back, I just grin. Of course, he is gonna want Titan bones, these are likely above anything he has and with his powers he could grow an extremely powerful minion surpassing even his Ancient Mammoth.

With that trade done with and plenty to analyze and change for the next iteration, we drop the smaller portal connection and comms to get on with it.

I pour over it for the next hour, but as the current plans are put into practice, and the portal is aligned with all we learned during the interaction, I'm left with a few free hours. I think about leaving, but that doesn’t feel right.

With a look at my inner world, the slightly larger finished product of all my work, but even as I push myself and our understanding of magic forward, something is missing.

Still, if I want to head over one of these days with the others to this new castle, I should extend the size of the inner world.

I look at the option to expand it by 50 meters in all directions and after the last few days of thought, I take the plunge. I won’t be expanding it anymore any time soon, so delaying would be foolish.

The system’s gaze brushes my senses, very faint hidden under a layer of other impressions. Space starts being manipulated, both in old ways and new ways. I drop absolutely everything and pay attention to what is happening.

The system isn’t making its actions inscrutable, it’s letting me witness what is doing.

Or maybe, I just bypass its security measures as I do with my perception field. Something innate to me that has no relation or real equivalent in the system.

I feel the change and try to emulate it.

There is no gaze of the system inside my inner world, but its long tendrils suck the edge of it out expanding it meter by meter.

I lower gravity given the supporting dome underneath the hemisphere of dirt is expanding but most of my attention is on something else in the air.

Even as I try to understand what is happening, some of the consequences are becoming clearer to me. This… is the limitation that so many run against.

Even as space expands, I feel the system messing with the limit layer of the inner world and making it tougher. But I don’t need it tougher, that will just make all subsequent attempts harder and more time-consuming.

But even as the world settles down and its attention drifts away, a strange smile is left behind bolted on my face. There are hundreds of meters of walls spread over and they don’t even hint at returning to their original place and I know why. Not because the system arbitrarily determined that, but because of the way it pushed against the edges making permanent changes. The very walls want to have this new diameter and shape.

I have a very similar capability to alter space without relying on runes or anything of the sort. Now I just need to practice a lot and replicate the system’s actions.