The Third Portal: Chapter Forty

After collecting the massive chunk of null-steel that was the vault door, we spent the rest of the weekend picking over the city with Edgar, collecting mana sources, killing undead, and picking up anything we could that we thought would fetch a decent price. We picked up some silverware made out of actual silver from several rich people’s houses, even though it was tarnished, as well as suncopper that had been used for lighting enchantments, a dozen more mana sources, and an assortment of ghosts that had been left behind from the era. 

As the weekend came to a close, Ed had to get back to work, I had to settle in for my shifts with the guild, and everyone else split off to pursue their own projects, I settled down and checked my account balance. 

With the sale of everything that we’d collected, I’d managed to tip my account balance to a bit over over six thousand points. Given that I owned a piece of land that the guild would be operating out of, and had also managed to add the Nascent Truth of the Druid into my staff, I thought I’d made out exceptionally well. Not only that, but I’d broken into the middle of third gate, while Dusk had reached the peak, and Dawn… Well, she needed to summit the mountain.

A part of me was tempted to go haring off to the top of the mountain next, but I stopped myself. I had all the parts of the array that I needed, as well as several tanks of fuel. I had lessons in waiting with the guild masters of the three main combat guilds. I needed to focus on learning new spellcraft. And I needed to train inside of the orb for the Elysian Mastery Tournament – all the preparations in the world wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t get in. Now was the time to consolidate everything I’d gained, not to go bolting after the next goal.

And so I did. 

Over the next eleven weeks, I focused on consolidating all of my gains. 

Dusk started off doing something rather similar – she’d sustained some damage from the detonation of the slaughter spirit, and even though it was mostly cosmetic, she was rather irritated by it, and refused to take any more missions until it was fixed. 

It was during this time that I was able visit the shadow realm that she’d integrated from the one we’d found. That realm had been formed around an artificial lake, and she’d made it into the shadow of her own natural lake, and transformed the bits of the office buildings into the cliff face. 

It was while checking these out that I got my first good look at the strange mana creatures that used spatial, temporal, knowledge, mental, and abnegation mana to hide themselves from my senses – spiders. 

Large trapdoor spiders the size of small dogs, their magic seemed to be incredibly well suited to hiding. Their first gate was mostly focused on sensory spells and a handful of spells that were linked to their natural webs, while their second gate was a full-gate spell that created a permanent warp in space around them, effectively tucking large portions of their body into a much smaller space. It also seemed to have a side effect of being unusually slippery to my senses, to the point that if I hadn’t been looking at them, I might have missed them entirely.

It was their third gate that had the real prize, though – a veiling spell. It actually used spatial warping to redirect all of the mana that the body and spirit naturally shed into a beast core, then slowing and redirecting the senses of anything that came near it. 

I recorded it and immediately cast it using my spatial and temporal mana, and decided to name the spell Hiding Spider. The drain that it put on my energy reserves was a little on the high side, but nothing unmanageable, and that would actually be good in the long run.

They also had another third gate spell that I thought might be useful, though I was a bit less sure, and didn’t take it immediately. It warped space around them in straight lines, helping them increasingly shorten the amount of distance and time along their webs. It was interesting, and didn’t need to be used on web, but it really only worked in straight lines, building up power over repeated uses on the same space. I wasn’t a courrier, and I moved around too much, so after a long debate, I skipped it. 

Through a lot of work on Dusk’s part, a handful of spells from Liz’s grandfather, and an overcharged series of Spatial Anchors, we managed to open the way between the shadow realm and her realm, allowing the soulsearcher rabbits and pocket spiders to integrate with her environments. We opened some portals to let them out onto Crysite, and while some did take the option to leave, most actually remained, content in their homes. 

Once she’d completed that, and fixing all the damage she’d taken, Dusk headed off to take missions of her own. She worked with Liz, Octavian, and even Maylee, the scout with the seeker legacy I’d met in the Idyll-Flume. I joined her a few times, but I had a different goal 

I spent hours every day pumping mana into the ghost of the enchanter that I’d encountered in the nexus building, while also listening to the layed out instructions that Orykson and Aerde had left in my head. 

Connecting the hundreds of tiny mana sources, nodes of scripted enchantment work, magical minerals, creation mana constructed spell matrixes, natural treasures, and pieces of legacy-enchantments that I’d recovered was both incredibly boring and incredibly exacting, a combination that I was not a fan of in the slightest. If I hadn’t been able to return to Mossford to pick up my medication, I wasn’t sure that I’d actually have been mentally capable of doing it. 

But it was for Kene’s life, so even though I hated it, I did it. 

Boiling down the massive tanks of low-powered alchemical fuel into concentrated, much more powerful versions was at least fairly interesting. The original design of the array had been meant for a lower powered, but constant nurturing effect, so the tanks had actually been artificially weakened, in order to make them last a much longer time.

I thought it was a bit like adding a lot of water to a soup in order to serve more people, but I could have sworn that just thinking that was enough for me to receive a mental glare from Orykson. 

Using my spells and cauldron to tear off the chunks of slowleaf, mana-grass, and weaklite that had been used in the potions was a fun challenge to me, one that didn’t take much power, but did take a lot of finesse. 

Connecting the alchemy into the enchantments as fuel, on the other hand, was awful. It was like taking everything I enjoyed about alchemy and crushing it, setting it on fire, and kicking it out the window. Everything had to be held perfectly still and synchronized, with no movement or chaos at all. Ed stopped by on more than one occasion to lend me his experience. He was more of a battle enchanter than a proper one, in the same way that I was more of a battle alchemist, but it did help. 

I even got Damien Nobody to help me a few times, after having Dusk vet him with her senses. After she’d been able to detect that there was something off about Travis before he’d done anything suspicious at all, I trusted her ability to read the Winds of Destiny, and I got a good feeling about Damien after they’d appeared in the Winds of Fortune. They were an enormous help, their experience crafting with complex mana types due to their legacy probably being the only thing that let me manage to do it. 

Of course, I couldn’t just work on the array day in and out. Though I poured endless hours into it, I also had other responsibilities. I got called in several more times to act as an interpreter to the myrmekes queen, helping them set up a good deal with the official government of the Isle of Crysite for gold. 

The things the myrmekes wanted were ultimately quite simple, in their way. 

First, they wanted protection for their colony in case of anything like the desolant nest popping up again. I expanded that to grant them semi-sovereign territory of their own, with the rights of sapience enshrined. That might be a bit overselling their level of intelligence, but I would rather give them more protections than were strictly necessary for them to be happy, rather than less. 

Once that was secure, they wanted access to telluric-heavy materials for the raising of their young. It took a while for them to figure out how to use potions, since they were mostly used to  natural treasures and harvesting the cores of their dead for raising the new generation, and because they didn’t really seem to grasp exactly what a potion was. In the end, they called them water-cores, which was… close enough. Setting a fair exchange rate took a lot of work, and I was called in four times for that job alone. 

And last but not least, they wanted food. This was actually the hardest one for me, since I had mistakenly shoved them in a survivalist mental box that I had to find my way out of. They wanted food, yes, but not just for survival. Between the groves of trees that they tended, their ability to capture animals when needed, and the abundance of edible fungal networks they cultivated, they weren’t lacking for quantity of food. No, what they wanted was variety. 

Figuring out what kind of things tasted good to the dog-sized ants was a misadventure in and of itself, and I wound up portaling in a variety of cakes, donuts, breads, and other pastries from my dad’s bakery for them to sample. As it turned out, while they did also like sugar, they weren’t complete addicts like I had expected. The things they enjoyed most were the pastries that had been filled with fruits they hadn’t encountered before, like a kiwi buckle, raspberry tart, and passionfruit pavlova.

I did find some amusement in the fact that I collected as many points from treating the ants to a feast as Dusk managed to get from a mission she and Liz had taken on to relocate a small swarm of angry velociraptors. 

I also spent time with my friends, family, and my partner. Being able to portal back and forth to Mossford and Delitone made things much easier, in that way, and I hosted more than one potluck for them all. Ivy even joined a few times, where he got into a friendly spar with Dusk, Dawn, and me. He won, but it was still fun. 

I didn’t slack on my own training, even though I was assembling the modified version of the array, as I scheduled my appointments with each of the guildmasters, and I summoned Ikki’s simulacra each Telsday for our training.

I’d expected him to immediately give me more spells, but he actually focused on returning to the fundamentals of movement again, helping me piece together a more coherent movement style that mixed all of my movement spells, and hammering its use into me through fighting. 

Even though he frequently limited himself to second gate, and had much less long distance mobility than I did, he still somehow always seemed to slip between my attacks, and strike me in the head with the flat of his blade.  It was only after five weeks, and when I’d landed a single blow on him, that he finally changed his tune.

“Good. You have reached a basic level of competence with using the magic you already have – at least for now. We may move onto new spells.”