The Third Portal: Chapter Twenty-One

I sighed, biting my lip as I considered my next move. 

I did want to see Kene – the weeks on the boat had been long without them. I also knew that the earlier I could get the portal network set up, the better it would be, even if forming the platforms did take a long time. 

It had taken about three weeks in Delitone, when I’d been setting one up in Dusk and on the log. Of course, Dusk had been able to handle most of the platform inside of herself, but I’d still had to get it started. 

Back then, I’d been balancing creating the portal with a job, training, and spending time with people. I didn’t have a job right now, and I had enough raw gold that I could support myself for a while if I sold it, and the three-year loan meant I had enough points stocked up to not have to go on a mission.

I could probably do it in about two weeks if I focused and Dusk helped me a little bit. It was the right choice, it was just painfully annoying. I didn’t like sitting around doing nothing all day, which was remarkably similar to what sitting around fusing teleportation platforms felt like. I would have to intersperse it with some regular training of my own, or else I’d go absolutely mad, and besides, I had a laundry list of things I needed to work on.

I was nearing ingrained status with Ghost Tether after the ant-venture I’d gone through, I wanted to reach a level of skill with Hudau Heart where I could direct a portion of my mana regeneration to automatically fill the Ephemeral Rebirth spellbond, I was only halfway through breaking into mid-third gate, I had to work on growing my new mushrooms, and of course I needed to figure out exactly what the completed root of resolve had done for my teleportation spells.

I began wandering back to the plot of land I’d purchased, and started running power in pulses through the Hudau Heart as I walked. At least temporarily I wanted to boost my spatial mana recovery rate above everything else, since I would need to form so many platforms and fuse them together, and getting practice had been on my list. 

With so many things I needed to do, the weeks flew by at a shocking speed. Dusk worked to consolidate her power, learning new spells that could help improve her power, and she even met with Idyll on occasion to discuss the theory behind some worldspirit magic. Dawn helped her, but she also spent a lot of time inside my mana-garden, helping trim off the excess power that was already bursting from Fungal Armor. 

That was… Interesting. The spell, instead of taking the form of a single giant mushroom, like my Fungal Lock spell did, had formed a large, tangled ball of mycelium and earthen substrate. The substrate budded off mushrooms that looked like golden honey mushrooms, and each one seemed to have a subtly different color. Nothing overt, simply a different shade of amber. 

Tapping the mushrooms revealed that they had half-formed impressions of spell arrays for all sorts of different attacks. All of them were desolant attacks, given that had been who I had used the armor against. Each mushroom only contained a fraction of a spell array, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of a full spell, and many of them had the same parts of the spell array.

I found that with effort, I could push the mushroom bodies together, until the adaptations fused into a single, slightly larger mushroom containing a more complete copy of the spell. That caused the two old ones to wither and fall to the ground, where they just sat, eating up space. For now, I moved them into my ungated mana, since I didn’t need to care for my ungated mana as much. 

The new, combined mushroom wasn’t as large as the two fragments were, only slightly larger than one of them was, so I spent a long time combining things together, and growing them to form more complete spellforms. The odds I’d fight against a desolant firebolt again were low, but the designed shared enough in common with the human firebolt that I hoped there would be some overlap in the defense. 

There were exceptions to the spellform mushrooms, but only two. 

Two of the mushrooms had tiny knots of desolation mana, barely the size of a grain of rice. I took that to suggest that they had adapted to block against desolation mana as a whole. When I combined them, the grain in one mushroom was sucked into the other, leaving the first to fall to the ground. I figured that it was probably due to the fact the knots were so small, and when I brought it up with Meadow, she agreed, and just pointed out that the rapid growth and maintenance of the spell was part of the reason I was dedicating an entire band of my mana-garden’s third gate to it. 

Of course, even with the maintenance requirements for the spell being particularly odious, they didn’t eat up the weeks. I ingrained Ghosteyes and Ghost Tether, and made a lot of progress towards breaking into mid-third gate with space and time, and other things too. 

I met up with the enchanter again, who I learned was named Damien Nobody. They identified the grass that Dusk found while out on the mission as Shieldstalk Grass, which had a lot of use in constructing detritus enchantments, like weaving looms, animated scarecrows, and the like. I sold them some, but also started growing some of my own, then brought the improved tablet to Ed one evening when I was having dinner with him and Liz. 

Liz had been doing missions of her own, while Ed was working as a guard patrol for the Birghteyes farm guard, and they were putting their points towards getting a half-acre of land near what would be the eventual heart of the town, then constructing a house on it. Since the nerds cared about things like having clean, running water, lights, and walls, they couldn’t just drop a few hundred points and call it a day. 

We had a lovely time, and Ed insisted on helping me by going through Dusk and casting Mass Enrich Soil. That actually helped my new echo-shrooms bloom, a temporal mana source that I thought might have some interesting uses in potions.

Orykson arrived on a Liday, and to my surprise, he started me off on working with the Hudau Heart, rather than jumping right to analyzing my unlocked root. I didn’t suddenly ingrain the spell in an instant, but he taught me a series of internal focused mana-manipulation techniques involving condensing balls of overcharged mana in my spirit and spinning them in complex patterns, which helped me improve my mana manipulation dexterity, and let me at least create a low trickle charge on the rebirth. 

After finishing those exercises, he clicked his pocketwatch, summoned Aerde, and we ran testing on my root, with both pairs layering me in enough analysis spells that I felt like a caterpillar in a cocoon. 

Their most recent test involved suspending myself upside down in the air with Immovable Lock. I didn’t know if being upside down was actually needed, or if Orykson was just messing with me, but Dusk found it hilarious, zooming around me and laughing while I glared at her.

“Excellent,” Orykson said. “You can come down now. Let’s begin the teleportation tests. Foxstep for me?” 

I fell to the ground, then rose to my feet and Foxstepped behind Orykson. He turned just enough to examine me and made a slight humming noise. 

“Your root is amplifying resonance through the spell. It’s making it fractionally cheaper, expanding your ability to go at range, and has more closely tied it to your spirit and body’s energy. That should help you escape with it more.” 

“It doesn’t feel cheaper,” I said, teleporting in front of Orykson. 

“It’s already such an efficient spell for you, given your reserves of energy and legacy, that a fractional reduction is unlikely to be noticed.” 

“Like a coupon,” I said. “A ten percent off coupon is great when you’re buying something expensive like a communication mirror, but if you’re buying a carton of eggs for three silver, it’s not really going to feel like it helped.” 

“Yes. Applying the resonance between the world and your spirit to spellcraft is exactly like buying a carton of eggs,” Orykson said, his voice dry. “Let’s test Seven League Step now.” 

I flickered a little bit away and raised my hand, then began casting the massive ritual spell, and I could immediately feel a difference in mana cost. It wasn’t huge, but it was definitely there. I didn’t feel an increase in range, like Orykson had promised, but I was guessing that was due to the design of the ritual spell being so tight, and less open to modification than an organic spell like Foxstep. Besides, the root was on Foxstep, not on Seven League Step. 

The first nine sections of the spell completed, then as I moved to cast the last, I felt Foxstep activate. It consumed that portion of the spell and re-wrote it. I could feel the power of Foxstep trying to impose itself, and I could choose how much I wanted to let it rely on my body. 

Seven leagues was still over twenty miles, and while I didn’t think it would almost kill me to put that much strain on my body the way it had in the Idyll-Flume, I didn’t want to offload the entire cost onto my body. I quickly cast Harvest Distance and let my body take on roughly a third of the strain, letting the rest fall on my mana and the ritual magic. 

The spell completed, and there was a rush as I appeared in a field seven leagues north. 

The impact rocked my body, as I was drained as if I’d run a third of that way myself. At the same instant, Harvest Distance began to gush mana in my spirit. With my first gate mostly full already, the power surged upwards, rushing through my also fairly full second gate and filling it, before settling into my third gate. It didn’t restore much third gate mana, only a fraction of the cost of casting Seven League Step, but that was still a lot more than nothing.

“Interesting,” Orykson said in a tone that made me feel like he should be jotting a note down on a medical clipboard. “That is roughly what I expected. Can you adjust the ratio?” 

“I can,” I said. “But also… this is great! I can cast and connect the other nine parts into anchors, and leave the tenth part uncast. Since the tenth casts almost instantly, it will let me set up teleportation chains, or create emergency escape talismans.” 

“You can,” Orykson agreed. “But I’ll be far more interested in seeing how this develops as you grow. At fifth gate, for example, will Basic Teleport operate the same way? What about using the meta spell to transform that teleportation spell into a portal?”

“I don’t know, but if I were to guess based off gut feelings, it will absorb part of the teleport spell, but not the portal.” 

“I agree, but it’s not certain,” Orykson said. “I am also confident in saying that you should use the trimmings from Harvest Distance and Seven League Steps as adornments for the spell.” 

I felt Orykson’s mana wash over the area, and a powerful feeling filled the air that seemed to cause the energy in the world itself to vibrate. 

“Now we should talk about the tournament, and focusing your rewards and training to improve your odds.”