I hadn’t been expecting to have a visitor for Ansae so quickly, even after she had warned me they’d be coming.  Uilei-nktik wasn’t likely to be the last one, either, but so far he was the only strange high-level person meandering into my territory.  I was really going to have to set up some way to make sure those types came to me rather than bothering Iniri – starting with an actual portal at the Palace.

After some consideration and a brief discussion with Iniri, I didn’t actually put it on the Palace proper.  Instead I raised up another island off to the side of both Meil and the Palace, making it tall and narrow and winding a staircase up the outside to a portal perched on the top.  That looked sufficiently mystical to me, and clearly set apart from the seat of government, and without any easy way of landing it’d keep out the riffraff.  I could have put it inside Shayma’s tower, but I felt that was more for when Shayma came down from on high to deal with something on Iniri’s plate.  Not that she would, but that was the kind of appearance I wanted to present to whomever was pestering Iniri.

I’d probably have to end up teleporting Uilei-nktik directly, though.  Not only did I not want to put him near Ansae’s tower without asking, portals were a little bit iffy in water, especially the size I’d need to accommodate a Leviathan.  He seemed happy enough with his quarters for the moment, though, and he’d spent some time talking to Iniri about how to set up deals with the local polity.

He wasn’t sure what to do about deals with me, specifically, which was fine because I didn’t know what to do about deals with him.  Aside from the coral, anyway.  It did make me realize that I needed to get out of war mode and start thinking about fiddling with all my resources again.  After checking over the floating islands I realized that, first, I had no way to make bulk magical materials like the floatstone, and second, I had never even thought of trying to magic up gems the way I had stone and metals and so on.

With all the panicking over various things I’d gotten out of the habit of trying to improve my basic stock of stuff.  It was far too easy to be distracted by the shiny products the Anvils made and forget there was a value in being able to produce huge amounts of things.  Quantity was a quality all of its own, as the floating fortresses showed, and I’d practically forgotten about my attempt to make some sort of automated material processer.  The pressure-tube was just as I had left it, and all the stuff piled up at the bottom had actually ended up transmuted.  I couldn’t tell how much of that was due to just steeping in mana and how much of that was due to the crystallizes local resources ability of my chrystheniums.

[Crystallized Tayantan Wood]: Conducts mana and is tough as crystal, while retaining the flexibility of wood.

[Condensed Weightstone]:  Extremely tough stone, with density and weight varying with mana flux.

[Dense Thaumsteel]:  Much tougher than normal steel, and far more responsive to mana and magical shaping.

[Obdurate Copper]: Harder than normal copper.  Resists foreign Skill intrusion.

The influence of the latter was obvious in [Crystallized Tayantan Wood], which seemed more gemlike than woodlike, but less so in [Condensed Weightstone].  Since it was converted from Stonesteel it was considerably cheaper than Adamant Stone.  Thaumsteel and Obdurate Copper seemed unexciting, but they were better than the base material and didn’t require Anvil time to make.  I did notice that I wasn’t getting a huge range of effects, but I just had pure mana to work with.  The intent magic meant that I wouldn’t be able to get cool things with more than basic effects.

I did get a nice surprise when I pulled out all the resources to look them over.  The whole pressure tube idea actually got turned into a dungeon feature, which was nice after the star-forge setup refused to.

[Pressurized Mana Refinery] – Converts up to 100 units of material per day.

It was a twenty-meter-deep, one-meter-wide tube of Adamant Stone, with a little bit of gold and alchemical diamond and alchemical purifying gems.  That was a lot smaller than my expanded-kilometer prototype, which was nice because coming up with enough Adamant Stone for something that big would have been irritating.  It was obvious why it was smaller though, at least in one respect: it took a drop of [Abyssal Water] to make.

Beyond that, it was automated.  Instead of having to load stuff in manually, I could set it to convert anything in my storage.  That meant if I wanted to convert wood I needed  to do some prep work, but for stone or steel or the like I could just have it run.

It was nice that my recipes were starting to incorporate Anvil materials.  They were just so powerful that I knew they could improve the efficacy of my extant features, provided I could figure out where to work them in.  I diverted some of my Anvils to [Abyssal Water] production for a bit so I could set up a bunch of the Refineries, something I could actually afford to do since I had multiple Anvils instead of just the one.

The [Aercrys] made me consider quartz, because frankly quartz was barely a gemstone and it seemed like something I ought to be able to make.  If I could make quartz, I ought to be able to make all the ancillary versions of quartz.  I was sure amethyst and topaz and jasper and the like all had different magical leanings, even if they weren’t strong ones.  Between my refinery and my Anvils, I could turn even moderately useful magic effects into powerful ones, but the scale of the floating fortress brought me back to bulk production.

At the very least rock and lava was something I had huge amounts of.  I should have seen some quartz form naturally already, at least in very small amounts, but I hadn’t.  It was almost certainly because of mana mediating what happened when lava cooled, which overwrote things like crystallization or separation.  It was concentration of earth mana that made crystals form, in the earth.  Or maybe not just earth mana — I could well believe that geodes had wind Affinity mana mixed in, to make the hollow space.

If I had the ability to push intent into my mana, I probably could have turned the whole mountain into quartz.  I certainly had enough of it, and enough granite to transform.  Without that ability, I needed to use a dungeon mechanic to try and transform stuff — even if my mana didn’t carry intent, the dungeon system seemed to get a good dose of it.  At this point I didn’t even begrudge my separation from actual mana, considering the sheer scope of things I’d affect by accident.

While I waited for Ansae to wake up, I thought I’d go back to my roots for a bit and try to expand my base of useful tools.  Or useful materials, as the case might be.  In theory I ought to be able to do even more now, what with new Affinities and Fields and Climates and all that.  Or even my brand-new Refinery.

Since I thought of it, I decided to set the Refinery to convert lava and connected it to an earth Affinity crystal, [Mana Geometries] ensuring that it only used earth mana to process what was inside.  Even if I couldn’t personally influence intent, the different Affinities were different for a reason and earth Affinity would have to give me more Earth based outcomes.  Combined with it being my dungeon feature I hoped that I could actually get quartz or another such crystal out of it.

Another thing I hadn’t tried in a while was crunching.  I had a lot more mana and a lot more levels now, so while I was fiddling with things, I figured I might as well see what brute force would get me.  Not that I had any objections to Adamant Stone and Cultivated Steel, but some extra fodder for Shayma wouldn’t go amiss.  Obviously, it still wouldn’t work on things like tayantan wood, because when something broke under brute force more brute force didn’t help, but it wasn’t like I lacked other materials.

I had been expecting another step in hardness and toughness, but such was not the case.  Instead what I got when I tried to upgrade my Adamant Stone and Cultivated Steel was a step sideways.  If I was reading it correctly, it was some kind of universally useful chimeric stuff.

[Mana Stone]: Alters properties based on Affinity of contacting mana.

[Mana Iron]: Alters properties based on Affinity of contacting mana.

The total costs of [Mana Stone] and [Mana Iron] were steep.  Not as bad as Anvil’d materials, but it was actually getting to the same ballpark on a mana-per-unit basis even if I could make the stuff faster and more directly than my supermaterials.  It wasn’t like the mana costs were any problem, so I was mostly limited by the amounts of raw material on hand.  I made a few dozen units of each, and while I was at it, I went ahead and did the same process on copper, gold, and magicite, since anything worth doing was worth doing properly.

[Thermastis Cuprite]: Transmits heat almost instantly.

[Thaumstop Gold]: Very strongly insulated against mana flux.

[Energetic Manacrystal]: Holds large amounts of raw mana in matrix.

All of that seemed like the stuff an artificer would use in something like, say, the Adamant Fortress.  I wasn’t sure if I had a use for it myself, at least not right away, but I added what I’d made to Shayma’s Smithery.  She was getting pretty good at making stuff, and I really needed to put these new materials to work.  There was only so much I could do personally, but Shayma and Taelah had crafting talents and at some point they’d probably need to buy labor from places like Meil and Wildwood for really esoteric stuff.

To some extent I could just pay for anything I wanted, like when I’d given Shayma a bunch of Sources, since it wasn’t like I wasn’t flush with resources.  But both of them liked the work they did and there was really no better way to advertise than to have them put Blue-sourced products into the actual market.  Not to mention The Village could always use more tools.

“Hey Shayma, I have some new stuff for you to work with.”

“Ooh?  That sounds promising.”  She was out with her group, so I didn’t want to distract her too badly, not while she following some Scalemind down through the Underneath.

“Yeah, it’s probably time to start doing more with what you’ve made than just piling it up.  I’ll let you and Taelah figure out the details, but considering I’m not anything near a secret anymore I should probably start showing you two off.”

“I’m not sure I like the way that’s phrased,” Shayma grinned, ducking her head under a stalactite.  The floor underneath it was notably smooth, with whatever stalagmite companion it might have had completely missing.  There were quite a few signs of habitation in the winding passages underneath the Scalemind’s basement, though it wasn’t quite clear if they were all from the Scalemind’s parties or some other civilization I hadn’t found yet.  Apparently in some places underground the earth magic was so strong things like stalactites could grow back overnight.

“Aw, I’m sure you’ll enjoy making people’s eyes pop.”  For the most part Iniri and the people of the Village were used to some of the ridiculousness that came from myself and Shayma and Taelah from time to time.  If we were to have visitors, we’d have a new audience to astound.  Though maybe a tougher one, if they were going to be Leviathans and other heavy hitters.

“Only your eyes,” she said with a grin, and I laughed.

Since she was busy, I had to find other stuff to do.  Like playing around with my Phantasmal Realm field.  It’d been ages since I’d dealt with it last, mostly because the last time I fiddled with it I almost killed myself, but I was feeling a little smarter now and I had a slightly better idea what was going on with it.  Not only did I finally have a reasonable description out of my Power block, but I had been able to see it work through Shayma and Iniri and Taelah.  Plus, that magic-dead gold from the plug was interesting enough that I’d kind of like to repeat the effect, if not the process.

I put up the Field in the middle of one of my Climates and studied it.  It was still pretty damn weird, since it sort of had an inside and an outside over the whole volume it existed.  Effectively, it added a new dimension on top of reality, a weird topographic wrinkle that existed one way from one direction and another way from another direction.

From that angle I could see what Ansae was saying about it being perspective rather than an alternate reality.  After all, overlaying it on top of trees and flowers didn’t move those trees and flowers anywhere but it did change the way someone could interact with them.  So long as they went through the doorway to the ‘inside’ of the field, at least.  Of course, I couldn’t go through that doorway, so I needed a volunteer.

“Taelah, can you help me test something?”

“Certainly, husband, just give me a moment.”  Taelah was weeding the little herb garden she’d put out behind her Village cabin.  Obviously, I could have fixed that myself or even prevented weeds from growing in the first place if I’d really had a mind to, but that wasn’t how growing herbs worked.  Besides, I was pretty sure Taelah’s Skills made the land better when she worked it that way.

“Take your time, it’s not urgent.”  I was still trying to articulate what exactly I wanted her to do anyway.  Really the best place to do the experiment was the Alchemistry, where she did most of her in-depth magical work anyway.  “Just head on over to your Alchemistry when you’re ready.”

Taelah finished up the row she was working on and headed into her house, stripping off gloves and apron and peeling off her dress.  She was still flushed from her work and when I saw her wearing her sunhat and nothing else, I couldn’t help but take advantage of her state.  When I was finally done with her, she was even more flushed and giggling.

“Now, I know you didn’t just call me away from weeding for that,” she told me fondly.  “Why don’t you tell me what you have in mind?”

“I would definitely call you away from weeding just for that,” I protested, but explained anyway.  “My Phantasmal Realm says it separates magic from mundane.  I’m wondering if you can look at alchemical stuff from that perspective, if it’ll help you do more with it.”

“I’m not sure what it’ll do but I’m willing to look,” she said, finally removing the sunhat and tying her hair back before shrugging on heavier, alchemy-compatible clothing.  From her house it was a simple teleport straight to the Alchemistry.  “Was there any recipe in particular you wanted me to try?”

“Something that takes a lot of time where you can fiddle with it, but isn’t expensive.  We’re going to be experimenting here and probably messing a few things up.”

“Hmm, I think I know what to make, then.”  She went to the storage racks and got out various ingredients – dried chrystheniums, powders, suspensions, all of it made from material she’d gotten in my various Climates.  I had no idea what she was doing but that was fine, that wasn’t the point.  Putting up the [Phantasmal Realm] Field was the point, though Taelah didn’t notice it when she was inside it.

“Soon as you can take a break from that, try going out and back in through the door.”  I anchored the entrance to the Phantasmal Realm field to said door, since from what I’d seen before going through the sides of the Field did nothing.  Or rather, going through the sides of the field was like wandering into the slide of a microscope, and it was only going through the door that was like looking through the eyepiece.

“This is all very mysterious,” Taelah said in amusement, but after setting a mixture to heating she followed my direction, exiting the room and re-entering it immediately through the linked door.  “Oh, my,” she said, taking a moment to look around.  It was easier for me to use her eyes to see things rather than [Genius Loci], though to me it looked about the same as it did when Shayma used her [Phantasmal Path].

Taelah maneuvered around the ghostly outlines of the equipment to the bubbling tincture and peered down at it.  Then she reached out to touch the streamers of mana that swirled within it and pursed her lips.  I was keeping an eye on the beaker in the ‘real world,’ or the non-Phantasmal part anyway, and it didn’t move at all while Taelah poked at it.  Though I didn’t expect it to, considering Shayma could pass through things just fine with [Phantasmal Path].

“I have never seen the Affinities this clearly,” Taelah marveled.  “Now, I only got my mana-sight recently, but I’ve always been able to sense some things.  It’s strange, though, because I’m only sensing part of the alchemy.”

“Yeah, I think it’s just the magic parts, not the matter that the mana is latched onto.  Is it useful?”

“Oh, absolutely.  There are variations I’ve never noticed before.  I can probably advance my Skill just by going through this!”  Taelah talked faster as she went along, clearly excited.  “The only problem is I can’t actually do any further steps here,” she added, waving her hand through the faded outline of the glass container it was in.

“Hmm, I think I have an idea, then.”  I started to disperse the Field, then I stopped.  I didn’t want to trap Taelah, just in case she stayed in the Realm when I got rid of the Field.  “Head back out the door, actually.”

Taelah chuckled and followed directions, and I got rid of the room-wide Field and replaced it with a smaller one inside of a box.  It was basically a fume hood, with the ‘door’ on one side.  For the moment Taelah would have to go from one side to the other to interact with things normally or through the Phantasmal Realm, but I was already thinking about how to use Argentum to make a standalone box that she could just rotate or something like that.

“I do like this,” Taelah mused as she stepped back into her Alchemistry, walking around the Phantasmal Realm box.  “You never run out of surprises, do you?”

“I’m sure I will eventually,” I told her.  “I was wondering something, too.  Stellar Affinity is supposed to have gravity Affinity in it, and that’s one of the chrystheniums I don’t have.  Do you think you could separate the gravity out into a chrysthenium?”  I wasn’t entirely certain how to get more abstract Affinities, like space or time or mind or entropy, but with Stellar I had a good avenue to extract gravity.

“I can certainly try.  Maybe put one of these in my garden cabin, too?”

“Of course.”  That had been first on my list, actually.  Obviously one of the phantasmal boxes would go in Shayma’s Smithery, too, and maybe even Iniri would have some use for one.  Ansae might, but considering her perceptions were sharper than anything I could manage it might be redundant.  Still would be worth offering, once she woke up.

Which was something that I’d have to push to happen soon.  I didn’t blame her for snoozing but among other things I wanted her feedback on traits, since I didn’t want to put off buying them too long.  Just in case there was some other catastrophe on the horizon.  Besides which, it’d probably cheer her up to have a fanboy like Uilei-nktik stroke her ego for a bit.

“Thank you Taelah!”  I told her, and she just sort of waved vaguely as she peered at the beaker she had bubbling away in the Phantasmal Field.  She was obviously very taken with her brand-new toy and I was not surprised to see she was leveling almost as fast as Shayma, though she didn’t have the capped Skills Shayma did.

My Companions had all grown fairly significantly.  Shayma was roundabout level forty, Taelah was near thirty despite having only broken through to second tier recently, and of course Iniri had hit fourth tier.  Admittedly they’d been doing a lot of heavy lifting but, for example, Cheya had only gained a single level. Even that level had come only recently, as she was dealing with the documents she’d gotten from Bel Aci’s office.  Maybe more relevantly, the Piping Hot Pies had gotten perhaps two levels apiece, and much lower ones than Iniri’s.  I felt almost bad for helping my Companions cheat so flagrantly, but only almost.  It wasn’t like they hadn’t worked for it.

Iniri and Cheya were working at the floating fortress, actually, since there weren’t all that many people Iniri and I trusted to go through the thing and figure out everything that was inside it.  I just didn’t have the knowledge to understand everything I was looking at, and my overlay was only variously helpful.  It could identify discrete magical items, but less so rune inlays or any lingering spells my own mana didn’t purge.  There were some, though not much.

I glanced at them now and again, though I trusted them to know what they were doing, and they probably didn’t need my help.  Shayma’s [Panopticon] and my own takeover had ensured there probably wasn’t anything left that might hurt them and any of the magic stuff they were looking at, I didn’t know enough about to be useful anyway.  Despite the occasional attention, I completely missed the moment they found the one thing I really wanted to know about.

“Blue, I think we have the Corekiller weaponry,” Iniri said, and that snapped me to her location instantly.  She was standing in one of the narrow hallways that followed the [Aercrys] the fortress used to carry magical energy, right on the outside of the fortress.  That was exactly where I’d expect such a weapon to be, but the problem was that I couldn’t see anything.

“What?  Where?”

“They’re spaced all along here at intervals.  I’m surprised you didn’t spot them first, since they’re buried in the rock.”

“Okay, what.”  I switch to looking through Iniri’s eyes, and then I could suddenly see the buried gleam of metal and crystal attached to the Aercrys line.  I really didn’t like that, but I hadn’t bumped up against one of those blind spots in a while and I’d nearly forgotten they existed.  “Turns out I can’t see them directly.  Hang on.”

Since I could cheat through Iniri’s senses, I pulled the rock apart where she was looking so she could get at the Corekiller weapon.  Well, one of them.  I didn’t like the idea of tons of them embedded all throughout my floating island.  I especially didn’t like the idea that, if I couldn’t see them, there were bunches of them where the other island smashed into my mountain.  I was going to have to send someone over there to make sure they were all destroyed.

The Corekiller looked like a four-meter-long metal latticework tube, the open spots filled with crystal.  In the center of it, visible through the clear quartz of the filler, was what looked like a red core shard.  I was a little bit baffled that I didn’t get any reaction from that on my overlay, but maybe when it was all a single item, the Corekiller Armament, it didn’t count as a stray red core piece.

“Yes, it’s a piece of Corekiller.  It’s a Dungeonbane Mana Infiltrator,” Iniri reported to me, sounding a little bit horrified.  I was a lot bit horrified.  They sounded incredibly nasty and I didn’t know exactly how I was going to defend myself against them.  Another topic to raise with my council, and probably a problem for people who knew more about magic than I did.

“How many of them are there, and what exactly does it do?”

“I don’t know.  Forty, fifty?”  She shared a look with Cheya, who just shrugged.  “There’s a lot, anyway.  I can only tell so much from my divination and a cursory study, but it looks like it has some way to project a Dungeonbane mana construct.”

“Mana Infiltrators are usually assassin’s tools,” Cheya added.  “They push foreign, usually hostile mana into an existing construct, like a shield or a ward, or sometimes even a person.  I’ve never seen them on this scale, but if the goal is to assassinate a dungeon it makes sense.”  Well, that was horrible, and probably worse for me than a normal dungeon.  I had mana flows on overdrive.

“You can keep one to study it and figure out how to defend against it.  The rest I want destroyed.”  I didn’t often give orders, especially not to Iniri, but I did not like having those around.  “I’m going to need someone to go scavenger-hunt where that other island landed and see how many survived the crash.”  At least I didn’t have to worry about the two islands I vaporized.  Nothing short of Firmament or maybe Ansae could take my [Starlance] to the face and remain intact.

“I wouldn’t want to see these in anyone else’s hands,” Iniri said in agreement.  “I might just send the Ells out to check out the crash site.”

“Sounds good to me.”  I’d absorbed most of the stone and sequestered the remaining magical artifacts I could discern for Iniri’s later perusal, but that probably meant there were a bunch of these things simply lying out where anyone could stumble across them.  Not that anyone had been near the place the island had gone down, but the principle was there.

I had to follow Iniri for the next couple hours as she surveyed the hallway and located the pieces of Corekiller with her own eyes so I could see them.  Each time I tore open the ground so she could pull them out, and aside from the first one she slagged them all with [Starlance] right then and there.  It was definitely a load off my mind when she finally finished the circuit, though I knew some part of me would worry I’d missed one somewhere.  Probably not, because they seemed to be plugged directly into the mana network, and it wouldn’t really matter without mana feeding into it, but I still didn’t like them.

I couldn’t watch through the Ells’ eyes the way I did Iniri’s, and I didn’t really want to, but they were obviously finding bits and pieces now and again.  Sienne had an even more thorough method of disposal than Iniri did, since she’d just light up the leftovers with void and they’d dissolve away.  I could catch them once the bane broke, skeletal remnants dissolving into nothingness.  I felt kind of bad that Sienne was peeling off skin every time she did it, but she had plenty of Taelah’s liniments and as soon as I had the extra Firmament she’d be getting a thank-you present for certain.

By the time that was done, Shayma had come back from her voyage below the surface, her little group looking tired and happy.  It was getting on toward evening, and I figured it was time to try and wake Ansae up again.  I’d start out nice, of course, but I wasn’t above dumping a lake on her head to get her up.