“Okay, I hope this works!”

I finally had my resource generation back to something I was comfortable with. All the flower types had fruited, some taking longer than others, and predictably, the one that had taken the longest was the one I wanted the most. The Latticework Chrystheniums that bore Core Lattice Gems were incredibly slow, but it did mean I had time to notice that the other types seemed to top out at about seventy growing gems each. A mere fraction of my total flowers, but the number was pretty suspicious. I would bet it was level-related.

“Me too!” Shayma picked up one of the gathered gems and pressed it against one of my core crystals. For a moment nothing happened, then the overlay woke up and decided to acknowledge my idea.

Core Lattice Gem absorbed. 1 Core HP restored.

I felt better instantly. Not that being down on hitpoints actively hurt, but it was like an incipient headache that never went away. “Ahhh, yes. Keep going!”

Shayma giggled. “Hey, that’s my line!”

“Well now we’re even! Ish.”

“Nnnnooo, I don’t think we are.”

“Well, who’s counting anyway?”

“You do, sometimes!”

“Oh, hush.”

I had a pile of the gems for Shayma to use on me, both cores now resting inside her cottage, and in no time at all I was back to full on both. Plus I found out one thing more, since I figured I should see if I could increase my HP or something if Shayma kept trying after I was topped up.

Core HP Full. Core Lattice Gem linked.

As usual, my overlay didn’t give me any further, useful information on what that meant but I did have a theory. The only thing I’d used a Core Lattice gem on so far was Shayma’s ring, and it had an explicit connection to me as an “Authority.” My guess was that the ‘link’ meant that if I put the gem into something, I’d have a connection to it and might even be able to control it. That, or I could use those gems to automatically heal if I got damaged again. Or both.

It was pretty clear I wasn’t anywhere near powerful enough to play in the leagues I had found myself in. Vok Nal could tank three fourth-tiers and Shayma couldn’t solo a monster that wasn’t even level forty. Admittedly, she was only level twenty-two and her Skills were progressing nicely, but she wasn’t exactly a powerhouse.

Shayma Ell

Blue Core Fox Spirit: You are a creature of the Dungeon, body and soul. You have a connection to the Dungeon like no other, and in turn it can reach out through you. Furthermore, your soul has been altered to be immune to depletion.

Enhanced Senses: Your sight, hearing, and smell are sharper than similar races. You can see mana naturally.

Blue Core’s Blessing: Despite being a spirit, you still have a body of flesh and can still have children.

Level 22 Trickster: As a Trickster, you are never where or what your opponents expect. The closer they look, the less they see.

Health: 445/445

Stamina: 1370/1370

Mana: 285/285

Skills

[Seeker] (Greater): You can find that which is most hidden, most lost, and most desired.

[Physical Superiority] 7: Your body is stronger, faster, tougher, and more flexible than your species’ base. Each rank improves benefits.

[Ghost Step] 8: You can walk through the world without touching it, instantly moving short distances and quickly moving longer ones.

[Luck]: Heads, or tails. You can bend probability to benefit yourself.

[Limited Shapeshifting] 7: You are exceeding the limits of form. You can change your shape easily, but not entirely. Convenient for disguising your identity or race.

[Illusion] 8: Reality is what you say it is. Allows the creation of illusions, temporary phantasms of sight and sound. Longevity and distance of illusions increases with rank.

[Illusory Presence] 4: You are not who you say you are. Allows you to present a false identity to magical and mundane senses, including your Status.

[Combat Shapeshifting] 5: Because you can shapeshift, your combat options are unusual. You may create claws, harden your skin, or wield a weapon not meant for your body. Allows use of all weapons as well as unarmed styles. Improves learning of weapons and unarmed styles. Provides unique synthesis of styles with shapeshifting.

[Stealth] 4: Sneaky, sneaky. You know how to move quietly and spot places to hide.

[Mana Manipulation] 4: What you can see, you can touch. Mana Manipulation allows for the basic handling of mana outside of specific Skills and improves facility with all mana-using Skills.

[Smithing] 3: The manipulation of metal. Smithing allows for the creation and maintenance of metal-based items.

[Alchemy] 1: Combine, distill, transform. Alchemy allows for the creation of potions and tinctures as well as the alteration of materials by the use of magical substances.

[Weaving] 1: Thread manipulation. Weaving allows you to create skeins of thread, bolts of cloth, or finished products from raw thread.

Abilities

[Regeneration] 7: Your robust nature significantly improves health regeneration and allows recovery from crippling or disfiguring wounds without magic.

[Wisdom] 4: You have become wise in the ways of the world. You have unlocked spellcasting, and this skill provides an intuitive grasp of known spellcasting skills. Improving rank improves mana pool and learning speed in spellcasting skills.

[Corrosion Resistance] 1: You have a natural resistance to acid and other eroding effects. Ignore damage and status effects associated with corrosion. Benefits improve with rank.

[Temperature Resistance] 3: You have a natural resistance to temperature extremes. Ignore damage and negative effects from heat and cold. Benefits improve with rank.

[Prestidigitation] 4: Your grasp exceeds your reach. Your fingers are supernaturally quick and you can touch people and objects without quite needing to reach them.

[Phantom Pocket] 7: You can store and retrieve items from a small space only you can access.

[Awareness] 5: Like eyes in the back of your head. You can sense your nearby surroundings even when you can’t see it directly. Precision increases with rank. Range very slightly increases with rank.

She would eventually be powerful. Maybe. But for now that wasn’t near enough, to say nothing of the fact that if I couldn’t kill it with lava I had few effective techniques of my own. The water cutters and steam mines worked to some degree, but they’d already shown they were of limited usefulness against really high level intruders. I couldn’t even properly take The Hurricane to task for skipping out on her part of the deal, and I really needed to. I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her since she left and time was ticking away, so I couldn’t rely on her for anything.

“Hmm. I’m going to see what I can do to make you three better equipped. Maybe Iniri too. What sort of weaponry does she use anyway? Heck, what equipment do casters normally have?”

“That really depends! Some casters use weapons, actually, others will use some form of focus. It depends on their Skills.”

“Oh that makes sense, duh. Okay, I don’t think I’ll have anything soon but I’m going to try and get everyone something nice.”

“I bet they’ll like that. Just don’t give them any rings, huh?” Shayma grinned.

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

I needed to improve both my Companions and my own weaponry. For the first, I had been spending all my stone and mana on Adamant Stone so I could make [Affinity Crystals] and hopefully boost myself into the next level of...stuff. Items, Fields, flowers, whatever. I built one for each of the Affinities I had access to, twelve total, and plugged them into my largest mana dynamo. Immediately they started filling with mana, ever so subtly colored, but they didn’t seem to feed back into the loop.

I needed to use [Mana Logic] to connect them to anything, and in this case I connected them to [Small Storage Crystals] of Cultivated Steel, one to one. That had knocked out all my iron production despite the fact that I’d tripled up on iron-producing flowers given how much steel I needed. Interestingly the connections finally used [Mana Latticework], a resource that I had started wondering if it had purpose. Now that I’d joined the [Affinity Crystals] to [Storage Crystals] I could see them as a delicate tracery physically connecting the two. Good thing I’d put them next to each other.

Nothing happened immediately, but I didn’t expect it to. According to the crafter people, it took time soaking in mana for anything to transform. Sometimes years, but I figured I had so much of it, and it was so pure, that it wouldn’t be nearly that long.

I made a thirteenth Affinity crystal, this one of healing, for a different experiment. A tiny isolated room held a tayantan tree and some grass and moss, with my [Rampant Growth] Field. I stocked a bunch of biomass into the [Composting Chamber], linked the Field to the Affinity crystal, and let it do its job. The grass and tree did start changing their look, but they didn’t yet register as a different sort of plant. My hope was that it eventually would, and I’d get some sort of absurd healing herbs and woods I could use for Keri.

The last thing was the calamite I had made, which had been tentatively identified as an alchemical catalyst. I dumped a good chunk of it into an alchemical bath with some fabrics and mineral oil that I got from the crafters to soak some thread. Apparently that was the best way to infuse them with the capacity for holding extra magic, though really I’d need to start with magical fibers to begin with for the best outcomes and I hadn’t gotten that far yet.

All that more or less exhausted my stockpiled resources, which was fine because my idea to give myself more of an arsenal mostly just took mana. Probably. I hadn’t tried it yet!

While my ability to wield magic directly was nonexistent and my tools to manipulate the world were fairly limited, I’d somehow managed to forget that I did have access to light. Given that Iniri’s Affinity was light I really should have remembered the offensive capabilities a lot earlier, and in fact I’d have to instruct Shayma on flashbangs. What I had in mind for me required a bit more juice, though.

I isolated a tiny chunk of one of my light panels and started using [Customization] on it. I had a suspicion that Ansae’s explanation of how magic worked sort of applied to my own processes, even if I couldn’t cast. Some things I unlocked were just from random experimentation, certainly. Yet the times I had unlocked exactly what I wanted, when I had a reasonable chain of logic on how to get there, made me think my intentions had an effect.

So my intentions were to narrow the light they emitted to a single wavelength, and match the output of every single point on that panel. Coherent light emission was actually relatively simple, compared to a lot of other technologies, since it could be done entirely solid state. Whatever I used to emit light was completely tunable to begin with, since I could color the light at will with [Customization], so narrowing it down more wasn’t that much of a stretch.

Once my focus hit a limit with the light panel I started throwing mana at it, concentrating on my knowledge of wavelengths and excitation and quantized energy states. There were three or four kinds of lasers I knew of that fit into the general idea of a light-emitting panel, but they had the same general method of operation, so I just visualized that until it clicked.

Coherent Light Emitter created. 1 Alchemical Diamond, 1 Light Affinity Source.

25,000 Experience gained.

Not that much experience, at least not compared to what I needed to increase skills, but then what I’d made couldn’t do much more than blind someone. It needed a few more tweaks to be really powerful. The emitter manifested as a dark polished surface, about a meter square and millimeters thick. I thought it was odd that a light Source and a diamond turned into something dark, until I turned one on and saw that the default color was, of course, blue.

I dialed the frequency up as far as I could, which turned out to be on the barely visible side of ultraviolet. Shayma could make infrasound, but I couldn’t make gamma rays. It was a bit unfair. Maybe I could do better later though, with some sort of upgrade or another. Then came what I considered the marginally clever bit, which involved abusing spatial Fields.

The basic architecture was two cylindrical rooms abutting each other, the joined circular face replaced by an open door. Actually by this point I should have stopped even thinking of my not-really-there doors as doors and started considering them mana boundaries, so I promptly did so. I had [Mana Control], so maybe I could finagle something out of a boundary that wouldn’t make sense with a door. After I was done, the boundaries covered the entire surface of each cylinder so there were two round rooms, one meter in diameter, facing each other.

One room got expanded, the other one shrunk, and through the convolutions of spatial magic the doors still matched, which meant that a ten meter diameter circle translated straight through to a ten centimeter circle like some trick of forced perspective. The ten-meter wall got polished as close to atomically smooth as I could manage and covered in [Coherent Light Emitter] film, while the ten-centimeter wall got another mana boundary for a portal.

Light Armament Experiment 1 Created.

250,000 Experience gained.

Oh. Seemed like that was worth a lot more than just slapping up some barriers around my core, no matter how layered they were. It seemed fair enough though, I bet that actual lasers and not just light magic were nonstandard for the world in general and dungeons in particular. Not to mention the extra work to condense the beam without using lenses or really, anything aside from space itself.

I decided to test-fire it into the corpse of the plant thing that Shayma and company had killed. It was still far enough outside the range of my territory that I’d have to exert myself to get it, something I hadn’t been doing while I was spending most of my time and mana on crafting, but close enough that I could still target it with some judicious portal placement.

It sucked up maybe a hundred mana a second, though with my regeneration I wasn’t completely sure, but given my current mana pool that was just fine. Especially since the damn thing flash-vaporized a good chunk of the corpse, punching a ten-centimeter hole straight through to the rock beyond and filling the air with haze. Maybe it had fewer defenses after it was dead, but seeing something so effective and cheap to use cheered me immensely. Especially since it was, effectively, portable.

“Hey, Shayma, I’ve got something to show you!” My foxgirl and her friends had somehow met up with Piping Hot Pies again, though I didn’t mind that they were sticking around. Both because they were definitely helping train up Shayma and the gang, and because they actually appreciated my fruits. A small thing, but it was nice. They were hanging out in Annit and Keri’s back yard, though at the moment they were just talking rather than sparring or lecturing or whatever else adventurers did in their downtime.

“Ooh? Is this what you mentioned earlier?”

“That stuff isn’t ready yet, this is more something for me I just made. It seems pretty good, but thought I’d run it past the gang.”

“Now that sounds interesting!” Shayma turned to the others, the four from Piping Hot Pies in addition to Annit and Keri, getting their attention. “Blue is going to show us a...new thing he made!”

“I take it that it’s not a normal spell or something,” the big guy drawled. He had the most normal name I’d seen here, Joe Calloway, but apparently he wasn’t a Tarnil native either.

“It is not!” Before I tried using Shayma as a base for the portal I wanted to get used to forming and firing it so I never blasted it in the wrong direction. To that end I lifted up a sheet of stone and put a ten-centimeter depression in it for the portal. Considering how potent it seemed, at least to me, I made sure it was positioned and aimed outside the group, into the woods beyond. I’d actually had to replant those poor trees more than once considering the area was used as a makeshift shooting gallery and sparring area, and I was pretty sure that I’d have to do it once again.

The portal formed and I flipped on the LAE. For a moment it didn’t really look like much happened, since it just put a ten-centimeter hole through bunch of brush, vaporizing it too quickly for it to even catch fire. Underwhelming didn’t even touch it.

“I don’t -” Calloway said, and then I twisted the portal frame sideways.

Trees crashed and toppled, grass shredded and smoked, and a line was scored into the stone in the far wall. I had enough juice to keep it going, but that was enough. Several hundred square meters of trees and greenery had been neatly trimmed to a height of about one meter. It was messier than that, of course, since I didn’t obliterate the falling trunks, but damn it was satisfying to see it work so well. It was also hideously efficient, more in line with the mana-to-damage ratio I observed from other people’s Skills.

“Oh.” Annit said.

“What in the Abyss was that?” It was another of Piping Hot Pies members, a darkness Affinity caster by the name of Jacey Elinn that I’d seen imitating artillery more than once. Not that I exactly understood the corrosive properties of her shadow spells but there was no denying that where it hit, things emerged in tatters, if at all. If she was impressed, I was happy.

“It was just light, that’s the best part.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen invisible light Affinity before,” Keri said, in a voice that sounded almost aggrieved.

“It’s not a light Affinity Skill. Well, mostly.” I was actually a little irritated that the emitter did end up taking Source material, but if it was converting mana into light it did make sense. Sort of. “So how would it do against second, third, fourth tiers?” The last humans I’d killed on purpose had been that dumb adventurer group, and I couldn’t even remember their levels or names. I didn’t have any gauge for how tough people actually were and I wasn’t about to experiment.

“Well it sure scares me,” Annit said dryly. “I couldn’t sense anything to warn me.”

“It’s a bit slow to set up,” Jacey said judiciously. “That’s its greatest weakness against third or fourth tiers. I wouldn’t imagine you could pin down a fourth-tier long enough for it to do too much.”

“I couldn’t sense even a mana surge.” That, surprisingly, was the opinion of the [Phantom Bulwark], a heavily-armored, spear-and-shield teleporter. Meister Grel had the weirdest Class I ever did see, a great big hulking tiger demihuman blinking about the battlefield to harry and defend. Even with that, I wasn’t expecting him to have mana sight or sense too.

“It’s hard to detect Blue’s mana,” Shayma told him. “I can’t sense it either. I only know one person who can.”

“Besides, the source for that beam is half a kilometer straight down. The portal just conveys it here. Don’t tell them that though. Also, we should probably practice you shifting an aperture on your arm or something so you can use it too.” Actually given how potent it was and the fact that it was invisible, I’d need to make a less powerful version and a much smaller portal for an ordinary laser sight.

Really, I was all kinds of excited about this. I assumed that people with light and maybe darkness affinities would be more resistant to a mundane laser than rocks and trees, but the potency otherwise was nothing to scoff at. The best part was that I could set up multiples of these and, aside from the time it took to make more alchemical diamonds and light Sources, they were cheap and easy to make. If I wanted to go overboard I could even chain more spatial chambers together, turn the ten-centimeter laser into something much smaller. Or use an even larger array. Or both.

Now, unless I could drop the wavelength down to the single-nanometer range I wouldn’t be within shouting range of actual capital ship armament. Not that lasers were nearly as useful in an atmosphere anyway. Scattering took a surprisingly heavy toll on coherent light, but the range was still probably several hundred meters. That made it the first “defense” that could meaningfully reach outside my territory.

Not very far, admittedly, without Shayma. Technically I outranged sword and bow folk, but the closing speed Yamal had showed and the range I’d seen on some of the mages made normal measurements pretty moot. Still I felt safer, and given the experience reward from it, the overlay agreed.

“Oh, now I have to know how that works.” Ansae, of course, somehow managed to notice all that from her lair. She’d been more or less quiet after chewing me out for letting The Hurricane go, even reverting to type and lazing half or all asleep. Though it was a little creepy because she kept that chunk of core crystal with her at all times, fastening a necklace of it that changed with her as she shifted forms. “That is a wonderful little toy.”

She strolled toward the teleport in full dragon form, apparently intent on joining the gathering in the hospital back yard, despite the fact that she’d take up most of the clearing. It was a clear challenge, so I had the feeling I’d really gotten her interest. So far as I could tell there was no difference between her being aggressive and her being playful.

“Uhh Shayma? Ansae’s coming so you’ll want to make room.” For my part I started putting together a dragon-sized teleport circle on both sides. I could have refused to, probably, but I was pretty sure she could teleport there herself if she really wanted and she’d been well behaved enough that something as harmless as this wasn’t worth getting into a spat for.

“Um. Ansae’s coming.” Shayma aloud.

“Shit.” Annit grabbed Keri’s hand and dragged her into their house. Not that she had to do much dragging, since even Keri didn’t seem too eager to meet Ansae again.

“Who’s that?” Jacey asked, staring after the retreating women with bemusement.

“A dragon! And also a Power so, you know, be polite!” Shayma said hastily, waving them over to the side to give Ansae room.

“We’ve dealt with dragons before,” Grel rumbled, though he followed Shayma’s shooing gestures away from the teleport circle I’d printed into the ground. “Give them an inch and—”

Ansae stepped through the teleport, her massive form towering over everyone as expected, silver-white and toothy. What I didn’t expect was for everyone but Shayma to instantly drop to their knees as if crushed under a great weight. Even the trees, the ones that were still upright anyway, groaned and tilted. Grass pressed itself away from her, as if trying to flee.

Shayma looked as confused as I felt. Annit and Keri had seemed a bit overawed by Ansae, and that made sense, but this was like an aura of oppression. Not that I felt anything, and neither did Shayma, which was doubly weird since my vegetation did. “Um, hello Ansae.” Shayma said. “What’s...all this?” She waved around at the trembling room.

Ansae laughed musically. “Oh, you’ve never seen me out and about, have you? Blue’s authority protects you, and your two friends somehow, which is quite interesting, but I am Ansae Ziir. Where I walk, the world itself bends to my presence.”

Suddenly I remembered how painful her presence had been at first, even without her doing anything, and had some idea of what was going on. Maybe it was mana pressure or maybe it was just the presence of someone thousands of years old, but it was undeniable she had an impact. Though I was immune, and Shayma was as well, though me. The reason her lair didn’t suffer, if I were to guess, was because it was hers. I would bet that someone arriving at her lair would feel the same impact from it.

“Though clearly Blue doesn’t!” Ansae said, regarding the silent members of Piping Hot Pies. “I’m a little bit hurt, Shayma. He invited these people to see his new invention but not me!”

“Next time I’ll make sure to give her a demonstration first.” I was reminded of fairy tales about powerful people who weren’t invited to certain events, and I didn’t want to become that sort of object lesson.

“I certainly hope so!” She grinned. “I would like to see this one close up. I only just caught the end of it.”

“I guess there’s not much of a difference between growing half a forest and all of a forest.” Shayma said.

“Yeah, not really.” I didn’t mind, actually. Ansae had a point, after all, that if anyone I knew was qualified to judge the precise merits and drawbacks of anything I made, it would be her. I just hadn’t realized she’d be interested in it.

Ansae sat on her haunches, tail curled about her forepaws, entirely catlike. Shayma glanced over at the others, who were still struggling, and waved in their direction.

“Would you mind?” I wasn’t sure if she was asking me or the dragon, but under the circumstances I decided I’d just put them back in Refuge. Then I disabled the teleport in, just in case.

Once that was cleared up I repeated the exhibition, cutting a swath in the opposite direction as the first. The sight of things just falling over was just as satisfying as last time, though I had to quickly cut the thing off as Ansae decided to try and wave her paw in front of the beam. Dragon or not, it’d probably hurt, and that assumed the scales didn’t just diffract the laser everywhere and end up hurting Shayma. Of course Ansae looked disappointed, but at least she didn’t actively ask me to shoot her with it.

“That is very impressive for how little mana you’re spending on it. I’ve never seen that before, either. It’s not light mana guiding it, so I’m quite curious how you’ve tamed light so.”

“Me too, for what it’s worth.” Added Shayma. “I have [Illusion]. If I can do infrasound maybe I can do this too?”

“Okay, well, it’s going to take an explanation. Let me start with what light actually is.”