Gaia had a lot of questions. Serenity was able to answer some of them but there were many others that he simply had to admit he couldn’t answer. Eventually, after he’d told her what seemed like the entire story four times, she said she had an idea. Crystal, once broken, cannot be made whole. However, if you can somehow return it to its prior state and bring it to me, perhaps I can use it to grow? I believe that might be helpful.
It may help with the more important task as well. It is not possible that there is no outflow; to use mana or essence, it must change forms. It must move. Stagnant mana does not build. Sometimes it destroys but most often it simply is. It creates areas where nothing should stay, though to most they are not harmful. To those who touch the leys, however, such places are strange and full of hidden dangers.
You touch the leys but you are not of them. That means you have some resistance, however minor. Please find what is happening. An oversized nexus and the mana being pulled raw from the lines and used cannot be all; that mana should be unfocused and scattered by the use, then slowly drawn back into the ley network. Neither mana nor essence is destroyed when it is used, it is simply frozen. Gaia paused in her explanation.
Serenity made a connection he never had before. Do you mean that that’s how a world core is built? That it’s used, solidified mana and essence?
No, Gaia replied immediately. Crystal makes crystal. It requires mana and essence to move through it but it is an act of creation through movement, not stillness.
That actually left a lot of room for interpretation. Serenity knew that monster cores were composed of mana and essence related to the monster, frozen in a solid form; they weren’t the same as dungeon cores or world cores, but they were clearly related. It was almost like monster cores were a less pure version of the same thing.
Still, if Gaia thought that crystal came through movement, Serenity was willing to accept it. She’d been around longer than he had, probably even including his time as the Final Reaper; she should know what she was talking about when it came to expanding herself. She might not remember most of that time, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. He didn’t remember a lot of things the Final Reaper had learned either.
It still didn’t answer the question about where it went when Gaia couldn’t see it, but Serenity shouldn’t have expected an answer. She couldn’t see it; that was the point. Perhaps it did become crystal and that was where the giant lump actually came from; Gaia would never know. Serenity had to admit he kind of doubted it; none of the broken pieces he’d seen before were linked to where they came from and couldn’t grow. This seemed different but not that different. It was still a piece of Gaia.
There was really only one answer he could give. He wanted to help Gaia; more importantly, he wanted to prevent Earth from destroying itself in the coming years. This seemed all too likely to play a part in that. I’ll look. I hope I can figure out what I’m looking for.
Have faith in yourself. I know I do; you are almost as good at causing trouble as D’Nehr was when he was younger, and you would not believe the trouble my Guardian caused in those days!
Serenity wanted to defend himself; he wasn’t a troublemaker! At least, he didn’t make any trouble that didn’t need to be made.
Maybe she had a point. He’d certainly found himself in a lot of situations where things needed to change lately.
It was well after dark by the time the muddy but fortunately not chilled pair made it back to the area of A’Atla where they’d left Serenity’s parents. Serenity was exceedingly grateful that he’d included both a microphone and a speaker in his parents’ armor; while they’d known a trip up a mountain, even a short one, was likely to take most of the day, they’d grown concerned when Serenity and Blaze didn’t return that afternoon. Being able to speak to them as soon as he finished with Gaia, before they even started the descent, made his parents a lot happier.
They were also happy to hear that he was - for now - done with the mountain. He’d go back when it was time to figure out how to do something to the World Core crystal to get it to Gaia, but that seemed like something he should wait on. Getting it to her would be a lot easier if she could reach A’Atla.
Instead, he and Blaze spent the next three weeks exploring the undercity beneath the surface of A’Atla, hunting down the different types of power system components Serenity could find in the “Lord Wizard’s” interface. Lex and Bethany often came as well, but they had to spend most of their time dealing with the events on the surface. Serenity got periodic updates, but most of them weren’t that important to him; he didn’t follow politics. Blaze seemed intrigued, so it was probably a better topic than the complete lack of progress that was Serenity’s most common result.
The news that the sludge that covered the land seemed to be turning into good topsoil was a surprise to Serenity; he’d expected it to be too salty. Either that wasn’t a problem or A’Atla was somehow handling the salt.
A’Atla was definitely providing plants. Strangely enough, most of them were ferns; Serenity didn’t know why that was the first thing A’Atla added, rather than grasses, but it was. There were apparently also worms. Serenity had no idea where A’Atla was getting them, but this wasn’t the part of its systems he’d been exploring.
It was obvious that they needed more people. Serenity was glad they were going to get some, but he was even more glad he didn’t have to manage it. He didn’t know where to begin and definitely didn’t want to manage such a large group himself.
His parents, on the other hand, did know how. They did not have an official position or authority, but somehow they still managed to pick out the site of the new camp on A’Atla’s surface, close to the underground entrance but not on top of it. Serenity had the feeling that it was going to be an open secret that there was an underground area, especially once Bethany started rearranging the interior to look like there was a cave-in, stuck door, or something else that blocked access past a certain point on each corridor.
It was still possible to reach the area they’d entered A’Atla, but only if you knew the route and could bypass the stuck doors; Bethany and Lex moved their tent closer to the known entrance and had a decoy tent set up that looked like Serenity’s. They had Serenity and Blaze stay where they’d started; that way, they had all the resources they needed to live and a secure home base.
The day the first shipment for Aide arrived, Aide would not shut up about it. He’d slipped the boxes in as part of the supplies for the multinational expedition; Serenity vaguely knew that it was supposed to be preliminary supplies for the UN advance mission that was to set everything up for the eventual multinational coalition that would explore A’Atla itself, but somehow the supplies weren’t on any of the inventories when they came in.
The next week was extraordinarily unpleasant. It turned out that simply incorporating new cybernetics was unpleasant, even when no surgery was required. Learning to use them, even with Aide’s help, was worse. The new inputs kept grabbing Serenity’s attention and pulling it away from what he needed to concentrate on, to the point where Serenity eventually had to ask Aide to turn most of it off until they had time to work out how to slowly incorporate all of it. Serenity wasn’t looking forward to the next set at all, but he’d promised Aide; they’d go through with it even if it was worse.
There were a number of important upgrades that were worth keeping. They had no direct impact on Serenity, though the additional processing power and memory that Aide gained did take some getting used to. Even Serenity noticed the difference; his body responded differently and seemed slower even though the changes weren’t supposed to affect him directly. Serenity suspected that he was using Aide’s hardware more than he realized, but that didn’t really bother him. He simply took the time to adjust.
The one other upgrade that Serenity left on, under Aide’s management instead of Serenity’s, was little more than a control system for a set of relays. It wasn’t even really a hardware upgrade; Aide could already do everything that the system had; he simply hadn’t integrated it and didn’t know how to talk to the signal relays. They were solar powered with limited battery backup and could be used to set up a local network.
With Serenity, or more likely Aide, in charge.
Strangely enough, even though no one knew of an origin for the network, no one seemed to question its existence. They clearly assumed someone else who was authorized had set it up, once Lex or Bethany started telling people how to access it. Serenity strongly suspected Bethany had finessed the situation, but it never came up.
Unfortunately, the box only held enough remotes to network the area from the external campsite through the entrance of A’Atla to the two internal camps; even then, the network was thin, at its maximum extension with no redundancy. For it to work properly, they had to either leave the doors open or have a repeater immediately at either side of the door; the only door they chose to not leave open was the one blocking the way into the hidden camp.
The next shipment would include more remotes, but there was only so much that Aide could slip in without it being noticed and no one wanted to risk discovery; having an easy way to get unapproved supplies was too valuable. There would be less than half as much slipped into future shipments. That still meant there would be far more range extenders arriving over the coming weeks; even the first additional set had more than were in the first batch.
It was another two weeks before Serenity found what he was looking for, and when he did he almost didn’t realize it. It was a point like any other deep in the city that ran under A’Atla, near the middle but not all that close to the exact center. There was no portion of the power system nearby other than the equipment that was everywhere; Serenity passed it only because it was between the one he’d just examined and the next one he wanted to look at in the hope that it would be different. It seemed like mana overall headed in that direction, but it eddied enough that he couldn’t be certain.
And then it wasn’t. He was walking upstream, not down.
Serenity spent more than an hour trying to hunt down where it changed; naturally, he wasn’t unlucky enough to have actually walked through the spot where the power drained away; instead, he was several corridors away, which gave him time to think but also meant that he had to spend that time searching.
He eventually narrowed it down to a storage room. It showed up as a void with no warnings on A’Atla’s systems, but something was clearly wrong because the door itself showed the skull that indicated danger.
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