Lillene
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Chapter 933 - The First Step
🕑 Added 2023-12-04 07:27:17 +0000 UTCEnjoy!
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The more Serenity thought about it, the more he liked the idea of inconveniently fulfilling the deal they’d made with the dryads. It had all the best elements: it let both him and Senkovar do what they said they’d do while rubbing the dryads’ collective nose in the results of their actions.
Was it petty? Yeah, Serenity was pretty sure it was. He didn’t mind and Senkovar was clearly in favor of it.
He could probably have gotten away with claiming the dryads had broken the agreement; Elder Inchabe had broken the agreement. At the same time, the point of the agreement wasn’t really to pass through Berinath, though they would. The point of the agreement was to learn how to work with a World to change its surface. Maybe he’d even be able to help Tzintkra someday.
Serenity returned Senkovar’s grin with one of his own. “Sounds like a plan. Berinath said the first thing to do is connect my mana to her core; how should I start?”
Senkovar shook his head. “That’s one of the things meditation is supposed to help you with, but it seems you’ll have to find your own way for that step, the same as you had to find your own way for speaking to Berinath.”
Serenity sighed. He really despised empty-mind meditation. It did not work for him at all. Maybe he could still get some clues from how Senkovar managed it. “So once you’re not thinking about anything, what do you do?”
“These days, I use a Skill,” Senkovar admitted. “It’s one of the hardest things for a World Shaman to do, and not something I’d planned to teach you here. I was going to wait until after we made it home to Suratiz; I don’t have the mana storage enchantments with me. They’re too useful and too fragile.”
Serenity vaguely remembered mana storage enchantments. He’d used them in a few rituals, back in the day, before he was good enough to strip the Affinity-residue off monster cores during a ritual. Without that ability, many rituals were too delicate to function with monster cores and required either enough participants to supply the mana (the more usual solution) or enchanted items that could be pre-charged with mana. The items were very expensive and had a good chance to break while they were charging, so it was usually cheaper to hire participants as long as the ritual was robust enough to handle the varied Intents.
There were always a lot of options to choose between; you just had to adjust your ritual for the ones you picked. Serenity preferred to use ley line energy for power. It was a bit wilder and harder to gather than mana from monster cores, but that just required building the ritual for it. It was location-specific, which could be an issue, but it was a far deeper well of power than any reasonable number of cores.
“There’s a small Tier Zero world near Suratiz that I’ve been slowly enhancing; I want it to be well-prepared before it breaks into Tier One and I open it for settlement. That’s where I planned to introduce you to ley line management. We’re skipping a lot of steps to do it here, but the key is really having enough mana. You reach out to the core with a thread of mana, then draw mana from the World Core to sear an anchor into the world. Once you have the anchor, you link it to another ley line, usually at an anchor.” Senkovar frowned in thought for a moment. “Don’t worry about that until you have the initial anchor; it’s stable once there’s an anchor. I can tell you what to do next then.”
“A thread of mana?” Serenity frowned. “That’s a very long way to reach with a mana line. They break up outside the aura.”
Senkovar looked puzzled for a moment, looked down and shook his head. “That’s because I forgot a step. You have to twine it and use the outer braid to solidify an inner center; it’s not usually useful for spells because it’s not at all flexible, but it works for this because the World Core will attract it using the loose mana that escapes from the far end if you get close enough.”
It wasn’t that easy, but complicated magic never was. The fact that Senkovar now used a Skill for it meant he’d forgotten some of the small steps that made the anchor work, so Serenity had to learn them bit by bit, making mistakes as he went.
Serenity vaguely noticed when Foremost Elder Omprek arrived and stood a respectful or possibly nervous distance away from the two of them, Serenity couldn’t tell, but he also didn’t pay too much attention. He was busy. Senkovar walked over to the elder and talked to him and he went away; that was really all Serenity cared about.
It would have been easier on a lower-Tier world, or at least used less mana, but Serenity seemed to have all the mana he needed. By the time he finally managed to actually extend a crystallized, multiply-reinforced line of mana down to something noticeable inside Berinath, Serenity had dealt with the mana backlash of a broken mana thread dozens of times, Senkovar had mentioned five more bits he’d forgotten, and three hours had passed.
Accidentally breaking the mana thread was apparently part of the process; it created a sort of a lane with a higher level of mana that would last for hours or even days before it dissipated, since there was no ley line nearby. It still wasn’t fun and the fact that he was working with higher amounts of mana than Senkovar could didn’t help.
Fairly early on, Serenity made a discovery that helped immensely: if he reinforced the weave around the mana thread with some essence, it held up far better. If he also added a little essence to the mana thread itself, he increased the distance before it broke even more.
The amount of mana lost with each break seemed to work to extend the distance each time, so it was definitely better to make the longer steps. Each thread took a little longer than the one before it, but it was still easier and even faster to get the same difference. If only he didn’t have to go so very far!
There was some good news from Aide, at least. Serenity’s glow had measurably diminished during that three hours. Serenity couldn’t tell visually, even when Aide showed him, but it was measurable. Barely.
When Serenity finally managed to get the mana thread down through several hundred miles of crust, he encountered a webwork of crystalline threads that surprised him; they weren’t present on any of the worlds he’d dealt with. Each one of them echoed the presence of Berinath. Serenity wasn’t certain if he should touch them or not, but he wasn’t certain how he’d manage to avoid them even if he tried and he couldn’t ask Senkovar without breaking the thread he was extending; it was already near the limit of his control, because they were always near the limit of his control.
Serenity shrugged to himself and reached out to one of the crystal-seeming lines. It didn’t pull the line towards it the way Senkovar said the World Core would, but he could still touch it. When he did, he heard a voice.
“Serenity?” The voice was Berinath, as he’d expected. “Why are you … wait, how did you get there already?”
“Already?” Serenity had been doing this for hours and he felt every failure in the sting when a mana thread broke. Yes, any damage healed, but that didn’t mean it didn’t sting. “Is it supposed to take longer?”
Berinath actually laughed at Serenity.
“I’m taking that as a yes, it’s supposed to take longer.” Serenity guessed he probably should have assumed that. His Tier might not be as high as he’d prefer, but his mana control was excellent and he was reinforcing the threads with essence. It was also possible that the fact that the mana in some sense came from Echa mattered; Faith magic did some odd things sometimes. He’d assumed someone with the proper Skill would be even faster, though; the Voice would help them, after all.
Maybe the Voice made it more reliable and repeatable instead of faster. Less painful also seemed possible. Those were all characteristics of some Skills, even if speed was the most common difference. Maybe it just took time to extend a thread through that much distance.
Serenity suspected he’d be able to do it faster if he had more practice and a higher Tier, as long as he had the mana available. Hopefully he wouldn’t have the available mana until he was high enough Tier to not glow. He hadn’t liked glowing when he did it on Earth in ley lines and he didn’t like it here.
Huh. He’d forgotten about the ley lines and the way they used to make him glow. The way he’d gotten rid of the glow then was managing to not take in more mana than he needed, wasn’t it? Maybe he needed to figure out how to do that with his new Skill. That might be the whole problem.
For now, he still had to get rid of it or he’d be glowing for weeks, maybe months. That was just too embarrassing even if it no longer felt like a strain at all. “Why are these strands here? I’ve never seen anything like them.”
“Strands?”
Serenity could feel Berinath’s attention shift from the conversation to the semi-physical, semi-magical lattice that he’d just reached.
“Oh! The framework! I don’t think about that often. Your Worldshaper helped me create the first version of it when we set up the fourth dome. I was having trouble with the dissonance between higher-Tier and lower-Tier areas and it helps shield my Core. It also makes it harder to Tier up, because I have to incorporate part of the framework and potentially expand it at the same time, but it’s worthwhile. Someday, enough of my surface will be domed that I don’t need it anymore. I look forward to that.” Berinath sounded wistful.
“I bet that means I need to keep going to reach your core and set up the anchor, then.” Serenity would think about what Berinath was saying about varying Tiers being hard on a World Core later. It was interesting and might well apply to both Earth and Tzintkra, but he didn’t have the spare capacity to think about it right now. Even talking to Berinath was making the thread hard to hold.
“Yes,” Berinath agreed. “It’s the - ouch!”
Serenity flinched as a wave of mana carried Berinath’s words to him and the connection was lost. The mana thread had snapped, probably as much from Serenity’s distraction as anything else. He had to try again. At least the mana that flooded out through the connection would help him get the next thread farther. He’d have to try not to snap the next one, since Berinath could feel the mana outflow and didn’t seem to like it.
The next thread didn’t make it, and neither did the one after that. It took four essence-reinforced mana threads after the one that reached Berinath’s protective lattice before Serenity managed to reach the outer surface of Berinath’s core. When he did, making the link was almost insultingly easy; he brought the mana thread close and it moved itself to touch the core. Mana poured out of Serenity and reinforced the line; he could feel it mix with Berinath’s mana as the anchor line became something more than just a mana thread.
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Author's Note: Terraforming is hard and expensive. I can’t think that it’s any cheaper even if the “only” thing you’re changing is the ley line structure.
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