Depths wasn’t much of a conversationalist. It would gladly discuss its prison, how much it disliked its prisoners, and what it intended to do once it got free. Which mostly amounted to killing everything and everyone, feasting on our souls, and subjecting us to eternal damnation. At least when I asked about the chambers again, it said something useful. “The Primary Ascension Chambers were useless. A lie they used to get their people to willingly give up their souls,” Depths said, gesturing to the vast network of machinery above us. “One I co-opted for myself, of course. They placed all the blame on me, which I admired. The chains…” it held up one arm, shaking it, and the room filled with the faint echo of rattling. As if the sound had reflected off a wall, then the original had faded and only the echo itself remained. “Not so much.” “Right,” I said, cataloging most of what it had said under ‘horrible reasons to ensure it never got free and why I should find a way to utterly destroy it,’ while focusing on the more actionable bit. The Ascension Chambers took souls and funneled them elsewhere. They were also broken and likely not a key part of the original infrastructure. Which meant I was wasting my time. Right as Depths started into another critique of his captors’ journey into excess, I tapped the panel and returned to the diagnostic chamber. There was a lot of information in the diagnostic room and I was hoping I’d missed something in my hurry to get through the facility. Half an hour later, I was bringing up the map of my territory, having found a section about modifying oaths but little else. Hadn’t missed a damned thing. Slumping down, I stared at that map for several long seconds, eyes unfocused before they came to rest on Mount Aeternia. The center of the Waygates. Utility Access hadn’t just been for the Golden Halls. They, like the rest, had been built on top of the original machinery. The Tertiary Transfer Nexus. I’d been approaching this wrong. I’d come to the Golden Halls because they felt like the most important, obvious building. The place where people became gods. The heart of their empire. But in truth, it was just the fancy headquarters. You didn’t put your critical infrastructure in the headquarters building. Well, we had kinda done that with the Waygates and Mount Aeternia, but that was a convenience thing that we were already planning to change now that Arizar was setting up Overflow City. We’d even started contemplating enchantments that might let people bypass the need to visit the central chamber, which would be great for security. Point was, where I needed to be wasn’t under the ocean. Shaking my head, I returned to the surface. The ocean was still clear, so I made my way back to the crystal at the heart of the Waygate Nexus. Sure enough, a dozen new tasks popped up immediately after accessing it, all overdue maintenance requests. At the bottom of the list, waiting on the other tasks to be completed, was the line: -Reactivate Aeternia Water Control Bypass. Yet if I was reading the data right, by making a few modifications, we could get it to do a lot more than control the flow of water. I chuckled softly, then went out to recruit Bevel, Ari and Xoth. Would’ve recruited Vetrov and Banya too, if I could’ve found them quick enough. The first thing we had to do was repair several isolated nodes that were spread across the breadth of Aeternia. While the Waygates made getting to these nodes simple, the repairs were complicated by the fact that the original design was honestly awful. So the four of us slipped inside my space for a while to rework them. It wasn’t much of a surprise that Xoth had his own Memory Palace. Bit of an oversight, but he had been hesitant to join as it was, even with disaster on the horizon, so not too much of one. It turned out he considered time inside compressed space to be something specifically for family and emergencies. Considering Xelinda hadn’t even awoken yet, it’d been a long time since he’d been inside his. We only spent six hours inside compressed time, all of it dedicated to working on the designs. When we were done, we moved from node to node, tearing apart the old deteriorated material and repurposing it where we could, supplementing it from our own healthy stockpile where we couldn’t. The day slipped past, and I couldn’t help but look to the east several times throughout. There was no obvious sign the leviathan had left or that the Sahevin were attacking. But I knew they were there, closing in. By the time night fell, I was feeling the effects of going without sleep while doing so many mentally challenging tasks. Still, Restore Form wiped the worst of it away, and none of us worked by ourselves as we continued through the night. “Papa, this one’s complete garbage,” Bevel said as we worked on the fourth item on the list, a set of lines that helped channel mana from place to place deep beneath the surface of Cape Aeternia. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. The cave we were in didn’t have access to the surface, at least, not directly. Instead, we’d found our way by sneaking through the catacombs. “Throw it to the side then. You know how we’re doing this,” I said as I pulled a replacement junction enchantment from the cart we’d brought along, tossing it towards her. She nodded, starting on the minor enchanting work that would bind the new part in place. I was thankful that most of the repairs were relatively simple. Like the junction box, they simply required parts that had been designed to fail so that the rest of the network would be spared damage. That said, even with all our enchanters working on the replacement pieces, I wasn’t certain we’d get the repairs finished in time. “We’ve got this,” Ari said softly, hand on my arm as Bevel did her enchanting on the junction, the only light in the long dark tunnel from one of Ari’s motes floating overhead. “Even if we don’t finish by the time the leviathans leave, it will take the Sahevin time to make landfall and they will be slowed even further after. And we have endured them fine before now. What has changed?” I nodded. She was right. It just… “Yeah. I guess… I was hoping it’d magically stop them at the borders, keep anyone from having to fight,” I said, rubbing at my forehead as I stared into that darkness. “After what Keeper did to Tillan… I guess I’ve been feeling vulnerable.” “Is it truly a fight, when most of our people won’t even be able to see their enemies when they release bombs upon them?” Ari asked, laughing softly. “I am just grateful that I have not yet had people move into Overflow. I suspect it will be far more vulnerable than we are in Mount Aeternia.” “If this thing works like I think it will, we’re going to become one of the most well defended places on Ro’an,” I said, grabbing my side of the cart and flying after Bevel towards the next connector when she signaled she was done. Ari flew along with her hand on the other side of the cart, nodding. “Even if it doesn’t, our people are working to fortify our borders. The mana pouring off the lake is allowing us to accelerate many of our plans. All across Cape Aeternia, we are fortifying our positions at a rate even Spellford would struggle to match. We will weather this storm, as you did the last.” “Fair enough,” I said, giving her a small smile. The work took us several hours, and none of us found it particularly challenging. Considering the dangerous nature of being hundreds of feet underground, I didn’t want to split up though. Even a Pegasus wouldn’t be guaranteed to be safe so deep if the tunnel collapsed. Not with the amount of reinforcement in the tunnel walls. While it made the tunnels stronger, it also made it harder to escape if something went wrong. Once we were finished in the depths, it was on to the next task. I’d had the Shaper cadres complete as many components as they could, with us mostly doing installs. It was critical infrastructure and I didn’t want others knowing how to disrupt it. Which meant it took longer than it otherwise would’ve, but with Ari and Bevel at my side, that part didn’t bother me too much. Did get to both of them, a bit. “Bevel, that’s a bush, not a mana sensor,” I said, pulling the sleepy teenager away from the bush she’d been attempting to ‘repair’. Bevel blinked, wiping her eyes. “Sorry Papa. We’ve been at if for so long and it’s just all so boring.” “I’m unfortunately inclined to agree with her,” Ari said, shaking her head. “While clearly necessary, these tasks are a test of one’s tempering to tempt tedium… that doesn’t make sense, does it?” Bevel giggled. “Maybe that’s the real test. To outlast the tedium.” I ruffled her hair, shaking my head. “Alright, I’ll take over. Should be able to handle this part by myself. Why don’t you two catch a nap. Should be fine on my own for a couple hours.” “That… sounds quite agreeable, does it not, Bevel?” “Yep,” Bevel said, looking around then pointing. “There?” Ari chuckled, but pulled out her pavilion and laid it out nearby. Then they were off to sleep and I was working on the mana sensor on my own. It honestly wasn’t surprising that there were hundreds of the things scattered across Aeternia. They really did look like a bush, especially since they ‘sprouted’ out of the ground in clumps. While they were robust, the enchantments themselves hadn’t been renewed in a long time. Several of the ‘fronds’ had to be replaced entirely, though most just needed a quick touch up. We’d already come up with several ideas on how to improve them, but unfortunately, they’d all take a lot longer to set up than simply repairing the existing sensor clusters. They managed to finish their nap just before I finished my work with the sensor clusters in the area. Once more, we moved on to the next task. Just off the shore, close to the Golden Halls, was an innocuous looking building. A simple rectangle with a domed skylight. The most remarkable thing about it was how pristine it was, even sitting a couple hundred feet beneath the ocean. While all the nearby buildings were long covered in aquatic debris of one form or another, it sat uncluttered. The entrance was locked with a complex Spellcode I’d received from the crystal along with the task once we’d completed all the prerequisites. Standing in the hall, I couldn’t help but smile as the inner door slide open, revealing the inside of the mana reactor. The mana rolled over us, yet from the outside it hadn’t been noticeable at all. The building seemed to have incredible shielding, which I was looking forward to studying. There were a lot of potential applications for a wall so resistant to mana seepage. Along the sides of the room the drones I’d directed to do the initial repairs waited, silent. Ari and Bevel set about going to each, checking them over, performing minor touch-ups on their enchantments. Out of the two dozen present, I’d only had four to do the initial work. With most of the other repairs complete, once the drones were fixed they didn’t have much to do other than what we’d come here for. To connect the mana-reactor to the Waygate network. There were three rings in the Waygate Nexus. While we’d long deciphered the coordinate system for the outermost set, the middle and innermost rings had eluded us, since we hadn’t had any of the matching gate locations. Now we knew where at least one of those middle Waygates led. After repairing so many, it didn’t take us long to add the latest - and possibly most crucial - pair of Waygates to the network. When we did, the ambient mana in the reactor plummeted immediately. Then a thrumming kicked in. It remained low, but it was now producing mana, pumping it where it needed to go. “Back through the Ways Between?” Bevel asked, eyes alight with excitement. “Yeah. Time to see if it worked,” I agreed, as we activated the Waygate to take us back beneath Mount Aeternia. With the last of the repairs completed, I brought up the interface once more. It still said Water Bypass, but I knew better. Like with the Waygates themselves, our modifications would allow it to be something more. With a simple tap, I turned it on. Then we all gathered on the top of Mount Aeternia, looking to the east. “It’s not as pretty as the lake,” Bevel said, squinting. “You’re right,” Ari agreed, nodding. “Not as pretty, yet far more beautiful.” Despite the brightness of the midday sun, I could pick it out in the distance. A barely visible shimmer in the air. “That doesn’t make sense,” Bevel said, turning her attention on Ari. “It does to me,” I said, nodding. “Because if it worked as planned… that’s going to keep all the monsters away.” Turned out that if you took the filtration process and combined it with the water redirection system, you could make it into a barrier. One that would kill any monster that attempted to cross it, stripping away their mana and feeding it right back into the shield. Now we just needed to see if it had worked. Official source ıs 𝔫𝔬𝔳𝔢𝔩⁂𝖿𝗂𝗋𝖾⁂𝔫𝔢𝔱