Imri’s time during the two weeks wasn’t just spent working out and fighting. He spent his afternoons enchanting. The vast majority of that was the tedious enchanting work that needed to get done. He looked forward to the day when there was a true surplus of mana, and he wouldn’t need to enchant another Mana Absorption panel. He suspected that day would never come. He had hoped his apprentices could take this task on, but they were still far from having enough crafting efficiency to be mana-positive, let alone efficient.
With over thirty panels finished, they produced almost a thousand mana per hour. This meant his profession rank-up quest would be completed before the auction. He sold most of the mana to the town, which then distributed it among the crafters. Imri was glad to be out of the business of allocating mana, as that seemed to be a constant topic of the few town hall meetings he did attend. The council seemed to have things well in hand, and they no longer requested Imri’s involvement with the day-to-day operations, something he was grateful for. The town also held a considerable reserve, anticipating the massive expenditure of opening a portal to New Chicago soon. They also always wanted to have enough mana for an emergency.
In addition to the panels, Imri spent considerable time crafting staple items for his shop. This included his Temporal Expansion rings, Dimensional Sabers, Low Gravity Perpetual Dimensional Storage Backpacks, Portable Self-Charging Mana Storage, and Low Gravity rings. With no immediate danger, Imri no longer felt the necessity of selling at a price that everyone could easily afford. However, he wasn’t the only one anticipating the auction, and people were unwilling to spend large sums of money, even for his powerful enchantments. Still, he did manage to make a few sales, and he wasn't concerned about excess inventory, as it would be perfect for the auction.
In addition to his typical enchanting, he took a couple of one-off commissions from Caroline. She was having issues preserving some of the more temperamental herbs and monster parts, and they were too delicate to be frozen like a hunk of Drake meat. The solution was simple: Stasis. Imri had Avery construct a sealed box about the size of a microwave. The enchantment work was trivial, as the concept was straightforward: everything inside the box would be put into Stasis. The only moderately challenging parts were defining the rune, which was only active when the box was closed, and defining the targets as anything inside. Still, even that took less than an hour of design work.
The final product was functional, if not the most efficient invention. Even with using one of his best cores and having the improved efficiency that came from the Manufacturing Array, the enchantment was a mana hog. However, for specific items, it was still worth it for Caroline. Her stoic reaction to the Stasis Box would have seemed unremarkable to those who didn't know her well. However, Imri noticed she was reviewing all her notes and making notations on possible candidates for Stasis storage, and everything else was wholly forgotten.
The second commission from Caroline was almost the opposite of the Stasis Box. Caroline had started work on a greenhouse where she would cultivate some of the plants and herbs she had collected. She even hired someone who had gained the Gardener profession for when the project was completed. While this was an excellent long-term solution, she wanted the ability to grow several staples at an increased speed.
The solution was the Aging rune. Imri had already been working on this problem, with his original intended use being to improve the speed at which brewers could ferment alcohol. He hadn’t implemented that because he was waiting for a larger brewery, as most were still experimenting with small batches. It was easy enough to modify the design for a planter, allowing Caroline to use mana to speed up the growth of a critical plant in short supply. Imri warned her that the plant would still need all the same nutrients it received during a normal growth cycle, just in a shorter time.
In addition to the items he had made for money, he continued working on the portal network. While Imri eventually wanted a portal at each semi-permanent Spatial Beacon, the amount of rune work required for each made that impractical for the time being. Instead, he devoted only a couple of hours daily, completing one a week. While the Espeonite caverns and Healing Springs were close to Celestia, they were too critical to skip the ease of access a portal would provide.
Imri’s focus shifted after learning the Reorient Gravity spell. He was immediately tempted to implement grandiose designs, such as constructing a floating house or mana-powered aircraft. While he fully intended to do such things eventually, he didn’t have the time or mana infrastructure to support such lofty ambitions.
Instead, he would do what he had always done: implement a single concept into a simple device. He wanted to create an object that would remain fixed in space or a semi-immovable platform.
He began mentally ticking off the runes he would need to use to complete this project. The first one needed was the primary rune it was being built around, the Reorient Gravity rune. To counteract gravity, he would have a Reorient Gravity pushing up with the same force as the gravity acting downward. This was a good starting point, but it didn’t allow anything on the platform, which would imbalance it in favor of normal gravity. To compensate for this, he would need to exert a certain amount of force on the platform at all times. Unfortunately, measuring force proved to be more difficult than he had expected. He had initially assumed there would be a straightforward mechanical way to measure force, but the engineers quickly disabused him of that notion. Therefore, without anything simple to work off of, his idea of a True Force rune was implausible, especially if he wanted it to be omnidirectional.
Once again, Imri cheated. His Spatial Beacons proved to be an invaluable tool in his arsenal, and the fact that he could create runes that efficiently knew the exact direction and distance of all his Spatial Beacons was even more valuable than he had initially realized. He could pinpoint the target's precise location using the distance and angle from any beacon, working somewhat like a GPS. Where his beacons differed was that he could always efficiently use them with unerring accuracy and a high degree of precision, and he was going to exploit that.
Imri combined the Spatial Beacon runes with a Metronome rune, triggering it precisely 100 times a second. With each pulse, the enchantment would check its current location against the activation location; if they weren’t exactly the same, it would calculate the change in force based on the displacement. It would then use that to determine the angle and amplitude of the Reorient Gravity, along with a small overcompensation to reposition the platform to the exact location it was supposed to be at.
The entire calculation process took even less time than the one-hundredth of a second at which the Metronome was running. The result was that the platform appeared affixed in space, even if it technically took a fraction of a second to adjust to any force.
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Imri tested it by tapping the activation rune about half a meter off the ground. It immediately locked in place without any indication that it had been falling. Next, he tried pushing it horizontally, but again, there was no sign of movement, even though he knew it had moved. Finally, he tried standing on it, feeling no difference between stepping on the platform and standing on solid ground.
Imri experimented with the Metronome rune before finishing the enchantment. He found that the motion and readjustment were noticeable if he made the checks less frequent. It was still bearable until about 50 pulses per second, at which point it had a noticeable give, but it still worked when the forces weren’t constantly adjusting. However, Imri noticed a slight efficiency gain by adding more pulses per second. This was due to the amount of mana needed to run the additional checks, which was offset by the reduced spatial correction required. At about 160 pulses per second, the efficiency started to drop again as the gains from the motion decreased while the cost of each additional pulse remained constant.
It was a good thing he optimized it, as running through his tests had consumed hundreds of mana in only a few minutes. It would be some time before they became practical for everyday use. Still, Imri deemed this a successful prototype and finished it with a higher-level core.
Imri idly wondered if the Collective Intelligence platforms he had stood on while talking with the sub-mind had been something similar to what he was working on. He could see a clear path to what they had and his prototype, especially with the near-limitless mana they had been working with. To that end, he resolved to study their enchantments from the salvaged Sentinels.
While he hadn’t made much headway into most of their runes, he had noticed one that seemed integral to each enchantment but wasn’t a simple, familiar rune that he currently used. Simply copying the rune onto a sheet of paper didn’t do anything; it was as if runes operated on another concept than just their physical manifestation. Even a perfect copy of any rune wouldn’t do anything unless the enchanter knew precisely how the rune worked on an almost spiritual level. This is why his apprentices couldn’t mimic any of his more complicated runes, even if they could physically redraw them.
Imri felt guilty as Emelia reminded him he was supposed to be taking it easy. With the number of things he was juggling, he needed to create a schedule and block off time to spend with her. It felt a bit off-putting to need to schedule every moment of his life, but if he didn’t, he would slip back into overworking himself. Emelia just smiled at him and told him it didn’t matter so long as he spent some time with her.
They spent most of their time together relaxing and conversing casually, exhausted from the day's activities. The pregnancy was going as well as could be expected, with her only experiencing moderate nausea. Imri hoped everything would go smoothly between the Fertility Array, her improved stats, magical healing, and a team of doctors.
With all the activity in preparation for the auction, Celestia accumulated enough wealth to purchase a third upgrade. They selected the XP bonus to improve this time, leaving Fertility and the two radiuses as the only ones remaining without a first upgrade. The system also took its due, allowing Celestia to reach level 13. They were also progressing steadily towards the next rank-up, which had jumped up to require 10,000 people and 1,000 buildings.
At the end of the two weeks, Imri reviewed all the stats he had gained.
Base Strength has increased to 117 (+1) Base Agility has increased to 90 (+1) Base Constitution has increased to 105 (+2)
Achievement Upgraded Mass Production 2 (+1): .1% increase to primary stats (+.05%) Supernatural Being 2 (+1): .3% increase to primary stats (+.15%)
Title Upgraded Baron of Celestia 17 (+5): 3.4% increase to primary stats (+1%)
Imri Padar has reached level 41 (+1) in Celestial Mage (2E) Imri Padar has reached level 41 (+1) in Primordial (1E) Imri Padar has reached level 27 (+2) in Runic Engineer (2F) Primary Stats Strength 146 (+7) Agility 116 (+5) Constitution 138 (+8) Intelligence 250 (+12) Willpower 203 (+9) Charisma 119 (+5) Secondary Stats HP 255 (+29) FP 192 (+20) MP 948 (+102) Mana Efficiency 804 (+80) Crafting Efficiency 926 (+100)
Imri smiled at the solid growth from the two weeks, especially since it hadn't involved fighting monsters significantly higher than his level. He noted that his title had also incorporated the improvements from the empire level and capital bonus, essentially giving him a rank equivalent to the floored bonuses of the settlement. He had also reached another milestone, with his Willpower now exceeding the theoretical limits of human capabilities.
As they had anticipated, it wasn’t long after the two-week point that the signal arrived in Celestia. Rayden had reached New Chicago.
A small group of around half a dozen people gathered in front of the portal. They were mostly at a lower level, with none in the double digits. They had been selected to be unremarkable, a small group that would hopefully slip into the city disguised as refugees. Each of them was a volunteer vetted by Emelia. They aimed to determine how things were actually run in the city before the formal delegation arrived.
While none of them were spies, they were all socially adept and observant. The lone exception was Imri, who would be acting as security for the operation. While his levels would make him conspicuous, he was so high-leveled that no one would be able to identify him, especially with his Enigmatic Being trait. While this would draw some attention, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to have abilities that masked themselves. It was worth the risk, as his presence reassured the infiltrators that if things went to hell, there was a contingency plan for extraction.
When everyone was ready, Imri gave the order. With the amount of mana needed to open a portal over such a distance, the nearby Espeonite crystals visibly dimmed as the mana drained out. Fortunately, it was enough, and the portal stabilized as the mana consumption leveled off. The team stepped through and traveled thousands of kilometers in an instant.