"Just... rats?" asked Abigail.
"Yup," I confirmed. "The only souls within my sensory range were rat-shaped. So unless there was someone there without a soul, or they could hide it somehow, just rats. I assume Maximilian does have a soul?"
"Whatever suspicions I've had about him, I can't say I've devoted any time to the question of his soul," replied Harry. "I don't even know what it is that skill shows you."
It wasn't a surprise that Harry didn't believe in the dangers of soul magic when he didn't even seem to believe in souls. Goodness knows what his true thoughts on my reincarnation entailed.
Still, it was a valid point. I had no idea what [Soul Perception] actually showed me. The Law had no reason to appear as literal chains, so the entire thing could be some metaphorical construct put together by the System to help me comprehend what I was looking at.
"Then do you have any guess what they were up to?"
"The pulsing behaviour you described does sound like an earlier iteration of our equipment. They've built something quick and dirty. And energy hungry. There must be some national-level support there; if it was just a one off, I could blame some judicious use of capacitors and batteries, but three in a row like that? They must have been pulling tens of gigawatts from somewhere. That's not an amount that a single generator can provide. It's multiple large power plants."
Plus one for Maximilian teaming up with kidnappers and thieves, then.
"I don't get the rats, though," added Calvin. "An experiment to see if the System would infect them?"
"Radiation exposure?" suggested Cara.
"Possibly, but why so many?"
"If their equipment was destroyed, it's a moot question," said Harry.
"I damaged it, for sure, but I have no idea how badly. For all I know, it could only be a day's work to repair."
"I don't think we have any choice but to contact Earth," he sighed. "Bring Darren over here, and we'll see what intelligence they have on their side."
A quick trip to the village and back, and the answer turned out to be very little.
"(Electricity use spiking by tens of gigawatts somewhere in the world should be hard to hide,)" said someone official-looking projected on their wall, Gregory having not been around for our unscheduled contact. "(That's equivalent to our entire country. There would be local blackouts as power was redirected, or satellites would pick up an increase in thermal output and emissions as power plants ramped up production. We saw none of that.)"
"(May I remind you that they may well have recently come into possession of multiple small orbs, each capable of producing an astounding amount of power?)" pointed out Harry.
Wait, then why talk about multiple large power plants? No, it still made sense; given the limited supply, getting their hands on monster cores would still have required national support. Or some pretty audacious theft.
... Wait, those monster cores could power a country? No wonder they wanted them so badly!
I hadn't seen any with [Mana Sight], but given the situation, my perception had been limited. Using it from detached body parts never gave me my full range, and even if the monster cores were only twenty metres from the portal equipment, I wouldn't have seen them.
"(True. That narrows down the list of suspects.)"
"(And what of Maximilian?)"
"(He...)" started the projection, glancing at a printout and looking confused. "(apparently doesn't exist.)"
"(Sorry?)"
"(The few minutes we've been speaking haven't been much for an extensive search, and we'll know more the next time you call, but so far we haven't found anyone who matches your description.)"
"(He's put tens of millions into the portal research! How can he not exist?)" exclaimed Harry incredulously.
"(On paper, the Blue Skies Institute is owned by a non-profit by the name of Blue Skies Research Group. There's no Maximilian listed as a director. Believe me, we tracked down the two who were when this all started, and they were just rich philanthropists. Both had multiple investments in kooky alternate energy research projects, and there was nothing suspicious that we found aside from perhaps their gullibility. They didn't even know what they were investing in, and most recipients of their funding were complete crackpots, if not outright fraudsters. This is literally the first time we've heard the name Maximilian. Why haven't you mentioned him before?)"
"(Because you lot never asked! You swept in and took everything over, and given the situation, I had no objections. I assumed you'd background checked everyone involved, along with their families, neighbours, pets, hairdressers, casual acquaintances from high school...)"
"(We did. Or thought we had.)"
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"(Well, he was always very private...)" said Abigail. "(Maybe he didn't leave much of a paper trail?)"
I listened on in bemusement. Had someone been pretending to pay their salaries to steal their research? But that made no sense; Harry said he'd been around since before they knew their experiments were a viable means of power production, let alone portal travel. So he'd created a false paper trail making it look like two others were paying the bills, safe in the knowledge that they had too much money to keep track of, and wouldn't notice or think it odd when the government turned up asking about alien portals? 'Gullible' was a substantial understatement, if so.
Either way, Earth had no useful information to offer about either the vanished Maximilian or our rat-loving invaders, so we left them to conduct some research at their end and hung up our connection. Of course, then I needed to make another loop back to the village to take Darren home. Couldn't my family move here? Else, Horail needed to hurry up and teach Darren to teleport.
The run to the village was long enough to ponder my next move. I'd had a thought earlier about hooking up a monster core to a decay grenade to make something that would function on Earth. The problem with Earth wasn't simply that it had no mana; mana-alloy materials could survive in the institute's null-mana room perfectly well. On Earth, though, most of them couldn't. Mythril and orichalcum survived, but anything steel-based decayed back to the base material within seconds.
Did Earth have anti-mana of some sort? Or was there some mana background here that couldn't be kept out? Vacuum energy was a thing that got mentioned from time to time on Earth; the energy left over in a region of space when all normal matter and energy were removed. Us having vacuum-mana and Earth lacking it could go some way to explaining why materials decayed on Earth but not here.
But potions had decayed on Earth, too, and I'd since confirmed that they needed the System to function!
Was it a System thing? But why would the System be required to keep mana-alloys stable?
Sometimes, I regretted introducing science to this world. All it had achieved was to show up how little sense everything made. But that didn't change the fact that I wanted weapons that would work on Earth. Designing something that worked in a null-mana chamber wasn't sufficient. We'd open another portal in a few more days to hear if the Earth side had discovered anything, which would give me a chance to test some stuff.
A level one monster core connected to a water crystal would be the safest start I could think of. If it functioned perfectly, I might splash some people, who would all be in hazmat suits anyway.
I stopped off at my new, wonky house halfway back to Dawnhold, employing my personal smithery to throw some stuff together. My skills offered no hints on how to extract mana from a monster core, but I'd watched Cluma eat enough of them to have a good understanding of how she pierced the shell and sucked up the insides. Jabbing a mythril wire into the core and connecting the other end to an intake would...
I carefully put down the wire—which no longer had anything attached to either end—plucked the shards of monster core out of my torso, and wrung some of the water out of my suddenly sodden clothing while waiting for [Regeneration] to take care of my puncture wounds.
Was there such a thing as level one-half monster cores? Or one-tenth?
Still, it showed that the principle worked, at least on this planet. I just needed to build it such that the wire only stabbed into the monster core when I was ready for the device to detonate.
My next attempt had a mythril spike hooked on a latched spring. Any shock to the device knocked the latch off, the spring sprung, the spike rammed into the monster core and the entire thing exploded in a mess of water, metal and monster core fragments.
Unfortunately, the shock that had set it off had been me throwing it rather than the impact of it landing.
As I picked more monster core shards out of my palm, I said a small prayer of thanks that Cluma wasn't here, then swapped out my regular clothing for my armour.
It took another half-dozen iterations until I managed to create something that detonated at a safe distance. It was kinda cool though, and making and detonating a second device showed no change to its output even when I employed [Expert Mana Control] to create a dearth of mana around it. Combined with what I could see through [Mana Sight], it was obvious it wasn't depending on ambient mana to function.
That just left the question of whether it would function on Earth. And if I could build a decay version with a meatier monster core without killing myself. Perhaps I should leave that part in the capable hands of Grover.
ding
Skill [Advanced Crafting] advanced to level 10
No class levels for it, alas. Now that I'd moved on from [Artisan], crafting was a lot less efficient for class levels. It was still magical, though. Surely that should count, given that I had a mage class? Maybe it didn't count because temporal affinity wasn't involved.
... Which was a very good reason to not leave it in the hands of Grover. Decay crystals were based on temporal affinity.
Another issue was that the monster core alone was significantly bigger than the grenades I'd been using until now. I needed some of those miniature cores from the smaller snakes. Unfortunately, I hadn't kept any around; the bullet serpents had all splattered themselves across my armour, smashing their cores in the process, and the fanged serpents had been too fiddly to bother with given that I hadn't seen a use for miniature cores at the time.
Dammit, past me! I lacked the proper RPG mindset, where a player would pick up every junk fork in case it turned out to have a use at some point.
I could rush in as far as floor four, grab some and teleport back out, but it would be a day's work. Besides, it was only floor four. If I was building a weapon, I wanted to go big.
For kicks, I took out one of the level thirty cores I'd stockpiled from our Obsidian Spires training and hooked that up to a water crystal. The result was underwhelming. The water crystal couldn't stand up to the flood of mana, shattering instantly.
Admittedly, it shattered quite forcefully, and a shard of steel struck the monster core, which also shattered, leaving me very glad of my armour and that I'd had the foresight to move a short distance from my house. The surrounding area was starting to look like the institute fields when Grover had just heard of a new type of engine.
No more levels for that experiment, though. A level one monster core couldn't possibly do that much harm, surely, no matter what I rigged it up to?
A few more minutes' effort resulted in the core of a weak goblin hooked up to a decay crystal. I wound up for a throw, thought better of it, very gently placed the thing on the floor, then backed well away. If I threw it as hard as possible, I didn't trust it not to go off in my hand again. Instead, I tossed a small rock at it, employing [Timeless World] to retreat at time-dilated speed the moment it left my hand.
The resulting crater was impressive. And I'd been planning on rebuilding the failure of a house anyway, so the fact it had disintegrated wasn't too annoying. Needing to replace my new smithy equipment was worse.
I wasn't looking forward to explaining where it had all gone to Cluma, either.
ding
Class [Temporal Mage] advanced to level 4
Class level increased intelligence by 1