I swirled up the Iron Mana Renewal and sat back down, going instantly into Meditation. I had used forty-four mana Casting four Iron Spells, plus thirty to replace the Shard Slots, so 74 Mana, and it came back at ten a minute in Mediation, as opposed to six without it, plus I was still down nine from the Thrungus.

I had seven Slots of Valence I that could be used, which was not a lot, but it only took two minutes to refill a Slot, so it was a good use of my time.

I noted that if a Cantrip was supposed to be half a level, it should be giving me five mana every cycle, instead of just one. I eyed my results, and decided that it had to be yet another Mastery or Skill I could start taking, putting Karma into being more efficient with harnessing mana and restoring my Mana Pool.

If Mana Conversion was a skill on the Pool side, then Mana Renewal should also be a potential skill there, right? And if not on hers, then on mine. Mira knew of no skill directly linked to it, and even Meditation was wowing her with the speed and power with which it worked.

All of them were things I was going to need to improve constantly. It would make more sense for Mana Renewal to be a skill on her side which was undeveloped, as Meditation had definite uses on the Matrix side beforehand, while Mana Renewal was effectively useless to a Matrix.

With that said, there was direct proof that Masteries on my side affected results on both sides of the equation here, just looking at how Health worked. My Feat and Mastery-based Health and Soak bonuses added in above and beyond what the confluence of Endurance and Hit Die+Constitution were granting me.

I’d taken my daily Feat and Mastery, so I’d have to wait until Renewal, but I was going to try for Pool Theurgy Efficiency Mastery/1, and see what happened...

Soooo much stuff to regain, and now new things being heaped on top!...

Well, it was what it was.

I stared at the multiple Burning bodies, the flashes and low bursts popping up of random bones and remains here and there, and pondered my next move.

My eyes fell to my bare fingers, and I knew what I needed. My Bonded Ring!

Of course, for a Bonded Ring, I would first need a ring...

------

Detect 0 was a fine, very short-range use of Divination magic. Each such iteration of the spell was very similar, you only needed to swap in and out what exactly you were looking for and represent it in the mana flow.

Mira was shocked at how versatile the spell was. Clearly the magic of the Power of Ten had massive amounts more modularization than what she had learned, especially given how all of her Creature Magic fit into a subschool of Alteration magic...

If I put Wieldskill and Animal Affinity into Spell Engrams, I had the feeling I was going to collapse her fairly encyclopedic knowledge of the Creature School down to two or three spells. She was already agog that my defensive spells had more in common with her War Magic than her Life Magic...

I flipped up Detect Precious Metals and Minerals and trotted around the room, my Phantom Servant trailing dutifully after me.

Yeah, the range was only fifteen feet, but that was absolutely all I wanted. I tinged a few hits here and there, things hidden by rubble or the dust that I wouldn’t have found or seen without giving this place a thorough cleansing.

Random coins of a metal I’d not seen before, but identified as an alloy of Air Gold, gathered to my hand, probably spilled from a dead person’s wallet or purse. There were only a handful of them, making me think someone had scavenged the rest.

Minor body jewelry, mostly in bronze, copper, and silver... chains, bracelets, earrings, a few minor rings... and one good one.

I lifted up the QL 23 ring, of gold alloy, set with knotted forms of what Mira identified as an Aluvian design, and four tiny emeralds.

Possibly a wedding ring, although I saw no names, dates, or attestations to it, and really, I didn’t care.

It was QL 23, and I could make it magical and grow it.

It was large, probably sized for a man, so I fit it onto my left thumb, sent my arcane energies through it, and rapidly Attuned myself to the Ring.

The downside of doing this would be that if I lost the Ring, I’d be unable to Cast from my Matrix. The upside of it was that once a day I could fish an entire Spell Engram out of my inner spellbook, ready and raring to go; I could enchant the Ring without need for gold or even having the proper Feats to do so; and I could both Witchbond it and make it my full-blown Item Familiar... which, among other things, made it my spellbook, and gave me access to the Ring Domain.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

The process began winding into the ring, and it promptly shifted over to my ring finger by itself, resizing and rapidly beginning to assimilate the Karma and power needed to become active.

At Renewal, it should be fully functional.

I tapped the plain wand in my hand, the implement cold and steady, not energetic in the least, having no magic of its own. I dearly wanted a Stave that could do double duty, but hey, can’t have everything.

I fixed my eyes on that tunnel which all the nasties had come through and none had gone back, the vivic mists crawling along the floor, creeping after the residues of older corpses dragged out of here.

Well, I just better be ready to run if it was needed. My Mask of Clarity still gave me the visual advantage, heatsight shouldn’t be able to see me at all, and vivus was taking care of all the scents.

I really missed not having lightfoot, and I was not in the best of physical condition... although the ki circulating through me as I breathed was having an effect with every step I took, building me towards a leaner and more balanced self... not that the Karma being invested wasn’t doing much the same. Mira was smoothly confident that we’d end up physically superior to any normal person could possibly be just because of her Levels and that gargantuan glob of indigestible Karma just sitting there, waiting to be nibbled on.

Whatever, it was time to bite the bullet and see what was over there.

The mist was covering up the floor, but I could use Minor TK to gently push anything in front of me out of the way, so I made no noise as I padded up in leather slippers, then slipped into the tunnel itself, which was about sixty feet long.

It was remarkably smooth, although there were definite gouges in it from chiseled claws that were much too hard. I padded past them, dreading the very idea that they had guards posted there. The vivic mist stole after me, drawn into my wake.

I stepped out into another stone room, again with the square walls, although now... stuff was growing on them.

It was a weird battle of two magical ecologies, one looking fungoid, the other squirming with the weird yellow-green light of the olthoi innards. Both were moving slowly, subtly, and it was really off-putting, while I wondered just where the tailings from all the removed stone had gone to.

The streaks of bodies being hauled away through the dust were obvious, leading down a hallway that didn’t seem to have much strewn about it, although I could see hooks and pins here and there, jutting out of fibers and tendrils stolen over the walls, where paintings or tapestries had been hanging.

I resisted the urge to align my little Darts to Fire and start Banespelling to Plants, which should kill all these different kinds of slime things. Maybe later. I had a full rainbow of Shards around my wrist since I had seven of them.

The hall sort of juked right. I slid up closer to the opposite wall, but did not touch it, looking for a guard...

Instead, I found a decent bunch of the mine tailings, crumbled down and fused together in a black-green mass. As I stepped around the corner, I also suddenly heard a very low and ominous buzzing sound. Almost a thrumming, really.

The tunnel was mostly blocked. The doors that used to hang on it were scattered and chopped apart, iron doors just like the ones in the other set of rooms, hacked into by abnormally hard pedipalps with acidic chasers, not leaving much functional behind. The mound was actually visibly giving off a strange smell, swirling in the air, and yellow-green lights were warring with arrays of toadstools upon it.

There were probably twenty different half-melted skulls fused into the mass of the thing, with bones sticking out of it all over the place.

I let the Shards fall, not wanting to be seen from the end of the hall, and glided up to the mound.

The smell got very bleachy, very fast, almost hard to breathe, and I had to snap a vivic Dart up I front of my face to clear the air.

There was a passageway beyond, and the ominous humming was coming from that direction.

This was some kind of block preventing what was on the other side from coming through, and torching it would alert everything wildly that I was here. It could wait until I came back.

Down at the far end was a conical thing that I belatedly recognized as an old kiln-style forge, although it was so overgrown with fungi it probably wasn’t too functional. The mushrooms were growing all over the place, but right down the middle of the floor it was clear, because things had been dragged through it and ripped up the mold and stuff that had been growing across it, sharp claws tearing through the matted stuff easily.

There were a lot of white things sitting in the mess of the toadstools and mushrooms, too, and it wasn’t hard to figure out where all the fertilizer to grow that stuff came from.

Two of the mounds of mushrooms there, weren’t. They were actually a couple thrungus guards resting among the stands by the kiln.

Well, I couldn’t pass them by. I held my wand behind me as I brought my Shards back up, allocated some overkill as those two seemed to be a bit bigger as Guard Thrungus painted across my Assay, and I sent the rotating buzzsaws down the hall.

They didn’t see them coming, and the explosions of rotating edges ripped them apart as neatly as it had their predecessors.

Just to see what would happen, I promptly sent two Vivic Darts down there to set their remains alight, then knelt down to wait for the spore alert to spread and see what happened.

The remains of the two thrungus went up like misty bonfires, and soon a merry and cheerful foggy bonfire was stealing over everything, sniffing out all the rotting flesh around and going after it, and probably taking any alien or weird magical energies with it at the same time.

I was crouched down at the corner, thinking about that open door of the kiln, and all the faintly moving tendrils that seemed to be coming from it.

I could shoot Elemental Darts all day, and ladle them down with Holy Banefire while I did it, too!