Hi all, this is going to be your bonus Chapter that I failed to deliver on Sunday. There'll be one more in a few hours tonight for today's chapter. hope you enjoy.
----------------------------------------
In the middle of the busiest street in Arigan, the hidden high elf city, large crowds were gathering around a podium. It was midday, just after lunch time as more elves streamed into the open town square from nearby restaurants. Then, a single male elf, no taller than Kiefer strode up onto the podium, with a roll of parchments in his hands. Light reflected off the bright blonde hair of all the high elves shimmered like sunlight in the ocean waves as everyone began to quiet down. The male elf began to yell, at the top of his lungs.
“Bringing you the latest news from around Arigan! Elder titan Isana, along with her human husband Kiefer has set foot inside Arigan as of 10 days ago and are currently residing in the royal palace as honorary guests of King Ryul.” The announcer paused to take a breath and allow the crowd to settle down again, before continuing.
“News from the palace has informed me that Lord Kiefer claims not only to be from beyond our barrier, but also from beyond our world! He claims he comes from a world far more advanced than our very own glorious Arigan, and that he would teach us the ways of his world.” Stopping once again, the announcer observed the crowd becoming noisy.
“However! After going through our royal library, and a session with our leading mages, he claims that our knowledge thus far is not only inadequate but also incorrect! He claims he offers us his wisdom and knowledge as a promise to an omnipotent being that he described as a ‘god’!” The crowd was starting to get rowdy, as elves started to doubt the words of an outsider claiming to be here to set straight their incorrect way of life.
“Is he truly a prophet sent to us by our god? Or is he just a swindler, a conman that’s got our lady Isana under his spell? Could what our gods have shown us all these centuries possibly be wrong? We shall await the opinions of our mages and –“ (Announcer)
“NO! its HERESY!” (unknown)
One yell from an unknown individual silenced the entire crowd and the announcer. Everybody stared at the source, waiting for more of his opinion.
“How can you believe someone who just comes in out of nowhere and claims that all our knowledge is wrong?!? And a human at that!? He’s just a heretic trying to weaken our country and its future!” (unknown)
And so, the streets of Arigan were filled with talks about Kiefer. Elves were generally divided into 3 main factions, the one that pegs Kiefer as a heretic to their way of life, another that believes Kiefer is here as a prophet of the gods to help them in their time of need, and a last faction that could not be bothered as long as it did not have any negative impact on them.
It had been one week since Kiefer started teaching the mages and they finally seem to start accepting his theories. Kiefer had understood that the language for the runes had changed several times during history and that it was not the language that was important, but the meaning. Trying it out, Kiefer attempted to cast a spell in English.
“By my will, calm yourselves, cease all movement and persist as I will, Permafrost!” Kiefer chanted, imagining all atomic movement coming to a halt within his mana’s reach of 60m. As he intended, standing in the field in the royal palace, the surrounding instantly dropped to near absolute zero, with water crystals falling out of thin air, the ground freezing over and plants turning white covered by water crystals. The phenomenon persisted for as long as he supplied his mana and followed him wherever he walked. Putting a damper on his mana flow, the frozen field gradually returned to normal temperature, leaving patches of dead grass where Kiefer had walked.
Kiefer decided to try another spell, one from an attribute he had not figured out until now.
“By my will, photons cease to persist, surround me and cloak me, dark shroud!” Kiefer was immediately encapsulated in a pitch black dome, void of any light. Even Kiefer was blinded and only regained his sight after cancelling the spell. “Hmm, still not quite right… Defeats the purpose if I blind myself too.” Kiefer thought still unable to practice magic related to darkness element.
Being watched by the high elf maids within the palace, Kiefer felt bed for destroying the beautiful field that they had attended to, so he bowed and apologised, and decided to perform his tests only outside the city. With that, he made his way back to the conference room to resume his lesson after they had taken an intermission for lunch.
The mages were beginning to accept Kiefer’s new theories and have recently begun to experiment with chemicals themselves, creating new rune spells to manipulate chemicals and elements to do their bidding. The fire mage was exceptionally flexible in accepting Kiefer’s teachings and showed obvious improvements, creating the first explosion spell ever in high elf history. He had managed to mix hydrogen and oxygen within the air in a 2:1 ratio and ignite it. Seeing his progress, the other mages become more permeable to Kiefer’s new information and it helped with the teaching process greatly.
Meanwhile, Kiefer had not only been learning new incantation based spells, he had been studying the barrier that Isana had put up to protect the village. After the session with the mages, Kiefer would be found at the edge of the barrier doing all sorts of tests. He probed the barrier with his mana threads to sense where most of the mana was gathered, and eventually found the source, or rather sources.
The circular barrier wall, was dependant on drawing mana from 2 sources to operate the special feature. First was a preposterously huge runic circle drawn on the ground that encompassed the entire city, with the barrier running along its circumference. This magic runic circle served to dictate the size and shape of the barrier, as well as supply the other runes with mana converted from the ground. There was an exceptional conversion rate of 1:20, almost matching up to Kiefer’s mithril armour.
The next key components were the 2m diameter vertical runes carved into the air along the circumference of the first circle. These magic circles were tessellated next to each other and on top of each other for the entirety of the barrier, going up as high as 200m, making the whole wall look like a giant piece of bubble wrap. The runes consumed mana from the main circle at an atrocious rate, keeping the special barrier up. Each of the runes were created in twins, each one positioned directly opposite the other on the other side of the barrier. Entering the magic circle would teleport anything to the twin circle on the opposite side.
Staring at the intricate design of the barrier, Kiefer couldn’t help but come to admire and respect Isana, wondering how long it must have taken for her to establish the barrier. Not even the high elves had learnt to carve runes in the air like Isana had done with the barrier. However, looking at this gave Kiefer an idea to incorporate this new technique into his own repertoire of skills.
Kiefer fetched a piece of parchment and began drawing a rune circle. Along the edge of the circle, Kiefer began writing down his rune in black ink, a rune meant for acceleration as well as mana conversion to supplement the power required for the rune. Within the middle of the circle were the parameters for the acceleration – the magnitude, the direction as well as a smaller rune instruction to use mana to reinforce the object being accelerated. Finally, right at the centre of the rune circle, with a diameter of 2cm, was an activation trigger that will activate the rune on the object that broke the trigger.
Setting the velocity multiplier to 10x and direction to be perpendicular to the plane of the rune, Kiefer lifted the piece of parchment using his mana threads. Taking aim, he threw a small rock, dead center of the parchment, breaking the activation sequence. The small rock accelerated instantly upon breaking the parchment, disintegrating midair due to the excessive acceleration, turning into dust.
Seeing this, Kiefer tried to allocate more mana from the converter into reinforcement of the target object, but this resulted in a lowered acceleration multiplier. After a series of trial and errors and 20 small stones later, Kiefer settled for acceleration multiplier of 5x. This ensured sufficient reinforcement on the body of the projectile to prevent it from breaking apart due to air resistance.
He then proceeded to try multiple step acceleration, lining up 3 circles one after another and then tossing the rock. The results were staggering. With each rune circle broken, the reinforcement kicked in, allowing for further acceleration, resulting in a final multiplier of 125x, without the stone breaking apart in air. Further testing and adjustments finally yielded the optimal results Kiefer was looking for. The projectile’s acceleration reached its peak only 20cm after leaving the rune, so the optimal distance to stack the runes was found to be at 20cm apart to achieve maximum efficacy.
By the time Kiefer was done with his tests, the sun had started to set and Kiefer returned to his room to review all that he’s learnt and taught the mages. It was about time for him to proceed with physics since the mages already seemed sufficiently interested in chemistry to discover the wonders of science in their own time.
Kiefer thought he would start with electro physics and magnetism, hoping it would allow him to bring about the topic on generators. Afterall, the modern world was a slave to electricity and they needed a way to generate it without having to depend on mana all the time. The goal was to move the high elf society away from its overdependence on mana and reduce the load with electricity.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“So, I heard you disappeared all afternoon after the lunch session with the mages. Still going at it at my barrier?” (Isana)
“Yes, I’ve sort of started to understand how it works, but there is a huge loophole if I might add. The sky is not covered, so anyone could just drop in if they flew over the wall.” (Kiefer)
“I considered that, but there wasn’t enough mana from the converter sequence to support another large rune to cover the sky. And besides, no one can fly that high. Dragons and birds might, but they pose no real threat to the city and they do not have any evil intentions like humans.” (Isana)
“And while we’re at that topic, how do you draw the runes in the air like you did with the barrier?” (Kiefer)
“Oh you saw them huh? I don’t know myself. I just can. It’s just magic?”(Isana)
“Not this again.” Kiefer thought. It was the same reply with Shearwood when they just met. “Titans sure have it easy, just being able to do the things they do without having to think of how.” Kiefer expressed his envy.
“Well, it’s got its downsides. Not knowing how it works means we can’t find ways to improve on it because we don’t know where to start. I can only draw one rune at a time and it took me almost 2 decades to put up that barrier. If I knew how it worked, I would have drawn multiple runes at the same time.”(Isana)
“Well can you at least show me an example so I can try to imitate?” (Kiefer)
Isana agreed, and put her right arm out in front of her. As she closed her eyes, Kiefer saw a light blue line forming in the air a few centimetres away from her palm. The blue line turned into a circle, almost as if it was ink writing on an invisible surface. Finally with the rune almost done, Isana stopped the process and the rune slowly faded away.
“See? If I lose concentration, the drawing fails and I’ll have to start over again. I stopped the last one intentionally though, don’t want this room turning to ice.” (Isana)
“Isana, I never asked you this before, but you can probably feel your mana like Sher does correct? What colour and shape is your mana?” (Kiefer)
“Hmm.. My mana is a vertical light blue coloured crystalline shard with sharp edges. Why?” (Isana)
“Haha. Ok this is going to be fun.” Kiefer laughed, excited at what he is going to do next.
Kiefer still seated at the edge of his bed, extended his mana thread to form a circle, finally cutting the thread off. He stared and watched the thread slowly disappear, taking a full minute to dissipate into nothingness. Kiefer made a mental note that he needed to write the rune within a minute. He proceeded to manipulate his mana, slowly forming the runic characters in his acceleration rune, finally ending in the middle with the activation trigger. Picking up the piece of parchment where he had drawn the same rune earlier, he confirmed that the designs were the same.
Kiefer hastily tore a corner of the parchment and crunched it up into a ball, and flicked the paper ball into the middle of the silver rune floating in front of him. The ball sped up and bounced off the wall of the room. Ecstatic, Kiefer immediately programmed his mana to deploy in the previous design mentally. With that, he was satisfied, picked up Sher from the foot of his bed and layed her down next to his pillow, tucked her in and went to sleep. Isana just kept staring at the paper ball Kiefer had thrown against the wall, still flabbergasted at Kiefer’s speed of learning new things.
[4 weeks later]
Kiefer was back at the smelly putrid swamp, standing that the end of the wooden jetty. Beside him were Isana, Sher who was flitting between Isana and him, and 50 high elf warriors. Of the 50 high elf warriors, 5 of them were the mages that attended Kiefer’s lessons. The fire and light mage hadstayed behind to carry out more experiments of their own.
During the last month, Kiefer had passed on the fundamental of Science which he thought were necessary to get the country to the starting line of a technological revolution. But they were stuck at a bottleneck and required raw materials to proceed. Hence their current location.
Using his mana, Kiefer extended a silver bridge towards the ocean until he was standing atop deep water. The high elves had already seen what Kiefer was capable of and were too tired to be surprised each time Kiefer pulled out something new. Standing there, he requested that Isana pull out the Frigate they had acquired from the pirates. Their first plan was to sail to the main northern port town of Wanda to stock up on their travel supplies. Their next destination was the continent of Grandu, to purchase as much metals as possible.
Boarding the frigate, the elves got into their stations one by one. With the 5 mages by their side, and Kiefer, Isana and Sher, the plan was to sell the magic cannons and munitions at the port in exchange for food and necessities. The cannons did not operate on gunpowder, but instead had repulsion runes carved on the inside that reacts with repulsion runes carved on the cannonballs. Kiefer was going to change that.
The legacy that Kiefer left behind in the high elf city included economic reforms, improved education system and advanced agricultural techniques. He did away the copper, silver, gold coin system, and introduced modern coinage systems, using all silver coins with varying imprints. This allowed them to conserve on copper for use in machines, and gold for trading with foreign cities for resources.
The education system now mimicked modern day schools with a revised syllabus to include chemistry, physics, biology and maths as compulsory subjects, with attendance compulsory for anyone above the age of 10.
And lastly, he dug an irrigation canal from the nearby river and from the mountain river leading into the farms, and introduced seasonal cycling of crops to allow the soil to fallow. This would improve the crop yields within the country.
With the sails at full mast, Kiefer cast a wind spell that got the entire frigate moving. Members of the crew were busy taking the cannons out of the munitions bay and securing them to the cargo hold. It was a 3 hour trip to the northern port of Wanda and they arrived without any complications.
As the high elves alighted from the frigate at the docks, all eyes were fixed on them, and the couple that were leading the group. Partly from the awe of the largest ship in the dock, and partly shocked by the hair colour, everyone within the port started speculating the origin of this new arrival.
Common elves in Aioa had light brown or chestnut hair, none ever documented to have shiny blonde hair. Seeing not one, but 50 such elves come into port, everyone was intrigued, yet afraid to approach the group. Keifer located a shipwright that looked prominent and engaged in negotiations, explaining that he wished to sell the cannons and cannonballs.
Seeing his frigate and the way Kiefer carried himself, the shipwright did not dare to swindle him, and offered a price that was a little above market value. Going to the back of his workshop where the treasury was located, Kiefer took this opportunity to take his steel pauldron and waist guards out. Kiefer then offered the 2 pieces of armour as a form of goodwill and as thanks for the good price he had been given.
With a sack of 1200 platinum coins for 12 cannons and munitions, Kiefer handed it to General Alwin who was his first mate and ordered him to buy the necessities for the journey. By nightfall, the port town had grown quiet, with the whole hustle and bustle about the frigate dying down, the ship had been loaded. General Alwin was stringent with the cash, negotiating for every piece of dried meat, vegetable and fruit. They had stocked 3 months’ worth of wood, plenty of lumber, and sufficient tools for the ship. With the munitions bay turned into a cargo hold, the ship was barely even 20% full. They reserved the rest of the space for the metals in Grandu.
The whole crew spent the night on the frigate resting and preparing for the arduous journey ahead of them, trying to make their country flourish and evolve. Kiefer however, spent the night repainting the ship with some paint he had bought out of his pocket. He needed a bold design and colour scheme, one that would attract attention and tell the world that change was coming.
Morning came around, Kiefer, Isana and Sher were enjoying the sunrise over the mountains, high up in the sky. And yet, despite the 2 floating people, port residents were instead focusing their attention on yet another spectacle. A Grand frigate, painted red and gold, with pure white sails and a single high elf runic word Painted in deep black paint – the word for CHANGE.
Kiefer and his 2 companions came back down from the sky behind the crowd while everyone’s attention was on the frigate. As they walked proudly towards their Frigate, Isana suddenly dropped to her knees.
“AAaarrghhhh… this…… pain… won’t… stop…. AAAAHHHHHHH!!!” (Isana)
No sooner had Isana fallen to the ground writhing in agaony, Sher did the same. She did not even have time to return to Kiefer’s breastplate, and dropped out of the air wriggling like a dying earthworm on the paved ground.
“Mas-ter… help… so pain-ful… nooo… stop…” (Sher)
“Wanda… What have… you… done…?!?! AArrrghhh!!” (Isana)
----------------------------------------
Muahahaa, CLIFFHANGER!! at least for a few hours. I apologise for that. Next one will be up soon.
Next Chapter - The titans and the plan