My mind ran wild with how to make sure the thread survived the scalding heat of the tempering oven. It was no joke. Adamantite was immune to heat because it was baked at temperatures that would make lava boil. Figuratively speaking. But making a living blade wasn't that useful, despite the coolness factor. I already had a kickass weapon, and then a score of ass-kicking weapons sprouting from my very ass. Not to mention claws, fangs, poison fangs… no, wait. I no longer had poisoned fangs. The Perk was consumed by some fusion or sacrificed in one of my many suicides.

I did a few experiments with throwaway enchantments. Could long-term exposure to Adamantite disenchant an item or just drain it. If the latter, how fast? Did it depend on the surface contact, the mass of the Adamantite object, etc? I set them aside and would come back to check every half-hour. I would love to keep tinkering with Adamantite now that I knew I had to think out of the box and play to the fantastic material's strengths. But I had another, more important job. I needed to set the teleportation Systems between here and the surface or people would still depend on me to go back and forth.

I started with a long and thick bar of copper. I heated the copper bar and started to bend it slowly, to make sure it wouldn't break. I needed to make an arch and this two-and-a-half meter long bar was half of it. Once the top was in a perfect quarter-circle, I did the same on the other side and welded a cross-bar along the bottom. Another visit to the forge to heat and I smoothed the welds and hammered out any flaws in the metal. I made four such frames.

The next step required my enchanted inscriber. I painstakingly went over the sides of the portal, engraving a long, long sequence of runes along both sides. Each rune was currently worth only 4 enchantment points but the gains to my Proficiency were inestimable. With one portal done, I set it in an electrolytic (Lightning magic, doh) bath to plate it with gold while I worked on the next one. The difficulty here was to get the runes exactly like the previous one. The symmetry must be absolute. Once that was done, into the gold bath, it went.

I took two huge emeralds we found in the crystal stalactites. With a thought, the table in front of me shifted and it now had gem cutting and polishing tools. The emeralds received a leaf cut, one that was complicated but perfectly matched the purpose of enchanting it with {Tree Stride}. I also cut the shards into smaller leaves, then ground the rest into emerald dust for later use. I wasted not a single spec of the gemstones.

The crane lifted the massive golden portals out of the bath and I inspected the plating for any flaws. Applying gold leaf to the electrode's point of contact and the flaws, I polished it until the leaf smoothed and merged with the rest of the plating seamlessly. I added the gemstones to the proper place, the big leaves at the crown of the portal, and the smaller ones symmetrically.

I checked the enchantment points. Still not enough. Replicating a Perk was too damn expensive, even with all the restrictions I'd put. The worst part was the requirement to clear twelve kilometers of distance. I needed to emulate a Magic Attribute of 120. Sighing, I worked on more leaf-shaped cut Magic Cores and installed them in the frames. The limitations I added were teleportation only between the two trees with the matching door frames, only between the places of their first installation (so nobody could steal them and use them elsewhere) and only if activated with a prayer by a priest of either Bit or the Matriarch brought the enchantment cost back to within reason.

Once finished, I cut my forearm and let my blood run on the frame. I wouldn't pay the exorbitant Exp cost to enchant these babies, at least not with Exp. I could replace each point of Exp by bleeding the equivalent of 131 HP. Regenerating 5M HP each second, I just needed to wait until the full cost had been paid. Which was around two hours for each portal because I needed transportation both ways. I could make a {Fairy Portal} enchantment for way cheaper instead but it required a fairy ring, which in turn required a virgin forest. One can see the problem of installing one of these inside a major city. {Tree Stride} only required two trees.

I wasn't done with magical doors yet, though. I also made another set of door frames, this one weaker with only five kilometers of range (the minimum), to link my storefront to my floating island. More on this second set later. With the four frames ready, I prepared to put the one in the Dungeon City first. Giving people a way to escape this cavern was more important than a way to come down here. I went to the central square of the underground settlement. The place for the tree was already set aside, right in front of the conjoined churches to me and Bit. Using {Granary's Gatekeeper}, a Perk clearly inspired by a certain shrine in Kyoto, I created a bunch of seeds of the Australian rusty fig. It was a sturdy evergreen that could grow even on rock outcroppings.

Before I started to work, I raised several wards around the spot. They would block divination magic, sight, sound, vibrations, and magical emanations. At my level of Proficiency, few other casters could get through them without my knowledge, if any. I filled the hole with a mixture of dirt, gravel, and fertilizer, with a few rune-engraved stones for generating heat, air, and water in small quantities. Combined with the enchanted Light sources on the roof, the tree would have everything it needed to prosper.

I planted one such seed and started to sing the {Elven Spell-Song}. Weaving Plant magic into the song, the seed absorbed my Energy and sprouted. I kept singing as I guided the tree to rise. This tree had a buttressed trunk and liked to fork early but I kept it straight and long, only allowing the trunk to branch out once it was above the roofs of the other houses around the lot. The front of the trunk was molded in the perfect shape to hold the metal frame I built. I took it out of the item box and placed the runed door frame in place, letting the wood wrap around and cover it. A small alcove in the rough shape of a door was left in the front of the tree. Unless you knew what to look for, the enchanted metal frame would be impossible to spot.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

As the tree towered twenty meters above the square, the branches grew their characteristic rusty green leaves and aerial roots. An hour later when it finally reached its limit, the majestic tree looked a couple centuries old and towered more than thirty meters over the nearby houses, with a gnarled trunk almost three meters wide. It seemed to be composed of several trunks conjoined. But I wasn't finished.

Now that the tree was fully grown and healthy, I added a short circular wall five meters around it. People could come, sit on this wall, and rest underneath the tree branches, which with the light at full power looked a bit like the surface. An opening two meters long allowed people to walk to the portal without needing to step over the wall. I enchanted this wall with an anti-theft enchantment. Any person attempting to harm the tree would receive a dose of deathberry sap and be paralyzed for as long as it took for them to die. The wall would also ring an alarm and glow, breaking almost any stealth ability and alerting the guards that something nasty was going on.

The enchantment wouldn't work yet because there was no tree on the surface. Time to rectify this.

I went back up by crossing through the Ethereal. In these months, the area around the grand cathedral, officially inside the Academy grounds and embedded in the institution's walls, changed. Some houses were demolished and a plaza took their place to accommodate the traffic of supplicants visiting the temples inside the cathedral complex. Unfortunately, Matriarch and Bit came late to the party and had no room in the complex so we took two large plots of land across the plaza to make the two temples. I suspected other deities would want a piece of the action too so the land around the plaza was a property of the crown. Right now we had buildings on lease for some business but the crown (and soon parliament) could evict those and build something else in place.

Between the two new temples, I left room for another rusty fig. Repeating the same process, I grew another tree with the portal embedded. I guided the roots to avoid damaging the foundations of the nearby buildings. This one's trunk towered twenty-five meters before branching out. I also added more heating stones to the soil mix, because the rusty fig liked warm climates and while winter in Windemere was relatively calm because of the mountains shielding the valley on three sides, it was still cold, freezing on some bad days when the cold oceanic wind from the Uroko gulf decided to come here for a swirl and got trapped.

Time to test it. I touched the tree and charged the enchantment. It had its own MP generation but the cost to transport was big. Unless it was used sporadically, the priests would need to charge it, and also charge a fee from the people using it for transportation. This way the two temples had another source of income. Since it was very profitable down there, I didn't expect much trouble with that but most people loathed to part with their money. Once charged, I walked into the alcove and felt the magic move me to the underground tree. The return trip was the same.

Good. Now I could start building my house. The second set of metallic portal frames were set to only 50 magic, the minimum for the Ability. That reduced the number of Points required by a factor of six, which let me remove one of the limitations on the “away” frame, the one that would go on my floating island. The portal on the ground could send people only up to the island, but the portal on the island could be attuned to one of several on the ground. This way I could take the floating island out on a trip whenever I wanted to.

Now that I was both the local Goddess and the [Queen]'s lover, it was easy to buy the right place, especially when I offered to pay double the market value. Three blocks to the east of the Adventurer's guild. Seventeen blocks to the west of the hill with the Lamia fortress, Duchess Nagini's stronghold. The city grew west until it crowded around the lamia fortress' walls. Without a building code, some even attempted to make their houses leaning on the walls but the lamias quickly demolished the offenders. What was the purpose of a wall if an easily climbable house was right next to it? Yes, people with high proficiencies could climb smooth walls easily too, but these were powerful enough to ignore walls with a myriad of other methods.

I started working at night. First I covered the whole lot in an illusion and a soundproof barrier. Then I snapped a finger and the house vanished, basement and all. A hemisphere of Force to cut a building this size off the planet required no fancy rituals. Before I let the spell fade, I checked the structural integrity of the nearby foundations with Earth magic. I reinforced some cracks and melded patches of gravel into solid bedrock. I also changed some of the mortar of the cobblestones next to the street gutter into porous pumice, creating channels that would bring rain and other runoff fluids to feed the roots of the tree. I focused the song away from the tree on the ground around it, growing grass and fixing the soil in place. A few flower shrubs sprouted here and there and I wove them into an elaborate living fence one meter tall.

I finished with a shorter stone fence around the lot with a stone arch and a wrought iron gate with the Matriarch's holy symbol in the middle of each door. Two enchanted quartz crystals embedded in the sides of the arch would illuminate the entrance at night. Opening the gate, I set round slate stones making a path to the portal. As a finishing touch, I placed three iron benches along the path, with a small stone table next to them. Next to a corner, I placed a small fountain, engraved and enchanted to summon, pour, and cycle water forever. If people took water from the basin, it would fill back to its limit but not overflow. I turned around to admire my work. It looked like a tiny park. I did some changes here and there, adding or removing flowers from the bushes, and adding anti-theft enchantments. Unlike the one on the underground, this would only make noise, lights, and freeze the would-be thieves.