The next morning, a niggling sensation in my mind prompted me to pull out my scrying mirror. I was expecting someone from New Alkerist, probably my family since the transmission stones should have projected the user’s voice directly into my thoughts, but it turned out to be Querit.

He beamed at me through the mirror’s surface after I finished the connection to allow him to see me. “I have excellent news!”

“How excellent are we talking?” I asked.

“My latest test results show about a thirty percent reduction in mana expenditure for all enchantments,” he announced. That was good news, but not necessarily something I could act on. Before I could say anything, he continued speaking. “Additionally, I’d put together a little cluster of runes you can simply integrate into currently-existing enchantments to recycle about ten percent of the mana they use. So far, I haven’t found an enchantment too complicated to modify this way.”

The enchants around my demesne used an enormous amount of mana. Even getting back just a tenth of that would be a huge boon. If Querit was right, it would be well worth taking a day to update everything. “What about inscriptions?” I asked, excited now too.

“Very little progress to speak of, unfortunately. And I probably won’t ever have anything like this enchantment cluster, given the nature of physical mediums.”

That made perfect sense to me. All too often, an inscribed object used all the available space to achieve its function. If there was extra space leftover, that just meant the next version could be smaller, or have additional functionality added to it. My own inscriptions had undergone so many rounds of refinement over the centuries that there was no way to add additional runes to them without reworking the entire design.

“Probably true. Still… it’s unfortunate. Those defense pillars I scavenged from Derro are fantastic at their job, but they demand so much mana that I just can’t afford to use them to their full potential.”

“Those are too delicate to modify,” Querit said. “Then again, I suppose you already did exactly that already. Perhaps if I can come up with a version of the rune clusters that work when physically carved into an object, we can find a way to modify them. It would have to be a secondary object connected to the pillars in some way since there’s no room otherwise.”

Connecting two objects with their own inscriptions was always a difficult procedure, and for something as complicated as the mysteel pillars with all their internal layers of additional runes, I had my doubts that it could work. That whole system was incredibly delicate.

“You should focus on the enchanting modifications first,” I said. “Even a ten percent savings is huge, but if you can get that higher, it might solve our mana problems completely. We could forget about salvaging the moon core from under Derro.”

Though I’d probably still try to do that anyway, it wouldn’t be a priority anymore. Once I got to stage seven, I would only need a week or so to reach stage eight, then stage nine was all about technique and skill. It was just this one last resource hurdle between my current state and regaining all my former power.

“Maybe you should come review what I’ve come up with,” Querit suggested.

“I have a lot to take care of preparing for the next assault,” I said.

“Yes, but, well… You’re applying this technique to master-tier spells now. It’s possible that an hour of your time could save me weeks of experimentation and research.”

He wasn’t wrong, but I hadn’t been lying, either. I had about two days before I was due to reclaim every teleportation platform on the island, and I needed a full day to build the shelter I’d be placing under New Alkerist’s school and scry out a fallback location for the teleportation contingency to transport everyone too. That location would also need at least some wards to keep it secure and the children who ended up there alive.

Still… if that hour of time resulted in even a five percent increase in efficiency, it would be worth it. I wanted all the gains I could reasonably expect from this line of research before I started updating the valley’s enchantments, that way I didn’t have to do them a second time.

“Fine, you’re right. I’ll be right there,” I said.

* * *

Querit’s solution was rather simple. He’d essentially created a set of runes that ‘fuzzed’ the lines of the enchantment in the same way we did it manually. The problem was that it couldn’t interpret the feedback, so the mana it recycled back into itself was more or less grabbed at random.

One hour of work turned into sixteen, which I honestly should have known better than to let happen. But I’d always been a researcher first. Handing this project off to someone else hadn’t been a desire to offload the work, but a necessity born of my lack of time. And Querit had been completely right. I did have a lot of insights into what he was trying to do. Our collaborative effort had paid dividends.

We’d refined the rune cluster he’d pioneered down to half its original size and increased its efficacy another twenty percent. I was convinced that we’d plucked all the low-hanging fruit in this project, but Querit wanted another day to work on it before we started upgrading anything. He had a few ideas he wanted to try out, and since I was now entirely behind on my own workload, I was happy for the excuse to delay servicing any of the many, many enchantments I’d placed on my home.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I idly scried my vat back beneath Derro while I mentally reorganized my schedule. The orbs moved around as the worms burrowed and scavenged, but my idea to drop them at a significantly lower depth seemed to be working. There were six of them all near the same location now, and two other ones traveling on paths that could have conceivably taken them near it.

Now why would so many of them be in one spot? Was there something down there worth eating, or was that where they retreated to rest? I shifted the focus of my scrying spell from my vat to the actual beacons themselves, which resulted in nothing but darkness coming back to me despite the modifiers to allow the spell to amplify any little scrap of light. The worms were truly deep underground if I got absolutely nothing from the spell.

No matter. I had other ways to go about solving this problem. A few seconds later, the spell shifted to give me feedback more akin to how earth sense functioned, which limited my range, but also let me feel out everything in every direction around me.

And what I felt was worms, worms, and more worms. They squirmed around each other, surprisingly placid for carnivorous monsters. I supposed they didn’t eat their own kind, which was actually not that surprising. Cannibalism seemed like it should run rampant in monsters, and in some species, it did, but the majority of them didn’t go after their own kind – not as food, at least.

I swept the spell’s sensory array around me and made my next big discovery – ‘big’ being the operative word. Apparently, the worms I’d been dealing with up near the surface were the smallest, youngest, and weakest of the bunch. Despite Querit’s surprise at their size, they had nothing on the other worms down there. Some of those monsters were over fifty feet long and five or six feet thick!

I felt a grin stretch across my lips. Monsters that size needed a lot of mana to survive. With that many of them down there, they had to have an abundant source of food. I just needed to go digging and find it.

The grin faded. I needed to find the time to go digging first. Where did this expedition, no matter how likely it was to pay off, fall on my list of priorities? It was certainly behind keeping my family safe, which meant I still needed to collect the teleportation platforms, and it was probably behind building a shelter for the children of New Alkerist. But everything else? That could wait a day or two.

Priorities reshuffled, I started gathering the supplies I needed while I scoured the mountains for a private retreat I could shape to fit my needs.

* * *

“I admit, I wasn’t expecting to see you until tomorrow,” Councilman Lishav said.

“The safety of the children was a priority to me,” I told him. “I wanted to make sure I got this job done before events outpaced me. Can you show me to the room you want to use for your shelter?”

We were standing in his office on the third floor of what had become the largest building in town. I wasn’t actually sure who’d built it other than that I’d personally had no hand in its construction. The school I’d built had been two stories, four rooms on each floor, and was on the other side of town. They’d apparently outgrown it and somehow built this monstrosity, which I was doing my best not to cringe over as I examined it.

It wasn’t their fault. They rarely built anything more than a single story high. There was so much space that it wasn’t necessary to build up instead of out in most situations. But here, they’d established their fields, and New Alkerist had quickly grown beyond their initial expectations. And so, people who had no idea what they were doing had built a clunky box with walls that were way too thick on the assumption that that would keep things from falling over.

Admittedly, it wasn’t the worst construction idea I’d ever seen, but when this was all over, the school needed to be rebuilt in a way that made it far, far less likely it would collapse on itself, killing several dozen small children in the process.

I followed Lishav down to the basement, which was divided into two rooms. At least they’d gotten a proper supporting wall running the length of the school and some evenly-spaced pillars, though it was more the thickness of them than the placement that was keeping the basement from filling in with the rubble of the building above it.

“We moved all the supplies in storage to the back room,” Lishav explained. “It seemed easier to only have to organize getting everyone down the stairs rather than have them spread across two rooms.”

“Sound logic,” I said, trying to make it sound like every part of this school didn’t strike me as ill-conceived. “I’ll get started laying down some wards. This place will have its own mana battery you’ll want to keep fully charged. I won’t be using a ward stone so as to avoid drawing attention to the non-detection wards that will help hide the shelter.”

“Wouldn’t that risk weakening the wards without an adequate source of mana?” Lishav asked.

And this guy was the dean, or headmaster, or whatever, of the school. I made a mental note to take a more active hand in the magical education of New Alkerist once I was done dealing with Ammun. If this place was going to be the center of magical culture in the new world, its standards needed to go way up.

“No, a ward stone doesn’t provide a stronger source of mana. It just provides structure so that the wards can be powered by anyone who pours mana into them and makes them impossible to attack individually. They’re great for quick activation, but they don’t do anything that a set of enchantment wards can’t replicate. The big drawback is that the wards are always active this way, and if the mana runs out completely, they’ll break and need to be rebuilt, but this is only meant for a single use if and when the town is attacked, so it’s fine.”

“I see,” Lishav said. “But what about—”

“I don’t mind answering questions, but I do need to get started,” I said. “As long as you can keep out of my way, feel free to hang around.”

“Of course, of course. Just tell me where I should stand,” the councilman agreed.

“Right there is fine. I’ll answer your questions when I can, but I won’t be able to stand here and hold a conversation.”

Now that the ground rules were laid down, I started moving around the room and anchoring the enchantments to various spots while explaining the methodology behind my work in as simple of terms as I could. Lishav peppered me with questions, so many that I briefly wondered if he was any relation to a woman named Shel from Old Alkerist who used to do the same thing.

I got the work done in a few hours while he watched, which actually ended up working out well for me since it meant I could explain the defenses and his part in them in real time as I set them up. Finally, the wards were set and I departed back to my home.

I had some worm hunting to prepare for.