Bakir and his friend retreated from the surface to the back wall of the cave, then proceeded to transmute the stone until they’d burrowed through five feet of it to reach a second chamber. That was a mildly clever bit of protection, enough to turn away a casual attempt at scrying by virtue of nothing but a decently thick layer of solid rock. It wouldn’t stop a divination from piercing through it, but it would hide the fact that there was anything there to scry for in the first place. It was considerably less effective when I was watching them dig their way through, of course.

While they worked on that, I scried out the rest of the cavern. It wasn’t much, just three small rooms joined together by a narrow hallway that had been cut from the stone. One room had been recently unsealed and looked to have a cache of emergency supplies, based on what was missing and the lack of dust in the air. A second room was still closed off and simply held a set of beds.

The third room was the interesting one. It had a junky old teleportation platform, obviously aged even by the Global Order of the Arcane’s standards, and a divination pillar much like the ones Ammun had been using back in his tower. It appeared to be made of glass, though reflective instead of transparent, and lacking the hundred gallons of liquid mana it would take to fill the interior.

Everything was old and obviously hadn’t been used in a long time, which made sense when I considered that there were probably thousands of caches just like this all over the continent. Most of them were never touched, as was often the case with emergency preparations. I’d certainly invested heavily in contingency planning that, best case scenario, would never be needed.

At this point, I was running out of time to make a decision. Either I recaptured Bakir, or I let him escape and followed along behind him. If I had the time to study that teleportation platform and determine how extensive the network was, it would be an easy decision. But for all I knew, all emergency platforms went to the same place, and finding this one got me no closer to my goal.

So I hung back and waited. The two archmages eventually got through the wall and patched it back up, then spent another few minutes dinkering around with the supply cache. When they were done, they pulled all the air out of the room and sealed it back up, then finally went to the teleportation platform.

“Just need to do a bit of scrying to make sure that guy isn’t anywhere near here,” the unknown archmage said. “Wouldn’t want him sensing the mana usage.”

“We should be safe,” Bakir said with a thoughtful frown. “I removed the escape rod that he laced his tracking magic into, but yes, probably best to take a few minutes and do things properly.”

I rolled my eyes and watched the mage put together what was barely an intermediate-tier divination. It was broad and could cover miles in every direction quickly, but it was so weak that I didn’t even have to try to avoid it. My shield ward blocked it all on its own.

“Looks like we’re clear,” the mage said. “Let’s get the platform prepped before that changes.”

Neither noticed me watching them as they worked, but there honestly wasn’t much to see. They sped the process up by collaborating, but the activation ritual was archaic, slow, and needlessly complex. It used as much mana as my own version of teleportation, but took four times longer to cast even with two people, and looked like it had a range cap of about four hundred miles due to some shoddy rune work in the platform instead of the thousand I personally enjoyed.

I frowned as I noticed a potential problem in the rune structure. Unless I was very much mistaken, several hairline cracks had formed in the stone. The spell might still work, but if it failed, that would likely be the cause. It would come down to Bakir and his friend’s ability to hold the magic together when the construct shaping it warped. It was possible they already knew about it, but if that were the case, I would have expected them to repair the platform before they tried to use it.

A soft sigh escaped my lips as the spell failed exactly where I’d expected it to. The two men not only hadn’t known about the damage, but they’d been unable to hold the magic together when they hit the unexpected snag. I supposed I’d see how fast they could figure it out, but my bet was that this was going to take a while.

I’d wanted this to be a sort of day trip, there and back before anyone could miss me. That was seeming less and less likely, to the point where I suspected I’d have to come back to Jeshaem multiple times to finish this up. Thankfully, at stage eight, I could literally be in two places at once. So while I was stuck sitting in the sky, watching two supposed-archmages fumble around trying to fix a cracked rune structure, my shadow went to do something productive.

I chose a spot about twenty miles away, far enough that I wasn’t concerned about anyone feeling the mana usage. Then my shadow transmuted a hole an inch wide straight down about five hundred feet until it was well into the bedrock. Once it had a good spot, it hollowed out a twenty-foot square room, then got started laying the groundwork for the super-long-range teleportation ritual.

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I’d originally used this to make it up to Yulitar when I was chasing after Ammun, but I’d put a bit of time into iterating on the ritual. First and foremost had been reducing it down from something that required several dozen people to just one, which hadn’t been that difficult for me. The participants were mostly there to handle the massive amount of mana the magic required; removing them had lowered the cost to the point where I could afford it myself.

After that, I’d spent a bit of time refining the ritual to take up less space, mostly by cutting off various pieces that I didn’t need. The distance to a moon was significantly farther than going anywhere on Manoch, and apparently, the old cabal that had designed the teleportation had discovered that moving off-planet had its own set of complications to be dealt with.

It was far easier and cheaper to jump a single person three or four thousand miles than it was to teleport to a moon orbiting around the planet. For all that, the ritual needed a lot more work before I’d be able to simply cast it spontaneously like I could with a normal teleportation spell. In its current incarnation, the elaborate ritual room was a necessity, and it could only target one specific spot. If I wanted to teleport somewhere else, I’d need to alter the ritual circle or build a new room.

Having an intercontinental teleportation platform would probably be worth a day of effort, but I was only carving out the ritual chamber now because I had nothing else to do with my time. It was either find something constructive, or watch Bakir and his friend try to figure out the problem with their device’s rune structure.

Sadly, with my shadow doing all the work, I had plenty of time to do both.

By the time they finally located and fixed the problem, my ritual chamber was set up deep underground. It boasted hardened steel walls, self-sustaining light, air filtration and temperature controlling enchantments, and a mana bank that would keep everything online for about a century, or, more realistically, enough mana for one long-range teleport.

Meanwhile, Bakir had spiraled more and more, often muttering to himself and stopping to cast additional scrying spells a few times an hour. His partner grew annoyed with him quickly enough, to the point where I thought I might have wasted my time waiting for them to finish when the whole project got shoved aside so that they could have a lengthy and loud argument.

Eventually, though, my patience was rewarded. They got the platform working, charged it up, and teleported away. I swooped in immediately, an empowered phantasmal step getting me through the wall they’d put up and allowing me access to their secret bunker. I’d already explored everything else with my own divinations, but I hadn’t dared to examine the enchantments on the platform, not with two archmages actively working on it.

My visual examination of the runes was already complete, so I dove right into deciphering the mana locks that prevented casual access to the platform. That took a few minutes to break, at which point the entire network unfolded before me. There were hundreds of these platforms all linked together throughout the continent, usually no more than a few hundred miles away from the next one. That included no less than three of them near my current location, so close that it would have been faster for Bakir to fly to a new location and use that platform rather than to fix this one.

He must have feared I’d spot him if he left the bunker, which was a reasonable concern when accounting for the fact that he was unaware I’d been watching him the whole time. It had made for a tedious afternoon for me, but I’d got what I wanted in the end.

With their network broken into, I now had locations all over the continent I could teleport to whenever I wanted. The difficult part now was figuring out where exactly I needed to go. I could chase Bakir—I knew which location they’d chosen—and ask him some pointed questions, but I had my suspicions that he’d be reporting to his superiors and probably be taken to where I wanted to go.

There was every chance he’d be debriefed remotely, of course, but I still considered him a better source of information if he didn’t know I was watching him. If tracing his movements didn’t work out, I could always catch up with him later. I doubted any of his colleagues were going to notice the scrying beacon I’d placed on him, not unless they were familiar with my spells.

For the time being, I was ready to start exploring. I could use the beacons built into the teleportation platforms as guidance points and appear nearby, much like I’d done with my last jump in the chain to Jeshaem itself, so I started with the spot Bakir had fled to. A few minutes later, I appeared a mile up in the air, still invisible and as undetectable as I could make myself to divinations.

The platform was somewhere in an immense city below me, hidden away in one of the hundreds of thousands of buildings. I could feel the beacon in my mind, probably underground in a cellar or basement. Bakir was also down there, a quarter mile west of the teleportation platform and stationary. He was behind far more sophisticated wards now, ones that were sensitive enough to prevent me from spying on him directly.

That was fine. There was plenty of city that wasn’t warded at all, and my immediate goal was to gain some familiarity with this continent’s geography. It wasn’t hard to find a few libraries or archives, though it did take me a minute to decipher the local language. It was similar to Enotian, but had diverged in a few meaningful ways. There were a number of terms I was unfamiliar with, but I picked most of them up from context and applied that new understanding to street signs and business advertisements.

The real treasure trove was some sort of shop that had large maps under warded and magically-reinforced glass. It looked like the shop sold copies of the map for what appeared to be a significant amount of money, but I didn’t need my own copy. Simply reviewing the maps would be enough for my purposes. I was looking for a specific city anyway.

Unfortunately, before I could find Ibasha, Bakir returned to the teleportation platform and disappeared again. With a twinge of annoyance, I finished looking over the map I’d been examining remotely and began teleporting myself after the archmage. Hopefully, he was heading to somewhere important, else I was wasting my time following him.