Magna had decided not to begin his new expedition right away. Instead, after studying magical and alchemy, he took the time to let it all sink in again. He wanted to make this day a further preparation.
Relaxing can be an essential part. Jumping from one tension to the next, with an uncertain outcome before your eyes, could be very detrimental to your mind and the decisions you made.
So he used this day on the one hand to check his equipment, to go through it, to stow everything useful or valuable in his attic, to groom himself and to relax. Part of it was to come up with a rough plan. One of the things he always preferred was rough plans because there was no point thinking through everything. You could go through countless possibilities, but in the end every plan failed because of reality.
Some would have called it Murphy's Law, others a law of nature, for him it was just his life experience 30% planning, 30% preparing, 30% improvising and 10% luck. Adjustment! That was the keyword, because the one who could best adapt to a situation survived. Maybe it was all improvisation too?
He started his morning with his usual washing, like cleaning routine, this time running his hands unsatisfied through the hair that had grown back. They grew back faster. For a long moment he stared at the wall, which had no mirror. It was still strange for him not to be at home anymore, whether they missed him. Was his sister thinking of him? What would she say if she saw him like that? The long hair almost made him nostalgic. His black hair had long since overtaken his shoulders, so he used an animal tendon and simply tied it back. He grabbed the ribbon with one hand and cut the dagger through his hair in the other, causing a short haircut to fall back on his head. Still a little too long for his liking, but it had to be enough.
Long hair was beautiful, even as a man, but it always harbored the risk of blocking your view at the worst. It would have been incredibly stupid to die for this reason, wouldn't it?
Magna: "Not better than when I parted my metal mane, but the long hair was incredibly annoying when I slept."puzzled
Leica simply looked up at him,why her partner was causing such a drama about her hair. Didn't you just have fur? Leica had fur! And she could do great things with it.
The rest of the morning he had breakfast with Leica outside in the forecourt with a view of the forest. So far the occasional fish had been the only change, apart from a few edible mushrooms. Although he was always very fond of mushrooms, a meat substitute as a supplement to meat somehow seemed to make sense to him, which is why he simply stuck to dried meat. Besides, once you got used to it, it wasn't that terrible anymore. As always, Leica chewed on a large piece that it kept fresh in its attic. This memory was already a huge improvement in the general quality of life.
The afternoon practically flew by as he went through his gear for the day ahead. For almost everything that could be done with magic, he always wanted an analog alternative. A few ropes, his hunting knife, the dagger, food, water in some clay pots that counted several metric gallons. Most of it he stored in his magical storage, especially the gallons, but also some in his backpack. Damn it, he even stored some perfectly cut slabs of rock that were 1m by 1m square cubes. Because there was the right tool for everything! And he wasn't a man to miss when his life might be at stake. You could only improvise if you had the means.
In addition, he was still training, with increasing success, to make things appear directly from the memory in his hand, again in the memory or even in other areas of his body. He achieved his greatest victory at the moment when he managed to put on and take off a substantial part of his equipment via the attic.
One of the things he materialized in his hands was small metal needles, some of which he always wore on his body armor. With his telekinesis he had also used the last few weeks to let the few metal needles float next to him again and again. Fine-tune them using them to turn pages or do other things with them.
After sorting his resources, storing them, cleaning, greasing and getting his equipment ready, he started thinking about what to do for the next day.
He had various options. On the one hand, he could take the stairs in the rock directly from his house to just below the plateau, but that posed the risk of revealing his home if he retreated. He could also visit the newly discovered waterfall and work his way up from there, but if he retreated there he would also have the deeper parts of the forest behind him. Maybe he had to flee into the forest? No. It remained an option, but he also wanted to understand the size of the plateau. So he should first walk in the opposite direction around the plateau until he came across a new waterfall in the lighter area or previously decided to create a staircase over the rock. Some of the blood willows certainly lived in the lighter parts, but at least they would avoid the other creatures on contact.
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He would create the stairs like his spiral staircase inside the rock, if he broke through at the top, he would first build a bunker of solid stone there, which could always serve as a retreat.
Maybe he should create more safety points in his exploration? It was worth considering, but it depended on what was on the plateau. It was best to let Leica work as a scout. She could hide so much better than him. Despite the fact that with her growing stats she was also on the rise and already towering over them, it was still terrifying how good she was at not being seen.
It was also very likely that he would spontaneously change his mind when his gut feeling told him that the poop was starting to steam. Having a good gut feeling could save your ass in many situations, but it could also be deceiving. Sometimes there was only the way forward.
So the rough plan was to move around the plateau in an unknown direction. To create a flight of stairs in the rock. Install an escape tunnel and separate rooms next to the stairs and, if necessary, a small stone bunker on top of the plateau or an exit just below the plateau in order to reach the top via an external staircase. The former was safer and the latter more secretive! Really, he had mixed feelings about leaving his den, but on the other hand he didn't feel safe in it as long as he didn't know if there was any danger above him.
To shake off the tension, thoughts and everything else that could bother him, he ended the day with an open-air bath in his hot spring.
The next morning, the two of them woke up quite early with the first rising of the sun and made their way across the river along the wall. Here too it took quite a while, but the exploration had a different flair from the beginning. Leica always peered a short distance ahead, seeming to be moving close to the edge of the forest. They made soil quite quickly with it, but always lost some time as he mapped the nearby forest and the blood willows in it, leaving some marks on trees to mark some safe areas. If they still had to go into the forest, he didn't necessarily want to step into one of those tree traps.
However, due to the lengthy procedure, they were forced to take a night's rest. At ground level he cut a room in the rock with his stone formation, equipped with a few patterns that he knew by heart, but always had with him as a template, the room had
a collecting circle, a pattern for light and a new pattern for ventilation that targeted air from outside through small tunnels.
This place of retreat was anything but comfortable, but rather resembled a small protective bunker that could hardly be seen from the outside. This bunker took up a single room. A couple of skins for the night and a small snack. Always consuming enough food as you needed, but rationing was part of a sensible safeguard. Rooms like this could be used again and again.
The next day they continued their way around the plateau. Even when they moved more slowly and the walk itself was uneventful, he'd always preferred boredom to stepping into the next pile of steaming shit. The forest around them also became less and less smaller, as well as lighter, which let more sun through the canopy of leaves. Presumably the blood pastures in these areas were weaker because they did not have the same prey? Well, he wasn't ready to test it anyway. For this exploration, the first thing to do was to avoid any unnecessary struggle.
The grass got a little higher and higher and soon it was up to his waist. A circumstance that he didn't particularly appreciate. While it lowered his presence, it also hid possible dangers that lurked in it. The more frequent occurrence of the sun allowed the grass to grow taller. In his area it was always quite low, because the gigantic trees or the rocks cast a shadow on them.
It didn't take much longer before their expedition came to a standstill and everything was thrown overboard. Leica sent him an image directly through the connection, which it had seen.
This image made him stop on the spot and call her back to him. Immediately he began to turn to the rock. There he cut out a room before Leica could arrive. Even before he closed the room, Leica shot through the still open wall into the room. In fact, he was grateful for the tall grass outside, because with this picture his whole plan was overturned. Leica's discovery called for a completely different course of action, as he had to decide whether to look around or whether to turn around and climb the plateau from the other direction.
Of course he was also afraid of this encounter, but he could always escape in the forest if things didn't go as he thought they would.
After the room was completed, he turned to Leica. This place should become the final point of retreat. Regardless of which route he would have taken, he had to expand this space further. On the first floor he had created a tunnel that ended in a new room that could serve as a secondary exit.
To be on the safe side, he added a few more simple rooms and finally began sculpting the spiral staircase up in the rock. In the end, he decided not to pull them all up, but to build different rooms on different floors. Always a few meters of stairs, then an arrival in a new room. A side corridor, a new room, a new climb.
If he withdrew from the plateau very quickly, whatever was following him couldn't rush right after him. The rooms were mostly supported by a single column and were laid out in such a way that if he destroyed the column, the rooms would collapse.
A multi-story chase also provided a better area for a fight, should one come. Shortly before he reached the plateau, he paused and first regained all of his mana with a meditation. Although the breakthrough was imminent, he decided to meditate for the second, much more secret, variant.
The darkness should hide his project perfectly. A narrow passage led to the outer wall of the plateau just below the cliff. On the side of the wall he began to create a normal narrow staircase upwards with a small gap to the outside. From there he could walk straight out on the wall of the plateau.
With this view he closed the stairs and made his way back to the first floor, where Leica was still waiting for him. As soon as they had left the room, he crouched down to smear some of the dirt on his face.
Then he checked his equipment to make sure that everything was in place and that none of it made a noise. For this purpose he jumped up and down a few times, after the test of his volume he began to use the dirt for everything that was able to shine on his equipment.
While he was preparing, some lessons from his military service were reflected in his mind. Together with Leica, he soon sneaked up to what Leica saw at the edge of the forest, in the shade of the trees and in the dark. The picture he got of their connection wasn't perfect and he couldn't make out much of it, but he still wanted to be sure.
Night had only just begun, as with the autumn that came the nights were getting longer, which was only added to his advantage. His mana eyes peered through the darkness as if it was still broad daylight.
Only a few hours later he could make out what she was seeing from a distance.