The meeting with the baroness concluded not long after, though she promised to have the land contract to him no later than the next morning. After she departed, he returned to his house and made his way to the room that had been intended for the Ley Line Tap.
He walked in to find BR hunched over the marble block, carefully etching away at the surface with a metal stylus.
“Almost done outlining,” the gnome said, clearly having heard John coming.
“That’s good,” John said. “Would it disrupt the enchantment if we moved the tap further down the Ley Line?”
“Hm? Maybe, maybe not. Why?” BR asked as he paused to look at John.
“I’m moving my farm further out,” John explained.
“Ah, I guess that makes sense what with this becoming more of a trade center than a rural farming area,” BR replied. “How are you going to move the tap? It can’t have been easy to get it down here in the first place.”
“It wasn’t. I had to basically carry it on a wave of moving earth.”
“Well, I guess if you’re going to move it, you should do so now, before I do any actual cutting. How long do you think it’s going to take you to get it to the new site?”
“Call it an hour,” John replied. “Half to get it there and half to build an appropriate room for it.”
“Alright, I guess I’ll go back to practicing,” BR said.
“Sure. Oh, uh…” John paused, unsure how to broach the subject of payment. He didn’t want to alienate BambooRooster but he also didn’t want to be taken advantage of.
BR looked at him questioningly and John realized he was going to have to say something.
“So, I talked with the baroness earlier,” he started, finally, “and she says our view of currency has been warped by the prices of the Auction, and now that I think about it that probably extends to the artificial scarcity in the area, anyway. I’m still going to pay you what we agreed, but we should probably figure out what the rest of the empire would charge going forward.”
The gnome looked at him for a few moments with a vaguely annoyed facial expression. “Alright, that’s probably fair,” he said after a further few seconds of thought, and John gave an internal sigh of relief. “Alright, I’ll be in the workroom when you need me.”
John watched the other player leave and then turned his attention back to the imbued marble. Getting it out was going to be a pain; specifically getting it up the stairs. “Best get moving I guess…” he muttered to himself. Then, with a gesture, he created stone rollers once more.
Getting it down the hallway was a slow process, but nothing compared to getting up the stairs. In the end he resorted to using magic on it directly. At eighty mana per second he could only lift it for fourteen seconds at a time, meaning he lifted it up one stair, rested to regain mana, and then repeated until he reached the top.
He quickly got it out of the house and to the gate of the farm, but there he ran into another problem; he didn’t want to use move earth on the road as he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t ruin its quality rating. With a sigh, he resigned himself to walking along-side the road instead. At least that was still on his claim and thus inside his domain.
He was perhaps halfway to the shrine when he saw Knight Elenia come out of the compound and walk down the road toward him.
“Mister John, what are you doing with a giant block of marble?” She inquired as she walked up.
“Taking it to my new farm location,” he replied, even as he rested to regenerate mana.
“New farm location?” she asked, looking vaguely concerned. “You’re moving your farm?”
“Yeah, there’s too much going on in this area, and I have to keep the chookers locked up, so the Baroness suggested I might want to move it, and I agreed,” John said.
Elenia, contrary to her usual easy-going personality, gave him a slightly pained look. “John, we may not be obligated to protect you, but you’re not an unimportant nobody. How are we supposed to know where to go to help you if you don’t tell us things like this?”
John paused and looked at her. He really hadn’t considered that he’d be moving further away from the Knights and thus safety, but he should have. “Sorry,” he replied finally. “I didn’t think about it. Now I’m not really sure what to do…”
“Probably finish your move. The Commander will probably want to station some Knights out wherever you are to prevent more incidents. Given we can’t claim any more land, and figuring out land prices is going to take a few weeks, you might consider setting aside some land they can use to build accommodations, at least in the short term,” the normally cheery halfling suggested.
John nodded. “I can do that.”
“Good, now, can I ask what the block is actually for?” she inquired.
“It’s going to be a Ley Line Tap,” John explained.
Elenia frowned briefly and then focused on the block. “Oh! It’s imbued; I guess that explains why you were having such a hard time with it; Great quality too, not bad. Who’s doing the Enchanting?”
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“BambooRooster, he’s one of the people who completed the trials and got a lot of Enchanting material.”
“You know there are knights who know Enchanting right?” she asked.
“I do but… you know how it was before you got promoted and the new knights showed up. And now I’ve already agreed to work with him, so I’d feel bad backing out,” John admitted.
“That’s fair. Maybe just have someone else look it over before you turn it on? Taps and Wells can be dangerous if enchanted wrong. While the guilds make it hard for anyone to learn certain trades, there was originally a reason for the master-apprentice relationship. Just because you have the theoretical knowledge you need doesn’t mean you have the requisite skill, and the system will only give you so much insight,” Elenia explained.
“That makes sense I guess,” he admitted. “Who do I talk to about Enchanting then?”
“Knight Fornweth is one of the three enchanters we currently have, and probably the most approachable. I’ll let him know you’ll be wanting to talk with him about the tap, and then you can drop by and ask for him when it’s done. Sound like a plan?” the halfling asked.
“Yeah, that sounds pretty good,” John agreed.
“Great, now why don’t we get this block moved and you can show me where your new farm is.”
John nodded, and then began moving the stone again.
—
John closed the portal right after Knight Elenia had finished passing through. Casting the spell and shifting the block through had cost pretty much his entire mana pool. The halfling woman looked around the walled in, barren earth patch with a critical eye.
“How much of this is your domain already?” she wondered aloud.
“Mostly just the walled area. I found that I can make it part of my domain by altering the landscape, so it went pretty quickly. Still not sure why that works. It seems like I should have to flood the land with my mana to make it mine,” John explained.
Elenia shook her head. “The land already has mana in it, so do most things, for that matter. All you need to do is align that mana with yourself. By changing the landscape you’re impressing your will on it, so the mana is altered in your favor. There are other ways to do this, the easiest of which is probably to use Mana Drawing to pull the land’s mana into your pool and then return it.”
“Wait, how do I do that?” John asked.
“It’s a simple alteration to the basic pattern, but you shouldn’t try it before Journeyman rank. Basically, you extend the loop outside of your body into whatever you’re trying to draw mana out of. Word of warning though, don’t try that with the Ley Line; they tend to push their mana into whatever tries to pull from them, and that usually ends explosively,” the young knight explained.
John paused for a minute while he did some quick mental calculations. With mana drawing John could pull in five-point-six mana per second, and theoretically expel that much back into the land. If it took one mana per square foot, he could saturate a little more than five and a half square feet per second. With that speed it’d be… what? Two hundred hours to saturate the rest of his new land, give or take a bit. However, if he used Control Earth to till the entire area it would take him less than thirty hours, assuming he could run the spell non-stop. Call it forty with breaks to restore mana.
“It’s faster to use move earth to change the landscape,” he said finally and Elenia nodded.
“With your bonuses, that’s probably true; but you’ll want to keep it in mind if you ever need to saturate land you can’t just rip up and replace.”
“Good point,” he agreed.
“We’re how far away from the Shrine?” Elenia asked as she looked around.
“About six miles, give or take. Far enough out that, as you saw, we can Portal back and forth,” John said.
“I guess that makes it quick and easy to get out here,” the halfling noted. “We’re going to have to make sure that anyone sent out this way knows the spell though.”
John shrugged uncomfortably. “It just seemed like this solved a lot of issues.”
“I mean it does, but it also makes another issue; not an insurmountable one though. You’re going back to your house to sleep, right?”
“Yeah, just going to get this settled in a new room and then it’ll probably be time for me to…” he hesitated.
“Log out?” Elenia asked with a smile.
John huffed. “Yeah.”
“Just because we don’t do the same doesn’t mean we can’t understand the concept. As I understand you’re basically using some kind of magic to possess a body that was created for you, and you can leave the body to return to your world. You call it ‘logging out’,” Elenia said.
“Yeah, that’s about right,” John said, bemused at the description. “In any case, I’ll be logging out in bed, so that this body can rest while I do.”
“Good, then you can take me back when you go, and in the morning another group will be ready for you to bring them here so they can watch your back and get familiar with the location for portalling,” Elenia stated.
John nodded. “Works for me.” He then turned and found the midpoint of his new farm and began to excavate.
With his bonuses, and this being his domain, it didn’t take him long to create a spiraled ramp that led to a ten-foot by ten-foot stone box some fifteen feet underground. From there it was simply a matter of getting the tap-to-be down the ramp and he was ready to be done for the day.
A thought and a gesture were all it took to seal up the ramp and cover it with a thick layer of dirt, making it look just like any other part of the farm.
Elenia nodded approvingly as she watched, and then the two returned to the Gateway of Worlds via another Portal.
“Alright, remember, we’ll have some knights to go with you in the morning, so don’t forget them,” the halfling reminded him.
“Got it, take the knights with me,” John replied agreeably.
“Good! With that I’ll head back to the compound. Goodnight John,” Elenia said.
“Night!” John replied, then headed for his own beds, both real and electronic.