Digging the cave ended up even more time consuming than I expected. The goblins with their little pickaxes had serious trouble moving large amounts of stone. I also realized I would have to dig higher to expand the ceiling into an arch and started expanding the tunnel. Alex trying to absorb vis from crystals was slowing me down as well, though. I even had to leave once on a day-long trip to collect more. I mostly grabbed small crystals from the edges of nodes to have her train with. The lower amount of energy made it much less stressful for me if she failed.
After a week we had a cave about five goblin huts wide and deep, which was twenty by twenty metres. It was rounded in the corners and the ceiling looked like a crude attempt at a medieval church but it was stable. For almost 60 goblins, this was not enough. We decided to keep from making one big hall like what the village was in to make it easier to stabilize. The chambers would be connected with large entryways cut into each wall. When the second one was finished a week later, I realized we had pillars holding up the ceiling rather than open doors between rooms. I would likely have to make more than one lamp of growth to reach everywhere. Then again, mushrooms preferred darkness, as far as I was aware, so we could use the corners for those.
I came together with the leader group and we discussed the final size and design. The general consensus was that we needed a lot more space. The best bet was to set up the lamp of growth and see how well it worked. Maybe we could be much more efficient with our farmland?
The goblins kept digging while I made for my workshop. I tried to lift Alex but found her simply too heavy. Even my wings of darkness had too little power. It would have been nice to have her come along and help with crafting.
My number one concern at the moment was finding a suitable node. I had a few candidates to use for supplying energy to Alex but none with a substantial amount of herba vis. At least I could combine the search with the task of filling up both of my silverwood wands to the brim as well as collecting fresh dirt for the farm. The goblins were digging up the ground of the halls in a nine by nine metre hole, two metres deep. That was a lot of dirt. I brought as much as I could with every trip, even leaving all the materials and money I carried on me in Roguk’s hut.
At least with my flight speed, I could go pretty far in my search and still return quickly. Otherwise, combining these two tasks would have been impossible. A number of the other goblins were also working on expanding the paths through the ravine. Where the gap was small they covered it, where it was wide they dug into the walls. This let them carry a decent amount of dirt over as well. The possibility of building the farms outside crossed my mind before I remembered Stormbringer passed here every half-year and would ruin any efforts put into surface structure.
Another week had passed until my wands were completely filled up. This made me think I should start picking up some useful nodes. The first one was earth and order not very far from the village. It was small, which made it perfect for an experiment I had to do. Putting a Node in a Jar into my storage. I had enough glass to take five nodes in total. After that, I would need to buy more. The process was simple. The node turned out to have a [Node Guardian], a little woodland hamster. It was non-sapient and ended up as a little snack in my stomach. Then, I simply built the glass jar and covered it with some freshly cut wooden boards from nearby trees. A quick application of my wand and the all-too-familiar cracking sound echoed through the valley.
This time, I tried to pay close attention to what was going on. In vain. My senses were simply overloaded. I saw a stream of power, vis coming from my wand, guided by a small amount of my own. It shot into the jar and did something that created a ton of flux. Said flux took only moments to completely obfuscate all my magical senses. The mundane sights were nothing new and when it was done, I sighed in resignation. I needed to upgrade my [Owl Senses]. At least this had gotten me to level seven in the Skill. Now I needed to push through the next Breakpoint. I should talk to Nymph and maybe Captain Dor how that worked. Maybe there was a trick to it?
I had my Node in a Jar standing in front of me on the grass. It being on the smaller end made me take the risk without much worry. I opened a portal to my storage and stuffed the jar inside. Nothing happened. I carefully observed what was going on within, but the part of my soul that could hold objects showed the jar simply sitting there, node inside, without any changes. I let out a sigh of relief. Some part of me had expected the node to disappear into the Empty as it was now technically inside it. The whole thing was a bit paradoxical with an exit from a place leading into it but the jar was apparently powerful enough to separate it from even non-reality.
I felt a slight sting in my brain after the thought had passed. A shudder went through my soul. Then, it was gone. Whatever just happened was not real. I felt it had something to do with coming closer to the truth. Maybe warp was catching up to me? A careful inspection of my body revealed no physical changes, at least. My actual soul was difficult to see in great detail, so I could not tell if anything had changed from the mind spider thread nest I had turned it into.
I pushed the thought out of my mind and took off after grabbing another pile of dirt. When I came back to the village, I placed the node with my other things in Roguk’s hut. It would at some point be placed in my workshop to give easier access for recharging. Or I might take it for some experiment.
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It took me two more days to find a medium herba node. It had a slight bit of aer as well. With this, I could finally work on setting up the farm. The goblins were making good progress on the third chamber, this one in a straight line with the others. It would be the centre for now and where I put the node to power the lamps. Now, it was time to make the stabilizer. This was a device built on an arcane stone base using a bunch of gold and brass. I also needed a bunch of quartz for the insides. Lastly, a piece of nitor to energize the device. The actual power for the stabilization would be pulled from the node itself. There was a much more important part after that. A stabilizer could be upgraded with an even amount of alumentum and nitor as well as a bunch of salis mundus. Alumentum was alchemically enhanced coal with explosive tendencies. The end product was called a node transducer and could energize a node, constantly drawing a certain amount of vis from it. Rather than having the goblins drain and recharge it regularly, I only had to set it up and that was it.
I still needed a stabilizer to go along with it, so I quickly got to work. The first attempt was made in Roguk’s hut with the goblin in question as well as Alex watching. I took some of the stone we had dug up and combined it with a few vis shards. Soon, I had a large pile of arcane stone. I cut that into smaller bricks before it fully settled so I could shape the stabilizer more easily later on. The next step was getting the nitor. Normally, I would need a crucible for that but I did not want to go to my workshop just yet. I got around that by using a bunch of vis crystals aligned with light, fire and energy to infuse some fluorescent moss. It took me a bit to properly control the energies and push them into the plant but I managed in the end.
Once everything settled, I had a slowly burning eternal flame floating in front of me. Roguk looked a little apprehensive. It probably reminded him of his old ork teacher. Alex was much more mystified. Unable to hide her awe, she stepped close and observed the nitor from every angle. Even though, or maybe just because, her eyesight was completely different, she was unable to turn away for a good ten minutes. Eventually, I pulled her away and continued my work.
I took the nitor and gently coaxed it into position in between a square of arcane bricks. I closed it off at the top and started working brass and gold threads along the surface. Last but not least was the quartz, which I shaped into a cut of pyramid with four square holes on the sides. More wires went through it. The final step was making the activation sigils. They were quartz blocks fitted to the square holes and lined with gold. These would guide the energies to form a proper protective shell. For the node transducer, I could skip this step since it required open pathways to pull and push energy more quickly.
When I had everything together, I pushed the sigils into their spots and willed the device to activate for the very first time. Earth and order vis hardened the outer shell into a smooth stone surface while water vis, supplied from crystals, opened up the wires for flowing energy. It was done.
“That was amazing!”, Roguk said, “Even the old fart couldn’t do it like this!”
“Thank you”, I answered, “I think I’m cheating a little bit with my Beast Core. Very few people can guide vis as I can.”
The goblin nodded.
“Probably. Still, amazing.”
“Wow!”, Alex finally restarted, “W! O! W!”
“Yes”, I nodded sagely.
“That’s… I see…”
She quickly sunk into her thoughts again so I got back to business.
“Let’s test this thing!”
I brought the stabilizer into the farming cave, the centre already done by now. I only had to clean up a few square metres of ground. Then, I put the herba node on top of it.
“Let’s see how this works!”, I said and broke the jar with a push of vis through a shadow tendril.
The glass broke and the node was set free. A surge of energy flowed into the world. It was not a huge amount but definitely noticeable. Then, it cut off. Not literally but for those with low sensitivitytowards the finer magical movements, it might certainly have seemed so. What actually happened was the vis being drawn into the sigils which then cycled it through the base. I could not see everything that happened in there but it was somehow converted into something else. This new energy then flowed out of the sigils and slowly formed a slightly opaque, spherical barrier around the node.
I poked it with a tendril and found the barrier to be very solid. The node was still accessible but muted. It would not unintentionally affect the surroundings. It would also make it more difficult to get both vis enrichment and flux poisoning from it. I could deactivate the stabilizer to have the fields supplied passively with energy or, as I had planned, energize the node to supply lamps of growth. I only had to make the lamps and the transducer, both of which required using my infusion altar. Back to the workshop, it was!