Obviously, the alcaoris was only able to tell me what happened from his side of things, but by putting the pieces together, I can make a better picture. I feel like I need to investigate the area again, now I know more.

“I’d like to examine the area below,” I tell the alcaoris neutrally, trying not to sound like I’m asking for permission, but equally not wanting to accidentally set off his protective instincts.

I’ll be watching every move you make, the creature responds warningly. Sure enough, as I drop down into the dry stream bed, Bastet next to me, the draconic beast follows me with his head. Given that the rest of him is definitely too big to make it through the hole, I have to guess that this is how he’s been looking after his eggs.

Pushing that out of my mind, I focus on looking around. Not starting with the eggs, I first go to the end of the chamber, where the tunnel abruptly narrows down to something that I doubt I could crawl through, only coming up to mid-calf level. Inspecting that area for a bit, I then look around at the tunnel as a whole, focussing for a while on the hole through which I came, before moving over to look at the eggs.

They are much the same as I saw before – vague lumps held within dark material which is itself connected to the stone ring which is part of the tunnel.

“Your eggs need to be fully or mostly submerged in the Pure Energy, right?” I check with the alcaoris, not bothering to turn around.

Mostly submerged. They do not like being fully submerged, he answers.

“Then why not make a basin or something which they could sit in? Why block the area completely?”

Even had I taken the time to carve something out of wood or stone, I would have had to replenish it far too frequently: my eggs were hungry.

“No, I mean in the stream bed.” I gesture to illustrate my idea. “If you dug a hole then the eggs could absorb what they wanted of the stream, and the overflow would just continue as normal.”

Were you not listening? the creature asks scornfully. I struggled to even make this hole big enough for my head and neck to fit in because I was limited to physical means alone. How could I have made a basin in the rock below the Pure Energy? Especially when I dare not touch it directly.

I feel like pointing out that when his eggs were blocking off the stream would have been a good time to try such things, but that would still have left the issue of exactly how to affect something which didn’t respond to his acidic mana. I suspect that pounding the tunnel floor with a rock would have been less productive than his efforts on its ceiling.

That information is certainly intriguing, and I find myself wanting to view things with a different set of eyes. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to manage to have both normal sight and ‘mana’ sight running simultaneously, not without making myself far too distracted and earning a severe headache.

For this particular situation, I feel like I should probably go even deeper into it than normal, so sit down in the middle of the dry stream bed. Bastet stands next to me, wordlessly reassuring me that she’ll keep watch and warn me if there is any danger. Or perhaps I should say more danger. It’s not necessary – I should be able to see that sort of thing for myself – but I appreciate the thought and lean back against her for a moment.

Closing my eyes, I focus on the environment around me. Instead of diving deeply into myself and finding my Core space, I spread myself wide. The moment I start seeing the connections around me, I find that I’m almost blinded with their strength. I have to backpedal mentally a little to dim them down enough that I can actually see.

My mental gaze wanders around the area in which I’m sitting, lingering on areas of particular strength. A mixture of curiosity and awe fills me.

I didn’t do this before. And even if I had, I doubt I’d have seen as much as I do now. The eggs are bright, the forms inside them vaguely brighter than the shells around them. The material holding them in place is also shining brightly, its connections rippling and moving, looking almost like the lines in the iris of an eye as they hold onto both the eggs and the stone wall.

Beyond the material is something that feels like the magical equivalent of staring into the sun; I dare not look at it for more than a moment for fear that there may be damaging consequences. Instead, I move onto looking at the stone surrounding me. There, my eyes catch.

I’ve never seen magic in stone before. I’ve tried, oh, I’ve certainly tried. And that’s when I ended up noticing the magic in fire, the connections in the flames. The stone and the earth seemed bare in comparison. But this…the magic in the stone around me is impossibly strong.

In fact, I’d dare to say that there’s more mana in each square metre of the tunnel than there was in the heart of the inferno while it was still raging. Which is…honestly quite humbling. Interestingly, though, it’s not completely consistent. The area of stone in the chamber around me is significantly brighter than what I can see in the smaller tunnel.

Or rather, it’s not that it’s brighter, but that it looks more concentrated. Like the colours within have been packed tighter. Interesting.

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Surfacing out of my meditative state, I move towards the entrance to the tunnel and hoist myself out. The alcaoris shifts backwards wordlessly to give me space and Bastet jumps out with me, making sure she stays next to me. Instead of going anywhere, though, I just close my eyes again and look around me with my mental gaze.

Hmm, that’s also very interesting, I remark to myself as I observe the area around me outside the Pure Energy tunnel. Opening my eyes, I look at the alcaoris.

“Can you direct some of your most powerful acid to touch the stone of the tunnel?” I ask him. He huffs a little.

I can. But I do not see why I should.

I eye him with irritation but try to keep it out of my voice and the Bond as I respond.

“I’m trying to work out a solution. As I said, the more information I have to work with, the better. I’d like to see why your mana couldn’t make an impact on the tunnel.”

Fine, the alcaoris responds, with the air of it being a great imposition. I just cross my arms and wait impatiently for him to do it.

The moment I see him drip a little acid which practically glows green onto the stone, I close my eyes again and spread my consciousness out among the connections again. With my mental gaze open wide, I see exactly what happens.

The acid actually does work on the stone. However, from what I can see, most of its power comes from the mana within it. That’s not too surprising, I suppose: I experienced it myself when healing my own body and the bodies of my Bound from the alcaoris’ attacks. The mana attack made it difficult for my own mana to work, especially considering it came from a being significantly more powerful than me. Its effects on my Energy channels were potentially even more disabling than the physical effects.

Here, though, that actually works against it. As it turns out, a Tier three beast’s acidic mana is definitely not powerful enough to overcome either the quantity or the quality of the mana suffusing all the stone around me. In fact, it’s quickly attacked by the dark brown mana and…devoured? The poisonous green swiftly vanishes, the only effects left behind are physical ones. And those are barely noticeable.

I feel like I have quite a good picture of what happened now. And it starts with the fact that the tunnel around the Pure Energy is unnaturally saturated with mana or whatever I should call the energy which isn’t pure anymore.

Perhaps this would be expected – that areas in constant contact with the Pure Energy stream are full of Energy is not a shock. Nor, really, is the fact that it’s not pure anymore, but I would guess has transformed into earth mana – if an explosion could cause the creation of fire-aligned Energy Hearts, it makes sense that Energy seeping into the earth would become earth-aligned.

What is surprising is how limited the Energy is. I would expect only the earth closest to the Pure Energy to be full of energy, and then for it to become less dense the further away from the Energy stream it got. However, that isn’t the case. Or at least, it seems to be more complicated than that.

It’s like the earth tunnel is something of an…artery. Comparing the narrow tunnel with the wide tunnel was rather informative: the diameter of the area saturated with earth mana is actually identical. The difference is that, in the wide tunnel, all that mana has been condensed into a thin ring around the outside of the tunnel, perhaps only a handspan’s width, where the earth around the narrower tunnel is perhaps a metre or more thick on three sides.

And then when I look at the area where the alcaoris is sitting, there is barely any earth mana that I can see. I suspect it’s there, but that it just isn’t in such massive quantities that even a novice in earth magic like me is able to see it. There’s a line drawn by the condensed energy which forms a circular tunnel around the space with the Pure Energy, like it’s made of a completely different material.

I briefly consider whether this is the case, but dismiss it after a moment. It’s more about the way the earth mana acts which makes the difference; it’s not visible with my normal eyes at all.

Pieces fall into place about the series of events. The alcaoris said that there was a mana crystal blocking the way through the tunnel. Why it had formed there, I don’t know. But it must have meant that the Pure Energy started building up pressure in the tunnel. For some reason, instead of immediately cracking the tunnel, the Pure Energy instead somehow expanded the tube. Upwards, that is: the mana that forms the base of the tunnel is already really concentrated.

Then, again for a reason I can’t fathom, instead of expanding further, the mana condensed the stone into something hard enough that the mana couldn’t push it any further. But it’s still clearly at least partially vulnerable to physical effects – the stone was cracked by the pressure of the Pure Energy building up and then the alacaoris used physical force to crack his way into the tunnel. The rest I know from his explanation.

It seems like the issues in this area have been going on longer than the alcaoris’ interference and I wonder whether I would have been offered a quest even if there had been no eggs. That’s irrelevant, I dismiss a moment later.

So, now with a better idea of what happened, I need to work out what to do.

After giving it some thought, I still haven’t come up with a better idea than making a basin in the bed of the Pure Energy stream. It just seems to be the most effective solution for keeping the eggs submerged while still allowing any overflow to go past.

Of course, another option could be releasing the pressure now and then blocking the opening up again afterwards. If we keep repeating that until the eggs are hatched, the short-term problem, at least, is solved. It might be the simplest, requiring no more resources than we already have access to. But I'll have to see whether the alcaoris would be open to that idea first.

Still, a basin will work well enough: if the flow isn’t sufficient, they’ll still benefit as much as they can from what there is. If the flow is more than sufficient, at least we won’t be causing this pressure to build up again.

But the problem is how to form the basin.