The fort might be a work of art but the only reason for this is the way that it has been constructed. the fort itself leaves a lot to be desired. you can essentially call it half of a building, with only the skeleton of the building constructed.

the things that one can take for granted in the case of other buildings are completely absent here. Environmental formation (which is vital in this frigid hellscape.) is the thing that is about to affect us the most. There is a significant worry about the weather and how it will affect the soldiers. The snowwinders can survive in weather like this but to fight in this weather is going to be hard unless I do something.

the one thing that everybody forgets about the issue here is that it is not the enemy that is our main threat but the environment. After all, it is more likely that a person is going to freeze to death than fight an enemy. That means that The main threat that seems to affect those in these forts is the cold.

Already, Every soldier here essentially resembles a ball in the way that they are covered in coats. not like it is going to help us a lot. you can think of our present situation like us sitting in an ocean of ice mana. Our life mana is like a boat in this ocean, protecting us from the worst. The soldiers are essentially flimsy plank that might not even survive a single trip here and I am much closer to the fisherman's boat, capable of surviving easily if things are calm, but I am equally likely to drown here once things get a bit chaotic.

that is why this place is such an annoyance to handle and why this fort seems like a stupid idea. That is why these soldiers have to wear coats inscribed with formations to isolate them from the ice mana outside. They certainly won't be able to fight in those coats.

While these soldiers are presently in a very crappy situation, I have something more important that I need to focus on. My main focus right now is to make sure that I don't bring the fort down because I had to fight in it at my full strength.

Shamon has been spending the last week trying to manage the particular problem as well as he can. He also seems to be succeeding at it. so I am sure that he can do that for a week or more. I will have a solution in place soon enough, after which Trevor can focus on more combat worthy matters.

I guess that I should report the fix that I have in place. It has to do with the formation that I am going to inscribe. I would have liked to claim that it was my work, but this particular formation of mine is a druidic formation that is used by the druids to grow copper bark trees. Copper bark trees are supposed to be trees that grow from any part of their body, as long as they are placed in particular formations that provide them with nourishment.

Such kind of formations are the core of the druidic society. A druidic village will have one such formation acting as the core protecting and nourishing their entire forest and the druids would protect this core formation. The older the druidic village is the stronger the druids are. If this formation of mine were to succeed it would be enough to act as the core for a druidic village, you know. Not a very strong village, but still it would be a village. Also, I can't predict how useful it will be in such a hostile environment.

There is also the added benefit that it can act quite similar to an environment control formation. at the very least the formation will make the fort have similar conditions to a place where copper bark can grow, which is going to be quite warm and humid. It is a fascinating topic since my formation is being supplied majorly with elemental mana that certainly won't be able to increase the temperature, but still, copper bark can do this. It is my master's theory that druids have somehow managed to embed microscopic formations well versed in elemental conversion in every inch of copper branch somehow that helps it regulate the weather. He has yet to prove that hypothesis of his. I am starting to realize that I am rambling about this topic. To put it into simple terms, there is something in the copper bark that allows for this environment to be created.

So Shamon will not need to manage it for very long, maybe two months at most after which the environment is not an issue to be dealt with. That is a good thing since I would rather that the man focus on the creatures coming to kill us.

That is not a matter that I am going to be achieving any time soon, my present estimates put me at nearly two months to complete this particular task. Thankfully, I have two weeks to complete the formation base. (which in the present case would mean a set of three formations, one of metal, one of water and one of earth responsible for controlling their respective mana.)

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The ice beast horde always ends up attacking after the first snowstorms of winter have passed. That time is roughly around this time. Thankfully, the very first wave of the horde is always dealt with by the experts of the Ice Peak, in their very first hunts. That means that we have to deal with the second wave which is coming in two weeks. Until then we only have to face beasts that the hunting party might have missed, which Shamon and his group can handle. In the worst case, I can act as interference.

For now, I plan to begin the process by inscribing the metal formation on the copper bark. The formation that I am inscribing has one metal based spell, six water based spells and three earth based spells to act as the ninth class formation base. As for the class 8 spell, that is something that I have yet to decide. There are many options from many different sources. The druids themselves have four spells themselves that can be used and the black mountain records have ten spells that I can use. I will need to consider very deeply which spell I have to use.

I would like to remove another misconception that non-formation mages have about the classification system. A class 8 spell need not be as strong as a class 9 spell. What a class 8 spell is doing is essentially managing the set of class 9 that have been inscribed into the formation core to create a desired effect. It is, therefore, a very complex field of study and research of methods of pairing the correct lower class spell with the correct higher class spells to ensure that the lower class spell will even have the desired effect.

The metal based spell will not take long for me if I focus on it. It will take me a couple of days and should make sure that the fort won't collapse just because an ice beast clawed at it weirdly. (at its present durability I don't even need to use my armor to shatter a wall, just my mana-powered fists are enough. Thank God there is no snowstorm yet.) What is going to take me the longest time in this process is to look for an elemental node.

An elemental node is a stream of mana that is specific to a single element and beyond that I have no real idea what exactly they are and how they are formed. These are not useful for the average mage since having too much mana of a single element can be quite deadly unless you cultivate very specific magic paths and even then these mages tend to be pretty rare. Some people use it to power a few formations, yet even formation mages always seem to forget just how useful it is for us formation mages.

Firstly, this way we would have a constant stream of mana powering the formation which means that I can reduce the strain on the mage powering the formation secondly, with materials like copper bark it can be used to nurture the material itself. The formation that I am considering building needs to have at least an elemental node of each element that the copperbark has affinity. There is a reason that the druids always built their forts deep in the forests where it would be easy to find the relevant nodes. They can find elemental nodes for such formations very easily and it also allows them to protect their formations.

It is this particular requirement of their formations that made the druids so territorial. I mean there are only so many places in the continent where you can find an elemental node to meet your demands.

This far north, I am not even sure that I can find any elemental node of an element other than ice and unless I want all of us to freeze to death, I cannot use a ice elemental node to power the formation. It is already freezing, this will leave Shamon and his group as ice cubes. That would be like creating a geyser of ice mana right below the ships that are the soldiers.

That is why the dwarves are my last hope in this matter. Dwarves are masters of finding ore. They can find ore in places where the other races would not even dream of looking to find ore. Most of their art is a secret even to me (not for a lack of trying), but we can still make use of the dwarf's hard work to find the elemental nodes I need. It is a common occurrence for an ore deposit of elemental metal to have a node passing through it.

Even if the dwarves have emptied most of these ores, there is a pretty decent chance that the elemental node is still present there. Right now I am exploring one such tunnel, where the dwarves have acquired nearly a ton of an ore called blue iron. It is a basic iron ore with certain water based affinity. That means that I am quite likely to find an elemental node of the metal element or the water element. I can't tell if the place will have an elemental node, but this is a game of probability. There are roughly thirty such mines that the dwarves have operated and I am hoping that I will find what I need in at least one of these places.

Normally, this would be not a task that I would be doing personally. I cannot exactly send the soldiers in here. Firstly all of them are required above and while revealing such small secrets won't cause me much problem, I have no desire to antagonize the head office more than necessary. The head office can be pretty petty If they decide that you are their enemies. You can already see me in my present case and I have no real enmity with the head office.

That means that I am trudging in tunnels that the dwarves would consider a tight fit, and in which I can barely crawl through to reach the point where I can detect whether the place has an elemental node or not. I won't even speak of just how frigid this place is. Let's just say that I am a single inch from becoming a block of ice myself.

That means that I am left with a lot of crawling and cursing, neither of which I have the desire to record so I will be taking my leave here. I will send my next log when I have managed to find an elemental node and have begun to complete the formation base.