As I enter the small room with only a single machine inside and a table filled with tools and molds, I hear Lewis by the press greeting me.

“Hi Nash, what brings you by?”

“I have the next silver loadout. About 10 kilograms, enough for over three thousand coins.”

“Ohh, are they ready to be stamped?”

I pull the bag from my inventory, open it to take a couple of small flattened beads and roll them between my fingers.

“Yeap, Stuart actually got them yesterday, but I asked him to make them into flattened beads like this. It will save you a lot of time. It gave him some trouble given the value of silver but he managed it. Nobody minds losing a few percent of the copper when working on something as small as a coin, but if even one percent of the silver spills my heart couldn’t take it.” He nods excitedly as I look around before asking him: “Have you been practicing mana infusion?”

“Yes, diligently,” he says while placing 6 of the beads in the press, on the lower part of the hexagonal dies that stamps the back of the coins. Before grabbing and pulling the shorter lever, lowering the upper face of the dies until they start pressing the silver. He doesn't have enough leverage to allow his 28 strength points to properly squish the metal so he flips a mechanical switch locking it into place before moving to the other longer and more robust lever.

Using both his hands on the right lever and sending a single mana point into it, the much greater leverage allows him to stamp all six of the die pairs at the same time. He moves the lever a foot and a half down while the dies depress for an eighth of an inch, touching together and forming six perfect coins.

However, what I pay attention to is not his technical mastery of the machine Blackwood expertly crafted or even his mastery of mana, but the intent behind it and the intangible feeling washing over me as he lowers his arm brings a wide smile to my face.

“Amazing, you are well on the way to being able to produce top-tier coins, maybe even being able to put a smidge of Aether in them.”

As I say these words I grow a few roots in each silver coin along with the dozens of trays of copper coins, intertwining in the middle of them all. I feel a very slight tugging on my own Aether field settling over the coins. It seems he is not the only one ‘unconsciously’ affecting the world.

I taste the Aether in them as they amplify each other. Separately, I probably wouldn't have felt anything, but the six silver together with the thousands of copper coins are noticeable.

At my request, he bags all the copper to be picked up later in the day as I pocket the first silver coins he has made.

A smile lights my face as I start to see the success even earlier than I expected. As more and more people started to use the coin and attribute value, I hoped this would happen, but if it has absorbed this amount of Aether already my schedule was more conservative than it needed to be.

“I will send someone to collect the silver coins every hour or so. When do you think you will finish them?”

“Tomorrow, silver is easier to stamp than copper, the metal is softer.”

“Good, keep up the good work and don’t forget that this is silver so use the mana from the battery with my mana instead of relying on the general supply when your pool runs out. Not sure if it will make a difference, but it won’t hurt to do it this way.”

“Sure thing.”

I walk out and finish making my rounds of the village getting ready to leave for another trip to the other villages. I grab the list from my inventory and count the lines.

Nine villages, two want me to expand their defenses with the other seven wanting access to the network and a few basic facilities.

We have barely started to use the library system and the expansion push is happening.

Technically I don’t even need to show up in any of these villages, but mulling it over a couple of extra hours moving between them is a small price to pay. Even the travel time doesn’t account for anything, as pushing the expansion of the underground root network will be faster if I’m closer. Not by a lot, but a little and it would make the difference much smaller. And that I wouldn’t need to expose my capabilities and fine control from so far away.

I zip on my flying bicycle across the sky to the closest new village asking to be part of the network, a 200 miles trip when an idea strikes me.

I don’t need to be there at all and nobody would be the wiser, I could just go back to my root-form and with a little trickery, they won’t even realize I'm hundreds of miles away. Still, it wouldn't do to start without having ever done anything similar, so I will go to some of the villages and show my face around.

Putting more mana into the propulsive formation of the flying bicycle, it speeds up again as I keep the heading and start planning.

Closer to the ground on the smaller craft, though still a good 20 meters high after some modifications, I’m high enough that I barely need to pay attention to the terrain elevation so I open small portals ahead of me, at the very edge of my inner world range. It’s now reaching almost 55 meters in radius and connecting to the underground network. With that Aspen and I can work on growing the tendrils reaching for the villages that requested to join our little ‘alliance’ to gain access to the network.

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I pay most of my attention to opening and closing the connections with the inner world. Something that is almost trivially easy when I am touching the ground and moving at much slower speeds becomes challenging while flying.

Something seems wrong about that though and I do the math in my head, plotting a graph comparing the size of the inner world, speed, distance, before calculating the time it takes to open the portals as it changed over the last weeks and months.

Looking at the mental picture I realize something is wrong. The time needed to open and close the portals didn’t change much.

Sure, opening and closing a portal every 2 seconds and reestablishing a connection is brief, but I managed to sustain the pace before which means something else is afoot.

The only thing that comes to mind is my speed. Perhaps it is not just about how fast I open and close the portals, but how fast they are moving relative to me. Just some inexplicable limitation of the inner world or something.

To test the assumption, I stop connecting the roots and only focus on opening successive portals, finding the task more difficult than I was used to while running on the ground. I slow, then speed up, I make the portals closer to the ground than far away. I try every conceivable variation and my conclusion is that my initial hypothesis was correct, it is mostly about speed.

I just learned about another thing to train, though I’m lucky I ran these experiments right now, it’s an important data point.

Aspen, at my request, tries to open portals midflight but fails, which leads me to define the task where he focuses on the roots and connection while I just open and close the portals. Something much more manageable without having much else in mind. I follow near the road connecting our village to Sarah’s, or rather the Matriarch’s village.

I pass dozens of carriages, still being driven by pedal power instead of wasting the mana, though now only a single person sits at the front, something the improved stats and better pavement allow.

Trade has been picking up as the Matriarch's village is trying to grow closer to ours, and the improvements they saw are significant.

Everybody saw our village's prominent position and though a few kept their distance and tried to form their own cabals to oppose us, the more forward-looking are instead trying to draw closer, and as the oldest village to come into contact with us and the first to have a road interlinking our economies, the Matriarch village’s people would be fools not to take advantage of the situation.

About halfway on my trip as I’m a mile from the matriarch’s village, I lean into a gentle banking turn to the right before turning back to head straight to complete the next leg of the trip.

This next leg sees me slowing to a hover over a few spots to connect the tendril growing there as it was still disconnected.

A little over two hours after leaving my village, I arrive and settle down outside. Preparing for my ruse, I draw roots, branches, and leaves from the inner world covering nearly every square inch of my body in a thin but gapless layer similar to my root armor before walking into the village. Approaching the gate, I’m met with an upgrade to what they had on integration, but still short of the wall in my village.

Four meters tall wooden walls with a simple gate. Though I can’t disparage their defenses too much given they haven’t needed better defenses until now. All they have to concern themselves with are the regular and easy attacks like the one yesterday.

Though as I’m getting close, I notice a few piles of rope and tools in my perception field. Perhaps the attack was a little more severe than they were expecting and they saw the wisdom in preparing more thoroughly, probably by growing the wall taller.

“Who are you?” Someone shouts a good 15 meters away from the wall.

Stepping closer, I reply: “Nash, I have come to grow a few defenses for the village.”

“Remove the roots so we can see your face.” Says the guard.

“I don’t need to enter the city, I can work from out here, just send the message that I arrived to whoever needs to know.”

“No, you will show us your face NOW.”

I shrug and move away from the gate before sitting down letting the roots grow around me and connect to a good portion of the network underground everything within a couple of hundred miles comes to my awareness for an instant. A moment later I release the vast network concentrating only on the immediate surroundings.

From my inner world, I pull 7 of the watermelon sized seeds and plant them in a hexagon with one in the middle. After I connect with them all I allow the large and thicker tendrils hidden inside to spread like the spokes of a wheel in all directions. Without having to actually grow the thinnest strands from scratch, it takes me about ten minutes to extend the overlapping and intertwining 500 meter long roots.

That would have taken me a couple of hours to grow relying only on mana to expand the network if I could even keep so many tendrils growing at a steady pace. Stopping for a moment, I count the number of tendrils at the outer limits. Almost 70 fully developed and crossed the 400-meter mark.

Magic can do wonders, but it was not a perfect remedy for everything and a few of the tendrils had trouble reaching their potential length. It doesn’t matter much for my purposes right now, all I need is to add mass and interconnect them some more before I start working on the runes.

Before continuing I notice someone waiting nearby looking impatiently at me.

“Hi, what formations do you want me to grow?”

“First let’s take care of the guard's request.”

I groan and finally let them peek at the face behind the roots, before getting up and walking over.

“Why do you insist on that, I should charge you extra just for that.”

“We are the client and we are always right.” He says grinning, no longer inpatient.

“But I provide an exclusive service in great demand, are you sure that doesn’t warrant a reevaluation?”

“Come on in, we will discuss somewhere more comfortable.”

I wave my hand in a well-practiced motion and take a dozen chairs, a table, and a parasol from the inner world dropping them outside. All of them are made of green wood and are comfortable enough.

“If you insist, but there is no need.”

“We will not pay for that,” he says.

“Don’t worry, I will take them with me.”

“Fine, we can deal out here.”

“Now, “ I say walking over and sitting before pulling a catalog from my inner world and placing it in a leather bag made to look like a space bag. “What did you choose?”

He yells back at the guards near the gate. “Get the commander he should be here for this.” Approaching me, he looks at the copy of the catalog I send over after they showed interest.

“Before that, I need clarification on a few points, just so we won’t buy something useless.”

I tilt my head to the side while lifting my shoulders, “You are the one paying for my time, I will just keep growing batteries and mana conduits in the meantime, standard things really.”

“That is fine, but we would like a little more detail on a few of these things. Like how do these batteries work? Can we draw mana and use it just like our own mana?”

“Yes and no….” I say launching into a long and detailed explanation about the benefits and limitations of all the options they have.

It took a long time for the currency I am promoting to be used as much as possible but was definitely worth it, and I can feel the Aether in the coins accumulating ever so slightly. I should have asked how much the coins are worth to the robot, but I will do that the next time.

For now, there still aren’t many of the coins yet and the other sources of money are plentiful enough. So letting them sit and circulate for a while longer and accumulate Value in the eyes of the system is the right choice. Value and Aether.