After finishing my talk with the Titan and a few other people in the village, I go back to my time chamber.

The process however is anything but serene. With only about 30 hours left, I push the temporal expansion as far as I can, which sits just shy of 32 fold. What I learn of the next relative days from Blackwood’s books push me to one last spurt of creation.

On the face of it, it’s not the refined and perfect craft that I would be able to make if I had a week or more of expanded time but even with all the other details I didn’t want to let go of it.

Given that I would need to tap into the village's war chest and tie up a large amount of capital that was being used for other purposes at the moment, I didn’t even bother to perfunctorily try to save 80 Mithril, that would have been futile if I worked alone.

So most of the money I acquired from the smithy goes somewhere more useful: my experiments.

Autonomous designs for mining equipment coupled with an automated flying craft that relies on hidden underground tracks could transport freight in the instance with very little reliance on mana. Even larger batteries relied on the natural growth of my roots underground to slowly increase their mana capacity instead of the attention of someone with both mana and the engraving skill. They would need huge battery banks when that number shrank to double and even single digits.

A thousand and one ideas run through my head and I have to carefully curate them otherwise half of my efforts would be a sheer waste of time. I leave a thousand loose threads in the air, not because of laziness, but the sheer impossibility of covering everything in the remaining time.

I look at the seeds and rabbits that sit inside the inner world as they enjoy at least a portion of the time acceleration that I have available. I hadn’t managed to make something work for another human given the size disparity, but at least a few of them could take turns.

In the end, I might have succeeded with enough time assuming I excluded myself from the equation acting only as the controller, but other concerns were more pressing like returning to Earth. Making an autonomous machine sounded possible, something that didn’t rely on me or my powers. It was also so far away from the current paradigm that I didn't know where to even start.

I take another look at the set of runes in the book and go back to a fat silver ring. With an engraving Mithril chisel, I carve out the paths that I envisioned with nearly as much ease as if the metal was butter.

A minute later, I flick it away discarding the failed iteration in a pot to melt later before starting again and again and again. There was a lot more low hanging fruit to be had, but I didn't want to make further weapons or armor. Instead, I wanted to imitate a profession we hadn’t seen in the instance.

A jeweler.

Although there were likely severe limitations to what I could accomplish in a month, I still pushed for all I could get and a thousand attempts later comes my first success.

Ring of dexterity

Wearing this ring for at least 12 hours provides an attribute buff.

+1 Dexterity

A very basic but functional design. The description takes a very interesting turn. And then the strange effect of stat bonuses usually taking a few minutes to fully kick in now makes sense in a strange way.

I put it on to test the effects and then go back on the grind. My next success takes nearly 100 more tries which breaks the dam.

Something clicked in my mind by end of the next hundred, I’m successful nine out of every ten times.

That is when I start on the next design, but then the 8 rings I’m wearing start to feel warm. Not in a literal sense. But when I look deeply at what is happening, I see the runes eroding.

Their physical shape is still there, but something intangible is affecting them.

Could this be a limit on how many I can keep at any one time?

I remove a few rings and start testing the limits.

A couple of days later my hypothesis is as proven as could be. I can have 2 silver rings at a time before erosion starts.

Or 1 wooden ring

Or 4 gold ones.

Though the lack of Mithril is still a mystery.

Other ornaments join in and while the larger sizes tend to protect the materials from erosion, they don’t actually provide any more attributes, only as much as the rings do and as I soon find out each other ornament takes up a spot of a ring. Though larger equipment like my staff or armor didn’t seem to have any effects on this limit.

As I’m about to start the next one, a disturbance arrives. A flaw in the mana distribution and a ripple in the fabric of space. My perception field fully extends in the blink of an eye and I take forceful control of things stopping the creatures hanging out just shy of my spot.

It manages to splash a hint of its black goo and I catch it with my hand. The familiar faint burn is even milder this time barely welting the spot it touched.

I slow my heart back down over the next minute and smooth out the ripples before returning to the task at hand. I keep trying, each time getting ever so slightly better results. Soon my senses and intuition get more information from the rings than my inspection skill. I feel the slow but steady improvements making the runes on each ring sturdier and more concise helping them avoid interfering with each other.

The mechanism that these little pieces of metal use to buff my stats is completely alien to me, but I don’t let this doubt distract me.

I sense a few people accumulate outside so I open the inner world and let another few people inside. People want to head back to Earth early. Not many, but they came from all over the instance.

With judicious use of the portals, even a few from other instances had made their way here. They couldn’t take a single step outside the inner world or its smaller brothers, the faux inner worlds. Otherwise, the system returns them to their own instance after flashing that orange screen, but even this much is already a boon.

During the small break to clear my mind, I roam the instance with the ever-larger perception field. Slightly unfocused let me proceed with little to no effort, I cover square miles in mere seconds while focusing on the areas that were more likely to have something of interest and I even discover a few curiosities.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Nothing that would take me from my spot, but enough that I take note to pass the others.

The last few real hours come to pass and every conceivable preparation I could have done in the time frame is in place. The rush is still there, relentless as always, but I take the time to try and center myself back.

A full and continuous action with very little focus. My intuition kept telling me that simply breathing was not the right way to meditate for longer periods.

A map forms in my head and the effects of tinkering with the Automaton’s puzzle seemed to nudge me in the right direction, but my love of puzzles and trip to the class trial just scream at me.

A missing piece, not unlike the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

I reach for the 50 something monuments in the HLZ, an incomplete map especially as I don’t have a full network, only tendrils extending through it. But a map hinting at a balance that is missing, at least if I observe the castle we discovered in the mountain. There should be another hundred or so other monuments, but that isn’t what I was looking for.

The center is off kilter. If I just…

With a few hundred points of Qi and a dozen Life in hand, the thinnest tendril I can work with extends out at record speed from the castle. I eat the miles effortlessly, even as I spend my resources, but I don’t stop for anything. Some 10 miles later I start spreading tendrils all around and extending the perception field out, but there is still nothing.

From the surface to some 700 meters in depth, there is an absence of anything that would even tangentially be considered interesting.

I search and expand like an umbrella a couple of miles wide, but there is nothing.

I look at the map, carefully curating and calculating where the place of balance would have to be checking each of my assumptions.

Could there be several such places? That doesn't make sense. Even if it was a cross or a hexagon, there would be something interesting over here. And the shapes with an odd number of points also failed to meld with the rest of the map.

I feel the mountain. I try to breathe as much as I can without even an avatar in place.

The mountain.

Our discovery.

The castle.

How was it hidden?

The sky with a ceiling.

My mind threatens to go out of control before it suddenly settles down.

Altitude…that is it.

I have the precise spot, but the wrong height, I had hints all through out the map that the height was all but random.

With no pause, I drill down with a tendril. The first 300 meters are just as I expected: hard soil compacted from pressure, but then it starts growing harder faster than I would have expected.

Solid dirt, almost like baked clay without a hint of free space.

I keep pushing. Having to use more and more Qi to forcefully create a path to avoid wasting Life. The effort is continuous and I just push the longest tendrils of the perception field reaching just shy of 700 meters, though extending that to the current maximum size which is about a kilometer would have been my next task.

I sense a few goblins starting to conglomerate at ground level. They are confused for all of 5 seconds before the digging operation begins. Meanwhile, I just keep pushing my resources in the area trying to get it over as quickly as possible.

After digging a kilometer deep the effort grows exponentially harder. I see no reason that what would be ground level if there was no mountain to make the effort harder but I just keep going with the goblin’s futile efforts in the corner of my eye.

A hundred more meters, 200, 300 and then I get a glimpse and understanding follows.

On one side a treasure trove of knowledge, a castle representing what came of using your head and on this other side the raw resources for us to build, to make concrete the knowledge we acquired.

A Mithril mine.

There is probably no better parting gift than its location.

The exact coordinates of a Mithril mine.

It would be troublesome to dig about a kilometer and a half underground through hard dirt before cutting through the final 500 meters of solid stone. Even after that, the deposit itself was significantly different than what we could expect from the magical regenerating nature of the system’s mines. An abysmally low ore concentration and is likely not a renewable source.

Though complaining that I didn’t discover an infinite supply of Mithril sounds unfair. That was the normal state of affairs in any mine we ever discovered on Earth and only in the last few months has that changed, but it almost surprises me.

How quickly did I get spoiled by the system?

As I’m about to dismiss the entire thing from my mind, an idea pops up. Something a little bit crazy that would tie the bow on my gift in the remaining hours of real time before the automaton shows up. That is just enough time for me to pull one last little stunt... probably.

I reach my hand in the inner world and take out the only deep steel metal steam rocket. A few mental requests and a pair of seeds climb inside the cavities before roughly grafting the largest pocket of space I could possibly wield without a lot more preparation.

Pulling my usual shenanigans with the inner world, the rocket hurtles through a pair of portals being ‘teleported’ to the edge of my inner world. Steam heats up and propels the rocket faster than humanly possible, which seems almost inconsequential with the time compression.

With no abandon, loads of mana, and a judicious amount of water. The rocket as tall as myself and as thick as my thighs cuts across the sky at supersonic speeds breaks that, pushing to about a kilometer per second which is about as fast as rockets ever fly, but in this instance, time is off the essence and I just ask the seed to push harder with the occasional pings that the comm rune trades.

At 1.5 kps and the seeds are forced to sweet through the skin of the craft to keep its temperature manageable.

At 1.8 kps a funny feeling grows stronger, but I put it out of my mind and they keep accelerating until it tops out at about 1.9 kilometers a second.

The sheer winds threaten to rip the body apart and just the compression heating of these speeds at such low altitudes is enough to destroy just about any earthly metal quickly, but the deep steel is only mildly strained as far as I can tell.

With it already in equilibrium, I push my attention elsewhere even as something nags at me with the strain on my soul gone.

A few more thousand Qi head for the spot that I need to dig. In moments, a hole two inches wide starts riping downward even as my main point of attention heads to another spot closer to the rock.

I let the feel of the rock affect me as I try my best to sing and mold it into a more conducive shape.

I feel the resistance strong enough that I dismiss the thought of asking for help from the other seeds. They can’t wield anything but mana, but I’m enough because Qi is relentless and not so easily dissuaded as the more common resource the system gifts everyone.

Still, compared to the usual rock l that almost desires to be shaped by magic, this is like drilling on tungsten, the very material that drills are made of.

I push downward with abundance in time compared to everyone else in the instance. With that advantage, I reach nearly halfway through the rock before the Goblins return. This time one brings a wooden shovel and I just laugh it off.

Still, better not to be careless. The single village that acquired a few tons of copper was proving to be a much more tenacious opponent because of it even after operations to try and deprive them of it. The other villages trying to expand out of the HLZ were almost an afterthought in comparison. That first raided village had become a thorn in our side, even after losing around half of the supply with their attempted raids to expand the HLZ.

Still, no need for me to overthink.

The others were taking care of that and my mental bandwidth shouldn’t be wasted on something I couldn’t and wouldn’t be doing anything about.

The seemingly glacial pace just keeps forward as the minutes pass. But even that is blazing fast compared to what a team of hundreds of stone singer mages would be able to do given the mana interference. That means I don’t get a lick of help from the other seeds wielding mana near the mithril ore.

Each meter downward I push myself harder and harder almost feeling like it will start interfering with Qi as well, but I grow used to the exercise.

Instead of slowing even as the rock becomes almost alive in its passive resistance, my mind shapes itself into the machine that overcomes all obstacles and I drill down. The will of a hundred seeds reinforcing me is barely an afterthought in the environment, but still a welcome addition.

A critical component through which I channel Qi into what it needs to become so that I reach for the ore containing a hint of an extremely precious metal embedded within.

After crossing the boundary separating rock and ore I start to consume a small layer carving a chunk of the rock out and when I’m done, I take my Qi away and turn on the thousands of active firewall connections blinding the goblins in the vicinity to the precise location that my roots pass through.

They were not stupid and they keep digging for a minute, but without the system’s prompting and seemingly no desire to dig hundreds of meters in the Dirt they slowly take their leave.

I get an occasional ping from the rocket carrying the piece of the inner world heading over there.

Forty minutes to go.

Just in time for me to pass by the village and inform them of the gift that it is on its way.