The world is a few kilometers beneath me. The wind blows against my face as I manipulate my Qi into a levitation runic formation that I just thought of and amazingly it worked. An errant thought that paid off with only a few seconds to tune to the formation on the fly. Most of my pie in the sky dreams don’t succeed immediately, but this did. It relied on thousands of hours of study of runes, magic and other developments, but its implementation after the idea was nearly instantaneous. It is this very simplicity and reliability of another of the inner world that gives it most of its miraculous properties.

That same levitation formation that could only keep small vehicles meters of the ground is extended past all reasonable parameters. The properties of the runic formation phase from the higher control of my inner world to the outside world beautifully.

It will be exceedingly useful in its relatively narrow application. Though with the old school airplanes back on the map and the ‘flying busses’ powered by faux inner worlds the first form of flight we mastered is far from our only option. The ever increasing demands for seeds capable and willing to act as inner world ‘can openers’, might force us to look back at the first type of magical flying vehicle we acquired as the main option. Unless I find a better solution to manipulate the faux inner world.

Even as I improved the spatial runes meant to help them and make their job easier and easier, no human developed the direct spatial manipulation skills to actually operate them. That remained the sole purview of my seeds even as I expanded their storage capabilities breaking increasingly larger pieces of my inner world.

I try to feel what my intuition said would work in this case. I don’t open a hundred portals spread out to let the levitation runes form as if they were closer to me. That would be subject to interference and require several skilled spatial controlling seeds. Instead, I somehow phase the levitation out. It puts a slight strain on my soul, but it is negligible even for this design spanning kilometers wide. I could probably even get better results if I’m not trying to fly above the elf's city or another flight restricted zone.

The height limit didn’t change on Earth, but efficiency is a lot higher than in the instance, requiring a fraction of the mana as upkeep, and most of that came from a fundamental improvement that someone else came up with in Australia. With an altitude limit between three and fourfold the size of the engraving on the vehicle we rarely reached 100 meters except for the largest of barges. Vehicles longer than about 30 meters get unwieldy and we only rely on them when we need to solve specific mining or transportation challenges. But using my kilometers-wide inner world size to spread the runes which gets multiplied by about 3 and a half depending on the design, will give me an absurdly high altitude ceiling.

I try to extend the runes into the narrow corridors of my inner world to climb even higher, but that makes the whole thing collapse. Actual physical runes could work in long ‘strips’, but this technique needs a lot more space to work. So I couldn’t just have a bunch of the long kilometer long rod inner world to fly at the same height as small planes. A little testing reveals that any such craft would need at least a disk.

I turn off the Qi flow and let the higher gravity of Earth do its thing.

Cold and dry air hits my skin on the way down, trying to cut it, even as I start to think of improvements for our current flying vehicles, mainly aiming to make the seeds that open the faux inner world portals redundant. At least for basic operations. That would make flying vehicles almost trivial to produce, limited only by the soul strain that accelerating causes, but at relatively slow speeds, I could probably multiply the transportation fleet by tenfold before it got to me. There may even be a way to shift who is under strain or in some cases, simply put the weight on the vehicle.

My own experiments and what I learned in the void and while trying to escape the instance are essential to our understanding of space magic. With regular updates from Merlin, suddenly everything was quite a lot more controlled and I grew a lot more hopeful about managing something like this any time soon.

Merling has a mind for detail when it came to magical phenomena I couldn’t hold a candle to.

Still, the enemy is still growing at an unbelievable rate.

The breather we got a couple of months back gave us a few toys and we managed to concentrate on a few longer term projects without fearing that such preparation would give an opportunity to the enemy. Now, my perception field brushes against the largest of those preparations. The holy grail of solutions to our flight problem. Sure, relying solely on big guns of a particular type was the surest way to leave a gaping hole that the enemy could exploit, especially with our lack of experience. But this can become a main pillar in our defense when we figure out the last piece of the puzzle.

There is a lot of potential here, we only have to unlock it.

I could almost feel the automaton’s seed hard at work to get that last piece of the puzzle working. Because if we wanted a nice flying fortress or at least a flying frigate, it needed a heart to power it, right?

Something way beyond the pale imitations with lesser technology that others knew how to construct. Way more powerful than anything we ever built. Relying on the current nuclear fission tech came with drawbacks. The old designs aren’t good enough so we are breaking ground either way and the Automaton seed went for a full nuclear fusion reactor to power it with my enthusiastic support. The power density of solid core fission reactors is wholly insufficient and though it would have probably been faster to make liquid or even gaseous designs work with plutonium or uranium, somehow the system’s interference made them much rarer on Earth and even complicated the mining efforts for those metals.

Pure hydrogen, deuterium, helium and lithium are all much more plentiful options. Even if I would need a modicum of rarer catalysts to accelerate the reaction of the actual fuels, they are much less of a bottleneck without system interference. Not much use having a ‘spaceship’ if its gas tank is always running on reserve. Thought to call this vehicle a spaceship when it's meant to fly inside the atmosphere is a misnomer.

Achieving full orbital capability is gonna be way harder.

If before a rocket had to be capable of accelerating to roughly 10 kilometers per second in a vacuum to reach orbit. Now, with Earth’s gravity that number had jumped to nearly 100 kps at 3 times the acceleration rate. Given that speed gain isn’t linear, reaching orbit isn’t just 10 times or 30 times as hard, but closer to 1000 times harder.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Producing 100 times the energy at a rate roughly 10 times higher than before for a given vehicle weight. No, those are still just fanciful thoughts.

And this isn’t even the tin can, with thin walls kept in shape by the pressure like old school rockets and space vehicles in order to be light enough to reach orbit. No, we have a gleaming deep steel weapon of war, with thick plates protecting its interior. Carrying powerful shields backed by silver, gold, and even hints of our precious Mithril stock piles mined from the rare lucky find. Mithril turned out to be much rarer than I expected, the largest veins e encounter contained less than 20 grams each after refinement. We only manage to find as many as we do with the help of the seeds. Mostly the ones that managed to acquire a ‘perception’ field facsimile. The rate slowly increased as our understanding of where to look grew, but there simply aren’t any Mithril mines, only this little dust spread amongst dozens or even hundreds of tons of rock.

The place in the middle of the instance was such a monumental find. Mithril is even more expensive than the coins seem to indicate.

Running my perception field along it, I follow the channels left for my roots allowing a few more engravings. Its main attacking weapons meld both technology and magic. I just hope that we aren’t building a huge white elephant.

Still, with the potential for destruction and the ability to fly even faster it will be a formidable weapon with inherit value. That compounded with the increase in the higher altitude ceiling I can probably get working at least on this first prototype, simply explodes its uses.

It will take months to complete the current design and then the last bottleneck will be the core. Depending on how development goes, it might force a few changes in the existing systems to accommodate it, even though we tried to make that part of the design as flexible as possible.

Flying vehicles based on the inner world came with limitations, the main of which is the soul strain that it put me under any time that I have to make up for the fact that it is only accelerating the vehicle and I’m the link that has to accelerate the millions of tons in the inner world. But this is going to use a different mechanism. This is going to have an even larger concentration than I initially imagined and there are only two ways to alleviate that. I either strengthened my soul, which I already steadily accumulate on or I make the inner world a part of the craft and let its engines be responsible for accelerating it. The last time I really tried that, my weight increased from the range of a hundred kilograms all the way to millions of tons.

This time it will be different, the piece of the inner world it will carry will be filled with only as much mass as its engines can effectively move around. It won’t be able to rely on system shenanigans while accelerating, but it would make the ‘spaceship’ more compact anything such as fuel, consumables, and cargo could simply be added to its faux’s inner world. After reaching a stable speed, however, we have another trick: decoupling the inner world from the craft. Instead of running the levitating runes and pitching its wing like body to increase lift as much as possible, it would be able to ignore the weight inside the inner world, as long as its velocity doesn’t change, it won’t cause me any soul strain.

This ‘trick’ could even be used while turning or breaking given that altering direction or bleeding off speed is much, much lighter on my soul. That way the vehicle won’t have to the deal with the mass and momentum from whatever is inside the inner world.

Eventually, even I might be able to couple my own inner world to my body or a similar craft to move around at higher speeds than I’m currently limited to. Or even better, couple it to a vehicle directly. But for now, I don’t have a craft capable of moving hundreds of millions of tons around. Even considering that the soul strain of my real inner world is a fraction of the typical faux inner world, it was also much, much heavier.

It is very rare I can cross 4000 kilometers an hour, usually only reaching that when traveling halfway around the world as fast as I dare. Even while we made better and faster crafts unless I’m willing to abandon my current philosophy of maintaining a piece of the world within me, I’m still gonna be limited to that for a long time to come.

Still, this limitation isn’t the end of the world. I could instantly get a large fraction of my power almost anywhere in the world with the root network. Be it the help of the seeds, magical support, healing, and my scouting capabilities everything is equivalent to my physical presence. The only missing aspect is my own body, which stayed planted at the starting point, but I guess I can't eat my cake and still have it.

Eventually, I would be able to ride a larger and more powerful craft capable of moving that much mass around. Or I could ditch most of the mass of the inner world, but that felt wrong. Retaining just a few thousand tons of stuff. I couldn’t even conceive separating myself from Aspen, my other brain, and other parts of the critical infrastructure and even the minimum level of that was already pretty heavy.

I shake my head going back to the spatial runes I was working on before my fifteen minute break.

I compare it to what I had seen from the system, teleporting animals around, the food in my trial and all the other runes I knew. Moving my mind in the flow and patterns that the mana forms as it activates, how the carved shapes curve and alter the structure of space, I deepen the impressions each rune gives off to me. All the different sources are the same language, I know that I can feel it in my bones, but there is more to it.

Because they might be the same language, but each of them is its own dialect. From formal speech to slang, passing over every region of the country and even dabbling into scientific, chiropractic and new age terminology. Every source I have of runes has at least a slight leaning away from the ‘average’. The same underlying structure is obvious and I could sense the small differences in meaning that ‘translating’ the phrases introduce, but I still fail to pick up the subtler meanings even from words I ‘know’. I’m nowhere near a native speaker, still working closer to a machine substituting words with the help of a dictionary by my side and hoping that it makes sense in the end.

At least, when I ask for toilet paper from the ‘universe’, it understands my meaning clearly enough that I do get what I want, but proper grammar and even my speech patterns should allow me to reach heights that are impossible for now.

Still, runes aren’t just the spoken language of a single planet but encompass the “universe” or at least thousands of galaxies if my most conservative estimates of the breadth of the system are accurate.

I dive into it with all my heart and skill, leaning further and further, forgoing the normal path that most engravers took tweaking runes in small increments based on what we understood and know how it worked.

Sometimes I followed that tried and true method, but now I jump from the highest rung in the ladder with my back to the pool hoping that it has water. That should help me kick my inherent capability of reading runes higher.

My will and expansion capability aren’t infinite. I’m not delusional. My path also generally took longer, but it is my path. I sense a kinship to it. Others focus on slightly more effective tweaks, limited in character count and how they changed the script, but I work based on understanding the underlying principles, on working with what ‘feels’ right.

I’m not a dictionary, I just try to make the ‘sounds’ flow naturally. I seek that real shift, when I will stop thinking of the individual words and translating them into my native language to suddenly I’m thinking in my target language.

Today I might fail to achieve that level, but as I pull my Qi and the flow of patterns around a portal rune seeking a stable configuration, I know that I’m on the right path.

I keep working for few hours expecting to go for another day before the attack, but a messenger interrupts me.

“Nash, the enemy had switch patterns, we are going to need your input.”

“Peace and quiet never last as long I wish it to, does it? What is it?”

“You have to see it for yourself.”