As I find out, taking such a big chunk out of the ground is quite onerous. Being one ‘continuous piece’ the system heavily resists me trying to put it on my inner world or inventory. What I end up needing to do was to get a shovel to facilitate my work.

It's already well into the night when I finish putting all the soil in. The sphere is now over a third full with the best soil available. After so long keeping the small portal up, I’m confident in my growing skill. I can maintain it as long as I’m awake, though there is probably stuff that could disrupt my concentration.

With this thought in mind, I deepen my Aether connection to the seed in my eye. It takes a few minutes of concerted effort for it to acquiesce and extend a small tendril through the portal. It is slow by human standards, but it’s not like plants have muscles.

Wincing a little I shut off the portal for a few seconds, and as the small sapling starts to react, reactivate it in the exact same place. With great relief the connection is instantaneous, and after a few moments, the little fluid that leaked out in the moments after the portal severed the connection is refilled.

So at least small interruptions will be no problem. Given what I know of Pando, barring unforeseen complications, a merge is just a question of time. Pando may technically be a tree, but while he had his limitations, he could do incredible things.

After a couple of hours, I manage to coax most of the root system from my body to my inner world. It takes time, but all the while I get better and better at maintaining the portal. With the roots now spreading in my inner world, I head to my house and put everything that normally stays there inside either the inventory or my inner world. I end up not touching the buried batteries, but the last copper plate not yet enchanted also goes in my inventory.

The implications of having access to this were enormous. Even at my current capped level, I could transport over a thousand tons of ore with each trip. That could revolutionize our transportation, but there are also drawbacks to announcing openly this capability.

Maybe I could pretend after it became obvious that I had access to some type of space bag to have a simple inventory.

As I run in the night, none of these thoughts truly leave me but I manage to concentrate on my run more. Running faster, with better perception and knowledge from the other hunters, I continuously run into wolf packs. Two or three encounters every hour. Each of my movements is accompanied by a thin stream of Aether around and within me, and so I learn more in this single night about how to fight wolves than in all my nights hunting before. By now, most wolves are level 10 to 12. I found out that there are only a couple dozen people still properly hunting them.

Their behavior is still quite aggressive. Their warped status along with the skin-care that comes with it are still there, but something has changed. The quest from so long ago comes to mind, and while it would have been nice to drop everything to solve this mystery, there a quite a few things to get to before then.

I learn to use my new staff. I will probably stick with this one a lot longer than all the other simple wooden staffs. Nothing against wood, but none of them was an actual proper staff, just stuff cobbled together. The system didn’t even recognize them as +1 implements. Too bad there was not magical wood or something on the carpenter.

While I could have tried to get something close to ebony and make a heavy staff, we didn’t have the proper technics to engrave wood. While the carpenter didn’t seem like a bad bloke, he was no master craftsman, let alone someone working on magic instruments.

As the night goes on, I try and focus on having the portal up and making an autonomic function of my body. I may not succeed in my goal, but it is one of those things always in the back of my mind. Something probably possible, but that I never tried to do. Trying to make this action as natural as breathing. It took me years to learn how to breathe correctly even when I was not paying attention, now to see if I can add something new altogether.

All the while I keep the Aether stream going and run from encounter to encounter with more energy than I can remember. Not the more physical aspect of energy, but the mental aspect of it. The cold air entering my lungs as I connect with the wolves, admittedly in a less than ideal way, but we in many ways are stuck to the same system.

A strange bond starts to form, and my Aether while not focused on this starts to weave a story. A story about the wolves, humans, and the system.

I will free you. Just you wait, there won’t be a binding that can hold you when I have accomplished my goals.

It is with those thoughts I run the rest of the night.

As the sunrise approaches, I get ready for a long-overdue action. With significantly better Aether control and a better idea of the mechanisms behind their teleportation from this place, I lay in wait. This time with a much greater range and eventually a much smaller Aether absorption from another lifeform, in this case the wolves, I don’t even feel the pinch of spending my precious Aether.

The seconds tick by and five minutes before sunrise, the second pack of wolves stops by. Smelling meat on the ground they rush forward. After a moment the biggest of them finishes most of it, and the two smaller ones also join in eating the last scraps.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

They all walk around smelling around and hunting for any more tidbits, which is actually expected given I spread a bit of the blood exactly for this effect.

I hope they will keep hunting for another minute or so.

When they are almost leaving the last second ticks by. I lower the Aether tendrils to know exactly where they are and trying to match it as closely as possible the very moment the first rays of direct light hit me. The very instant I find out where the closest one of them is, my entire concentration goes to the mana around the area.

What greets me, almost surprises me. With higher stats, unlocked soul, and higher skill levels I can perceive so much more. I barely even notice the wolves reaction, what takes my entire attention is the intricate and almost delicate rune script that precipitate the event.

I don’t get everything, but if before I only got a glimpse, now it was burned in my memory with only a few spots a little fuzzy. I take a thin wooden board, a piece of paper, and a pencil from my inventory. Before forgetting even the smallest of detail I’m drawing as fast as possible.

To really mark it in my memory, I end up putting the entire thing on paper three times. Each line I could remember, leaving the small spots I wasn’t too clear on with dotted lines.

AS the sun continues to rise, I sit there for another few moments. Starring at these runes, I try to make sense of them. The central one is the only one clearly drawn the first time so long ago. And while the experients were interesting, they didn’t get anywhere.

With a closer look now I could see why. Two main reasons. Around the central formation, there were a lot of runes in configurations I would not have expected to encounter in teleportation, or whatever this was.

There were also six new runes connecting the central rune to the rest of the spell. Each of them was fairly complex. While not as much as the central rune, they were beyond all the runes were experimenting currently outside of two.

The fact that this spell worked different from our way of using the runes, and with so many new and specific runes made damn sure we would not be able to ‘control’ and ‘regulate’ any kind of teleportation.

With nearly the entire picture in my hands, all that would not a problem. We would probably need to tinker around a bit but it would be a matter of time.

I run back to my house. There are hours yet until a messenger comes by, so I write a couple of letters. In them put down a few thoughts for Charlie, two of the spells just drawn to Merlin, and also a few notes to the group I hired to work on my ‘rune’.

With the immediate business taken care of, I settle in the clearing right outside my door. I do something that I haven’t done in years. Follow a few katas. Nothing specific to any single martial art. Just a few moves picked up along the way that mesh well with me.

I don’t remember ever practicing them after I went to live on Pando, but each of my favorite moves comes back in an instant. Aether circulates as I was doing most of the time now, and without conscious thought. Trying to relax and get in a state of flow I practice each of them.

Flexibility, Strength, stamina, power, fluidity. These concepts fling around in my mind. Each of them always gave me a distinct impression, and when I was not visiting Pando, practicing them seem to strengthen me. I identified most with the ones relating to stamina. To sustain an effort long after everyone else had given up.

As I practiced each of these, a story formed in my mind. A story both greater and simpler than what had for so long surrounded me. A story of me going a little beyond the human, and now far beyond. None of that is conscious, but the simple actions allow me to make better use of the Aether than I ever could before.

The hours pass and the sun is high in the sky when I hear someone tracking through the wood. Opening my eyes and returning to a resting pose, I watch intently and wait for him to come around.

After a few seconds, a younger messenger, perhaps 16 years old. Shows up at the edge of my clearing. It only takes him another few seconds and he is standing right before me.

“Hy Nash, here is your correspondence.” He says while reaching his hand for an inner pocket and delivering two letters to me.

Taking them and while opening them, I speak:

“Ok, just wait a minute to see if I need to send anything else.”

I barely notice a little impatience in his demeanor, but he quickly suppresses it. Opening both letters I skim them. The one from Charlie is mostly news from the city. There doesn’t seem to be anything I will be reaping to now so I leave it for later. The other one is from the group I hired. Two days have passed since they received the rune, and they were making good progress.

Glad about how much they discovered, I open the letter was gonna send them, and add a few more notes along with recommendations on how to proceed. Soon I send the messenger away with a copper coin for his troubles.

With both letters in hand, I again read Charlie’s letter more carefully. It seems that the rumbling about a possible attack, likely to come from ‘Lord Max’s village were looking more and more likely. In the letter was included one tidbit that pulled my attention. When the attack was occurring, someone in the Map room, noticed a large mass of people moving through the land in the direction of the village.

They stopped about 80 miles out fairly dispersed. The color of their clothes and positions made the identification a little hard without knowing where to look, but we had attentive people on watch. Reading a little further, I think about whenever there is someone that infiltrated our village, or if someone betrayed us. Probably the latter. By now I would think there would a few people that could recognize everyone by face.

It was always possible someone else repeated my actions, but running over 1000 kilometers without sleep was quite a bit more than I expect people to do on a whim.

Something to think over later. There was nothing I could do immediately. I would continue in regular contact with the village, and they would be alert to the possibility of attack. From what I knew of Charlie he would be prepared. Whoever got in the way would be steamrolled.

Now on happier business, there was quite a bit of progress on the other front. The group I hired took the initiative of include Merlin who also got help, and in just two days, they had improved significantly my design in several ways including the addition of a very useful capability. Voice transmission. For now, the range was still very limited given the mana requirements. But for something simple like a walkie-talkie about one mana a second from people about 100 meters from each other was reasonable. And I had a few ideas about that.

With my mind firing on all cylinders with all the ideas and possibilities, I go to my next task, something long overdue. Figuring out nature mana. About time Pando’s guardian did something that was expected of him.