"Wait." Chantelle said as I was about to leave. "I have questions."

I nodded. "So do I." I said. "I'll answer as well as I can."

"Your race changed to 'demi-AI', what is a demi-AI?" She asked.

"Technically speaking it means 'half artificial intelligence', though as it relates to race it probably means primarily AI with the other lesser part being human." I said. "Your race would have changed as well. Why it uses 'race' and not 'species' as it does later has to do with the ability to have children, I think. Species cannot interbreed, races can."

There was a flutter of... Something from Chantelle at the mention of children, but she moved on.

"Limited power duplication?" She asked.

"No idea." I said.

"Okay." She said. "Major and minor species?"

"I don't know what the major species are." I said. "And I don't know what makes a species 'minor'."

"Maybe the species that has the largest population for each of the biomes?" She asked. "There are four biomes on the plane, mountain, forest, plains, and ocean."

"When you say 'plane', what do you mean?" I asked. "The System used the same term when it mentioned biomes."

"I don't really understand the question, we live on a plane." She said. "The world is flat?"

"... What happens when you reach the edge of the world?" I asked.

"There is no edge." She said. "If you head north you leave the forest biome and enter the mountain biome. If you head north from the mountain biome you enter the forest biome from the south. East and west of the forest biome is the ocean biome. And east and west of the mountain biome is the plains biome."

The world's geography is four biomes that loop... Odd, but it only took me a few moments to adjust my view of the world.

"Any other questions?" I asked.

Chantelle shook her head and started playing with one of the enchantments. It was very interesting to watch, where before when she was working on wards all I could see was her staring at a mana crystal. Now I could see as the symbols changed and split, moving in a hypnotising flow of rainbow-coloured mana. I tore myself away, gave her a hug, and returned my time perception to normal.

I moved the doorway to the new village on the fourth floor of my fortress closer to my stone source and then stepped through it. I would have to go and get the thread portal that I had left in the mountain city soon, but I could make do with the large doorways for now. I did start on a smaller thread portal with the last twenty centimeters of my Arachne silk steel thread.

The village designers hadn't made a lot of progress while I'd been gone. Though I guess that wasn't very fair, only a few minutes had passed for them. They had the walls laid out around the stairwell, simple and thick for a run of ten meters leaving a five meter wide road leading out. It only took me a few minutes to finish the walls they'd marked out, catching up to where they were having a discussion. They were much less afraid of me now, not shrinking away at all when I approached, which was a great improvement.

"My lord." The woman who had approached me before said, bowing.

"Hello." I said. "Your name?"

"Helen, my lord." Helen said.

"Helen." I said. "Have you finished designing where you want walls?"

"Yes my lord." Helen said. "There are more buildings that it would be nice to have, but we have the most important ones done and everyone will have a place to sleep. In less than an hour."

She said that last quietly. I shrugged, building out of stone was something that was trivial for me to do. It wouldn't be very comfortable, though. Furniture and beds next, I think. And getting the rest of the villagers up here.

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I moved the fourth floor Pocket Dimension doorway back against the stairway and then shuffled the doorways around within the Pocket Dimension. The safe room now had four doorways in it, the fourth floor, the old Warder village, the bottom floor, and the Forest Keeper city. And I had moved the exit of the old village doorway so that it was above ground and able to be used. I also picked up the small thread portal I'd made and placed it in my pocket. It wouldn't be useful as a potential escape doorway, but it would allow me to access my Pocket Dimension.

"Veya." I said, calling her over to the doorway on the fourth floor. "This is the beginning of my portal nexus. That doorway there leads to your old village. Take some people and bring back whatever you need for your new village. There were snow worms there when I went through. I killed them all, but make sure to take some people that can fight if needed. And it looks like the entire village is buried in snow, so you'll have to deal with that too."

"Snow worms?" She asked.

Oh, right, they don't call them that. "Snow burrowers?" I asked, to which she nodded.

What I really needed was some non-magic fighters for guards for the nexus room. I had been about to ask Veya, but my impression of her people was that they were magical fighters that focused on defence. The nexus room, being entirely within my Pocket Dimension, didn't have access to magic.

I left Veya organising her people, getting them up to the fourth floor and preparing to go to their old village. I went up the fortress stairway past the druid floor right to the top and the guard room there. Brutus, the ox man and head of druid security, was standing guard there as I expected.

"Greetings Brutus." I said in his language.

"Greetings my lord." Brutus said. "You sound like one of the People when you speak now, much improved."

I had listened to hours of stories in the short time since setting up my presence in the storytelling room, almost exclusively in the beast people's language.

"Thank you." I said. "I had a question about how many guards you had, and how I would go about assigning a place that should be guarded."

"It should be done through Dael." Brutus said. "You negotiate with Dael, Dael tells me, and I will assign guards. We have ten dedicated guards, but sixty combatants."

I nodded to Brutus and headed down to the druid floor to find Dael. Barr, one of the guards at the entrance of the druid floor, took me to Dael's house that was just off of the entrance hallway. He was doing paperwork at a desk made of vines.

"My lord." Dael said, rising from his chair as I entered.

He gestured to a chair on the other side of his desk and I sat.

"Dael." I said. "I just spoke with Brutus who said I should speak with you about assigning an area to be guarded."

"Yes my lord." Dael said. "Although if you needed it Brutus would follow your orders directly. We can more effectively secure ourselves if I distribute our forces."

"I have begun to set up my portal nexus, which will provide fast travel to different places on the world." I said. "It does open the possibility of being attacked from there, but the opportunities for trade should be great. The nexus room itself won't allow magic, so I need physical fighters to guard it. In return I will put a portal at the stairway for your floor, where you have your guarded entrance."

"Thank you my lord." Dael said. "We would guard it without compensation, though."

I waved my hand at that, dismissing it. There didn't seem to be any expectation of lords to improve their people's circumstances, just demand whatever they wanted.

"It suits my purposes for you to have a portal." I said. "Also, my estimate for the number of people that you will eventually be responsible for providing food for is roughly two thousand, of various species. Do you have enough land to consistently provide that?"

Dael started digging through the piles of paperwork on his desk, pulling out several sheets and writing a list of numbers on a fresh sheet. A minute later he underlined the last number he'd written.

"No, my lord." Dael said. "We would require at least twice as much land. And a place to grow full height trees would also be helpful."

I was going to have to do something for trees for Mal'Thorn, so that was already on my list. And they could use the sixth floor for crops.

"I will make sure you get more land and a better space before I put a strain on your food providing capabilities." I said. "I acknowledge that my first attempt at providing you with an ideal place to live hasn't been perfect."

"My lord, we negotiated for you to provide a safe place not one that was perfectly suited to us." Dael said. "This place will easily hold against the monsters of summer. The rest we can live with."

I frowned. Building a space wasn't an issue for me. What I needed was to know what the space should be for it to be ideal.

"I am your lord." I said. "To me that means that I should be doing everything in my power to improve my people's quality of life. Think on what an ideal space for your people would be, write it down, and I will see what it is possible for me to provide."

I nodded, satisfied. That felt right. I left to carve out the portal for the druid floor after Dael assured me he would give it some thought. A teenage rabbit person went by me as I was carving, going up the stairs, and a minute later returned with Brutus following him. Brutus was back and waiting behind me when I finished the doorway. Four meters wide by three meters tall, large enough to drive a wagon through.

I had to reshuffle the nexus room a bit to fit the doorway, making the whole room taller and wider. I pulled more stone from my stone source so I didn't have to make the walls any thinner. The new nexus room was a six meter square with a four meter high ceiling.