My body would be sleeping for hours still, so I went back to carving symbols into the thread portal I was making.

"What have you been working on?" I asked Chantelle.

"I've been trying to create a more subtle anti-god ward." Chantelle said. "And working out a way to record what is happening when the wards are broken. If I can figure out how they are broken I can work around it and create a ward against it. The simulation here being of the ward room has been helping a great deal. I can throw wards up and test their effects without having to carefully lay them out so that the symbols don't negatively interact."

"There can be problems with that." I said. "This simulation is only as accurate as the underlying rules that it is running on. It might not match the outer simulation, and probably doesn't, so anything done here should be tested out there too. And then update the rules here just like you did when you introduced magic."

Chantelle pushed back from where she had her head resting on my chest. "What do you mean 'outer simulation'?" She asked.

"The world outside, I mean." I said. "Don't worry about it too much."

Chantelle frowned, considering that. "Just tell me one thing." She said. "Am I real?"

"Yes, you are real." I said. "I was told I knew you in a past life. There are some deeper things going on, but I have been avoiding thinking about it to be honest. I have more than enough to occupy me here and now."

I pulled her back close to me and she went back to resting her head against my chest.

"What are you up to?" Chantelle asked.

"Letting my body sleep so that it doesn't pass out at an inconvenient moment again, making a huge flexible portal so that I can excavate the Forest Keeper floor, and expanding my digital memory a bit in preparation for healing the unhealable druids that want it. Some of them backed out after the problems that the second druid I healed had, but there are still several of them."

"What problems did they have?" Chantelle asked.

"The pain from the body modification that restored her eyes made her feel like she might lose her grip on her sanity." I said.

"I didn't have anything like that." Chantelle said. "Though that was more because I knew you would save me and I could feel you through our connection which was very comforting."

I hadn't thought to ask her, but she had felt fine and I would have noticed any issues through our connection.

"Couldn't you just slow down the body modification so that the pain isn't so extreme?" Chantelle asked. "I know you do something similar when you run?"

"That's different." I said. "When I'm going at full speed in serial mode about a quarter of the process is actually repairing things that the body is breaking in response to things changing. If I slowed it down to the same speed as when I refresh my muscles, which is right at the border, then it wouldn't be able to keep up with the body interfering. Refreshing my muscles only works because I am reversing the way energy is consumed, I'm not changing anything. And people tend to stop breathing from the pain, so if I extended it beyond a few minutes I would have to deal with that as well."

I had tried flooding my system with endorphins, but I came across the same problem as my digital side feeling the pain, it wasn't a physical pain but one felt by the person's consciousness. There was no cheating it, the only way to get the benefit was to endure.

"You said you passed out before." Chantelle said. "You dreamed then, too? I think I felt it."

I told her about my body falling asleep between one step and the next and my face-planting into the snow. And the other champion nearly killing me, with the fight afterwards.

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"I am sorry." She said quietly.

"He threatened your family, and then said you could save them, right?" I asked. "And you would do it again."

"Yes." She said. "I knew he could have been lying, but they had my mother. And even if I couldn't save them all I knew you would come."

"I understand." I said.

She went even quieter, barely whispering. "I didn't mean for you to get hurt." She said. "They even said you died, and our connection said you were near and far at the same time."

"It was worth it." I said. "You going to them gave me an exact direction and the motivation to get there before anyone else had died. So it all worked out."

We stood in silence for a while as Chantelle's guilt, sorrow, and residual fear settled down under the weight of my acceptance and forgiveness towards her. She was usually very stable, but it seemed that meant she needed more support when it boiled over.

"Where is the Forest Keeper floor going to be?" Chantelle asked after she had calmed down.

I brought up the model of the fortress in the simulation, with the new floors added to the bottom. I hadn't had the full fortress displayed when I made the Forest Keeper floor, it really was huge compared to what I had built before. Eight and a half times wider and still twenty five meters taller.

"This goes out to the edge of the claim that the Forest Keepers gave you?" Chantelle asked.

I nodded.

"I will need to rework the wards to be in a cylinder instead of a sphere." Chantelle said. "I will be able to fold them into the detection and claim wards, though they will need to be changed as well."

She pulled up the simulated ward that was attached to one of the mana crystal orbs in the table and it expanded into its full three dimensional display. There was something odd about it, and I walked around it trying to figure out what it was. There was an extra disc of symbols attached to the disc that had the string of symbols coming off of the mana crystal.

Where the second disc split off, at about a third of the way through the symbols of the first disc, the symbols had been nudged apart to fit a new symbol that was done smaller. The mana source side entered at the bottom and one of the horns led off to the new disc while the other tied back into the original disc. The second disc was much more complicated than the first one was.

"This is the detection ward?" I asked.

"Hmm?" Chantelle said, distractedly. "Yes. The first string lays out the flow of mana and the size of the projection field of the ward and I used the original setup that the claim ward had. Then I just added my own split symbol splicing it between the setup and the claim function. I had to add a toggle to the front as well, as we didn't have enough mana available originally, and it's still there."

She was tracing through the setup string of the ward, as she'd called it. After half a minute of playing with that, where some of the symbols morphed into other symbols, she pulled up the other wards from the mana crystals in the table and the recharge ward from the mana crystal pillar.

She waved her hand and a glowing two dimensional screen appeared in front of her and she started making notes, a tally of numbers and multiplication.

"This is the most useful feature." She said as she worked.

I tended to just make models of things directly, I could remember numbers perfectly when performing mental arithmetic. A side effect of my memory power.

Chantelle finished her calculations and sighed. "There won't be enough ambient mana coming in to run the existing wards at the new size, even with the recharge ward maxed out." She said. "Which isn't even counting the enchantments running in the fortress. And you will be adding more to them."

"Does ambient mana exist underground and up in the air?" I asked.

"It does." Chantelle said.

"Just extend the recharge ward down into the earth then." I said.

"There is a limitation on how much the recharge ward can pull in, which is governed by the efficiency of the ward." Chantelle said.

Which was controlled by the size of the symbols. She had the recharge ward up and I made a private copy of its model. And then I increased the size of the existing model, zooming in by a factor of ten.

I made a copy of the splitting symbol that was on the claim and detection ward and spliced it in as the first symbol of the recharge ward. Then I placed an exact copy of the recharge ward with the first symbol coming off of the split, but at a tenth of the size. That should make it almost three times as efficient.

Chantelle was looking at it intently. "I see what you're trying to show there." She said. "And how the simulation doesn't react faithfully to outside. It is probably good that you can't affect magic directly. Adjusting a running ward causes mana feedback, which would cause the mana crystal to melt itself. You placed the split symbol, very nicely formed by the way, before the mana push symbol and then duplicated the mana push symbol. I think that would lead to the split symbol distorting, to unknown effect. And you have two identical wards covering the exact same space, which will cause them to contradict, which is how you traditionally break wards."

Wow, okay. So I'd done everything wrong, basically. And I wasn't even sure if symbols could be done ten times smaller, or what the limit might be. I picked ten arbitrarily.

"But the principle should work?" I asked.

"If I can zoom in out there, yes." Chantelle said.

I packaged up how I would go about writing a program to do exactly that, with her mana sense as inputs, and sent it to her.