All of the Forest Keepers had their heads bowed. After a few minutes of them grieving Mal'Thorn's guard moved around me and spoke to Mal'Thorn. Mal'Thorn spoke back to him and then gave a resigned sigh.

"My lord." Mal'Thorn said. "I need to go out to the Forest. If the Heart of the Forest lives then we must go save it, and if not then we need to make other preparations. After. I can grieve after my duty is done."

I nodded and shifted the portals within my Pocket Dimension to connect the Forest Keeper floor to the portal at the top of my fortress and led Mal'Thorn through it, going around the leprechauns. There were no guards in the guard room at the top of the stairs so I sealed the entrance to the fortress behind us after we had gone through, then went down the outer stairs.

Mal'Thorn immediately went to the trunk of the nearest tree and laid his hands upon it.

"The Heart of the Forest is dead." Mal'Thorn said, falling to his knees and sobbing.

There wasn't anything I could think of to console him, so I gave him privacy to cry, moving back to sit in the pavilion.

Less than a minute later Mal'Thorn approached.

"Where is the Forest Keeper floor relative to here?" Mal'Thorn asked.

I brought up the model I had of the fortress. "The ceiling of the floor is fifty five meters below your feet." I said. "Ten meters of soil, thirty meters of stone, ten meters of fortress wall, and then a five meter maintenance floor. There is one hundred and seventy five meters between the surface of the soil here to the surface of the soil of your floor."

"There must be a connection between the Forest and the Heart of the Forest." Mal'Thorn said. "We could grow roots down fifty five meters, but one hundred and seventy five meters is far too far. Could you set up a permanent portal between our floor and the forest?"

"I could." I said. "But if the connection is magical in nature, which it must be, then it won't be able to cross a portal. It is a basic property of my portals that they block magic, and it isn't something I can work around. How would you grow the roots? Would it be possible for you to have intermediate trees that you could use to cross the space?"

"It is possible for Forest Keepers to borrow from the growth of the Forest." Mal'Thorn said. "The Heart of the Forest provided a buffer, without it the vitality of the Forest will be drained directly. It would damage the Forest more to grow intermediate trees, but with a connection to the new Heart of the Forest the damage will heal. Without it... The Forest will die, in one way or another. We can use more Forest Keepers to distribute the damage."

I nodded. I had some spare thread portals by this point and I drew one through my small pocket portal, forming it into a doorway and connecting it to the Forest Keeper floor. Mal'Thorn went to get ten Forest Keepers while I made a model of the ideal placement of the connecting trees. I walked to the east edge of the pavilion, bringing the portal with me.

I wanted to line up with a support column on the Forest Keeper floor, but the closest one directly down was just outside the bottom of the stairs, right where the pavilion was. To compensate the roots from the nearest tree would be the starting point and they would go west as well as down.

Mal'Thorn returned and I grabbed another thread portal to dig the hole, excavating the material into my Pocket Dimension.

"How wide does the hole need to be for the root?" I asked.

"For a fifty five meter run?" Mal'Thorn said. "The top would be a meter wide, in the ideal."

That was half the width of the trunk of the tree we were using. I moved the excavating portal down into the ground, careful not to damage any of the roots of the tree, and over under the trunk of the tree. Then I started excavating down and to the west at a sixty degree angle.

"You can follow that?" I asked.

"Yes my lord, we are right behind you." Mal'Thorn said.

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I soaked my power behind the portal to find that he was right, a meter thick root was touching the back of the portal I was using. The growing effect was magic in nature, so the root wasn't going through into my Pocket Dimension.

Forty five seconds later we were at the wall of the fortress, and then through it into the empty air of the maintenance floor above the Forest Keeper floor. The root that was following my portal had gotten significantly thinner, barely five centimeters wide.

I put a three meter wide patch of soil two meters deep under where the root was coming out of the roof.

"Does the whole tunnel need to be one meter wide?" I asked. I had kept it a consistent size the whole way, but the root was tiny as it sank into the soil.

"The connection will grow to the full meter wide as it is used." Mal'Thorn said.

I formed the excavator portal into a doorway and matched it to the portal next to us.

"Through there is the maintenance floor." I said. "That's where the first connecting tree should be placed. The ceiling is only two and a half meters above the soil, so it will need to be a short tree."

Mal'Thorn and the other Forest Keepers went through the portal. It might be useful to have a portal at the outside entrance of the fortress, so I spent a minute making a solid stone wall next to where the stairs met the pavilion and then put the portal against it. Going through the portal I saw a short and wide tree that had thick branches that ran ten meters into the maintenance floor in every direction, the root coming from the ceiling wrapping around its trunk. Leaves were just coming in as I stepped through.

There were no sunlight enchanted mana crystals in the ceiling of the maintenance floor, so the leaves weren't going to do much. I was sure the tree would be able to get its energy from the connection joining the two forests together, but it would also be simple for me to give it sunlight.

I made a quest for Maaata to make a sunlight enchanted crystal that was linked to the relay on the maintenance floor with a reward of two Fortress Coins. Small mana crystals had appeared in the shop under the Items menu for one Fortress Coin, so that would reward her an extra Fortress Coin for her work.

The Forest Keepers were ready to move on to the next phase, so I took out another thread portal and cut through a one meter wide hole in the soil and floor. The hole came out exactly where I wanted it, right next to one of the support columns for the Forest Keeper floor. I slid the portal down the column sixty meters and began building a platform from my reinforced stone. The column was one meter wide and would be in the way of the tree if I wrapped the platform around it, so I built the platform as a three meter wide circle out from the column towards the stairway one hundred meters away.

I made a thin wall around the whole platform, rising two meters, and filled it with soil, leaving the one meter hole for the root of the coming tree. The excavating portal I again turned into a doorway and connected it to the portal on the maintenance floor.

I watched this time as the Forest Keepers speed-grew the tree. One of them placed a large seed, about the size of my fist, onto the top of the soil. Then all of the Forest Keepers reached out to touch the root coming down from the ceiling and the seed burst into growth. From seed to seedling to sapling to tree took thirty seconds, and then with another thirty seconds there was a full sized forty meter tall tree with a two meter wide trunk on the platform.

I leaned over the edge of the platform to see the connecting root that grew down from that tree was already nearing the ground of the Forest Keeper floor, and there was a group of Forest Keepers already there waiting for it. I connected the portal on the platform to the Forest Keeper floor portal and sent the Forest Keepers through before going up to the maintenance floor to collect the portal that I had left there.

I folded up the portal that was on the platform with my power and slid it down the column to the ground and was just leaving through the maintenance floor portal when Maaata arrived with the enchanted sunlight mana crystal.

"My lord." Maaata said with a slight bow. "I was just linking the sunlight crystal to the relay."

I nodded. "I'll take it when you're done." I said.

She frowned slightly while she was working. "Will that complete the quest?" She asked.

The presences were an extension of myself, and I was the one that people were handing in the quests to through them. At least that was how I saw it.

"I think so, yes." I said. "If it doesn't I will give it back and you can put it in the Fortress Presence."

Half a minute later she was done and handed me the sunlight crystal. I raised my eyebrows at her.

"It worked." Maaata said. "Thank you my lord."

With another bow she left back up the stairs. Huh, I hadn't considered that. Using portals within the fortress should be free. I sent that thought to the System and it sent an acknowledgement back.

I placed the sunlight crystal into the roof above the tree before going through the maintenance floor portal to the Forest Keeper floor. I was met with a fully grown Heart of the Forest tree twenty meters away from the portal, glowing a pale blue. Ninety meters tall, branches extending to make it fifty meters wide at its widest, and the trunk was easily six meters wide.

The leprechauns were sitting to the side of the portal, all fully healed, staring at the Heart of the Forest tree. The leprechaun scout leader turned to me as I exited the portal.

"Who, what, are you?" He asked.