Lord Cillas Sat in his meditation room, considering improvements he could make to his wellspring. Since he had previously decided that he would try to allow things to develop naturally, he had been making an effort to morph the mana creation spiral in a way that caused the least resistance. Several days had passed in this slow, deliberate manner, and he found that his original spiral, large and wide as it was, had been pushed down into a tight, compact thing, with only the barest separation between each go around the spiral. Hundreds and hundreds of times, the spiral circled the wellspring, and yet it was significantly smaller than it had been before. This had the curious effect that each spiral was influenced by the last, causing the internal speed to increase, meaning that less potential was converted to more mana, as well as the greatly increased quality. Lord Cillas had attempted to created a vertical spiral in the same way, but the two had a nearly catastrophic influence on one another, so he was stuck at a bottle neck with no improvement.

Luckily, the mana in his body had made some developments for him to consider. Firstly, the vastly improved quality had some bleed effect, wherein the mana naturally imbued itself upon anything which he kept on his person often. Perhaps not as much as someone who was consciously imbuing, but still, an improvement. Indeed, it seemed that this natural growth gave him the benefits of all the major paths, although at a reduced rate. if the average person got full effectiveness out of their abilities, Cillas got perhaps 45% of each of the three primary methods. Additionally, the road to Oasis had been mostly finished at this point, and some enterprising mason had moved his whole workshop out into the fields,hugely expanding his area and making dozens of extremely high quality magical sculptures.

The sculptures depicted a wildly popular pair of twin sisters which seemed to be the manifestation of the order and chaos that was held within mana, and the balance of the two aspects was always shown as the best path forward. Besides the more cultural effects of these statues, they also seemed to have positive effects on the area around them, depending on how they were sculpted as manifesting. the crafting sculpture helped craftsmen, the mage sculpture helped mages, and so on. The scholars continued to codify the abilities of mana, but as far as anyone could tell the use of mana had no limits, except perhaps that some uses were terribly inefficient. Cillas had often found himself considering the upper limits of mana, as if one had enough of it, there was no limit, especially for those effects which are more efficient uses of mana. Perhaps even Selvok had been merely using some incredible application of mana after having empowered himself for long enough.

Discounting the more metaphysical explorations that had been done, there was also a huge amount of the more mundane form of exploration. Most of the plains had been explored, and a few other locations had been defended by alpha foxes, but for the most part the plains were largely featureless. The forest and mountains, however, were full of beasts which none could injure, much less defeat. For the time being, it seemed his people would be limited to the plains they had been placed in. Once all the major fox alphas had been slain, it seemed they had accepted their place as prey, and began to avoid humans like the plague, and the grass-beasts simply were not enough of a threat to be worth considering on the scale of a kingdom, or even a city, small as it was.

Most of the farms had begun seeding their crops, and mana once again showed it's strength here by making stronger plants that grew faster and fed more heartily, even better than Cillas had expected. Cillas had also made the decision to begin an extremely aggressive training and sparring program for all military personnel and as much of the militia as he could manage. This had caused some leeches to drop out of the militia, but it was ultimately necessary, as they had found that even sparring and training increased mana generation, if only by positively minuscule amounts.

Worried for the future, Cillas knew that any native people would vastly outstrip his own, so he could only hope that an extreme amount of effort could bridge the time disadvantage. Hopefully, The next five years would go smoothly as things had gone so far, but Cillas doubted it; even gods would not be so kind.