I find Silje sitting outside the caves, practically drowning in wolves. Female and male. “I’m going to the water temple now.”

With a small movement she seems to realize she’s basically stuck. “Give me a moment and-”

“You’re not coming.”

“Huh?”

“Uh, sorry that sounded a bit harsh. I just figured I should tell you I was leaving. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not taking you to the water temple unless you have a reliable way to breathe underwater. You can just… do what you want, really. I don’t know how long this will take, but I’ll be busy afterwards. We’ll meet tomorrow anyway.”

“Wait, the water temple? From the video? It’s here?”

“Uh, no, this is the wolves’ den. The water temple over in the lake.”

She does not seem amused by my half-joke. Ah well. I say goodbye for today and head to the lake, stopping by the shore. Time to test out a few ideas. My phone is in an airtight bag, right? Ok, good. I lift my foot. I move it forwards. Before it hits the water, I freeze it (the water), holding the fresh, new (growing) chunk of ice stable with [Force Magic].

I take another step. Then another. Okay, good. I gradually swap from force to water magics, and then thin the ice. Eventually, I am simply walking on oddly solid water. Then I speed up, and start running. No problems so far.

Time for step two. Three? Four? Uh, the next step. The next thing to test. I slow down to a casual walk, then kick off with my right foot, landing on the inner part of my left. There is a snag of friction, and I trip for a few steps, then try again. And again. Aaaand- Ahem, either way I succeed after probably looking stupid for a while: Ice skating, but on water.

I continue with the side to side motions of skating, getting some decent speed, then stop above the approximate location of the water temple, or rather a bit off to the side since some people are diving nearby. I switch to the much more familiar [Force Magic], grab hold of air in a small sphere around me with the relevant magics.

I go over my mental diving checklist, then -perhaps a second after lifting off from the water- plunge beneath the surface, stopping a few meters below and descending at a safe, slow pace. Not long after, I get the now familiar sense of my mana being dissipated by the weird seagrass. I continue on to the entrance of the dungeon.

Time to investigate, then. First, a simple use of mana sense. As per usual the barrier simply stops mana. This time, however, I reach around it. The barrier seems to extend a bit into the rock, but beyond that, nothing. As in, according to my mana sense there is nothing on the other side.

It really is a subspace or pocket dimension or whatever… Moving on, I use both [Spatial Magic] and [Temporal Magic] in much the same way, trying to get a sense of how this barrier/portal works. It’s… like that huh. It sorta just holds space. The barrier function makes it very tricky to get the whole picture, unfortunately.

Oh wait, I can just enter. Or rather, enter with most of my body. I do so, absorbing the air bubble into the spatial wristband. Keeping my head inside the dungeon for breathing, of course. Being able to sense both sides of the barrier at the same time gives me a much more complete picture, and I immediately get an idea on how to replicate it, at least on a smaller scale. Prototype, test, scale up.

Like from the other side, I am unable to detect anything on the other side of the barrier, but here my mana is stopped if from reaching around the barrier. I glide a string of mana of whatever blocks it - it just continues outside of the dungeon. Is it in a spatial bubble, of sorts?

I enter the dungeon with the rest of my body, then spread out my mana. Yeah, there seems to be a bubble around the dungeon, where it just stops. It expands so the dungeon fits nicely inside the bubble, but not by a lot. I walk to the big room. Same thing. And the Door has that barrier, as usual.

The dormitories - in the bubble. The drowned rooms, too. And the elevator. And the test room. The entire dungeon -as far as I can go and sense- is inside the bubble. The spatial bubble. It feels… Can I even describe the sensation of space? Loose, perhaps? Like a slack rope. Not fully, completely… not truly solid?

Hmm, now that I’m here I might as well run the test again. I quickly return to the big room, going over the steps and movements again. And then, I do the new ones. Yesterday I went over the steps and noticed some new ones. So I practiced those too. After repeating all the steps I know I look around, and notice more.

This entire room… I’m starting to think it’s covered in the odd symbols that teaches you how to move. It’s really cleverly made. A few of them stand out, so you start there. If you manage to follow them, they will naturally point you to some others. Eventually, the trail ends.

But if you practice and get used to the steps, learn the symbols… The next time you realise it doesn’t actually end. It simply becomes too… hidden. Complex. Advanced. …or something like that. Each one builds on the previous, and all before that. Will you eventually see the entire mosaic like a giant instruction?

Perhaps, hidden somewhere, is the movements to open the big door. Or perhaps you need to learn it all. Enough thinking, let’s do it once more. Doing so clear my mind. Meditation by movement? I only find two new symbols since yesterday, and adding up all I know accounts for a miniscule portion of everything here. Maybe I’m just overthinking things.

I make my way to the test, and put my bag next to the orb. After a moment of deliberation and deep breath, put my hand on the shiny sphere. It does… something with my memories, or perhaps the ability I first learned here, [Water Bending]. Reads, perhaps. It seems to modify the test for you current skills. Well, it starts from step one and is essentially an endurance test.

Breathe in. Out. Clear my mind. Okay. I step onto the platform. Let’s dance. As before, it starts off effortlessly, difficulty, both in speed and complexity, ramps up slowly, and after five, or ten, or something minutes I start to get tired.

Eventually I have to desperately improvise to just move the water anywhere neither knowing nor caring which urn I should aim for. And then, when water comes from two urns at the same time, I barely guide one with one arm and merge it with the other, then turn around and meet with a stream of water.

I magically dry myself as the platform stops glowing. The movements seem pretty martial arts-y, but I imagine it looks a lot like dancing if anyone saw me. Well, ahh, that was a bit too intense movement. Good thing I’ve been getting a lot more exercise lately. The changes I’ve made to my body helps, too.

Well, time to go back up. Eh, I’ll dance in front of the Door again. I doubt it would open or anything, but… I doubt I’d be able to replicate the whole pocket dimension thing in a short time, not being able to see how it works, just what it does. That’s an experiment I’ll do outside.

Turns out making a portal of sorts to a pocket dimension isn’t particularly hard. I can’t for the life of me create the portal in a way that is not touching the subspace object, though. That, and the entire thing consisted of a fist-sized stone with a portal barely large enough to fit a finger in. Because scaling it up increases the mana cost by simply stupid amounts.

It struck me that if I succeed in making the gates human-sized, and find a way to separate them from the physical subspace key (object that holds the subspace), I can make instant transportation gates. Adding another gate costs extra mana, yes, but compared to scaling up the subspace it’s neglectable. At least assuming that’s how it works at larger scales.

Silje seems to have left by the time I got back up, and with no viable way to make a pocket dimension, the room in the Den gets a simple spatial enlargement enchantment. As with the much smaller bags, the larger the original space, the ‘cheaper’ increasing the size is, and I settle for a rather effortless four times size increase.

Of course, being bigger the total mana cost is also bigger than the bags, but it’s comparatively less for the extra size. There does seem to be diminishing returns, however, so I doubt I could take an airplane hangar and make it like 100x, even ignoring mana cost. Either way the room becomes much bigger.

Unfortunately a lot of the size is vertical, but I with a lot of string and some trips to grab some wood, I build a second, if low, floor. In all likelihood I won’t really use the floor or even the room that much, but it feels good to do something and see the results. Were it not for the Reveal and/or Upheaval, I would probably spend most of my time inside, in front of the computer… Doing nothing particularly creative/productive unless I felt like it.

I guess one could say making something you don’t expect to use is a waste… But at the very least it’s a learning experience. I guess I’ll give Tåke some physical affection then head- Oh, my phone is ringing.

“I’ll see you then.” I hang up on the psychologist, then open my calendar to put in a reminder for tuesday. They have reserved some scanning machines and readied the other things they need for the research. She said they wanted me to bring my companions, but with Leda being what she is, they decided it would be best if they get permission from the relevant institutions.

She also mentioned something about scanning Leda’s main body but shrugged it off saying that would have to be another time. Either way she’ll contact me tomorrow once they have cleared up the whole problem of Leda.

“Hi Leda, what are you doing?”

“Enchanting!” Her puppet says, strained but chipper.

“Okay. I want to check something, can I form a mana link with your puppet?”

She responds by forming said link, clearly concentrating on ‘enchanting’. It looks kinda funny, with her puppet making a strained grimace while her main body is the one that uses all the mana. What is she even enchanting? Her mana is spread over a larger area than I can sense.

She has rebuilt her nest into something more looking like a small fort, especially with the spikes of rock and wood encircling it. Wait, mana flows through the outer ‘wall’ and- Oh. The entire nest, uh, fort? Base? Her entire base seem to be a massive version of my mana-gathering array. It doesn’t seem to be as effective, but with the size it doesn’t really matter.

What it uses that mana for is more interesting. As I noticed on the way here, she’s set up an illusion to make her base blend in with the forest around. Well, the illusion is a green blob, so to an intelligent observer it’s pretty clear that there’s something odd with it. It also has that jedi mind trick magic- I really need a better name for that. Uhh, ‘ignore-me spell’? That works.

The ignore-me enchantment covers a lot more than just the base. Or rather, the part it makes you ignore is the base. The way it works you can easily see what it tries to hide from outside the effective range of the spell, though. I guess that’s why she’s bound it…

Ohh. OOOH.

So that’s why she’s sending her mana out so far - She’s enchanting the entire damn forest! Well, a sizable portion at least. TIme to try that… Using her puppet as a node, I cautiously send mana into her main body. I draw a sharp breath. Safe! Her massive mana pool drowns out what little I channel into her, but leveraging that I can sense what she can.

Which is a lot. I can see why she’s so focused. She is forming mana absorption arrays spread around the forest, connecting them all together and channelling all the mana to the center, her base. No wait, that’s not quite right. The arrays only draw as much mana as they need for the enchantments, she’s the one drawing in all the mana.

That’s pretty clever, using the mana from the arrays to supplement her own mana in order to further expand the arrays. It would be really interesting to have that much mana available, but right now I think the mana would burn me to little more than ash. If you can control how much mana you draw in, however…

I shudder as she shifts her attention to create yet another array. …I better not mess with that just yet. I withdraw my mana, focusing instead on her puppet. The sheer amount of mana in the air, little more than waste for this massive undertaking, gives me goosebumps.

The puppet has a mana core and mana veins, the word I decided one for the channels in your body where mana flows much better. Tåke has them too, but they are nowhere as… refined? Strong? Using water as a metaphor, they would be like literal channels, specialized to funnel mana to where it’s needed. Without them water still finds a way, but a thousand small streams are not nearly as effective, and a natural river snakes its own way.

How would that work with flooding, then? Too much mana would be like flooding. Mana burns would then be the erosion from a river overflowing its bounds? Or the metaphor just falls apart. Either way this doesn’t get me any closer to forming my own mana veins.

I break the mana bond and take a mana-rich breath. I look around, finding the egg lying on top of its bag in a small nest of sticks and small trees. I go over to it, then reach out my mana. It absorbs the mana. Not particularly fast, but it does draw on my mana,as well as the mana of the air. I turn to the nearby wyvern. Is gathering mana an instinctual thing for them?

I take on Wyvern, covering myself in scales, then climb into the nest and sit down leaning onto it. A nest where the eggs are as big as me, huh. I close my eyes. I wonder how far developed the little one is? Is it drawing on the mana, or is that something the egg does, through a natural enchantment or something?

I insert my mana again, more this time. It greedily absorbs at a steady rate. Is that… good? Bad? I should improve my mana sense, but at the current level I can at least tell that it’s not just a proto-embryo soup. It’s hard to gauge the size, but… It has room to grow, at least.

More importantly, it does not seem to have a mana core. Yet, at least. That means I should be able to gain some insight into how one forms by regularly checking up on the egg. It will be interesting to see how Leda’s nest/base ends up too. I’ll just try the teleporting trick then head home for today.