A bell tinkles as we enter the small shop, and we’re immediately overcome by a flood of smells. It sounds like he has another customer, but in the meanwhile I tell Tåke not to touch anything while weaving past a table with various kinds of fruit and berry jams, stopping by a glass-door fridge with a whole bunch of cheeses.

Hmm, as I thought, they definitely have that faint feel of the Decay aspect, as do a few other foods here, but it’s, hm, subdued, barely there, and feels… less sharp? As opposed to the cheeses, if I opened the fridge Tåke would probably recoil away from the smell. So might I, for that matter.

The other customer is done, leaving with a plain paper bag, so I walk up to the counter, avoiding the cured meat hanging from the roof at the side of the shop. I make sure to let her taste each of the samples on the way, of course.

“'ello, can I help you?”

“Yeah, I want a few things. First, can we get samples of that, that, and that?” I point at a salami and two kinds of cured meat.

We get our samples, and Tåke gives her thumbs up, so I buy a bunch of each of those, and couple others, getting his advice on how much I’ll need for something like tapas this and that many people.

Once back outside I let her shift back to her normal, furry, form, making sure to compliment her for bearing with the other one for so long. That ‘other one’ being a human form and ‘so long’ being the ten to fifteen minutes we were inside. Despite wearing more, and proper clothes, she claims to feel naked in the furless form, and I can see where she’s coming from. Fur is like a blanket you wear, that doesn’t get in the way.

Normally the wolfkin only wears the skirt-kilts we’ve made for them, and tank-top kinda stuff if they cold or they otherwise want to/like it, but while they’re better than simple loincloths and rags, they do little more than cover the most important bits. Well, the closer they are to and more contact they have with humans, the more they wear our kind of clothes.

A few days later, it’s time, and while I was worried for a bit, it’s looking like it’ll be a warm and sunny day. Very warm, in fact, and this year has been unusual, with forest fire warnings, actual forest fires, and bans on all fire outside designated areas. We have one of those though, and I’m going to make it even safer, and do some other things while at it. Since there’s no rain I don’t strictly need the help of the earth-shapers, but hey, they’re already here, and it’ll be faster. Besides, I have a hypothesis to test.

I link up with each of them, both with mana and a weak mind bond, and have them spread out in a rough circle around me as the center. Hmm, that’s 4-8-10… 15… 19 wolfkin plus Tåke and me. Yeah, that should be plenty, and they can spread out a bit more. Need to be more evenly dispersed, though.

Perfect.

I was prepared for making shelter for rain, but since the sun is our opponent today there’s no need to make any shelters, since we have both trees and the Den available to anyone who gets too hot. So instead I direct our mana around the area I’ll be working on to get a better feel for it, as being the nexus of a chain this large is quite something. It’s more challenging, of course, but the sheer power available, the even without burning mana crystals…

Warmup done, I start by flattening and hardening the area just outside the entrance to the Den, forming what will become a plaza of sorts. Everyone has either moved away or into the Den itself, and we removed the last few tent-shelter-things earlier today, so there’s tons of space. I make sure to make the surface slightly angled away from the center, away from the Den, to let rainwater drain away.

The plaza is (very) roughly rectangular, more blobby, really. Next up I make a line of tables of slightly varying rounded rectangular shapes, each with some combination of benches, chairs, and cylindrical ‘stools’ for people to sit at. If the entrance to the Den is at the ‘bottom’, there’s a nice wide path straight out of it. The sitting groups are on the ‘left’ of that, with a gap in the middle so people can easily walk past. They’re not quite stone, but are still hardened dirt, so bring your own pillows, I guess.

Then, in the ‘bottom right’, I add ovens. Two, to be precise, forming the bottom of a mirrored L, where the long side gets two grills. Well, they won’t be very useful without the metal grates (or grills, I suppose) to put stuff on, but I’ll get back to that. That leaving a plus-sign and one corner open and walkable, with plenty of seats and equipment to cook food.

Yep, it’s not the fanciest thing I’ve seen, but it should serve us well. It would be kinda overkill just for today, but eh, I’ll just leave it and we can even slowly improve on it. In fact, let’s add a few enchantments to make it even more sturdy.

Right, with preparations done I can get started on the real work. I pull out two mana crystals, ordering wolves to further enlarge the circle, but leave three people as relays at their current location. That wolf isn’t strictly speaking a person, but it’s nice to know that even those who haven’t made the transition to two legs also want to help.

Well, I say that, but I think word has gotten out about the food.

Hmm, it seems I have to strengthen the mind bonds slightly to properly communicate with the those in the ring now. Yeah, that works. I hand one of the crystals to Tåke by my side, then take a deep breath. Maybe I should’ve gotten someone to record this with a drone? No matter.

I start slowly burning the mana crystal, sending the mana through the relays to the ring of wolfkin, using their local mana control to flatten a half-meter wide ring of dirt all around us. They use some of their own mana to do the casting, but most of it comes from me and the crystal, and I’m the primary caster and source of the spell, too.

With the first ring done, we make a similar ring a few meters inside the first one. I make a significantly smaller ring around myself, both in width and radius, to mark the center of the formation and acts as a nexus-node. Then I make even triangles around each of the three relays, pointing towards the center. Between those and the inner ring I make three pairs of even smaller rings, and make underground pathways connecting everything.

From the central node above the entrance to the Den the pathways avoid the plaza and hit the tips of the triangles. As if the split by the triangle, I continue the two connecting sides underground, touching the smallest nodes before widening just before reaching the inner ring.

Changing the area on a large scale was the easy part, though, being merely physical. I slightly increase the rate I burn the crystal as I split the outer ring; once, twice, thrice, and a fourth time, into sixteen sections. With the mana readied, I have each member of the outer ring of the chain take a section and make the same inscription. First, groundwork. Then, details. Finally, key nodes, and the outer ring activates, starting to draw nearby mana inwards.

With it done I have everyone stand between the two rings, splitting the inner ring into three sections, and each of those into a total of fifteen sections. This one has a different purpose, and I mark off the outer third. Foundation, details, activate. The mana, which had been pushed towards the center, is now merely drawn within the outer circle, naturally diffusing inwards from there.

Now comes the hard part.

The crystal has become noticeable lighter, and I further increase the burns rate as I inscribe and enchant each of the segments connecting to the pathways to passively channel mana towards the center. Each of the nodes between those and the triangles I set up the formations to grow mana crystals, so that they only need a seed.

Using the relays, the outer corners of the triangles get the same inscription as the outer parts of the inner ring, this time to act as valves to only let mana flow towards the center, instead of blocking the effect of the outer absorption array. In the remaining space of the triangle I make the foundation and details of an active mana absorption formation, tweaked slightly and without the key nodes for it to activate. We infuse the pathways between those and the center, linking that up with the central node, in which I add another foundation for an absorption formation, baking the activation of the triangles into the details, and nodes for a caster to connect into.

Such as I do now.

The crystal has become brittle, so I trade it with the slightly smaller, but unused one Tåke holds, after which she hurries out of the circle, so that I can activate it.

For a moment, nothing happens, then I feel alarm from most of the wolfkin as the mana the outer array had slowly gathered is rapidly pulled towards the triangles, and from there to me

“Aahhaha, it works!”

But now is not the time for power-crazy monologues, so I turn my attention to the unused segments of the inner ring. Each of the three major sections has smaller sections that goes unused, absorption, unused, absorption, unused, and I start by the middle unused sections, building a complex, layered formation that I used wayyy too long on. But once it’s done, the effect is noticeable immediately, and the slight breeze picks up as I funnel some of the mana around me into it.

Time will tell if how much of it actually works, and I’ll need to regularly come back to see how it does, but it should stabilize the environment in the area. By this point the air around me is practically thrumming with magical energy, and the sheer density of it have already led to a few discharges of wild magic, mostly just flashes of light, but it’s getting hotter and the air feels staticy.

I better hurry up, then. I doubt I’ll need to withdraw any mana from this crystal, but -ow!- I might need to store some of this mana in it before anything bad happens.

But first I start sending out the mana as fast as the relays can handle, and when that’s not enough, make everyone reorganize to have more relays, with the outermost links gathering by the unused segments.

Mana surges both ways, and I make Tåke, Trilli and a particularly notable earth-shaper secondary nexuses of the chain, then have them make the foundations for binding the massive spell I’m starting to weave. I take a moment to compartmentalize so I won’t interrupt them, then use everyone else to form a dome of the faintest strands on mana around us.

We keep channeling mana into it, and the air starts to visibly shimmer as it thickens, all the while the foundations are being made. As soon as those are done my helpers pull out the first of several anchors for each segment, conjuring a material that mana can freely flow through around the small metal sphere and insert them into the formations.

As each of them give the mental signal I make a mana link with the anchors, then tie it in place, binding it to the spheres. While they work on the next steps, I weave another spell tightly into the first one, which requires less focus now that it’s bound, making the dome a barrier against mana and ki alike from both sides.

They place down the anchors, I bind the spell to the anchors, and then i move my mental focus to each of them in turns, as I help them connect the formation to that of the outer parts of the inner ring. Next, I reach down to the Den, connecting to anyone who accepts, and use our collective power to grasp the mind-diverting spell that has risen in the area, ‘reading’ it to weave another layer of that into the dome, and again anchoring it. We do the same with The Mist, though anchor it to spots left open in the climate control segments.

Then, I weave the the two spells together, the artificial dome and the natural spell the wolves’ gestalt seems to have created, in such a way that the connection relies on the dome; if the dome fails somehow I don’t want to affect the natural grand spell, after all. That could be… bad. Very bad. Or not, we simply don’t understand natural spells very well yet.

With everything I wanted done, done, I disconnect from those not part of the original chain and stop the array from actively drawing in mana, then go over each of the segments in turn, inspecting them and fixing them up where relevant. I’ll need to inspect them in-person too, but no rush.

Since I have all this mana available anyway, I turn my attention downward again, and touch up, strengthen, and improve the structure and enchantments that make up the Den. Is this how Leda feels, all the time? Maybe not, I haven’t been mana burnt, but I also haven’t tested my limits with Leda’s mana lately, either.

Hmm, the segments seems fine from what I can sense from here, no unnatural flows or parts that shouldn’t activate activating. Everyone feels tired, so I should let them- Actually, before that…

I have everyone who helped gather in the plaza, and borrow their mana to weakly infuse the floor of the plaza; each gets a similarly sized (though not shaped) portion, leaving the plus-shaped path unmarked. The infusion will disperse in a day or so, but that’s long enough for our purposes.

I used a trick of the mind bond to share my idea, then come to an agreement on ‘rules’, and finally decide collectively who gets a piece where, and now that everyone’s happy, I let them disconnect if they want to leave, or simply do their work without the buzz of other minds.

Most of the wolfkin remain, some simply to use my mana to assist their own drained reserves, others to receive assistance, and they all seem to want to know my opinion.