Sitting in my little mud hut I spread my awareness, and even though I just spent days expanding the network and growing runic defenses for these other villages, I continue along a similar line.

This time I focus only on the tendrils spreading from village to village that the scouts have helped set up. Vast swathes of them are already connected, and just need me to bridge small gaps and I do so gladly.

So far away, some 500 to 800 miles from myself, I can’t effectively concentrate on more than one place at a time, but even not being unable to work simultaneously on it takes me less than half an hour for each new tendril to connect to another village.

After a good twenty hours, every single village in a 200 mile distance from us is redundantly connected and all the villages within 400 miles have at least a single tendril leading to them. I even reached out to a village almost 1000 miles north so I could add it to the network.

A couple of hours before sunrise I get ready to sleep but instead of continuing on to my house that is seeing less and less of me, I head for the village’s inn. I wanted to sleep there a couple more times as a trial, and today is as good a day as any.

Getting up only 2 hours later, just a few minutes before the sunrise, I feel the subtle difference in my rest. It’s still not enough to be conclusive, and I guess I will need a lot more data before being able to accurately judge the benefits if there are even any beyond the one brought by my own belief. Though even if it is a placebo I don’t really mind, as long as it works.

Inside the room, I reach out and connect to the network for a few minutes with a broad overlook of what Aspen has been up to while I was connecting more villages or sleeping.

Reaching for more and more, I sense the circle around the entire high level zone almost completed. Probably only another day or two before he finishes. I give a quick pass through the new areas inside the high level zone looking for more of the metallic taste and cold feeling of a silver mine in the newly covered area but there isn’t going to be new mines today.

So far we have started on the three I found and it is proving an amazing source of silver as the miners and controllers learn their intricacies and improve the method of extraction.

I head to my little hut in the village, now with a thin layer of flat wood held in place by the inner structure which makes it not stand amongst the mass of wooden houses. It looks almost respectable.

As I get within a pair of steps, I feel the automatic pulse of mana bouncing over my body and the little runic work in my pocket reflects the signal back without me having to do anything. Without fear, I walk right through the door which swings open just as I’m to bump my head against it.

I gaze at the table and cabinet where there are hundreds of plants in small vases, most of them disconnected from the network and the growing effects being in contact with nature mana may have on them.

I carefully connect with each of them, avoiding sending any mana or doing anything that could alter their growth speed and development direction.

Nature mana and a few other tricks may be helpful, but I needed to learn how the plants react without any mana and I observed as they slowly grow and develop in the ‘sterile’ environment.

A few quick notes on a runic pad, still a cumbersome thing that weight as much as a crt style computer monitor from the 90’s which sends my scribbles into it to the ‘data storage’ before I put the book in the receptacle and update it with all the information it gained since the last time I was in the village.

I could have made another of these receptacle platforms to carry it with me but it didn’t seem like it was worth the time investment, not when there is so much else I could be doing, and if I ever needed it, I could just grow one right on the spot.

Thinking of the book reminds me of something and I stop my work before rushing to the library. As I at the head librarian, he smiles and calls me over.

“Nash, you were right!”

“About what?” I ask, only having a vague hunch of what he is talking about after our last talk.

“There are plenty of people that were writing fiction and other stuff from back on Earth and a few were also making new original stories.”

“Have you been able to add them to the library?”

“Two of them, but I don’t want to fill the data storage modules with useless stuff, so I picked the best ones, with a shortlist for when we have the storage needed.”

“When more people manage to learn the runic casting process, maybe storage will no longer be a problem. It’s so much faster.”

“Let’s hope. So why did you come?”

“Mostly to get an update on the state of the books, so as long as we get enough data storage capacity we can add their books.”

“Pretty much, we can actually start before if we cut down on the useless stuff, I have no idea why people are adding grocery lists and stuff to the library.”

“A thousand people each adding a single page of groceries list are going to use less space than a single full-time writer, but I understand your concerns. Don’t worry, we will figure something out.” I say.

I look at the runic pathways and add another incomplete cube to the secure section of the library which sits in a smaller room, sealed in solid stone a couple of meters underground with runic defenses and shields. With my inner world, I can simply make the material pop out by forming a portal inside. No need to call for a Stonesinger mage or waste a bunch of mana to do it myself.

After getting everything else in order, I say goodbye and walk out. With the remainder of the need for more storage fresh in my mind, I pay more attention to the next iteration of the data storage cube, though I am pretty sure I will part ways with it long before it has grown to full size.

Every couple of seconds I put my effort into formin 25 new data storage cells along a 2-inch long strip. More and more are added, back and forth like a 3d printer, and just like any print of a decent volume, it takes time… a lot of time.

It has been a week since I last dropped off one of these. I have only spent a couple of hours here and there working on it, and as expected barely a third of the full 12-inch cube is formed. But even with just a third of the volume filled, it would be enough for over 100 thousand words with no ‘compression’.

I don’t want to drive people away from using the storage system of the library, especially in the future as storage capabilities would far outstrip whatever they could fill by hand. By then the value of having everyone using this new service would be well worth the effort.

And everyone’s grocery lists would not be competing for space with some of the greatest literary works of art from back on Earth, or at least the best approximations based on how well people could remember them.

I look at the first layer of the cube. I was already making it a dozen times faster than anyone else coul, and this partial data ‘cube’ is only enough for a single novel. Well, at least before ‘file’ compression shenanigans. Burges has found a software engineer who emigrated to our village and they figured out how to store several characters in a single cell with the help of a dictionary similar to how file compression worked in computers, which reduced them to about a third or fourth of their initial size.

But adding 4 books a week is still too slow. I kick around the problem in my mind but find no immediate solution. All I can hope for is that casting intricate though repetitive patterns like this will be easy.

-----------------------

After a few hours and finishing my rounds around the village, as well as 80 silver richer from work in the in the smithy I head to meet Merlin.

“I don’t know if this will work.” I hear after presenting a small clay mold for data storage to be cast.

“We won't find out if we don’t try.”

“Well, it doesn’t hurt to try.”

“OK, meet you in a few minutes at the smelter yards?”

“No need, I can work within my inner world. We will only be working with a bar or two of copper.”

I sit and put a single copper ingot into a small crucible while feeding mana into a fire formation. Not a very economic solution, but a hundred mana points for the 10 or 20 minutes I will save instead of waiting for the forge to heat up are definitely worth the expense. I also put the mold I prepared nearby to help the process given this will be a more detailed casting than most.

I lay back waiting while watching Merlin finish up another of his experiments. I try to understand the runes and the way they are connected, but for the first time since getting to the instance, something I should have understood completely escapes me.

I smile widely at his progress, it isn’t even about mana moving unexpectedly like on the fire mana conversion runes needed for infusing wood and a few other designs. This is much more advanced with me simply failing to grasp the inherent logic of what he is trying to accomplish.

He moves mana around while I’m lost on what he is trying to do. The mana doesn’t move in the grand displays I had often seen from him in the attacks, but with only a thread of mana moving faster and more intricately than I could hope to do for months or maybe years, not unless I doubled my mental stats and put a lot more time into my mana manipulation.

A pang of envy for the speed at which he is progressing hits me, but after a moment it’s gone. I have nothing to complain about. What would I give up to gain this capability? My inner world, Aspen, my intrinsic understanding of runes, my physical stats, Aether, or something else.

For as impressive as his capabilities are within their field, they are fairly one dimensional. He dedicated his entire time to improving every bit as much as he could and I could not do the same, not from an inability or because I was forced in any way, but because I want all of these capabilities and more.

My decision is strongly solidifying in my mind as the correct choice for me, and as his last flourish finishes and a small puff of mana dissipates, I realize his last experiment just failed.

With a small sigh, he comes and sits in front of me, grabbing hold of the mold.

With him having finished his short experiment we are both ready to start this other one.

“Go ahead. Pour the metal in and I will try to enchant them as the runes are formed.”

“Enchant?” I ask

“I’m trying different terminology, engraving doesn’t sound right when we are pouring metal.”

I shrug, saying: “Hey, I don’t really care, I just mentioned it because it sounds a little strange.”

We form mana shields around our arms to stop any droplets of molten metal. We may be playing with fire without the proper precautions, but no sense in pushing our luck too hard.

I take out the clay mod and give it to him so he will hold it before using a pair of scissor tongs to take the crucible with boiling hot copper to tip it into the double plated clay mold. Steam and hot vapor wooshes and Merlin squints his eyes as he sends his mana to allow his skill to take hold during the pouring process.

The small hole in the maze that will form internally the runes is too small and a few droplets fall onto the wood floor blackening small spots but causing no further damage.

I sense his mana struggling to connect, even with his clear understanding and deep study of the runic patterns as I continue to pour into the carved clay sandwich. I feel him fight to keep his skill active and even a moment or two where it seems to turn off.

A minute goes by as the last of the droplets finishes filling the mold and he gives a sigh of relief as he gasps for air. With sweat dripping from a face so red it almost glows, he speaks.

“Phew, that… was hard… Check if it worked.”

He tries to catch his breath like he just ran a marathon, not simply spent a minute working with runes.

I separate the two pieces, still keeping a thin shield on my fingertips to avoid burning myself, pull the engraving and send my mana through looking at the response from each of the data cells.

The design is a fairly basic one. With only a hundred cells in a ten by ten grid, and the response I get is not very positive. Checking closely, I notice one of the runes malformed on the edge of the palm sized plate.

That means not a single cell in that column will work. Another few seconds and I test every single cell finding another malfunctioning rune, though this one affects only a single cell. I rub my fingers over the pieces and use my perception field, but the malformations are not physical, they were the result of the ‘shaky’ connection during the enchanting process. The casting process, basic as it is, is well worked by now and at least that ran smoothly.

Wanting Merlin’s take on it, I ask.

“Two runes failed. Here and here.”

“Umm, 11 dead cells then?” As I nod he continues: “Maybe I can manually fix it, but….”

“Yeah. A minute for only a hundred cells is not very factory-like, I can make them faster without even paying attention. Just idling away when I’m running or doing something that doesn’t require a lot of mental power.”

“And it isn’t that much faster than engraving them manually, and is far too tiresome to sustain for long.”

“What was the problem? I sensed your mana being quite erratic?”

“The technique is good at connecting with a few big runes. So the size and mass are what lends power to the batteries and eventually other works, but these have a lot more runes. Current mana batteries use what? Eight runes no matter how big it is, these:” he says pointing at the plate in my hand, “are more like 800 runes. These won’t benefit from… size, only how many cells are present and working.”

“Do you think making bigger data plates faster is just a question of training?” I ask him.

“Sure I could get faster, and there are plenty of tweaks and tricks to employ, but I don’t see it improving enough to make it worthwhile, at least not anytime soon.”

I gaze at the floor intently as what he mentioned before strikes me.

“You mentioned power, given that the cells require nearly no power to run, could there be some other method to engrave them that makes weak runes, which in this case wouldn’t make a difference?”

“That’s something we are experimenting with, but so far no luck. Theoretically, even if the data storage runes only work at one percent the strength, it won’t be an impediment.”

We look to the door as we both hear someone comes up running. A few moments later a messenger shows up panting lightly and holds himself with one hand on each side of the doorway.

“Ohh, Nash, you are here, I was going after you next…”, he says to me before addressing both of us. “Charlie wants you two for a meeting, now.”

“What is it about?” I ask concerned.

“Bad news, that is what it’s about. Bad news.”