I sit unmoving in my hut just like in the last 48 hours after the disaster with the scouts near the HLZ. I only took regular short breaks to keep myself sharp, but otherwise kept working non-stop to make a detection grid around the entire perimeter. The roots are finally close to finishing the encircling, but detection will take a lot longer.

Still, at least I’m almost finished with the unbroken circle of roots surrounding the entire place. Just another few kilometers and Aspen will finish. I had done little to help him over the last couple of days concentrating much more on the runic side of the equation.

The actual mass of roots is negligible, with only thin tendrils extending the thousands of miles to encircle the HLZ, and by this very act, it would add redundancy. No single cut would be able to remove part of the network from my reach.

I let Aspen’s work fade from my thoughts and concentrate on the runic working I’m growing. Yet another detector for anything entering or leaving the high-level zone.

Merlin had worked hard on the design to make it as simple as possible, but even then the most basic of setups still took me a good minute to grow the needed formation capable of detecting people or the HLZ beasts in a 100-meter radius.

I feel the relatively simple shape forming hundreds of miles away and for the hundredth time start to run the math in my head.

With no redundancy and no overhead, a single of these is capable of covering 200 meters, which multiplied by 60 per hour for 20 hours a day results in 240 km a day. At this pace, it will take me another three months even counting for a slight speed increase as I get more used to the exercise.

I grate at the turtle's pace, but no matter what my mind tries to conjure, there are no better answers than to continue and hope it is fast enough.

As I send my perception another 200 meters forward feeling myself being squeezed through a tunnel and as I push south something calls me back. I finish this next formation, before letting my attention come back to my own body.

“You are back.” I hear from a messenger holding one of my hut’s security tokens. “Come over, Merlin has something to show you.”

I nod and crack my neck as I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. Though it’s far from true, it’s just the instance is at risk, so far I’m the only one making any real progress.

Felling my neck still a little strange, I pop it again trying to settle it in place. It has been years since I have felt like this, not since I was young, small, and full of rage. On Pando things were simple and these last couple of days have shown my decision to not lead the village to be the correct one. Being as integrated as I became after the threat of the mobs on was already starting to take its toll on me, let alone taking even more responsibility for an even longer-term.

Hopefully, Merlin will have good news.

When I get there, what I find is not only Merlin but also Burges, Stuart, and 4 other people who are not from the village.

“Here is Nash,” Says Merlin. “He will be able to answer about the possibility of integrating other people’s work in the network.”

I frown wondering what he was thinking about and he expounds on it.

“Can you can integrate a design of lifeform detector that they provide on the network faster than what you are currently doing now?”

“Humm, likely. I would need to know exactly what you have in mind to say for certain.”

Over the next few minutes, Merlin tells me what he has in mind, providing even more detail than I need but I appreciate the context.

“We were talking and between ourselves, we have over 300 engravers. Individually they can’t match you, but together with the silver laced design I alluded to, we can assemble a specialized engraving that will be able to cover a kilometer of the border. Assuming nobody else pitches in, full-time total production will sit around 3 or 4 thousand units a day.”

Looking at the runic blueprint in my hands I speak.

“Uhmmm, something to connect this design with the network would need only a very simple alteration. A pair of runes, every kilometer or so and I can prepare the entire circle around the HLZ in a couple of hours. If we ignore the distance, single earthmovers or similarly classed mages will be able to place more than a thousand of these a day.”

“It sounds like we will have to expose your….” Merlin trails off.

“I know, I wanted to keep the inner world under wraps for a while longer, but there is no way, we will let a few more people in the secret.” The four representatives look at each other confused but don’t interrupt.

Burges then says: “And after knowing about our plans, I doubt many villages would be stingy in pitching in.”

One of the other representative's volunteers: “You guys have no idea of how petty and shortsighted some people can be.” We all look at him and he just says: “There is a group with more engravers than all of our villages, and they haven’t answered your call.”

Stuart chimes in: “Regardless, there will be plenty of villages that ought to answer the call and we can send messages to every village through the merchant. It costs what, 1 copper per letter?”

“Yes,” I say. “Now, call me back in say... 3 days. By then so we will have a decent stockpile to start, enough for some 10 thousand kilometers or a half turn around the high-level zone and when we come back, there should be enough to cover the rest while laying redundant lines in between our villages and the HLZ.”

“Will you have enough mana?”

“Even if I run out, I will still be within range of the network, a good part of it old enough to have decent mana throughput. That will give us options.”

Another of the representatives then asks:

“How are you going to move so quickly carrying well over two hundred tons of cargo?”

I look at Merlin surprised at the sheer weight of the whole thing and he explains:

“Each one weighs about 20 kg to have the required range, but with the inner world that matters little, right?”

Nodding at him, I turn to the others and give a brief explanation.

“The inner world is like a bag of holding that will fit what we need inside.” I look stop for a moment, and after gathering my thoughts I point out a limitation of my plan. “After running in my mind, with the pauses and considering the speed of the craft, laying it down will be slower than the speed you can produce it. Even without counting the time for speeding up and slowing down to work on each of the spots, it will take about 4 days.”

Merling which had been looking upward and mumbling to himself lowers his head and nods.

“Yeah, but with the mana network in place and say, 10 other people each an earthmover with a flying craft of their own carrying a couple of the life sign detectors only a single person will need to stop in each of these places.” Merlin says.

“Interesting… I think that will work. Not starting at the closest point of the HLZ, but waiting until a quarter turn so we can work on the backside first will allow for other people to make the shorter track on carriages to finish it.” I say.

“Good idea,” says Merlin. “That will be half the distance they have to travel. About 5,000 kilometers instead of 10,000.”

“How expensive would it be to use flying craft to transport the rest of the detectors?” Asks Stuart.

I start running the math in my head. With a few of the slower and more economic we may be able to get it as low as:

“Some 40 milion mana points.” I say.

“Over 70 million,” Merlin says over me.

We look at each other and Stuart widens his eyes in shock, though behind it is a look of confusion and I explain:

“It will depend on a few things, if we modify the design enough we could get even cheaper than my craft, but with current designs, I don’t think going below 25 or 30 million is possible. Even that is still too expensive.”

“Yeah, no way we can afford to blow that much mana with everything that is going on. Carriages will have to do.” Stuart says and I nod at him.

They know my capabilities and we have already worked out how my part will be executed, so I take my leave letting them work out the rest of the details. As I walk into the sun I see Charlie walking purposefully with another few representatives, possibly from the very same villages to reassure they made the right choice in trowing their support with us

As I walk something loosens up as the weight of the world fades… or at least most of it. I still have a critical role and I was fine with that, but at least now I‘m no longer alone.

Using silver to boost the range of the engravings will probably consume all the output of the silver mines, but I don’t mind. Otherwise, they would have to reduce the range from a 500 meters radius to about 300 by using only copper it would be a lot slower to put them all in place.

I have three days to prepare. I already worked on the smithy and put everything else in order today. I could go back to growing more detectors on the network and even after the current developments. It might be worth helping it come together a little faster, if only by minutes, but a break was in order even if I decided to come back to it later.

With that decision in mind, I head for the MRI and find a pile of notes on the shelf to flip through.

I skim most of it, stopping to reading more closely any of the ones that interest me more I come across the detector and its final blueprints. I go over the compromises they had to allow faster production. Even it will waste some of the material’s potential, it will cut down engraving time by more than half while still allowing a good 80 percent of the range. In the current circumstances, definitely worth it.

Too bad even the simplified design was way beyond our current capability to cast. If Merlin had trouble casting the data storage, which mostly consisted of copies of a few runes in a neat grid pattern, this would be absolutely impossible with its hundreds of disparate runes. Even if there is a logic behind it, it’s not nearly as organized which precluded any casting attempts.

I go over them digging for any insight to be gained.

I probably won’t go back to making the detectors full time, but doing so in a few strategic places along with setting up other projects like charging stations sounded prudent. Better than sending people hundreds or even thousands of miles when I just wanted a few engravings in place.

No brilliant insights or groundbreaking discoveries follows in the next minute but as I continue going over the stack of notes but I learn a little bit more, Which adds rearranges, and contextualizes what I already knew in the long but rewarding processes also known as learning.

I look at one of the last pages of the more recent notes and see something has nothing to do with the detector. A little hydromancy rune with a few quirks, and just as soon as I’m ready to discard it, only filing it at the back of my mind an idea pops up.

Not anything revolutionary that will suddenly solve all of our problems, but I needed something that I can sink my teeth on and this is the perfect choice.

Looking over, I see just one person in the MRI so I ask him.

“Hy, can you do me a favor?”

“Uhh, sure.”

“Buy 1 silver of ink from the merchant.”

“Umm, ok.”

I give him the money already mentally shuffling things around and starting to outline how the next little project is supposed to work.

In my inner world, I start growing the first iteration of the design. Three pairs of wood rollers, close to each other, a small tray where I drop a few pages of paper, flexible parts that allow for the cylinders to have a bit of wiggle room, and most important of all, a small bottle of ink with a few runes on it directly connected to a simple data cell stack.

When he comes back I give him a handful of coppers for his troubles, not even bothering to count and quickly coming back to my work as I place the ink in the printer bottle.

After setting a random sequence in the data stack, a small strip of ink flows from the bottle, and with expert precision, I could have not hoped to match… the ink flies all around.

“Ohh, damn,” I say out loud at the mess all over the ground, though luckily there are no rabbits in the vicinity. They learned to keep away from this particular corner of the inner world after one too many experiments gone wrong.

When I was messing with something actually dangerous, I didn’t take the chance and so not a single one had been injured yet, but getting this much ink over their beautiful white or brown fur would be impossible to remove.

I go over the runic engravings responsible for forming the strip of ink that was supposed to peak in specific spots to print an entire page.

Though it was not a perfect solution by far, it didn’t tie hundreds of engravers to work on the data storage runes day and night for a little storage space. Not that they could even do that at the moment with all the other more important things to work on.

And so I worked on the very first step in this journey leaving all the other problems for later, and likely for other people. For now, I would let inspiration guide my actions and advance as much as possible. Data storage would soon become the choice only for more important data than what most people were adding to the library. And though it will consume ink and paper, it is something scalable, unlike the data storage runes.

Now all I need is a few hours of peace and quiet and I will have something minimally function…I hope.