Over the next day what happens can only be classified as frantic preparations. Dozens of small projects that I assign to the MRI and a few others who took up a job with me as they further delegate given the slowly developing shortage of available manpower in the village.

I sit in one of my little huts, this one the original clay covered one some 30 miles from the village on the edge of the low level zone where the wolves and rabbits roam.

In my lap are two of the rabbits, Aster and the other older Rabbit from the second colony that I added to my inner world.

. “How?” I ask him and Aster helps translate that into a mental image that he will be familiar with. “How do you create runic engravings?”

From him, a confusing mess of images comes back just like all my attempts yesterday. Aster already used to it sends a consternation Image to me and I translate it to:

“How am I supposed to know what he means?”

Which is not a knock on her capabilities, but instead a reality of the limited understanding she has of engravings or runes. I never put much thought into it until after I added a few more colonies to the inner world, but that they can make Earth runes that work so well is just strange.

Though that was always my assumption, it was not quite accurate.

“Tell me again what is the normal way of engraving?”

The following sequence of images can only be interpreted as:

The scary eye in the sky puts a shape that we dig underground in the precise blueprint required until a force passes over us, and we become safe from other people’s sight, though as always not from the eye in the sky.

I exhale letting my shoulders slump.

No new information, no new angle for me to grab a hold of and learn a little more. The system just prompts them to do something and it helps them in the last step after they finish the mechanical aspect of the engraving.

“And how can you alone create runes on your own that no other colony can without the system’s assistance?”

He repeats a very similar response from a moment ago, and it’s a mass of images just as indecipherable as always.

“Can’t you show me?”

The reluctance that I had found there every time.

“I know that you can’t show me what is the normal process, but you ought to be able to create something else.”

For some reason he is reluctant and I don’t manage to convince him yet, though as I take one point of mana and pin it around my fingers in an exercise suited to increasing my dexterity, I feel the infinitesimal draw from him. Only a tenth of mana point, but I notice it just the same.

He spins it around like a halo atop his head as he tries to control it more precisely. Though his mental fingers are clumsy compared to anyone but the greenest of system users.

I gape not having considered the source of mana for the engravings.

“You are the ones that powered the Engraving?” I ask.

He looks at me for a moment and hesitatingly nods his tiny furry head. To which Aster sends an affirmation that my guess was correct. He was just beginning to come to understand my body language and still got something confused occasionally, but this is simple enough there is no doubt in my mind.

“Can all of you give mana?”

After Aster helps him understand what I meant, he sends a clear picture of a full colony of Rabbits with every one of them holding a small mana sphere atop their heads.

“All of you?” I ask intrigued at the thought. “Can you gift it to me?”

After that, he sends erratic and unintelligible images for a few seconds, until Aster and he starts communicating in earnest. They communicate far faster and more subtly than I could have ever managed as a human.

When I’m almost giving up on the idea and call it off, they both surprise me. Each sending a small mana sphere to me.

“Ohhhh, I’m going to like this.”

I look out to see just the barest of sunlight rays entering my window. I should be rushing back to the village. The automaton will be there to collect everyone’s monthly payments.

Though as I look at them both, I open a portal back to the inner world and feel the thousands of Rabbits coming back from the Netherworld. Not all of them went over, a good portion always choose to stay in the inner world, but they rotate a few to the other side regularly.

I get on my small speeder. NO, My flying bicycle. Not calling it a speeder.

After I activate the defenses of the little hut which will be tested in today’s attack and settle in a good pace back in my flight back to the village, I send my attention back to the inner world. This time I make a near copy of the mana input plate on the smithy, though this one doesn’t use or store the mana, it just sends it to the buried batteries.

I open a portal right beside Aster and tap her ribs.

“It’s time.”

An affirmation comes back and I turn off the telepathic link and let them organize themselves.

The mostly full batteries in the inner world start filling slowly with lines of furry little balls of goodness donating all of their mana in an almost choreographed process.

Well, it should be any surprise given they have done this before at the behest of the system. Each gifts only about 50 mana points, but with the thousands of rabbits inside, I won’t have to worry too much about mana even when I’m outside the network or even when there is no one else willing and capable of recharging the batteries.

Not exactly an option for anyone without something such as the extremely rare inner world, but it was an ideal option for me.

The short flight over is uneventful. Even as I take the flying craft from the sky and drop the 6 meters to the ground all the rabbits industriously continue gifting their mana in a continuous stream.

I jog to the central square and settle in one of the benches against the fountain in the middle and wait for the automaton to arrive.

He should arrive at around 7 O’clock to collect the fourth installment of our payments. Eight silver coins. In our village, everyone that still wanted to remain would have enough, though in other villages, even if they wanted to remain had to fight to scrounge together 8 silver for everyone.

And with the attacks from the HLZ, many were thinking about bailing.

I shrink my perception field into a sphere just a few centimeters across and send one of the mana spheres like the rabbits were conjuring up except I hold it in place as steadily as possible.

Mana flows from my fingers until I have about a hundred mana, so I stop the flow and compress it in as small a volume as possible. Barely a finger wide and sitting in the middle of the diminutive area my perception field is focused on.

I try to look at it and find them without relying on the system’s tools like the mana manipulation, which lets me among other things, sense mana.

Ten minutes later, fatigue stars creep in from holding the mana in such a small space.

Twenty minutes and my mental fingers start going numb, though as I move the sphere around the fatigue changes just enough that I manage without too much difficulty.

Almost forty minutes later, I call it off and reabsorb the mana.

The change to my perception field did not come this time, but it will… eventually.

All the training the last couple of days had payoff at least in one aspect. The skill version had finally reached its current apex.

Perception field - Lv. 99

Now I no longer had to spend any time on it, at least until I learned how to cross the level 100 barrier.

Someone sits to my side and I open my eyes.

“Meditating a little bit?” asks Merlin.

“You know me. That and practicing a little bit of magic.”

He nods sagely and looks forward as we wait for the Automaton.

“How do you think the other instances are dealing with the HLZ attacks?” he asks.

“I’m not even sure they are suffering these attacks,” I reply.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, I just have a feeling. Not sure it makes sense that the system would basically enact a death lottery after the third month.”

“The system is callous.” He says.

“Absolutely, it just doesn't feel the same brand of callous as usual. I don’t know how to explain. It could be that something we did helped scale the threat profile of the beasts, like our village being the single most developed in the instance, maybe our instance is one of the most developed of humanity or at least in a high position in the “rankings”, that would be more the system’s speed.”

“Humm, interesting. Your book has been giving a lot of insights into the inner work of the system lately, maybe your personal connection to it gives insight we can’t fully develop.” He says.

I look at him. That thought hadn't crossed my mind in a while. We both turn to our own thoughts.

The seconds tick by until the section of the square in front of the town hall is nearly filled and the wrongness of spatial distortion, much subtler than other applications, but still it is still a pervasive assault on my perception field.

I start walking in his direction. I have questions.

The automaton materializes and starts off: “Everybody forms a single file and delivers your coins to me. 8 silver, don’t forget.”

After getting to his side he says:

“Hey Nash, you are not skipping the line.”

“I can wait, I’m pretty sure you did this just to delay so we can have a few extra minutes.” His solid-looking metal skin bends into a proper human smile. “You are getting better at understanding and expressing human emotion,” I say seeing him grinning even wider. “What?” I ask suspiciously.

“I got a present for you.”

“Ohh! What is it?”

“I thought long and hard about what to get you and although I guess that a few extra runes you would not be able to acquire from your book or some high-level magical insight would be good options, they are also limited in many ways. What I decide is a little something that I guess is a favorite of yours. A puzzle.”

“A puzzle?”

“Yes, just a simple puzzle.”

“Any surprises?”

“I can’t even hint at anything beyond that. Though I can say: ‘Do you really think I would give you something useless?’ ”

“How long until I crack the puzzle?”

“A while, but believe me; it will be worth it. I thought about making something more useful for the short term, it might make things interesting, but I ended up going for something else

“Which you cannot comment more on.”

“Exactly. I can’t be an impartial administrator if I’m seen intermingling too much with whom I’m supposed to oversee.”

I turn to him as he takes a wooden cube from a pocket in a very similar gesture as my usual modus operandi of pretending to take something out of my pocket while taking it from the inventory or inner world. Suspicious of how similar to my actions that is, I say:

“You have been watching me.”

“What can I say? You are the interesting things in the instance.”

“I thought that administrators couldn’t do that? I mean doesn't the system restrict any monitoring from outside parties like yourself.”

He looks at me intently, “Your book told you that? Well, never mind. I’m a lot closer than any others and I like to cheat. I got to say, your experiments on messing with the spatial integrity of the instance are delightful. Like a baby playing with dynamite. I just hope you don’t blow yourself up too soon.”

Concerned, I ask:

“Is it really that dangerous?”

“I can’t say much, but I say that you have been taking decent precautions for most experiments you are running.”

The knot on my gut relaxes and I take a deep breath. I look at the strange cube puzzle. On its surface, I can only make out flat blocks of wood but my perception field shows me thousands of interlocking gears inside and hundreds of pieces forming almost runic patterns in a system more complex than any puzzle I ever heard of, so I ask:

“So, how do I ‘unlock’ this puzzle?”

“That you will have to learn for yourself, and your special sense is not going to help you much in solving it.”

“My..?” I start but then realize he is referring to my perception field. Curious I sent it to him so I can learn what or who I’m dealing with. Why I didn’t do it before now escapes me, but as the perception field pushes against his skin, it simply stops.

He keeps taking everyone’s money as I smirk forms on his face.

“You have some very interesting powers, but you need to develop them a lot further if you hope to contend with someone like myself.”

“Is it really that easy to detect my field?” I ask concerned about my plan to do with the library.

“Nope. I doubt that is more than half a dozen ‘NPC’s’ in your entire instance who could even infer you are using a skill like this on them, at least when you don’t rely on the system’s skill.”

“Damn, you even noticed that.”

“I notice much.”

The long line starts shrinking, as the minutes pass and I ask him something.

“How much are these worth?” I pull a couple of my Pando’s silver coins from the inner world.

“Uhmm, 51 coppers.”

“What?” I ask, shocked. “That is half of their nominal value.”

“You did a decent job of getting a large population using them, and you are not overprinting them.”

“Could I buy anything with them? Or can I only use them with you?”

He shakes his head.

“Nope. It is always possible you may break the system’s rules and find a loophole or something, but for the foreseeable future, your only choice is to use them among yourselves or with me. By the way, as long as they are not certified, they can never cross 80 copper per silver. And you are not getting a certification while inside the instance.”

“Well, it’s already more than I expected,” I say as I sit on the foot of the stairs as he continues speaking.

Though all throughout what I really want to do is get to the puzzle. It’s been a while I have found something to play with.