For some reason, I resented that I wasn’t able to take a nap during the flight, even though I knew I probably wouldn’t have done that. But now I felt disgruntled about it, knowing that I shouldn’t sleep any time soon. Maybe that’s just human nature?

I snorted and turned away from the window, where I was just watching our airship descend over Blue Valley City. The flight back to the city from the coast had seemed like it dragged on endlessly, even though it was really pretty quick all things considered. The airship we used was downright spacious, which was a good thing since I’d taken advantage of the trip to ask one of the servants for a massage, making up for that nap. Lia, a woman who’d come with me from the palace, had a gifted touch when it came to that. I should make use of it more often.

At least we had two airships, since one had carried the reinforcements. Most of the guards were in that one now. The rest formed up around me as I headed to the hatch, with Tenira and Lei coming up behind me. As soon as I felt the airship touch down, I straightened up and stepped forward. The hatch opened to let me into the courtyard of the royal palace in the city.

I stepped forward, tilting my head backwards to take in the sunshine, and let the noise of the city wash over me. After my time underwater and in the caves, I liked the sense of returning to civilization.

I glanced back at the others. My gaze settled on Aston, who walked up beside me, taking his usual place as my guard. He still seemed different. While his aura was mostly veiled, I could sense the new currents in it. He looked straight ahead, his face unmoving. I got the suspicion he might be talking to Mior in his mind. I hadn’t seen much of him since he returned from his ‘hunting trip’ after about an hour, as he’d focused on organizing the guards.

After I made sure that everyone had disembarked and was organized properly, I turned away. Most of the other people were leaving for their own purposes. I might head straight to the university, since there wasn’t much I should do here. Well, I should send a message to Mother. Probably best to do it from here.

Tenira was walking off, but I noticed Lei kept close to me. As we headed into the side entrance of the palace, he cleared this throat. “Do you mind if I walk with you?”

“Sure.” I gestured at the guards to give us some space, wondering what he wanted to talk about. I couldn’t help feeling a bit tense.

He waited until we were walking down the corridors to our suites. He seemed hesitant, glancing around and walking a bit too slowly. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Inaris, I wanted to talk about Tenira. It was pretty clear you were worried about her, that you felt about this strongly. And …”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I’ve seen the way you look at her.” He glanced at me and bit his lip.

I sighed and opened the door to my room that we’d just reached, letting him go in after me. “Yeah. I guess I should have expected that.” I grimaced. “Don’t worry. I won’t do anything stupid.”

He frowned at me. “I wasn’t implying that. But I’m here if you want to talk about it.”

I turned around, leaning against my desk, and took another look at Lei. I realized this couldn’t be easy for him. He was friends with both of us, and probably wouldn’t want to be caught in the middle of something, but he cared about both of us.

“It’s not a big deal,” I said. Although I tasted a bit of bitterness in my throat. “It’s not the first time I’ve had a friend I found attractive. I’ll deal with it.”

I’ve been hoping this would go away on its own, I couldn’t help but think. Hasn’t worked well so far, has it? I shook my head, and answered myself, What else can I do?

Lei looked at me for a moment. “I’ve known her for a long time, Inaris,” he said. “We’re each other’s oldest friends. In all that time, I’ve never seen her show any interest in a girl. Physical interest, I mean. Though not in a boy either, I guess. She’s always dodged questions or comments about taking a lover. Or marriage. Her parents might try to set something up, but since Acura isn’t likely to insist on it, she’s probably planning to refuse any offers.” He shrugged. “Maybe she has a secret sweetheart. I don’t know. I’m just saying.”

“Yeah.” My hands clenched, but I managed to keep an even expression. “I know. Thanks, Lei.”

“Alright. I should get back to the team. See you in the lab?”

“Sure.” I watched him leave, then turned back to my desk and sighed again, cursing my stupid hormones and drama in general.

I found it hard to focus as I went about my tasks the next few minutes. I unpacked a few things, grabbed another defensive talisman, and wrote a message to Mother. I kept it short, but hit most of the key points. We should probably talk about things more in person. I’d need to arrange a trip back to the capital. Well, I wanted to see how things were going there, anyway. Maybe I could leave the others here? Well. At least this shows Lei is a good friend, that’s something, right?

I got up and left for the university. Working on a few technology-related problems might clear my mind, and besides, I was curious what they might have managed in the time we were gone.

Most of the building we’d set up for it, surrounded by an enclosed courtyard and a few smaller outbuildings, was still unused, since there just wasn’t a need for it yet. But there was already some bustle in the university, with a few students walking across the incipient campus, and through the hallways of the building. I couldn’t help but smile as I saw them, and overheard some of what they were talking about. All technical discussions. I’d missed this more than I realized. Almost a shame I can’t go to university myself. Well, I had my research team, that was almost as good.

I stopped in one of the larger rooms, which seemed to have the most activity at the moment. Glancing around, I walked to the desk I’d used last time. A number of people were experimenting with different substances. They used formation plates for heat, and it looked like they’d finally gotten the exhaust hood functioning, with some formations on the side working with air qi to suck in air beneath it, which would then be sent through several means of purification and released from the chimney. That should work unless we had some really nasty stuff.

I looked at the large poster hanging on the wall, most of it still in my handwriting, and sighed. Reconstructing the periodic table was not an easy task. I hadn’t had much interest in chemistry, and even what I did remember was often too abstract. Even if I knew the name and symbol of an element, that didn’t help us trying to find it in this world and connect to existing knowledge, since I often didn’t know how it looked, how it occurred in nature or how to get it. There were a lot of question marks on the table. Although, at least ‘this should be somewhere here’ can be helpful.

Suaki approached my desk and bowed. “Your Highness. Welcome back.”

I nodded at him. “Thank you. Things are going well, it seems?”

He glanced around the room. “Yes. Though we still haven’t found a good way to make your batteries.”

I sighed. “I know. I’ve just been thinking about how nice it would be to know what all the elements are and how to get them.” I looked at the latest experiment. A simple setup, with two solutions separated by a porous substance, just like I remembered from chemistry class. “I think it should work with Na and K, but that doesn’t help much. And we probably don’t even have some things, like lithium.”

He shook his head. “I won’t ask how you get this knowledge, which seems suspiciously like it comes from another world. But we should have some success just trying different things.”

I straightened up and fixed him with a hard stare. This was the first time he’d implied otherworldly knowledge. Maybe I’d said too much. “The existence of other worlds is not a particularly common piece of information or speculation. What do you think you know?”

He raised his hands defensively. “Not much more than their existence. I apologize if I gave any offense, Your Highness.”

I stared at him for another moment, then snorted. “Alright. What I am sharing is knowledge my clan and their allies have been amassing for a long time. I hope you understand its value, and the trust we are placing in you.”

He bowed deeply. “Of course, Your Highness. Like everyone here, I will treat this with discretion, and refrain from further speculation.”

I nodded and turned away, looking over the room one more time. Nothing really stood out to me. “I’d like to speak to you further. Let’s go to your office. Although, we could stop by the workshop.”

He nodded and held the door open for me. The workshop I wanted was on a lower story and a few doors down, and we reached it quickly. As I pushed the door open and stepped inside, I could sense the qi accumulated in the formations we worked with here. Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing to bow, so I waved them back to their work as I strolled further inside.

To the left was a rather cluttered section taking up one side of the room. In the center of it stood a frame holding a length of tube with runes carved into it. I took a step closer and scrutinized it, but everything was pretty much as I’d last seen it. This was one of my more whimsical ideas. The formations were air-based. Since there didn’t seem to be any way to manipulate gravity directly. Shame. That would have been a real cheat.

The design was similar to pneumatic tubes I’d seen on Earth, that could be used to convey small loads throughout a structure. With the help of formations, this could be extended into a path or even network covering a larger area, like a city. Although it would probably lose out to simply taking stuff into a storage ring and carrying or flying it around.

“No one’s experimented with that any further,” Suaki said, standing beside me. “We wanted to get back to the slate for the formations.”

I nodded and wandered off, to look at the next shiny new thing. That one was literally shiny, since the block of metal in the middle of the experiment was currently in the process of melting. I stopped a few meters away, feeling the heat on my skin. “This looks to be going pretty well.”

“There are a few materials we haven’t been able to reach the temperature to melt yet,” Suaki said. “At some level, adding more formations to the ring around it only generates more interference.”

“Diminishing returns and probably a curve with an optimum point.” I nodded. “Let’s try to chart this out.”

It was a simple test, really: how high a temperature could we get using only formation arrays. Of course, we’d placed a second ring of formations around those for safety, to contain the fallout in case something went wrong with the first or it got too hot. Simple, but I could see a number of applications.

“Actually, let’s do the same thing in reverse, with trying to lower the temperature,” I decided. “Perhaps in a different room.” I wasn’t sure if we could reach the level of liquid nitrogen, but it would be a lot more convenient and efficient to use. “That might give us a simple way to store tissue samples or other material that needs deep-freezing for storage. We might even find a way to use that to shatter material …”

Suaki smiled. “That’s very interesting, Your Highness. There should be a space we could section off in workshop 2, and I have a number of students for whom this might be a good project.”

“Good.” I looked around the room again, but nothing caught my interest. “Let’s go to your study, if you don’t mind.”

Suaki raised an eyebrow, but didn’t question me. Instead, he led the way to his office, which was only a few doors down. This side of the building was dedicated primarily to formations. I’d only been in his office a few times, but I found he’d somehow managed to increase the clutter since then. A few more books were lying around, and a few models took up the table. At least the sunlight streaming through the window showed everything was clean, without any collected dust.

“Is there anything I can help you with, my lady?” he asked, removing some clutter from a chair.

I took a closer look at the bookshelves in his office, filled with thick tomes and information storage devices. “Actually, I was wondering how much you knew about formations with mental effects. Especially for defensive applications. Failing that, other wards, specifically some efficient against spirit beasts and spirits.”

Suaki raised an eyebrow, then turned to his bookshelf and took down a few tomes. “Let me see …”

The next hour was filled with technical discussion about formations. He didn’t know of anything exactly like I was looking for, but it still proved to be time well spent. If nothing else, I deepened my knowledge about formations in general. After a while, I concentrated on ways of storing information using qi, asking him for a few books on that subject. They were some of the most complex known enchantments, and needed specific materials. Much of the process of making them was still not understood in detail, just born out of tradition.

I found myself absorbing all of this information like a sponge, and following the connections he laid out easily. My special ability really showed its worth here. I also became more convinced that my theory was right. There was nothing I could point to as definite evidence, but I felt like things just fit, on an almost instinctive level. I frowned at the latest text. Usually, I’d be wary of this, knowing I should rely on hypothesis-driven science and evidence. But I do have a lot of evidence for my ability …

I shook my head. “That was very helpful, thank you, Expert Suaki. On an unrelated note, I wonder if you have any material pertaining to spirits and theology? Even myths. I find myself curious about this topic.”

“For obvious reasons, it seems,” he muttered, then cleared his throat. Probably realizing that he was referring to rumors I hadn’t actually confirmed, as far as he knew. “Of course, just give me a moment, Your Highness.”

He was in the process of picking out books and laying them on the table when the door opened. I whirled around, feeling tense for a moment, before I realized I’d simply overlooked the familiar presence coming.

Tenira paused in the doorway, a smile on her face. “Sorry if I interrupted you. But there’s great news. Inaris, we finally got the plane working. Just finished its first test flight.”

I jumped up, everything else forgotten. “Let’s go!”

We hurried out of the room and through the building, Suaki tagging along behind me and Tenira. It didn’t take long for us to reach the courtyard where the test must have been done, and I skidded to a stop in front of the plane and the team of researchers working on it, absentmindedly waving them up from their bows.

It was still more of an airship than a real plane from Earth, with air affinity qi in formation arrays as the main source of lift and thrust. But it looked familiar, with wings like a typical plane, flaps on their ends. There was a propeller, one that we would hopefully be able to operate on batteries at some point. The whole thing was built out of a dark material that had to be some metal alloy, although I wasn’t quite sure of the details. A good thing we had earth cultivators working on it, though. This would have taken a lot longer to construct the normal way.

“How did it go?”

“Perfectly,” Lei answered, grinning broadly from where he stood at the head of the team. “It handled as expected and we didn’t notice any issues during the flight.”

“Great. Then I’m going to try it out.”

Aston cleared his throat. He had appeared behind me at some point. “Your Highness, your safety …”

Definitely just Aston this time. I made a dismissive gesture as I stepped up to the plane, opening the cockpit. “If anything happens, I have protections and I could survive an explosion easily. Besides, you could catch me.”

He was an air cultivator of the late sixth stage, not to mention Mior’s help. That really wouldn’t be an issue.

The inside of the cockpit looked crude, though it might be a good thing the controls were simple. I took a moment to familiarize myself with everything again and double-check it, before I got the plane moving. I turned its nose, then accelerated. A quick yank of the lever tilted it upwards, and before I knew it, we’d taken off from the ground.

I couldn’t help but grin broadly as I soared into the air above the city. People in the street stopped and stared. But after a moment, I banked, pulling away so it was headed in the other direction, over the fields. I still kept the plane climbing, though. My enhanced reflexes and control over my body, as well as perfect memory of how things worked, helped me manage the controls.

I’d been in a smaller airplane once, one that had two seats. This one was even smaller, but I felt the same sense of freedom, nothing much separating me from the sky. I whooped and laughed as I attempted a barrel roll. I wanted to try every crazy thing I wouldn’t manage with a flying sword, though I manged to keep my glee in check somewhat. Turning my head, I watched Aston flying beside me, arms crossed.

But it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm. This is so cool. I grinned again as I soared through the sky.