Mal'Thorn left, taking his Forest Keepers with him. Chantelle was studying the mana crystal that he left that had the claiming ward attached to it. It was rectangular with points at the top and the bottom, a blue colour, and projected a shimmer from inside it.

"I think I can add a detection ward to this." She said. "I can tie it in to cover the same area as the Forest Keeper ward. It would give us advanced warning of anything entering your territory."

I had territory now, apparently.

"Go ahead." I said. "I'll be working on my preparations. Do you need anything before I go?"

"Just a stand for the mana crystal in the warding room." She said.

I set that up for her and then went down stairs to carve out a large room, storing the excess stone outside. I wasn't comfortable leaving the door open while I was working further away, so I sealed it after clearing enough space. I would need to open and shut it to go to recharge my orb, but Chantelle would be much safer.

The new room would be where I stored all of the stone and debris from digging out the copper I had found. With no more distractions I should be able to get my Artificial Intelligence started.

I pushed my power back into the stone, focusing it narrowly and reaching back to where I'd found the copper. Forty meters away, and almost directly down. I dug a narrow stairway downwards in a spiral, each step a half meter drop, quartering the stone to get it back up into my storage area.

It only took a few minutes to dig my way down to the copper. Reaching out to touch the vein I pushed heat into it until it started to melt, then soaked my power into it and walked it up to the storage room as a liquid. I was able to extract almost pure copper from the vein that way, and I got most of the energy back when I cooled it into a block. I ended up with five hundred kilograms of copper before moving on to search for iron, and there was still plenty left in the copper vein.

It took me some time to find the iron I needed, it was right at the edge of my range and in the opposite direction to where I had started searching. I excavated over to it and smelted fifty kilograms. That, along with the dirt that was everywhere on the surface, is all I needed to start building the hardware platform for my AI.

I moved everything I needed into my Pocket Dimension, including some oil lamps for light. I couldn't control my Matter Manipulation power finely enough to create integrated circuits out of silicon, but with computer assistance I should be able to.

I would need to bootstrap the first generation of processing power from vacuum tubes. I melted sand into glass, copper into wire, manipulated it into the right form, extracted the air from within the glass tube, and then sealed it to form a diode. Four diodes wired into an AC to DC converter, and I just needed an AC generator to have electricity.

I formed my iron into a primitive flywheel and magnetised sections of it, adding coils to the outside gave me my generator. I would have to come and spin it every so often, but as a first step it was adequate. Now all that remained was to make NAND gates from vacuum tubes, which was only a slight variation on diodes from vacuum tubes. Wire them up in the right way and you have the full range of Boolean logic, the most basic building block that computers are built upon. Thousands of them to do anything useful, trillions or more to get to the level of AI.

NAND gates could also be used to build the other essential piece of computers, persistent memory. It took me a couple of hours building vacuum tubes before I got to the point of a very basic computer. I quickly found that I could duplicate vacuum tubes using my power, and so long as I used the same materials it was made from as a source it cost a small enough amount of energy that it was worth doing.

I still had some copper left by the time I had the computer to the point of being able to run binary code, but continued making vacuum tubes until I was completely out. Then I wired the computer up to the large input and output connections on the Mind Link box in the Pocket Dimension. There were finer connections that could be made, but they were outside of my capabilities at the moment.

After I hooked the Mink Link up I used my power to spin up the iron flywheel. I had power. I felt an odd itch in my mind as the Mind Link firmware adjusted to the connection, and then I had access. I could write binary code and store it in the persistent memory and have the computer run it and return me the result. All without having to deal with creating input or output devices.

Equally as important, I could provide basic inputs from my senses as inputs to the code. I suddenly had a way to precisely measure the energy in my orb. I quickly wrote a program that would record the differences in energy level, ran it once to get an initial value, then got a piece of wood and set it on fire. That would be a measure of one unit of energy. My orb held fifteen thousand, four hundred, and twenty three units of energy.

I went and built up the bonfire outside to the same size as I usually did. It took around two hundred energy to cut down a tree, and it varied a little for each tree. Burning the bonfire down to ash gave me twenty thousand units of energy.

I went back into my Pocket Dimension to spin up the flywheel again, the power had run out while I was testing how much energy different things took to do. That done, I sat down to write more code.

I spent the next several hours working out how to feed back into my senses from programs, specifically my Matter Manipulation power, as that is what is limiting my ability to make integrated circuits.

I kept coming up against memory limits. Four thousand and ninety six bytes, with eight bits per byte, is tiny when compared to the quality of system needed to run Artificial Intelligence, but when you have to build each of the four individual vacuum tubes for each bit it's enormous. I needed about twice the memory to get the finesse of control I needed before I could progress to the next stage.

I went back down to the copper vein, but before melting the copper and taking it back upstairs I tested the program I had been working on. I pushed my power into the stone in a beam and got to my limited range of fifty meters, then controlled the program I'd written to control the finer aspects of my power. My range extended out to two hundred meters, and moving the beam around was a simple matter of changing the inputs into the program in small increments. I found more copper, iron, gold, and other metals. And some formations of crystals and gems.

I cut out a slope following the copper vein to give me closer access and tested out a variation of the program. I could narrow the edge that I was cutting, which gave a polished cut, and took less energy to do. I couldn't think of any shortcuts to do with moving stone around, but that was fairly cheap to do.

I melted out another five hundred kilograms of copper and went back to making vacuum tubes in my Pocket Dimension, focusing entirely on expanding the amount of memory I had available. Every half hour I switched between building vacuum tubes and making refinements to the code, expanding it to use the available memory.

I fell asleep after the fourth hour and had odd dreams about coding.

I woke up an unknown time later and went to check on Chantelle. I found her sleeping in the warding room, her things spread around the room and a large book that must have taken up most of the space in her backpack resting on the table. She was using her cloak and overcoat as a bed and her backpack as a pillow.

I needed to make proper beds, and soon. I warmed the room up for her by pushing heat into the stone and went back to my Pocket Dimension to get back to work. I almost had it, but I had run out of copper again. Another load, and I was back to alternating expanding the memory and tweaking the code again. A little over an hour later I made a breakthrough in a coding session.

I could now sense, at the very limit of my abilities, individual atoms. I couldn't manipulate things at that level, but I didn't need to.

I set about purifying some silicon from dirt by pushing around chunks of atoms, not worrying about their structure. Once I had enough silicon I made a memory chip, which was a simple repeating pattern with a change every so often. Then I had to make a processing chip, as my vacuum tube processing setup design would only be able to access a tiny fraction of the memory available.

The processing chip was more complicated, but I managed to get it done too. Now the moment of truth, I built a circuit to connect the two chips together, to power, and finally to the Mind Link over the much finer connections.

There was an odd itch in my mind again as the Mind Link adjusted, much more intense than before, and then I had access to the new system. My mind boggled at the sheer size and speed I had access to. Compared to my vacuum tube system it was millions of times faster and also had millions of times the memory. None of the code I'd already written would run on it, but now I could start on the real Artificial Intelligence.

Chantelle had come into my Pocket Dimension while I was distracted.

"C.C." She said, getting my attention. "The detection ward went off. There are humans and Arachne headed this way."