Before starting on the Forest Keeper floor I wanted to update the model I had of my body. When I originally designed my nails I had thought specifically of a cat's ability to sheathe their claws within their paws. I wasn't aware that there were any cat people within the druids, and Greta didn't know that I would have found that specific physical ability useful, so she hadn't brought them originally.

The cat people had stubbier fingers that allowed part of the complicated bone and tendon system to exist partially within their hands. I decided to take the principle and improve it. I kept my original fingernails and made my fingers thicker to accommodate the extra complexity of a tendon to push claws out of the end of my fingers. I made them long and curved, when they were fully retracted they extended along the under side of the last two segments of my fingers.

It did limit how much I could bend the ends of my fingers, and I put in a fault line that I could snap with my Matter Manipulation to give me back full dexterity to my hands if I needed it. I left my thumbs without the claws.

I was considering how to give myself night vision, or at least low light vision, when I got a ping for my attention from one of my portal room presences. I considered ignoring it for the moment. There was something to combining how owl eyes worked, made larger and sacrificing being able to move them in return for more perfect control over focal depth and where the light was cast onto the cones and rods of the eye, and how cat eyes worked.

The similarities between the two suggested that the entire criteria was a sacrifice of cones to fit more rods, more night vision and low light sensitivity at the cost of colour perception. But if I could make a concave lens instead of convex within my Pocket Dimension and then have two portals, I could surround the lenses with a much higher density of both rods and cones. Or have the sensors be on the inside of a sphere and rotate the sphere to have predominantly rods or cones depending on the circumstances...

I brought up the audio from the portal room that pinged me before I got too distracted, super vision would be an interesting thread to pull on. I would even be able to incorporate my heat vision into it.

"And it's a closet again." I heard through the presence. "Did you see what happened? How am I supposed to get in contact with lord C.C. now."

Ah, Mal'Thorn, and the portal was the one that lead to the Forest Keeper city.

"Greetings Mal'Thorn." I said. "I am keeping the portals secured while they aren't in use. I will be keeping an eye on them and connecting them if and when they need to be used."

Mal'Thorn entered the small stone portal room. "Greetings lord C.C." Mal'Thorn said. "Thank you. There was some question regarding the security of the portals, and whether two guards would be enough."

"Your floor isn't ready yet." I said. "I was about to start it now, though I will admit to getting slightly distracted."

"My lord." Mal'Thorn said. "I wasn't expecting you to be ready for us for days, possibly weeks. I came back to tell you what my Queen and her advisers decided to do. Which was to plan a military offensive against the priests."

"And they want my help with that?" I asked. "I took down the ice walls around my fortress easily, roughly four hundred meters long, in about half an hour."

"It is unlikely that they would ask for your help." Mal'Thorn said. "The Queen isn't against you, as she values my counsel highly, but many of her advisers do not like you. I am your greatest supporter within the court, and it is being interpreted by some that I am being exiled for it. I see it as safeguarding our species, and the Forest itself."

Mal'Thorn had started pacing within the small room, going to the edge of the portal and then back to the wall. It was only three short paces each way. I started making yet another thread portal, a smaller one for transferring people within my Pocket Dimension itself.

"When the winter priests first put their wall up some of the Forest Keeper city guards took it upon themselves to kill the priests that were on top of the walls." Mal'Thorn said. "The ice wall was changed to provide proper cover and there hasn't been much success in attacking them since. It will take the advisers days to come to an agreement on their exact plan of attack."

Mal'Thorn stopped pacing and shook himself. "But this is all boring Forest Keeper politics." Mal'Thorn said. "How long before you expect to be ready to receive our advance team?"

About half of the work will be in dumping the massive amounts of stone into my Pocket Dimension, and both portals can move in opposite directions while my power cuts around the edges. The other half, or maybe more, would be in changing the ordinary stone into the blue super stone that I was using for my construction material. Ten meters thick over a circle one kilometer long was a lot of matter to convert, and that wasn't counting the supports or walls of the place.

I went over the conversation I had had with Mal'Thorn about the design requirements while looking over the model for the new floor and found a mistake. Only a small one and easily fixed, Mal'Thorn had asked for thirty meters of soil and not the twenty that I had in the model. But the total height remained at one hundred and fifty meters, so nothing else on the model needed to change.

Of course I wouldn't need to work in horizontal layers, which is how I envisioned doing it originally. If I started in the center with the stairs and then expanded in a circle outwards I could get them a foothold nearly immediately.

"How many people would be in your advance team?" I asked.

"It would depend on the space initially available." Mal'Thorn said. "A dozen for a small space."

"I can give you an initial ground space of a circle twenty meters wide, not counting the stairway in the center that will be five meters wide, in ten minutes from now." I said. "That would be the full one hundred and twenty meters tall with thirty meters of soil. And then extending that outwards to the full one kilometer width will take me..."

I paused to calculate it out. Damn, but that was a lot of stone. "A little over two weeks." I said. "Constantly growing outwards from the center, of course."

"A kilometer wide?" Mal'Thorn asked. "Truly a claim of our own. It will take us decades to grow a new Forest over that area, and you casually say it will take you weeks to build it."

"Would you like to watch?" I asked.

"Very much so." Mal'Thorn said. "I will just send word for my people to start making their way here."

He stepped back through the portal to the Forest Keeper city and into the city itself to deliver his messages.

I brought the Pocket Dimension side of the portal out of the portal room, facing it into the empty space of the Pocket Dimension. Some small portals only took a minute to make, and I had electricity anywhere I wanted inside.

I pointed some floodlights out into the darkness and moved my ten meter by ten meter excavator thread portal into position. I had moved my stone source portal back to my fortress, it would be following behind the large portal to give my digital side's Matter Manipulation power access. And I set up the new thread portal that I would be using as a viewing portal for Mal'Thorn. Who still wasn't back.

I shone a light through the viewing portal and started on the stairs down. The excavator portal started at the portal at the bottom floor of my fortress. I made it into a square a little over five meters by five meters and dropped it through the floor of the fortress and down into the stone.

Half of the stone that it passed became the stairs and the other half came out into the Pocket Dimension. This would be the biggest initial time expenditure, and it was half an hour before I'd finished the one hundred and sixty five meter deep stairway.

Mal'Thorn returned when I had just started on the maintenance floor above the new Forest Keeper floor.

"My apologies lord C.C.." Mal'Thorn said. "Some people had taken advantage of our leaving to push their own agendas. My people shall be along within the hour."

Mal'Thorn looked around at the five hundred cubic meters of stone already in the Pocket Dimension, and then through the viewing portal to the floor I was carving out.

"You do work amazingly quickly." Mal'Thorn said. "Of course I believe you when you claim such things, but seeing it is another thing entirely. What is this area though? It has a permanent floor, and the ceiling can't be more than five meters up."

"This is the maintenance floor." I said. "It will be where the sun enchanted mana crystals will be accessed from. Perhaps a rainfall system of some kind. This is where it gets interesting."

I had just finished the twenty five meter wide floor and moved the excavator to the top of the Forest Keeper floor, extending it out to its full ten meters by ten meters. The viewing portal was blocked by stone, as I was going to leave it in its fixed position at the ceiling looking down next to the stairway wall. And then I started the excavator. One full revolution around the stairway took forty seconds, and then it was down to the next layer.

I had to shift the stone as it was coming out in my Pocket Dimension so that it was in straight lines and not curves. Eight minutes later there was a one hundred a twenty meter drop through the viewing portal. The last three revolutions around the stairway were converting stone into soil.