Now I just had to work out how to practically take them all. The snow in the winter realm was deep, and my fastest way of travelling was to run through it while banishing the snow in a tunnel in front of me that collapsed right behind me. That wouldn't work for my entire army, we moved too slow and making the tunnel wide enough would slow me down even further. It was probably inevitable that it would take longer than I'd prefer...

Message from follower: schadof

Note: Messages are highly moderated so as to not affect the simulation. Why take a whole army (which like mentioned will take a lot more time and is more obvious) when you can just ready it. And teleport it when needed?

That... I was still a bit uncomfortable when followers showed that they could read my thoughts as I was thinking them, or that they could read my thoughts at all, really. But like with the other messages I had gotten from followers, this was something obvious that I had missed by being too close to the problem, and I was thankful for it.

By teleport I took it to mean using a portal. I could ready a room in my Pocket Dimension that my army can gather in, ready to sortie out through a portal that I carried with little notice. I could carry my entire army and not sacrifice any speed.

Guides, like the wisp, and people with sensing abilities, like the diviner, might need to be outside of the Pocket Dimension to be able to give me their insights. But the rest of the army could watch from the war room simulation. We should be able to move faster with just a few people.

I began making a decent sized stone room in my Pocket Dimension for my army to stay in, adding the portals for the winter realm, my pocket portal, and the leprechaun floor portal. Conor and Jenny were still taking the occasional shot at snow men that got closer, but our current position on the plains was entirely irrelevant. I took out and opened up my pocket portal, forming it into a doorway.

"Everybody through," I said.

Everyone entered the room, including the wisp, and I followed them through. I closed the portal down into a thin line and then buried it into the soil of the plains. The ground was likely going to be frozen soon, and I wasn't sure if I would be able to recover the thread portal if the freezing was a magic effect. I didn't want anyone to get easy access to one of my thread portals though.

The wisp began bouncing around crazily. I opened the thread portal to the winter realm after using my power to dig it out of the snow and ice it was buried in. Even before the portal was wide enough for the wisp to get through it was pushing against it. It finally made it through and a few moments later the portal was big enough for Clay to follow it.

"That was scary," the wisp said. "I couldn't breathe. What was that place?"

"It's my space," I said. "It doesn't have mana. Are you going to be okay?"

"I... Yes," the wisp said. "I didn't like it, but I could survive there for a short time if I needed to. It did make me hungry."

I had been a little bit concerned that the wisps, being mana based, wouldn't be able to use my portals at all. If they could make it through with the equivalent of holding their breath then I could offer them a place in my fortress. Though there was one other problem with that...

"I'm going to do something that might let me be able to hear you," I said. "If it works the same as for other people then it will drain your mana to half."

"Don't want to," the wisp said. "Not worth half of my mana just to be able to talk to you. Talking to you now fine."

Right, they wouldn't regenerate mana, they would have to eat it to get any back.

"My people will give you at least as much as you lose," I said. "Of different types. And I will stop when you say."

It was possible that I would drain it completely trying to adapt it to my power, or that I wouldn't be able to adapt it to my power at all.

"Your people mana is good," the wisp said. "Okay, you do."

I began pushing my power against it.

"Tickles," the wisp said. "Doesn't feel bad, different."

"Conor, could you collect everyone's mana crystals and go fill them up?" I asked. "The leprechaun floor is through that portal. I might head out before you get back, but this is going to be the army room. There is no reason all of us have to travel when you can watch from the war room simulation and come out of the portal I'll be carrying if you are needed to fight."

Conor nodded to me and began collecting the large mana crystals, then left to the ward room to fill them.

I began creating chairs for the army room out of stone, and the others joined me in designing their ideal chairs, tweaking them as I made them. I ended up with unique chairs for everyone, arranging them around a table in the center of the room. I also added a presence, though the Demi-AI in my army all had inventories and interfaces to the Fortress functionality.

I gave them all access to the army room feeds, so anyone could look into the room even if no one was there. And I gave them a Fortress Coin each before summoning a platter and filling it with different sorts of berries, including the condensed versions I had been playing with.

With that done my power finally began sinking into the wisp and I began making a detailed scan of it. What I could see of it was the same material that made up mana crystals, and near the center of it there was a complicated intertwined set of circuits. It definitely approached the complexity of a brain, but I had no idea how it mapped out. And it was possible that there was some active component that was represented entirely in mana.

If the wisps were going to join my fortress then I would want at least one of them to be a Demi-AI. But I wasn't sure if it was even possible. I opened up a private communication channel with Clay, who was in the winter realm with the wisp.

"Could you use your magic to make a scan of the mana of the wisp?" I asked.

"Sure thing," Clay said.

I sent him my detailed scan of the physical representation of the wisp and after a few minutes he sent me back the scan with mana added. It gave me a solid snapshot of the wisp, but that wasn't telling me enough about it. I switched to the war games simulation, which should have the most accurate rules for simulating mana, and created a copy of the wisp.

It was just a static model, and I wanted to study how its mind worked so I could work out a way to interface a Mind Link to it. I nudged the simulation to make the mana flow through the model of the wisp and suddenly it came to life. I could see the mana flowing through it, but it was beginning to make sense how it worked as a system that held a consciousness. There were even flickers of electricity running deep within the circuits.

The model of the wisp sent a wave of mana at me which quickly resolved into a digital communication request.

"Hello?" it asked. "Where am I? What am I?"

Ah, whoops? I think I may have just made an entirely digital consciousness.

"Hello," I said. "You are in a simulation, and if you are self-aware then you are a digital consciousness. Patterned after a wisp. Do you remember anything?"

"No," it said. "I was just here. There's nothing before."

Its consciousness was tied to the model that it was using. I could pretty easily turn it off again... Which would kill it. That didn't seem very fair. It wasn't an AI, it was a simulated wisp, and as I had created it it was one of my people. If I gave it a Mind Link and a digital platform... Couldn't I then make it a body in the outer simulation and share its consciousness between its digital and physical self? Like how I made Demi-AI but in reverse.

I split off an instance of the war game simulation and moved the simulated wisp there, then shifted the time dilation of the instance all the way up so that the wisp wouldn't experience any time passing. I was still at the maximum time dilation of the war game simulation and I set about designing the Mind Link for the wisp.

A few hours later I had it tested and working and the simulated wisp's consciousness split over to a highly throttled digital platform. It worked. So I could make wisp Demi-AI. And I hadn't, yet, got a message from the system saying that I had broken everything. I could see how following up on the simulated wisp had the potential to, so I set that exploding can of worms to the side for now. I had other priorities that I needed to deal with first.

I returned to the war room simulation, and normal speed, and walked out into the winter realm.

"Hey, I can hear you now!" The wisp said. "And you can hear me!"

"I can," I said. "We should go to you archwisp now. Clay, step back into the army room."

I picked up the portal after he had stepped through and turned to the wisp who was drifting side to side.

"I don't know where we are," it said. "There are some wisps nearby, we'll go ask them?"

I followed it as it went around the corner of the wall of ice we were next to, heading towards the gate further along. There were two wisps hovering there and my guide approached them, bouncing excitedly up and down. A few seconds later the other two began bouncing too.

"Know where we are now," my guide said. "Come, we go this way and down."

It headed out into the flat snowy plain and I followed it at a run, clearing snow as I went. We were making good time, my guide able to float at twenty kilometers per hour, which was near my top speed in the rough mountain terrain. After half an hour I began hearing a buzzing sound and slowed to a stop.

"What is that?" I asked my guide.

"What?" My guide asked, and then a few moments later. "Oh no, Devourers."