I returned my focus to my body, which was resting where I'd left it in the very comfortable bed I'd created in the center of my Pocket Dimension. The portal that led to the stairway landing on the first floor of my fortress was a few meters away. I struggled my way out of the sinking softness of the bed and left through the portal, going up the stairs to the guard room at the top of the fortress.

There weren't any guards guarding the guard room, due to the fact that the stairs leading outside were filled in with stone. Mal'Thorn hadn't arrived yet, so I removed the barred doors and set to work removing the stone blocking the way out, and then unbarring and opening the doors at the top.

I climbed the stairs to the outside and stepped into the light of an overcast morning. Every other time I had come outside it had been completely dark, this was the brightest I'd ever seen it. The clouds were still there, thick and heavy a dozen meters over my head, but it seemed the god banishment zone set up by the wards over my claim were having some effect on the permanent winter over the forest.

My breath was still fogging in the cold air, but the stone beneath me was giving off a comfortable warmth. Looking out over the forest around my fortress it got more dark the further out I looked.

I was still admiring the view when Mal'Thorn came up the stairs behind me. I began filling the stairway with stone behind him.

"My lord," Mal'Thorn said. "My apologies for keeping you waiting."

I waved my hand at him, dismissing his apology. "Look at this," I said. "It's almost daylight out here. That must be helping the forest, at least somewhat?"

"It helps the trees here somewhat," Mal'Thorn said. "But the area is still too small to have much affect on the forest as a whole. Are we ready to go down?"

"I still need to finish sealing the top of the stairs," I said. "But you're welcome to head down first, I'll come down when I'm done."

Mal'Thorn nodded and headed down the stairs down to the pavilion outside my fortress. Even from here I could see the damage done to the trees, several of them had fallen over, leaning outwards from a central point. I finished filling the stairs, closed the doors, and followed Mal'Thorn.

He had stopped a dozen stairs up from the bottom, just above where the damage to the stone began. The stairs and the pavilion itself weren't covered in the physical protection wards that were on the rest of the fortress, and the pavilion was in ruins.

I moved past Mal'Thorn and soaked my power into the shattered stairs, fusing them back together as I went down them. The wall that I had put the portal in at the bottom of the stairs was still standing with large chunks gouged out of it, but the pillars that had held the roof of the pavilion up hadn't survived the explosion, which had caused the roof to fall down and break into large chunks.

Mal'Thorn moved to the relay tree immediately, going over the unstable debris. I moved the rubble of the building to make a path to it, stacking the leftover stone to the sides. The relay tree itself had been further along from the blast, and had held up better than the other trees around it, one of which was laying against the relay tree where it had fallen. There were still large holes in the relay tree that were slowly closing over as Mal'Thorn worked.

I took my portal out of my pocket, making it its full size, and began using my power to push stone through into my Pocket Dimension. The first area I cleared out was around the wall that had held the permanent outside portal and I set to studying that while I continued to move stone.

Almost all of the symbols of the portal were damaged in some way, with large gouges in the stone. It would be as much work clearing it and reshuffling portals as it would to just repair the portal, so I set about repairing it. The stone filled in first, including the area where the arachne silk steel thread had been pushed into the stone. Then I converted the stone into the silk steel thread and carved the missing portions of the symbols into it.

Repairing a portal was much simpler than creating a new one from scratch, all of the required links were already set up. It still took twice as much effort to carve the symbols as it should have, carving a matching set in the Pocket Dimension at the same time, but it was something anyone could do if they knew the shapes of the original portal symbols.

With the last of the symbols done the portal reappeared leading into its portal room with a presence at the end. The portal room hadn't suffered any damage from the explosion, the portal having closed so quickly.

I walked around the remains of the pavilion moving stone into my Pocket Dimension and fusing the cracks in the stone floor. There was a large crater that I filled in as well, and I found the scraps of two thread portals that were so far gone that they weren't worth repairing.

I had started cutting down the fallen trees, putting their remains in my Pocket Dimension too, when Mal'Thorn finished fixing the relay tree.

"The damage to the relay tree was due to my carelessness in choosing a testing location," I said before he could say anything. "I owe you reparation, what would you ask for?"

"May I have some time to think on it, my lord?" Mal'Thorn asked.

"Sure, I'll continue to clean up," I said.

I went back to cutting and clearing the fallen trees. They were too large and unwieldy for me to do more than cut them into sections that I then let fall to the forest floor. After that I trimmed their branches and moved the entire lot through my portal.

I had just finished with the fifteenth and last fallen tree and was looking over the area when Mal'Thorn approached me again. I don't think the area at the foot of my stairs needed a roof anymore, as there was only a light snow falling occasionally, so I was done.

"My lord, I have thought of something," Mal'Thorn said. "But, tell me if I am overstepping. I would ask for six of my people to be converted to Demi-AI at your earliest convenience."

"I have that process partially automated now," I said. "I don't need to interact with anyone who has a Demi-AI to vouch for them, the only thing I need to do is the start of each the micro-portals. Six conversions as reparation for the damage caused. Done."

I sent Mal'Thorn the details of the quest he should send to his six candidates, that would direct them to the conversion room through the portal system.

"Thank you, my lord," Mal'Thorn said. "Will you be opening the portal back into the Fortress?"

"For payment purposes this portal should be considered within the fortress," I said. "You should be able to access the portal to your floor for free?"

Mal'Thorn and I both went through the portal into the portal room, and Mal'Thorn went to stand in front of the presence at the end of the room. I waited for him to finish, and a few seconds later a portal linking to the portal nexus slid through the wall and settled in front of the presence.

Mal'Thorn nodded to me and left to go through the security checkpoint. I went directly through the wall and ended up in another portal room, and two more walls later I was out into my main Pocket Dimension area. I queued up the instructions to send my body back to bed and dropped down into my magic study simulation again.

Chantelle and Maaata were both still there in different sections of the room, and almost half of the tables in the room looked to have annotated notes, even those that didn't directly have symbols associated with them.

I approached one of the first tables, which had the enchantment that was added to the shards of ice from the weapon as it left the tube. According to the notes the enchantment was added to increase the stability and accuracy of the shard, correcting its trajectory as it moved through the air to maintain a straight line.

Chantelle was the first one to notice me in the simulation and she wove through the tables to give me a hug.

"These are all fascinating," Chantelle said. "The physical stuff is all useless to anyone but you who can create things at that level, but there are hundreds of symbols here that I'd never seen before. There are several variations on absorbing mana, including one that actively breaks down mana that is in enchantments or wards."

"Anyone can design using the physical stuff here, actually, I can create from a detailed model anything you come up with," I said. "The enchantment eating enchantment is from the wisp model?"

"Yes, they also have a way of breathing ambient mana in and out that draws more ambient mana towards them," Chantelle said. "As well as enchantments for flight. Though they are limited in the weight that they can carry, I don't think they would be able to carry the weight of even a small child. It's all very exciting. Maaata and I have been compiling a primer on what we've found so far. It's on the blue table there, the larger central orb is the combined primer, the two smaller ones are what we're working on and haven't added back into the main primer yet."

I walked over to the blue table and touched the large orb that was floating above it, which gave me a prompt to load the primer into memory. I agreed and loaded it up to study, Chantelle going back to what she was working on.

Some time later as I was working through and creating different enchantments in the air I got a communication request from Jeff, the human leader of the Fortress Army.