A second communication followed quickly, written up by another hazmat-suited individual who had approached my hand-drone, holding his messages up to my eye. Amusingly, he was wearing an actual suit beneath his protective gear. I couldn't tell whether the beads of sweat on his forehead were from stress or the overly layered clothing. Probably both.

"May I ask who I'm talking to? How do you speak our language and know the length of an hour?"

I answered with a half-truth. "My name is Peter, and while this is the first time I've heard of someone deliberately building a stable portal, it's not the first time anyone has crossed over accidentally. English isn't exactly a common language here, but there's a few people around who speak it."

That information seemed to stun him, but I wasn't at all surprised. His mouth moved, followed by a few seconds of motionlessly staring at nothing. Talking to someone else? Yes, now that I was looking for it, I could see something in his ear.

"You are a child. Do you have the authority to talk to us?"

With my other eye, still in its natural location inside its socket, I peered at the unmoving drone on our side of the gate with suspicion. Was it still transmitting an image, or were they basing my childhood on the size of my hand? And speaking of that hand, I was surprised they weren't fussing about it. If they'd been watching a video feed of dragons, even if they'd lost the feed since, it would explain why a mere detachable hand and eye didn't concern them.

"By the laws of this world, I'm a full adult, but I'm not speaking alone. I was asked to come here to act as a translator. If your drone is sending video, you can see our group. If it's sending audio, I'll go back to talking. Writing one handed isn't fun."

Yes, not particularly diplomatic, but I was no diplomat. Would I unlock a diplomat class after this?

"The drone was destroyed by the dragon. If it's acceptable to you, we can send another?"

"Go ahead."

I watched the sterilised helicopter take off and fly into the portal through one eye, before my other eye spotted it emerging from our side a second later. Multiple fields of vision were weird, but as with everything [Eldritch Mage] related, it was remarkable how easily I adapted.

"(Welcome to...)" I started, before stopping to ask a question I'd barely considered for the past fourteen years. "What's the name of this planet, anyway?"

"Name? It is simply the world."

Of course... Just like 'the village'. "(Welcome to) Erryn's world," I finished. They wouldn't be able to tell Erryn was a name, so it would do. "(Now, again, please can I ask why you opened a gate here?)"

"(We wanted to ask the same thing. You opened a gate to our world. We opened this one to ensure there was no threat to Earth.)"

Through my hand-drone, I could see the person speaking was the same as the one who had been writing, having moved back behind the barricades. He was standing behind a bank of monitors, presumably watching the video sent back by the drone.

Unnamed human, Commoner (1/1)

As expected, he had a System shard growing in him, too.

"(There isn't. That was someone attempting to replicate your portal simply to see if he could. There was no intent behind it beyond curiosity, and he didn't realise the significance of what he was doing.)"

"(This civilization is advanced enough to open a wormhole out of pure curiosity?)"

"(It's advanced in some specific ways. Not in others.)" I answered, not wanting to give too much away. They must know we had magic, though? Even if that wasn't the original purpose of the anomalies, they'd seen enough to know we treated the laws of physics more like guidelines. Heck, he was still sharing a room with my detached hand, and had seen me teleporting notes to it.

"(You mentioned this gate being a danger to both our worlds. Could you elaborate? We have taken full precautions against the spread of disease and the like.)"

I hadn't even thought about disease... What would an Earthen common cold do to this world, where no-one had immunity? Probably not much, actually, given healing magic and the endurance stat. They were probably more at risk of the inverse. Nevertheless, it would be rather ironic if my hypothetical nefarious individuals crossed into this world, became subject to the Law and hence failed in their evil schemes, but then killed everyone anyway because they happened to have the sniffles.

But as to the problems I was actually thinking of, how could I explain without giving away information that could be used to harm us? Even if I could trust whoever I was talking to—and I wasn't convinced I could—information would leak eventually, and Earth was hardly unified. There would always be someone wanting to take advantage.

"(The laws of physics are different here, and some things are bleeding through.)"

"(In what ways? We haven't noticed anything strange?)"

"(Really?)" I asked incredulously, waving my hand through my head.

"(I meant in terms of strange occurrences on our side. We're obviously aware that your side has... magic.)"

The word 'magic' was mumbled, as if he really didn't want to admit such a thing existed.

"(No strange occurrences at all? I would have expected anyone close to the portal to have experienced auditory hallucinations. Hearing dings that no-one else heard, and don't show up on recordings, for example?)"

"(That is true. Some people have reported hearing chimes. And you think that's a danger?)"

Being straight with them would probably be the best way to get through.

"(Look... Have you ever heard the term 'system apocalypse'? Because that's exactly what you're risking here. Try saying 'status' while willing yourself to see a character screen.)"

There was a period of silence, but from my hand-drone, I could see that was because they'd cut audio while everyone in the portal chamber made public fools of themselves. I hadn't needed to tell them to say 'status' out loud, after all.

"(What in the hells is that?)"

Hah, now that was a more appropriate reaction!

"(That's something some overly intelligent people on this world built thousands of years ago in a misguided effort to end all wars. Believe me when I say you don't want it infecting Earth. It should get cut off once you close the portal, but it can learn. Leave the connection open too long, and there's a risk it'll work out how to keep it going on its own.)"

"(We understand, and thank you for the warning. And you believe that will happen on a timescale of hours?)"

"(I have no idea—this is uncharted territory. I know the first time it was exposed to an Earth human it took months for it to work out how to interact.)" Admittedly, they were months I spent gestating in mum's belly, but they still counted. "(These days, it takes minutes. But interacting with Earth humans who are still on Earth is something new.)"

"(We were hoping that, if your people were amiable to it, we could establish trade. Do you think that would be too dangerous?)"

Wow. Jumping in at the deep end there. I know I'd considered it myself, but not as an immediate thing. I knew what Earth could offer, but what were they expecting from us? Given that magic wouldn't work over there, the best we could offer would be gems and precious metals. In any case, it wasn't something I could answer myself... "They're asking if we're interested in a trading relationship. I'm sure there's plenty they can offer us, and they place a high value on silver, gold, platinum and gems."

"Silver and gold are in high demand here, these days, and platinum in short supply," sighed Serlv. "Gems are a possibility, but is there anything else you think we could offer?"

"When I said high value, I mean very high. A single gold ingot could buy a lot of Earth goods, and if we fashioned it into jewellery beforehand, even more. But really, most of what we could offer that would be interesting to them is magical in nature, and I don't know how well it would transfer. I've already confirmed enchantments burn out within seconds over there. The same would likely be true of potions. Sending sick patients over here for a [Heal] is something they'd pay well for, but we couldn't come anywhere near meeting demand. And we certainly don't want to be accepting tourists. Aside from precious metals, we could offer trade goods like clothing and tools, but we'd need a lot of them."

"Then I do not foresee continuous trade on any sort of scale. Maybe a one-off, if you wish to gather goods with your own resources."

If I was dumped in an Earth department store for a few hours with an unlimited credit card, what would I buy? I didn't need utilities, like a microwave, oven, fridge or washing machine, because magic was better. The most obvious answers—a computer or games console—wouldn't work due to the lack of an electrical supply. Maybe Vargalas could build something with a lightning crystal, but either I'd need a big supply of sacrificial electronics or else he'd have to be very sure of getting the voltage right first time. Everything from Earth either wouldn't be useful compared to what we had here, or wouldn't work at all.

Actually, why was I thinking about things? It would make more sense to seek knowledge. Textbooks and the like.

I'm sure they'd find some of the local non-monster wildlife interesting, and I'd quite like some real chicken eggs, or to introduce Cluma to a real Earth cat, but given their concern about biohazards, trading animal life wouldn't work. If we were to do a one-off trade, the best option I could think of was to get a range of science textbooks, and maybe some items for the research institute to reverse engineer.

But we were getting ahead of ourselves. Before talking about trade, there was another question they kept evading.

"(First, you haven't answered why you were originally opening gates to our world. Yes, we opened one back, but only in response to you. Until this one, the gates were not designed to be traversable. What was it you originally wanted?)"

"(A renewable power source. The researchers were attempting to extract usable power from a vacuum. They had no idea it was actually coming from another world.)"

A power source? Was that what they were doing with our mana? But how were they doing it, and how much power could be extracted from mana? A rank two fire crystal could boil a kettle in a matter of minutes, so as an order-of-magnitude estimate, it must be operating on the scale of kilowatts. I'd never seen a crystal of any affinity or rank suck up enough magic that it had any noticeable effect on the background mana. With the amount drawn in by the anomalies, there should have been megawatts available at the least. Maybe more. Then again, I had no idea how much power their equipment took to operate.

As another point, water crystals made water, at least as far as I could tell. It wasn't teleported in, or extracted from the air. I still knew Einstein's famous equation linking mass and energy, and while I had no clue as to the exact figures, if that water was being produced from energy, the amounts involved would be of an insane scale. Enough that the entire human energy use of Earth would be nothing but a rounding error in comparison. Then again, I already knew magic had no respect for conservation of energy, so perhaps basing a potential power supply on a water crystal wasn't meaningful?

We could maybe safely establish a permanent portal. Our end would need to be in a null mana room, or something close to null. Their end would have to be kept well away from people. Would the System reach out further over time? Despite this portal remaining open, and me still having a hand on the other side, I hadn't had any more foreign soul notifications or seen any further System or Law activity.

Would we want to, even if the portals themselves were safe? There were dangers involved with associating with Earth, but the cat was already out of the bag. Again, I believed that information would leak eventually. Turning them away now wouldn't stop others trying to open gates in the future. Making some agreement with these people might even be helpful, if it resulted in some way to block gates from being opened. Perhaps, if I had a button I could push to block all contact with Earth forever, I'd have been tempted to press it, but I didn't. Besides, that was probably just my love of the status quo again, the same as the way I'd been reluctant to change the Law.

I ran my thoughts past Tilyana and the dragons, and all agreed.

"(It might be possible to create portals safely, and maybe even permanently, but more investigation would be needed. But even if we could, trade would unfortunately be limited by what items we have that would work on Earth. Magic simply doesn't work there. We can offer precious metals, but not in a volume worth tearing holes in the fabric of the universe to get your hands on. But, if it's power you're after, that's something we may be able to offer.)"

I pulled out a water crystal from my [Item Box], letting the water flow through my hands. Yes, I was getting Krana's back wet, but he'd just have to deal with it.

"(This item produces water from nothing. Obviously, by conventional physics, the power required to do that would be immense. I believe it draws its power from the same source you were trying to.)"

I put it away and drew out a lightning crystal. I didn't actually have any idea how they worked, in Earth terms. They didn't have positive and negative terminals, but being permanently negative or positive would require generating electrons or protons, which would make electrostatic repulsion a problem. Worse, over time, we'd end up charging up the planet. Maybe they alternated between polarities? Could you get lightning bolts from alternating currents? I saw no reason why not, as long as the frequency wasn't too high.

"(This one draws on the same power source to produce electricity. I don't know the details of how it works, but if the source it draws from is as big as I think, a large enough array of these things should be able to supply all of Earth and then some. We also have items that generate heat—or remove it, in defiance of thermodynamics—that could power a conventional turbine. None of them would work on Earth, but if we could safely open permanent portals and lay cables through...)"

The other side fell into silence, presumably discussing my suggestion.