“Nash,” Calls out the operator just a few meters away. “T-1 minute. Do you care to do one last check on the root engravings underground?”

I nod simply and my task begins in action instead of just waiting for a countdown.

I reach for that same feeling of time slowing down that my higher stats helped me achieve in battle and it comes. It is sluggish and different from last time. Just like Qi, my other resources and every meaningful measure of my physical strength. The one thing my loss of stats doesn’t seem to have affected is my will, which I leverage for all I can.

Getting a feel for it, I realize that it is not just the same, but it has grown with my soul stat increase, luckily a stat entirely unaffected by the damage to the Aether constructs inside my soul.

Letting out a breath, I try to make the world stop while going over the roots underground. I spin up my creation field, while using both One Step Towards Connection and Runic Language, each adding their own perspective on the work before me.

My mind bends and folds as I can see everything. I can understand and I absorb it all.

I become one with the engraving, not in the same way as I do with Aspen. This wonderful state is closer to myself disappearing and only what is before me existing.

I can faintly hear in the background the timer:

40 seconds.

There are a few twists and bends.

30 seconds

My will and skills nudge the runes into a better alignment by fractions of a millimeter.

10 seconds and I exert all my will, even beyond what I thought possible to say:

“Everything in order.”

But even after the words leave my mouth, I don’t leave this state. I take it all in, even as mana starts flooding the channels. I push a little of my Qi with it like I do when strengthening shields, though I don't know how this iteration of the portal will react.

Massive underground battery banks discharge at a greater rate than in any attempt before.

If before we spend 50 k mana in an entire test, now that goes every second, but barely a blink later it is over.

“The stabilization models we established are not matching up.” Says the portal operator

“That is my fault,” I say. “I send a bit of Qi along. We should double up all the tests programmed for today.”

“We were already planning to spend 3 million mana today, are you sure you want to double it?”

“Don’t worry about that I have a few sources to call upon, all the village's batteries will be filled before the attack along with the main one in my inner world.”

“You are the boss.”

Minutes later the same test is repeated without my Qi.

With each test, we make small adjustments. More mana, than less, varying the mana rate, other times making it as smooth as possible. Stabilizing it before the portal opens or waiting a few seconds. Shorter lived connections than longer.

Everything we can think off has a proper test, sometimes multiple ones trying to isolate the variables. I push everyone's skill a notch higher as each of the engravers and even Merlin steps in to modify small details of the main engraving and I work on the supporting structure of roots underground. Others could do the same, but none so easily and effortlessly as myself.

I pulse the creation field out, but the strain is great while the gain is limited. Knowledge of the perception field and runes that the others pluck from my mind are doubtlessly useful, but the Creation field is not as transformative in engraving as it is in blacksmithing. I still keep it up, because for someone as advanced as Merlin, each inch of advancement pushes all our capabilities forward.

Each trial we improve and learn.

Something familiar bubbles up, as new ideas start to pop up and the trials I’m under and my desire to go back to Earth is sated for a moment. I’m making progress. Even if for now I can’t go back, nor is a portal like this a realistic path to returning, it is at least progress. A step in understanding the rules of the world, for I cannot know how to break something I do not understand, nor how to fix it.

I feel my natural Aether field stirs up and instead of letting it be, I feed it with even more Aether from my pool.

I would eventually run out and harvesting it from anyone else is not an option, but I would make do with what I had and find a path forward for when a dead end arrived. There was always another path forward.

I try to get a sense of the warping of the portal. But the way runes powered by mana interact with space is so very different than what I can do. Punching a millimeter wide hole in space is like taking a crowbar and trying to lift a ship.

Power folds and amplifies itself in a cycle concentrating on a spot creating a hole in reality and touching this other instance. Some interference is expected, and I try to taste the edgie currents, the warping flowing from it. Like a molten droplet of metal, the heat is too concentrated for my senses to get anything useful. I can’t touch the very hole with my space sense, because there is only white noise.

I inch forward trying to get at that perfect distance.

Cacophony, a pinprick of pain and I jerk back. I’m either too fast or too slow. Each time I get close, the portal turns off.

I try two, three, ten times to no avail. Frustration gets to me and I curse out:

“Goddammit… do a 10 thousand mana per second portal, stabilize it as well as you can and keep it active for a minute.”

“Oh, ahh. Sure boss.” Says the main operator unsteadily.

I take a deep breath and then I continue:

“Sorry, it is just I’m trying to do something but the portal keeps turning off on me.”

“Ohh, yeah no problem.”

I wait patiently as he spins the dials controlling the mana accounting for everything he learned today, and the last couple months.

A beautiful thin needle punching a hole through space. In my senses, I get only the aftereffects from far away or white noise as I push against the portal. So I approach slower ever until I finally get a good look at the torus of power. But there is something funky with my perception, so I move around and realize that from any angle, I can see the same thing. A donut aimed straight at me. My sense of space is amazing, but it sometimes has some strange interactions. The torus spinning on the outside edge of the tiny portal overlaps the power of space folding itself inducing most of this instability. That phenomenon is nearly absent in the much easier to observe portals to the netherworld.

The system doesn’t want us communicating with other instances, but the way this is happening. It is not just a random quirk, this is intentional.

This is what has made our task nigh impossible. The minute hits its end and the spinning reduces as the mana flow is cut off and I let out a sigh.

“What did you learn?” Merlin Eagerly asks.

“Your ‘pessimistic’ predictions, I don’t think they are nearly harsh enough. We won’t be able to fully stabilize the portal even with a million mana per second. I might not even have realized if you didn’t explain your thought process, but the problem is much broader than you imagined, and as we input more mana…”

“Are we gonna have to chase the precision that I imagine only pure mithril would be able to give us?”

“No, I don’t think even that would be enough, not if we try to brute force it with our meager understanding of the field. We have to think sideways, otherwise, it will be a self perpetuating problem, put more power in, cause greater destabilization, feeding an inescapable cycle. There might be even a hard limit we could never cross no matter the precision materials or anything else with our current method. I can almost feel the system's touch in the way our instance interacts with the other side.”

They all go silent, but a single tech walks back wafting off a grim demeanor like he just saw someone die and I pay attention to him.

“What is wrong?” Everyone around looks at me, and soon after the object of my attention.

With a hundred stares he calls out.

“A high price for each time we connect.”

I furrow my brows. “Speak plainly, if you please.”

He points at the gold right in the middle of one of the largest fully metallic engravings. Definitely the most intricate formation we have made to date. I train my perception field on it and for an instant only an instinct in the back of my mind warns me, but soon, it all comes into clear and sharp focus in my mind.

“This is eroding the gold runes. If we keep this up, soon the entire engraving will become swiss cheese … or even worse metal styrofoam.”

Merlin an expert as always, reaches with his humongous will and pool of mental stats tasting the runes in their metaphysical elements trying to be certain of the changes there. As I spread my will to the outside I see that there were infinitesimal holes all throughout the silver and copper as well. If we keep this up, soon there will be nothing left.

“The power of the runes is eroding, but we could probably run a hundred tests like this before any significant change, but….”

“Why do you think this happened?” One of the leading engravers asks.

“The only variable that meaningfully changed is the time scale, I don’t think any other test lasted more than 10 seconds, this one when on for over a minute.”

The portal controller nods from his seat tapping buttons trying to find any information hidden in the logs.

“We need to test how and when this happens, that is the only way we have a chance of gleaming why this is happening and what countermeasures to add.”

“Let's get to it,” I call out.

The next few tests confirm our suspicions and give us more concrete data to work off. Any portal lasting more than some 15 seconds with at least 5k mana running through it per second is affected. Even with my perception field, I couldn’t feel what was causing the erosion, though at that power output it was so weak it barely merits a mention, at some 10 k mana it was a greater problem, but from some 30 k and above it no longer becomes manageable and it was the one test we cut short.

I try to make sense of it and this just seems another layer to what is stopping our actions. Not a natural development, but making use of the harshness of the environment and layering the burden on our shoulders.

“We can make a dummy structure to take the damage, even if it is wasteful in its mana usage and that might be enough to protect at least our limited supply of gold.” Burges volunteers as Merlin nods.

“I could make a few critical components of roots and that should further mitigate the damage. I feel they would be able to at least partially resistant, but it is time consuming to make roots absorb enough gold and silver. I’m talking a month for a pound of gold and that is counting the expected improvements from a hundred different ideas I have on how to speed it up.”

“A hundred ideas?” Merlin calls out with a smirk in his face.

“Fine a few, but you could let me have a score to brag about.”

Burges and the few others that could contribute to a project like this and aren’t occupied with the preparations for the attack sit around grinning. All except for Merlin.

“I will magnanimously allow a dozen, do not make me regret it.” He says pointing his finger like he is lecturing me.

I bow in mock reverence before my mind turns to the problem. Those are all possible solutions to half of the problem. The other half however still remains, if it hasn’t grown worse given the ever increasing complexity of this setup.

The one chance we had of stabilizing the portal without spending the mana pool of every single person remaining in the instance every second to somehow get access to the other side like we used to do.

But this is a chicken and an egg problem. We can't get access to the other side, because we don’t have anyone with blueprints to engrave on the other side. And to get there we would need to have an already functioning portal.

I ask them to turn it on one more time.

At the barest of portals, pushing just shy of 5 thousand mana so I won’t be degrading the integrity of our limited supply of gold, I send my perception field out.

I reach for the other village with my perception field. The flattened space around it, but this time there is something different. That same dizziness and lack of control from putting my perception field in contact with space warping phenomenon come back in full force, but I handle it much better than my first few times.

There is something new on the other side. It is the same instance, but some thirty meters off inside one of the houses and protected by a decent mana shield, stands an old man, maybe middle aged.

A man with strange slightly warped bones. Tall, lean and extremely gaunt face exuding Death. Strange even compared to myself in the last days of my trial after weeks without eating. I wonder for the briefest of instants if we could trust him. He looks to be just short of a lich wielding a bone staff and clad in full black attire, but that doesn’t make him bad does it?

I strain my perception field across the portal. I try to feel the magic in the air, and anything that might help to tie the other end of the rope. After all, a bridge was a lot easier to build from both sides of a canyon rather than just one.

But as the sigil in his robes light up and magic starts taking hold I’m dumbstruck by my own stupid assumptions.

We already have people on the other side, we just need to tell them what to build.