The night wore on, even as most people take short breaks fitting their own sleep schedules, but the group never dips below some 50 people working diligently. Dozens of engravers pouring over the runes and making the smallest of tweaks to smooth out the mana flow with help of a couple of metalworkers that got enough magic to melt the material back into place in small spots.

The permanent team keeps scouring all the data acquired and seeking clues on how each minute change affecting the portal. A pair of them accompany and discuss possible changes over the dozen blueprints that interlock with each other.

Time marches forward as I do my best to come up with the next steps even as I take the input of what they learn.

Through all that, Qi’s failure to make something out of nothing, to create matter like mana could, even if only temporarily, strikes me. I try to make even copper or wood, instead of Mithril, but that fails as well.

Each brief break sees me experimenting with the concept, but nothing succeeds, not until I try to replicate dirt.

Just a mote of dirt, as I carefully draw on my limited stores of Qi made even worse by the reduction in stat points and regen speed. At least it lasted a little longer compared to mana, but anything more complex than dirt strained its capabilities.

With just a single day before the end of the month, the automaton will come again to deprive us of some of our hard earned coin and right after we will be attacked again. I want to be done with that given my future plans. While it is not a certain thing, I can see things on the horizon, especially given that I started to see the shortcomings that the automatons hinted Qi would have. At least it is a superior resource when it comes to wielding space.

I move and joke like always. I concentrate and act in conformity with everyone’s expectations, even when I do surprise them it happens within a familiar frame of reference. Beneath it all, however, every time a new setback shows up or I discover one of my plans will need to change a small twinge bothers me.

I need to find a way back to Pando.

I want to rage but my small progress and hope hold me back. While there is a chance that I can save him, I need to keep a grip. I may take risks, I may even do something stupid, but all in my effort to come back. And this is the step I need to take now.

Though as the decision solidifies in my mind, a small idea pops up. Five minutes won’t hurt anything, will it?

Cross legged on the dirt floor just a dozen meters away from the epicenter of the hustle and bustle, I take another small step.

Life. It was another resource of mine that I used in sparing terms, but with the right approach… I draw a tiny tidbit of it and let it go outside my domain. Outside my body. I really should make that distinction clearer in the future.

The deep red resource, keeps its ball shape, as it falls to the ground with only a loose relationship with gravity. It splashes in slow motion with droplets of it returning to my body and quickly phasing into my pool. Suffusing the ground, the resource is absorbed like colored water and pushes growth around it even without any prodding from me.

Which is not an unexpected result given other tests I had run.

Next, I prepare to do something just a little bit crazy. I reach for all the instinctive and easy knowledge I gained by making and later expanding the food catalog of our instance. Even my experimentation with the hundreds of similar plants helped our regen speed. I still didn't really know what mechanism these herbs used to accomplish that, even while being a relatively constant user, but this time, I take a much more radical step that is likely more up Doctor Frankenstein’s alley.

I try to mix plant DNA with my own.

My limited testing indicates that Mana can’t do that, but a mixture of Life and Qi is a potent glue. I try to create a single cell, wielding all I am to make it into a reality. The first hundred tries bring to reality misshapen and dreadful things, but some are slightly more successful, exuding a hybrid nature. I can still affect it with my nature mana or rather nature Qi.

With a particularly successful example, I feel each second losing energy, burning it in the incessant drive to keep itself alive. I ask Aspen to send a bit of ‘sap’ containing the basic nutrients to it.

He does so and for a moment it seems to alleviate the struggle, but that isn’t enough. I try a few things, not wanting my first successful creation to die in such a pitiful way, even if it is no more alive than any other random cell in my own body.

I reach in with my entire perception field training on the little thing to connect with it as I would with a plant.

One step towards connection: A little pain, a burning, too much lactic acid, and carbon dioxide… Ohh.

Is it lacking Oxygen? That is not something a plant can transport efficiently, not without a lot of modifications.

I cut the connection and get Aspen to help. More of my blood flows into his network making its way to the hybrid cell. As soon as a single red cell touches it, it is re-energized beyond belief.

Now I have finally imitated Pando in the smallest of forms and made a creature that is part of myself, yet still close enough to the thousands of trees in the original grove. Now to see if my idea holds merit, I send a bit of my Life to it. It is instantly overwhelmed, blowing up into a hundred other cells. They all grow at a rapid rate from even the smallest of amounts of life I can wield, fractions of a point of Life, but soon, the minute draw slows as the single cell becomes a small sphere capable of supporting the last remnants of my Life resource.

I wait patiently, purposefully fully withdrawing my will to watch its own path. A wonderful state begins to form, as One step towards connection almost seems to draw me in deeper than before. But the ease and depth of it are to be expected. After all, if I couldn’t reach inside it like my own body, there was something wrong right?

A lot of information is missing and I don’t learn it all. But just because I don’t extract 13 volume encyclopedia in a few seconds, doesn’t mean that the one or two volumes aren’t immensely useful.

I can tell that changes that nearly starving and later running out of oxygen through. Changes in their composition. Their desire to create a specialized cell in the middle. A few large adipose cells store fat, but the largest change is oxygen storage for lean times.

Happy at my success, even if only the very first step, and with a lot still to figure out, I end my brief break and go back to the next iteration of the formation. Something that I could add underneath it all and only make a few tweaks on the main formation that should make a difference with the full use of my resource: Qi.

Just throwing it at normal formation usually saw a decent increase, though even that now seems more luck than anything else, but the subtle differences that it shows from mana ought to close the gap to the ‘final version’. And that was even more prevalent given how difficult each tiny step forward is.

Slowly, as the sun is rising, the few gawkers and remaining magic user return. Not everything is ready, but even Charlie shows up for the next opening even after the previous day being full of halting attempts. We learn more about each other, though the necromancer holds back on a few things after he realizes we didn’t know anything about the legacy classes he mentioned.

The first portal of the day opens up, but I mostly ignore the voices of dozens of people. Each with their own communication channel.

I look at all my hopes and dreams around. I wanted to make a rune that could teleport not only information instantly no matter the distance, but also matter, though that was always a distant concern. But if even making a portal work was such a hustle at least we understood it and using it correctly was safe. I shiver at the thought of asking Scotty to beam me up. While the ‘comm’ rune itself may be capable of much more, so far no one had even the smallest of hints of success ‘dematerializing’ and ‘rematerializing’ even a grain of dirt.

The whole effort could be futile and if there is an easier way to accomplish it, we should pursue that.

As the teams of diplomats all talk simultaneously, I reach out. The millimeter sized portal, powered from our side rebounds off a small formation on the other side. Nothing too complicated, nor mana intensive, but while it would be a nice thing to have a balanced formation, each supplying half the power, even this much helps immensely. Like a small permanent magnet in the middle of dozens of coils of wires and electronics to control the energy generation. Not quite the most efficient compared to something more appropriately sized, but still better than nothing.

I feel the mana consumption. Just 50 mana a second on our side. The other side, however, is inscrutable given my perception field can’t sense mana let alone my more common senses. They said the bone plate less than a meter in size was consuming about 1 mana second which is in line with our expectations, but I couldn’t tell either way with my perception field as it is, no matter how much I wish it so.

At this reduced but still significant mana consumption, the former minute long talks were lengthened until we were sitting at one hour on and one hour off.

At the comparatively low mana consumption, we didn’t have to worry about the erosion of the materials, but even with everything we learn, at this junction, the 50 mana is not nearly enough to pass anything but the ‘waves’ of my runes. Passing coherent light through the magical ‘projector’ I painstakingly helped to align and account for the dynamic shifts in the portal transition was still expensive. It requires nearly a thousand mana points rather than the required before the formation helping on the other side.

“Can we pass matter through the portal, even if get over there as dust?” Merlin asks me starting me out of mine.

“I was thinking about that. One thing I have started to figure out was the underground support network, even if temporary, would mitigate a good portion of the damage from the higher powered portals. After we succeed, we will probably learn something, but it should help us figure out how to improve much more than by taking small steps like we are now.”

“I wanted to wait until their engravers got better materials. They may not have as much silver as us, but they have more gold, comparatively speaking.”

“I have the feeling that he is not telling us the whole story. From a few of his hints, I would guess he controls most of the instance’s wealth, even if just in a managerial capacity.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I can’t describe it, but I have seen him with my perception field and there is something under the surface, a realness, and weight to his actions that I find in no one else here. Not lessening your’s or Charlie’s accomplishments, but he somehow got an early lead and now he is the undisputed top dog. In multiple domains at the same time.”

“I think I get what you are saying, but that is still a long way from having thousands of gold coins to waste by melting. And I guess silver is in the same boat.”

“Sure, for the time being. But what if we trade our bulk silver for system currency with him? We learned a few interesting runes and a bit about magic from his sources, which seem more in line with the normal progression the system expected, but… the rules for him are a little different. He didn’t get the storms, nor are the attacks in his village as large as ours. Even the beasts in the HLZ, don’t react the same way. He invades their territory and they keep coming until he withdraws.”

“They are a lower level.”

“Yes, but if he can’t take territory, his silver mining efforts are much more limited. He has his advantages, we have ours. We should take advantage of that.”

“Ok, but first things first, we can’t even send raw metal that gets shredded on the other side yet, let alone an intact coin.”

I grin and say:

“Well, I still haven’t really shown what Qi can do and I have a few ideas.”