The next day I was looking up the cliff face even before Kasidy was awake. Three hundred-plus feet of rock going straight up. I knew that a big part of the problem was that I didn’t want to go up a ton of steps. The only way that I could put them in would have been to go along the face, which would have been almost as crazy as digging out a tunnel.

So the first thing I did was I went and marked off the place where I would build my elevator. It was going to be a tube going up, which meant that I wouldn’t have as much to dig out. After I got the tube, I was going to use the same concept as I did with my dust collector.

While I was calling this an elevator, it was more like the tube used at banks. I would build a little capsule that would shoot to the top of the cliff. The goal, of course, would be that it wouldn’t overshoot and turn the whole thing into a circus cannon with me as the clown.

I quickly headed back into the thicket and dropped a dungeon seed into the central support. Before I did much more, I wanted to see if I could get this dungeon to grow up the cliff face. I might not want to have one on both sides, but that didn’t mean using one to move wouldn’t be a fine thing to do. After all, I had one going to the shrine.

I pulled up the interface and sighed. “33 days to grow up and through the cliff face. I could go faster than that myself using my wands. Guess my hope for an easy job is gone.”

I went back to the waterfall and got the gear that I needed. All of my stone-to-dirt wands and my dirt-to-water ones as well. I also got my stone hammer because while it wasn’t going to be the best thing to use on this, it would work to open things up. Besides, it was always fun to use.

Kasidy wasn’t even awake as I started to blast into the side of the cliff. My first few stone hammer swings had me covered in dirt. That would be fine since I was going to be working above my head, and it would just be a mess. I got into the hole that I had made. I wanted to be about 15 feet in as I wasn’t sure if the cliff went back or not.

By the time Kasidy came out to see how things were going, I was already around ten feet up the tube. The biggest problem that I was having was that I needed to be able to be in the range of the wands. Which meant that I either had to climb up or figure out some other way to move up. While I tried climbing in the square tube, I found after the third chuck of dirt fell on me, making me fall that this wasn’t the best way.

I had to change up my plans some for how I was going to move up. My first thought had been a rapid-fired air tunnel. That just took me all the way to the top. Yet that wasn’t what was needed at all. Nope. If I was going to do this, then the air tunnel was going to need to be variable.

Blink had taken off by this point, running someplace. I knew she hadn’t gone into the tunnel since I could still feel her. Kasidy was watching me work writing in her book. I wasn’t mad that she wasn’t helping me because I knew she couldn’t. That said, her writing in a book did make me a little sore. I was mad that I couldn’t read and that she couldn’t teach me.

I headed into the safe room. I needed time to work, and that was the place to get time. I had to create a platform that would work with a base to send air up the tube to the set height that I wanted it to go. That meant that I was going to be putting lots of runes of lightening, and I was going to be working with my call air runes.

I had to over-lighten the platform so that it would be light enough that the air would send it up. But it also had to be stable enough that I wasn’t going to rock it and tip it when dirt or water fell on it. This meant that while I did have some loose construction safety, I had tight requirements.

I spent the next few days in the safe room building and selling. My goal was to make my component parts in the safe room once as I had with the thickets. So I started with getting a plank that was 6 feet tall. It wasn’t that I didn’t want one that was longer. It was that was the only plank that the dungeon had a copy of.

On the planks, I put in runes to limit the flow of mana and air. Then I added runes to connect them to the next plank at the end. My goal with the planks was to put in four runs of them heading up the whole shaft. Each length of plank would be able to connect with the one below it and also stop the ride up. On the backs of the planks, I put runes that would secure them to stone.

Then I built the platform. I made it so that it was light, almost as light as air. On the bottom of it, I put in the air movement runes that I used on the dust collector. The goal was much the same I wanted to push down with air, and that would send this whole thing up.

Once I had everything built, I bought enough of the carved wood to take it over to the tube. I spent the next few hours fiddling with it until I made sure I had everything right. Then I set up the first 12 feet of my tube. Then I added the cores to each of the four rails on and to the platform.

I climbed up onto the platform, and it slowly raised up to the top of the rails. I started doing more stone to dirt, and the platform was able to handle the additional weight of the soil falling onto it. The platform also did an excellent job of taking the transformation of dirt into water.

I, on the other hand, didn’t do such a great job of handling the dirt to water. As it made me completely wet. Which by itself wasn’t a problem until the next batch of dirt fell on me. Then I was covered in mud because it was hard to use the wand on me.

I fell into the pattern of using all of my mana with the wands and then going back into the safe room to recharge. As I would be in there, I would order the next batch of planks and then head back out.

I miss judged how long it would take me to do the job, and I would have been faster if I had gone back to the goblin cave and taken a different route. I kind of got so focused on what I was doing that I didn’t notice that it had been 9 days when I finished.

It was the middle of the night when I floated to the top of The tail. When I stepped out onto the plateau, I couldn’t see very far. The trees up here were three or four times the size of the ones down below.

I walked over to the edge and looked down. I could see the light below coming from the thicket. From this angle, the branches didn’t do much to screen that it wasn’t a normal part of the forest.

I started to laugh as I looked up at the sky. “I built a magical elevator!”

As I slowly made my way back to the elevator, I heard a screeching sound. It wasn’t a metal-on-metal sound. No, it sounded like a giant owl type of screech. I ran for my creation as I heard the beating of wings behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder as I got to the elevator. There flying at me was a cross between a woman and a bird. It wasn’t a person with wings but a person with wings and bird feet. Her arms were also part of the wings, with little hands at the end like a bat.

I told the elevator to go down. It started to move, but I had built it to be a gentle ride, not the drop that I wanted right now. The harpy because that was the only thing that the beast could be started to follow down.

For someone that had talons for feet and wings for arms, she crawled down the tube quite well. Which for me was scary. What was worse was there was another following behind. I wasn’t sure what was going on as, so far, they hadn’t attacked.

Then the close one spoke in a scratchy voice. “The Queen wants to know who you are. How do you hide from the Mistress?”

The second yelled. “Tell us who you are!”

I shouted across the bond. “There are harpies here and they are chasing me!”

But I noticed too late that Blink wasn’t in range.

* * *