In a strange way, a simultaneous arms race was occurring between Mila’s forces and Tonya’s, but they started out for completely different reasons.

For Wu, it was cause he finally had the time and space to explore all he wanted with the Wave. After dealing with the drought and seeing things trending better day after day on the resource management front, he was able to set himself up with a small workshop just within the city bounds of the Dune’s Diamond. However, that was all but a place to keep all of his toys while he planned for something far beyond anything he’s done before.

“Ver!” Wu said, pushing into Ver’s room as the door swung all the way around and banged against the wall. However, she was nowhere to be found except for a handful of Kraken’s shells scattered all throughout the room like shreds from a dog. He examined the patterns roughly before squatting down next to one of the pieces and nudged it slightly with his hand.

A portal opened right on the wall behind him, and Kraken’s tendril slapped him straight across the butt, sending him flying onto the bed before Ver emerged from above and tackled him.

“This is what you get from not knocking!” Ver laughed, sitting on Wu’s back when something popped on his back.

There was an awkward silence suddenly, and Ver looked quickly at the door before she ran his finger down his back with her heart threatening to escape her lungs at any given moment. There were no obvious signs of damage, and Wu was moving his legs to make sure that he hadn’t had his back broken by Ver Batman-and-Bane style.

“Are you alive, kid?” The Kraken’s voice spoke through Ver before she quickly moved off Wu, and he was picked up by a pair of tendrils from the shoulders before being placed gently on the bed like a baby.

“I guess so…” Wu turned around when suddenly, the release of tension in his back became clear to him. As it turned out, that crack actually relieved a lot of the tension he had from all of his work, “I feel…better? I guess…chiropractic stuff work? But surely it’s just placebo?”

“What did you barge into my room for, seriously?” Ver asked, pretending to be mad and using that to override the worry on her face as Wu smiled and pretended not to notice.

“I have an idea, and It’s time to follow the river.” Wu said, clapping his hands together, “And we cannot do it without your help.”

When the group of five had fully gathered and sat around the tiny table around Wu’s workshop, Uncle Zhad was relegated to standing right behind them with Wu standing in front of the local map right across from him.

“Here's the recap. The blood of Necrovia was an untapped resource that was equally as valuable as it is explosively dangerous. To prevent it from being misused by Mila, we have poisoned it at the source.” Wu pointed a wooden branch he found on the road straight back, “Thanks to Tonya working with a few of the local sources, we now know that there are branches of the river that lead straight to the Dune’s Diamond, and we are going to take advantage of that..”

“What do you mean by…poison?” Uncle Zhad asked.

“Poisoned as in it no longer functioned as you know it, after something we had to do.” Wu said, “It had become completely unresponsive to the Wave through a chemical reaction that I do not yet understand. Or in another word, it’s inert to the Wave.”

Uncle Zhad nodded blandly, though he held his follow-up questions.

“We are to undo that, and use it to transform Necrovia eventually.” Wu said, “Think the fuel rocks that we recharge by the oceans, but at a far larger scale and placed far closer to us.”

“And do what with it?” Uncle Zhad asked, “We have solved the drought, the farmers were busy catching up on this year’s planting cycle, and the traders have returned. What else is there to change?”

“We will revolutionize everything here.” Wu said, “A system of transportation, of information, of protections, of reduced labor and increased efficiency. Life will become easier, for everyone…”

Uncle Zhad stood still and blinked with Tonya sat quietly and pondered.

“ImagineThink instant communication between the Dune’s Hive and here for anyone at any time, think about a vast network of information where traders from all around the region and exchange information, where shortages in some places can be dealt with through information of surpluses and rapid redistribution from elsewhere.” Wu said, looking over at Lera who nodded at him, “The operating speed of your government will become far greater, far more efficient, and far more suitable to serve all of the people. All of those...infinite possibilities...will start here.

"This technological revolution will all start here.”

“Wu, if something’s going to be this good, why haven’t you tried to do it elsewhere?” Ver asked.

“Cause elsewhere, deficiencies in the Wave didn’t cost people as much as they do here, despite all the best efforts of the Necrovian people.” Wu said, pointing straight at Ver, “With the patch jobs that Casters have done over the millennia, all of the component functions that will make up the Net had already been taken care of. But what the Net enables is a central control point where all of that I mentioned, and far more, is possible. You can also call that control point a server. Because it serves the rest of the system.”

“This is far too complicated for me…” Uncle Zhad let out a sigh and wiped away sweat over his forehead, “Just don’t go too crazy, okay? I need to take care of some paperwork from the other towns...”

“When the system is fully in place, you won’t have to use paper anymore!” Wu emphasized when Uncle Zhad waved his hands and waddled away. With the adult leaving the room, Wu slapped his hand on the table, “The other reason that we are going to start here is that the underground river is too good as natural conductors of Wave. So long as we have branches of the river connecting between us and the Dune’s Hive, and the neighboring regions, we can set up our initial nodes and test out some of the basic functions almost right away.”

“So what would you like us to do first?” Tonya asked when Wu picked up a pen and drew two points on the map, one around the Dune’s Diamond, and the other around the Dune’s Hive.

“With Ver and Lera’s help, I want you to dig to the levels of the underground river there mark out their location vertically for record keeping. That’s where we will keep the initial control stations.” Wu said.

It wasn’t exactly a hard thing to do. Tonya had ridden the underground rivers before with the royal family, and she roughly remembered where she had emerged, which made the searching on the side of the Dune’s diamond far simpler.

However, when they popped their hands in the interior of the channel, they were greeted with a smell of grime as the once semi-transparent opaque river water revealed itself a darkened and depressingly dull black.

They all looked at Wu simultaneously, and he seemed still embarrassed by what they’d done even though it was a group decision at that time.

“The next step would be to trace it all the way towards the Dune’s Hive, or places as close to it as possible,” Wu said before setting off Ver, Augen, and Tonya off in the direction of the Dune’s Hive, with Ver and the Kraken keeping an eye on their direction and Tonya keeping an eye on the maps, "If it doesn't automatically go all the way, then we might have to do some digigng."

Lera had wanted to help the group with their exhibitions, but Wu had instead asked for her help on a different job.

“You wanted to…make a what?” Lera asked, when Wu sat her down by the tiny table, “A…server? Like a servant?”

“Imagine your book of Casts.” Wu said, flowering his fingers in the air as Lera traced it with her grey eyes, “But virtual.”

“Fake?”

“No! Non-physical.” Wu said, “It will be information stored at a specific place away from you, and it will be accessed when you provide it with a specific sequence of…something. Like a pattern that's specific to any Cast you'd want to use.”

“Ok…” Lera placed her book of Cast in front of Wu, “And how exactly would you do that?”

“Start simple.” Wu said, pointing one finger up to the sky, “Start with one. One single path between a pair of nodes, one bit of information transfer, and one bit of information storage. But before that, we might have to put together Cast printer again.”

As they set up the levers, work platforms, and the cast lines with the raw materials that Wu had asked for, Lera couldn’t help but think back to the times back at the Academy. For something as influential and pivoting in their shared journey, their time at the Infinite Academy felt like it was all but a flash.

Yet so much had already happened during that flash of time.

With the levers and controlled set up the same way according to Wu’s drawings that he had Lera kept within her book of Casts, Wu got his paws on it right away as Lera loaded up a freshly ground-up supply of Cast ink.

“How does this look?” Wu asked after a few minutes of handy work, and Lera poked her head over the latest addition to the machine, her Wave microscope repurposed from her scouting Eye only to see tiny yet ugly scribbles by him.

I love you.

“Aw…” Lera smiled and gave Wu a big kiss on the cheek, “So what now?”

“Remember what we learned about the theories of Cast making?” Wu asked, “The casts in this world had always been written with one specific purpose in mind. In a way, that’s referred to as hard coding. It’s rigid, inflexible, and cannot be changed easily according to shifting inputs. In order to achieve what I desire…we need blank slates in the Wave…something that’s completely malleable yet simple, and the first engineers on my word had an ingenious way of storing information…”

“What’s that?” Lera asked when Wu showed her his hand.

“Ones and zeros.” Wu said, “Every ounce of information can then be coded from that basic alphabet. It just so happened that we both have ten fingers and toes and operate with what we refer to a base-ten numbering system, but there’s nothing special about any bases…”

“Slow down!” Lera cut him off quickly before he could get too carried away, “You are going to change the way we count?!”

“Not the way we count, but rather…the way information is stored.” Wu said, “The basis of the age of Wave technology is computational power, and the basis of that will be the nature of the Wave, upon which the smallest units of computation and logic will be built. So…while our friends can dig all the holes and even lay down Wave lines all they want, if we don’t move beyond the way that Casts are being written currently, we can never get far enough.”

Lera simply nodded along, and Wu held onto her fingers, bringing her attention to the present.

“Now…tell me everything you know about the nature of the Wave itself.” Wu said, “And…we will go from there.”