Wu woke up the next day with a killing of back pain, though as he slowly rolled around and moaned like an old man, Lera’s hand found its way onto his chest as she slowly caressed him back and forth in a massaging manner while she continued to sleep.

“What even happened…” Wu wondered how he got back to the bed when the last of his memories from the day before were him scrambling to put in the right series of switches into his shitty computer while fighting an unending horde of yawns. Then, he looked across at Lera as her hair covered the top half of her face while the bottom half of her face was firmly planted into the pillow.

He playfully poked into her cheeks with a finger, and in response, she burped straight back at him, which made the decision to get up all the easier.

Even though he got through the part that required converting series of 1’s and 0’s into a message through a very arbitrary and 'hard-coded' mapping Cast, the job of the long range communication was only part-way done. To allow for communications between the ends of the device, he will have to create a duplicate of what he already made and connect them in reverse order at the other end.

Then, in time, they will be able to swap out mapping Cast which generates the scribbling patterns to project Casts that deliver voices instead.

It was another day of work for Wu to lay out every little detail in the circuits of his Wave computer before he enlisted the help of job-seeking citizens from the city into replicating a second machine following the exact steps that he had taken before.

To prevent any errors from propagating, he then set up lines of inspection where each logic gate was connected in isolation and tested. Then, they were handed off to a second unit of people responsible for the incorporation of the logic gates into the flip flops and then registers.

Such is the nature of computer science, where functionalities layer one after another, treating each layer as a unit and zooming out to examine the greater functionalities of the whole system is paramount to the development of each successive layer.

In the meanwhile, communication stations were set up along the underground rivers on the sides of the Dune’s Hive, where Ver teleported a massive rock to block the flow of the freshly polluted river water from the central regions of Necrovia. Once that was completed, Wu then headed over and began his depollution project.

It was all remarkably simple, as Wu simply had to give out copies of anti-Void Domain and fuel rocks, and the people from around will just go around the riverbeds and spaced themselves out at regular intervals before working to trigger chemical reactions to bring life back to underground rivers.

When the guards from the Dune’s Diamond and the Dune’s Hive first entered the underground rivers, they were equally stunned by its existence and its appearance. Yet when the simple setup was activated, the dark fluids all around them started to transform before the black matter seemed to have dissolved completely into the water, returning the dreamy purple glow to the ambiance around them.

Obviously, Wu isn’t stupid enough to give the raw fuel rocks and let it be exposed to the intense Wave of the underground river, so each of the packages came with a cast of Containment as well as an instruction manual.

It was just a few more days of work on all of the projects with the workers contributing as much as they can while supported by funds from the Dune's Diamond. It seemed stupid that all this work was just for some communication Cast equivalent to be set, but no conventional communication Cast can cover a long enough distance at the rate Wave is decaying in the Necrovian desserts.

The only way through is underground, and if that's the case, they may as well build up a far more flexible and efficient system.

Once the communication stations are set uip on both sides, it was time to set up the wiring system. As good as the fluids are at transmitting the Wave naturally, it was far safer for them to create a small canal into the sides of the wall through the shells and seal it up with a lining of the cast making ink that contained the small drops of the river water instead. Wu's plan was to use a small proportion of the natural resources and take advantage of the already formed tunnels.

“Here goes nothing…” Ver murmured, looking at the guards watching with anticipation on both sides as she slowly pulled away the separator on both sides and allowed small pools of river water from the Dune’s Diamond and Dune’s Hive side to mix and connect, “We are ready here.”

“So are we.” Augen and Tonya said through the Kraken’s shell as they waited at the Dune’s Hive end.

“Then here we go…” Wu said nervously as droplets of sweat formed over his forehead. This is by far the largest project he has done so far, and one that required the most amount of technical coordination between a large number of people. Even if he had put in quality checks at every possible junction, it’s still likely that something will slip through the cracks.

“No cheating here. I am going to input some phrase, and you are going to tell me what it is.” Wu said, his hands moving through a keyboard Cast that he made in his spare time, where each input letter just corresponds to a specific series of ones and zeros.

His fingers moved slowly from one character to the next, and he finally stopped after typing the entire phrase.

“Have you started yet?” Tonya asked, “I haven’t seen anything here?”

“Shit.” Wu cursed under his breath before he leaned into the Kraken’s shell as if that would make his voice clearer, “Ver?”

“There are pulses of Wave signals passing through here…” Ver said as Wu scratched the back of his head.

“There’s nothing here.” Augen added, “I don’t even sense any Wave in the machine.”

“Check the fuel rock.” Wu quickly replied, “Was it charged?”

There was only silence from the other end, and Wu and Lera shared a nervous glance. Did the Kraken’s shell also fail? Is this an enemy attack?

“…Distance is all but a measurement…” After a whole minute, Tonya’s voice finally came through, and she sounded extremely nervous.

“Was there that much of a lag?” Wu asked, “I am sending another packet of information over.”

“No no no! It’s…it’s fine…” Augen added, and Wu turned to Lera who shrugged with confusion.

“We are never letting them find out that we forgot to turn this on!” Tonya whispered quietly as Augen nodded profusely.

“Ok. Now let’s and swap in the voice conversion Cast.” Wu said as Lera provided him with a piece of paper. This was just taking the simplest of the communication Casts and utilizing the part where voice is converted into packets of Wave. However, instead of sending the entire packet, the information contained within was merely ‘digitized’ into the ones and zeros and transmitted.

It worked in the exact same way as a telephone, so it should work just as well as their current communication Cast, except people don’t need to worry about Necrovia having shitty receptions.

You know, since it’s all a landline.

“It’s connected?” Wu asked, when Tonya gave him the affirmative, “Then here I go.”

Lera contained the Kraken’s shell in a Void Domain, and Wu leaned into the circle where the receiver of the vibrations for the communication Cast was set.

“Here is my voice…Wu Li.” Wu said.

“Here…is…me…To…Za.” Tonya’s rough voice came through the other side and made Wu jump. He quickly turned his eyes toward one of the control segments in the Cast before manipulating the settings for the amplifiers, “Here is my voice, Tonya Glaza!”

“Here is my voice, Wu Li!” Wu repeated once again as Tonya did the same adjustments on the other side.

“Here is my voice, Tonya Glaza!” Tonya smiled brightly as she looked towards Augen, “We’ve done it. This is crazy…”

“Thank Alexander Graham-Bell…” Wu smiled and leaned back in his chair relaxed, “All I do is to take bits and pieces from the greats of my world and make it happen here…I deserve...maybe a little bit of credit as an engineer and a manager~”

“Never a doubt.” Lera smiled and rubbed Wu on the shoulder as he put his hands up and asked for a hug instead, “What are you going to do now…?”

“Beyond training the workers on how to operate this machine and maintain it? Maybe think about how we can pull out the Wave from underground and use it to upgrade Dune’s Hive and Dune’s Diamond. Good thing is that we don’t have to worry about the speed of information transfer being the same as horseback riding, or rely solely on Ver’s abilities anymore.”

The scribe from the Dune’s Diamond gladly took on the task of documenting everything, and the rest of the people started creating new stations in each of the neighboring towns while the traders and officers had already begun using the landline phone to coordinate their trade and work schedules.

As it turned out, once the poisoning of the Blood of Necrovia was undone, it was a fairly simple task for them to extract the Wave. With a small hole drilled down and held open through self-supplying structure Casts contained under the white shell casing, Wu then added sets of Wave diodes that promoted the singular direction flow of the Wave before they were brought to the surface.

Then, Ver and Lera helped Wu figure out the issue of making cables as they are not confident how much more the white shell casings made from the walls of the underground river can be used without risking the full collapse of the cavities.

There are a few experiments on what materials can contain the Wave, and what materials can transmit it, but there were just no good candidates around. However, Wu accidentally came across the final solution when he saw a bucket of poisoned underground river water sitting in the corner of his fluids lab.

“Huh…” Wu squatted down before he hovered his hand with the anti-Void domain over it, and the color of the water changed before blue lines of Wave exploded from within and started spreading into the environment as the Necrovian air and soil started sucking out the Wave immediately.

He blinked a few times before palming his face.

It seemed like he truly cannot escape being the one to poison the Blood of Necrovia, yet the poisoned form of the river water turned out to be the most stable version for storing and transmitting the Wave.

As he headed to the headquarters of one of the brand new industries within the Dune’s Diamond, the Cast making and ink-making shops, he dropped down his full sets of drawings for the Void domain and anti-Void domain before turning around and leaving.

If that’s the price for innovation, then he shall make it all open access. Ironically, the colors of the poisoned river water had the same darkness as crude oil on his earth. And it is then that true revolution had arrived at the Dune’s Diamond.