Alpha had decided to build the Sect using the architecture of Clan Frost as a starting point. She had to make changes, of course. Three Waters Sect needed to be adapted to allow for the seamless integration between the aquatic needs of the Hindel and the solidity of land for Elves. The innovations my people had made when constructing the Arena were being utilized to make that possible.

I was able to entice a few members of Clan Frost who had reached journeymen in each of the professions to join as visiting Elders. Those people were easily convinced. They were interested in learning new Hindel Profession techniques. They would be rewarded for volunteering with access to secrets about Hindel techniques and the I had looted from the Mystic Realm.

Aki was still indexing and collating the libraries' worth of tokens I had looted, but she had made enough progress that I could begin sharing the knowledge and skill enhancements I had discovered.

Spirit contracting and cold fused metal were not the only new methodologies and techniques that would have a tangible impact on Elven society. While those would make the most significant changes, there were minor adjustments that would make incremental improvements to our knowledge base.

I had worried, at first, that the Sect’s location would be a disadvantage. Any ship sailing along the shore was sure to notice it, but the Hindel had alleviated those concerns. They had planted and grown a series of coral reefs offshore that made navigating the waters in that area of the ocean impossible.

They had been kind enough to grow the same coral I used for my comm devices. I wouldn’t need to harvest these reefs, not with the time-dilated spatial reef gardens I had established. But the town’s coral divers might take advantage of the new stock to harvest as an export.

They sold the coral they harvested to the mainland. At one time, I might have worried that the secret of using a coral seed as the link between comm devices might leak, but I was past that. Competition was often the reason advances were possible, and while a monopoly was nice, I was positive it couldn’t be sustained. Giving my people a reason to innovate and continue to inject new ideas into future iterations of the comm devices was worth losing our monopoly.

That and the fact that the coral reef we used seemed to be unique to our area, and what I might lose in profits by selling comm devices, I would make up by exporting coral.

At least until someone else figured out how to create and stock a time-dilation spatial device to grow their own coral.

We were already in the process of researching new ideas for the devices. I wanted to use them as a means to create an Internet. The devices could be scaled up to serve as routers and computers for every home or business. They were already robust enough to serve that purpose to a limited extent. What was left was developing the computer and monitor, an operating system, software, and server clusters to store and manage data.

The number of people and the size of this world far outstripped Earth’s population, so finding a way to organize and maintain a powerful enough Internet was going to take time. Earth’s main disadvantage they had needed to overcome was that the Internet connecting humanity wasn’t limited to one planet. Humanity had colonized other worlds, and with the advent of life extension, creche babies, universal health care, and income, those new colonies had exploded in population.

I wouldn’t need to figure out how to link other planets into the information network I was hoping to build. Still, the exabyte of information that would need to be stored was a daunting task. The most exciting research currently being conducted was to grow coral reef clusters within spatial devices and slave these reefs together to serve as data centers.

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There were experiments being conducted that would allow the coral to be enchanted, held in arrays, and hidden with formations so that they retained any information stored within each coral cluster in the same manner as a hard drive.

But that was something that had nothing to do with the Three Waters Sect or protecting it. The Hindel hadn’t been content with growing reefs, making it impossible for any sailing craft to navigate. They had also installed a powerful illusion formation. A formation that had been crafted by one of their people that had reached the Profound Immortal Realm.

I had learned during the building and staffing of the Sect that the Hindel had a much easier time reaching the Venerable Immortal Realm, the last mortal realm before ascending, because of the high concentration of Qi found in the deepest ocean trenches.

These trenches were chock full of old monsters and concentrated Qi, making it almost effortless to advance from Immortal to Profound Immortal to Venerable Immortal. Because they had such an advantage, that meant these powerful Cultivators had more time to continue refining and advancing their Profession skills. There was no reason for them to enter closed-door cultivation when their environment was so beneficial.

The illusion formation they had deployed hid the Sect visually as well as from scrying. Even Clement and I would have no way of locating it if we hadn’t been gifted a token that registered our Qi signature with the formation and allowed us to see and pass through the illusion.

For those people unlucky enough to stumble across the Sect by accident, they would find themselves lost in a fog. They would be mired in a maze of shifting landscapes that made escape impossible.

If you entered without an invitation, you would not be leaving again.

The opening of the Sect coincided nicely with the newspaper. It had taken months to get the newspaper operational. But it had been worth the headache, and it already proved useful and profitable. Allowing businesses to purchase space for advertisements and keeping subscriptions to a few coppers a month had allowed the Editors to hire enough staff, writers, and imagers to generate an informative and recreational product.

The advent of fiction and the serialization of Storm’s adventures had been a huge hit, and the Editorial Board had already been approached by enterprising business people interested in collecting the serial chapters into book form. It meant sharing our process for creating paper and the printing press, and I allowed it. No world should exist without books or fiction.

The biggest boon for me, the Sect, and the goal of protecting the identity of Geon and Syha had been the clamor of parents answering the ad offering a spot in the newly established Sect for children between ten and sixteen. Even better, we had gotten a host of applicants willing to serve as the teachers the children would need for standard Elven studies.

I hadn’t thought about that aspect of Sect life, but the children would need the same educational opportunities every Elvem child received. It was bad enough that they were being cut off from the mortal world early, but if they weren't successful and unable to awaken a spirit root, they would be lost when they were forced to leave the Sect and return to their homes.

The establishment, staffing, and protection of the Sect had been the easy part, and it had been done. Now, I had the most challenging part left to do- letting Geon and Syha know that they would be leaving home to live in the Sect. My parents had been against the idea at first, but it only took proof of Ja Fiat’s actions and the knowledge that a Cultist had been hunting their children for them to change their minds.

Geon would probably be fine, maybe not right away, but sooner than Syha. He was sixteen, only two years away from when he would be leaving home to join a Sect if he managed to form a Spirit Root anyway.

Syha was only twelve. She hadn’t even begun puberty and would have to grow up without the benefit of Mom’s wisdom. I would make sure our parents had a chance to visit. Not often, the mortal world and cultivation were separated for a reason. But with our parents having advanced to the pseudo-Body Refinement Realm, that separation between worlds would begin to blur.

I managed one final glance at Three Waters Sect, impressed by the sprawling territory the Sect had claimed. Buildings for each profession, a series of Halls, a Contribution Hall, the Sect Headquarters, a Library Archive, a Treasure Pavilion, and the Hindel’s unique solution to closed-door cultivation chambers using isolation and Qi gathering arrays to construct pockets of water pods deep within the lake the Sect claimed.

The Hindel had established and built what was needed to get up and running quickly. The shape and scope of the Sect would change and evolve over time. Our insight into the changes awakening food, a gestalt mind connection, and access to spirit companions made upon the lives of each child would necessitate change.

But what was one more change in our quickly changing nation?