There was a certain irony in the fact that I had taken the longest to prepare for our group excursion into the depths of the Charland, even compared to Alex. Granted, most of that came from the fact that I didn’t habitually prepare large amounts of supplies that I might need, instead relying almost entirely on my directly usable magic and physical abilities but still. They were supposedly the specialist when it came to preparing and using disposable equipment but they managed to finish their preparations before I did.

Well, for a given value of ‘finish’ but that given value applied to me, too. Neither of us could actually claim to be finished, just prepared to the point that diminishing returns would quickly kick in and additional time spent preparing wouldn’t translate into a better ability to cope with the expected and reasonably unexpected circumstances. There would always be things we might be able to do, and ideas we could experiment with and some of those ideas would eventually turn into something usable. Not the majority of them, not even a sizable minority but progress was made by failing and correcting until a functioning result was achieved.

My own preparations had been focused on cutting time when it came to conjuring obstacles and obfuscation, mainly walls and mist. The idea I had considered in regards to compressing mist had worked out fairly well, allowing me to magically compress enough mist to fill a space roughly twenty metres in radius up to a height of two metres into an orb the size of an orange. I had ten of those orbs, with an additional ten being carried by Luna to save some space. Sadly, I couldn’t carry those orbs in the shadows, something about the dark realm being corrosive to the Ice Magic I created the orbs from. Another fairly serious disadvantage was that the orbs didn’t last forever, not even for very long, the one test-orb I had stored right in the beginning of my preparations had disintegrated after five days, despite my regular attempts to keep it stable. To make matters a little confusing, the disintegrated left me with a few shards of Ice, tinged with blood red, likely from the infused Blood I had used to connect the mist to myself, and nothing else. The mist had, somehow, vanished without leaving a trace but testing with other orbs I had prepared the day after the disintegrated one had worked reasonably well. I had no idea how that mechanism worked, but I was somewhat fascinated by the process and was planning to study it in the future.

The second group of items I had prepared were similar in nature, prepared Ice Magic linked to myself with Blood Magic, but different in practice. Where the orbs were compressed Mist, the other set of items was made from Hard Ice initially, filled with as much Astral Power as I could manage, as if I was trying to make Eternal Ice, before adding a runic formation, focused on creating more Ice and filling the lines with my Blood, infused with even more Astral Power. With nary a thought, I could let these tokens snap into far bigger objects, most of them were prepared to form solid walls, and the rest would expand into spiky constructs, hopefully big and sturdy enough to block a passageway and sharp enough to make chasing us through such a passage to be fairly hazardous. And if nothing else, the Ice remained mine, thanks to the blood I included, allowing me to turn these constructs into impressively destructive Ice Bombs, scattering razor-sharp shards everywhere.

While those two ideas had worked out quite well, especially if one ignored the limited time either tool would work as intended, other ideas hadn’t worked out nearly as well. My idea to prepare caltrops that we could use to cut off pursuit didn’t work nearly as well as I would have liked. Sure, I could conjure caltrops from Ice but it turned out that the large surface area compared to their overall volume meant they evaporated faster, too. Meaning, instead of lasting days as my normal Hard Ice objects did, these lasted for a few hours, maybe a day, and even in that time, they started to melt and sometimes stick together. The failure of that idea eventually led me to the spiky Ice obstacles, so not all was lost there.

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In comparison, trying to come up with a way to create instant caves or something along those lines hadn’t advanced beyond the initial idea. I had tried to create objects holding a runic formation that could dig one upon activation of the sequence but material limits, and possibly limits of my Earth Rune Mastery, had prevented those ideas from working. Instead, I had multiple broken rocks and a lot of dust to show for my efforts. It would have been even more dust but some of my experiments had used conjured stone, similar to the Hard Ice I used for my instant Ice Walls, and the conjured stone faded back into the Astral River after the object cracked, leaving me with nothing but failure.

Similarly, attempts to get some sort of delayed healing had failed miserably, something I probably should have expected. And, in a way, I had and had limited my attempts to objects that would simply release a burst of Blood Magic that I’d have to control directly instead of some sort of actual healing item. Those came with far too many problems, from the various deadly side-effects improperly applied ‘healing’ magic could have seen while training Luna to other problems with a greater link to Blood Magic, namely the possibility of calling Nethersprites to this world. So far, I either had been lucky or the Nethersprites were currently unable to get to this world but I wasn’t sure. I knew that using Blood Magic released the vital essence that rapidly decayed into miasma Nethersprites fed on but I had no idea why they didn’t show up. Was it a problem with the still-churning Astral River, was it a problem with the concentration of miasma or maybe the Nethersprites didn’t know that Terra existed, so couldn’t detect the miasma in the first place? I had no idea, there likely were other options I was completely ignorant of, leaving me with little to go on.

Similar to the idea of healing aids were power batteries, orbs filled with infused Blood that I could either have Lia snack on or use to power my spell casting. Sadly, the idea didn’t work as well as I’d have liked, unless the Blood was already bound into an object, like the instant Ice Walls, the infused Astral Power faded away rapidly, giving such objects a lifespan measured in minutes and not a lot of minutes either. It roughly took the Astral Power only a little longer to fade than it took my body to recover it from the Astral River, and that was with my fairly insane recovery rate. Thus, it sadly was no valid option, though we had recently discovered that Lia could store some infused Blood internally, increasing the time she could go between feedings. It wasn’t as efficient as directly digesting the blood and the Astral Power but it was a step in the right direction.

Ultimately, the biggest failure I had when it came to preparing was that I utterly failed to create anything that could keep Lia safe during the day without rendering us immobile. The best I could come up with were thick cloaks alongside a sturdy parasol but that only helped so much. Even with that kind of protection, she’d be highly limited with her mobility and the indirect sunlight was enough to reduce her attributes considerably, leaving her little more than an ordinary human without any levels to speak of. Still better than the slow decay she’d suffer without the protective equipment but only marginally so while we were in a dangerous environment.

Trying to teach her how to enter the Shadowrealm, hoping that she could hitch a ride in my shadow or something along those lines hadn’t worked out so well. She could get into the shadows but only for short times before the environment started to drain her Astral Power and moving from shadow to shadow had its own problems. And the less said about the one test we did with her hiding in my shadow before I moved into the sunlight, the better. It seemed that sunlight remained her weakness, despite the shadow still being there, even being deeper than it had been in the dim environment of our shelter. I wasn’t sure how that particular interaction worked, but it felt almost as if her body remained in the location it had been relative to my shadow but intangible to the world until it got hit by the sunlight. Then, things got wonky and we ended up with a somewhat scorched Lia. Nothing that couldn’t be healed but unpleasant.

Ultimately, the time used was, in my opinion, wisely spent and we were ready to venture into the Charland as a group. Hopefully, nothing would go too wrong.