A Relatively Powerful Mage

For the week following his encounter with Collective Intelligence, Imri worked on various projects that had been put off for too long. Many were tedious, such as mass-producing mana absorption panels, but they needed to be done. He found that it was more doable now that he no longer was running on only a few hours of meditation.

To lessen the burden in the long run, he accepted more short-term responsibility, mainly mentoring another enchanter. His rationale was simple: he wanted someone else to do all the small-scale enchanting work that didn’t demand complex runes or high efficiency. There was enough demand for home appliances to keep a second enchanter busy indefinitely.

When word got out that he was looking for an apprentice, there was no shortage of applicants. It took Imri a while to conduct the interviews, but ultimately, he selected two people. The first was a somewhat chubby young man named Luke, who had been a college student when the integration happened. He had clung to his past life and struggled to adapt, gaining the mathematician profession and languishing at level 2. He had some experience with software and was obviously intelligent.

The second apprentice was a woman in her later thirties. Her name was Claire, and she had been a meteorologist before the integration. She had gained the Storm Caller class, an intelligence-based mage class specializing in weather manipulation. While she wasn’t as book-smart as Luke, she was tenacious and willing to learn. Imri hoped she would also have the same synergy he had taken advantage of, automatically learning her class spells as runes.

Imri dedicated several hours to teaching them each day, coming prepared with lessons on the fundamentals of the profession. Instead of forcing them to memorize countless runes, he focused on teaching them the logic behind them. While neither took to it as quickly as he had, Imri could see steady progress each day.

On the third day, Luke started grasping the fundamentals and putting together some basic functions in a notebook. He stood up excitedly without warning, proclaiming he had gained the profession. With the new traits and skills from the profession, his comprehension improved noticeably. Within the next couple of days, he had gained several levels and started to implement some basic enchantments.

Now certain that Luke was well suited for the profession and would stick with it, Imri held out a Drake core, “Here, absorb this.”

“I can’t accept that. It’s too much,” Luke said, though his eyes were wide in awe.

“I literally have a bucket full of these in my workshop; I won’t even notice one less,” Imri said, trying to downplay it. “Besides, you’ll be representing me while you are an apprentice, and I don’t want you making something with such a low efficiency that it's a drain on the mana grid.”

Eventually, pragmatism won out, and Luke reverently accepted the higher-level core. It took him a while to finish absorbing it, but he gained 3 full levels from it. An infectious grin spread across his face, and even Claire was genuinely happy for his success.

From that point onward, Imri shifted their lessons to a more hands-on approach. Each day, they would spend a few hours working through a single appliance in someone's home. The shift in approach wasn’t only good for Luke, who started to gain practical experience, but also for Claire. She seemed to grasp the concepts better when she saw them working as a whole rather than something that was just theoretical.

Imri continued the classroom theory for Claire, helping her catch up to Luke. While it was only an hour a day, he was certain Claire spent extra hours reviewing her notes each night. Between that and the practical experience, she gained the profession before the end of the week.

Like Imri, she gained a trait that allowed her to create the runic versions of her spells. This helped her close the gap between herself and Luke. As soon as she had gained a few levels, Imri gave her the same reward: a D-grade Drake core. She accepted it solemnly, without putting on a show of arguing it was too much; she understood that it wasn’t just a gift but a responsibility.

Imri didn’t spend the entire week on his new apprentices. While there was no longer an imminent danger, he couldn’t be overly lax. He had briefed the council on the Collective Intelligence, stressing that they were near-omniscient beings that could eradicate this entire planet if they so desired it. The only thing that prevented it was their directive on non-interference so long as the world capital hadn’t been established. Hopefully, they would be on more even footing by the time that happened, though Imri didn’t think that was likely. Their best option was appealing to their sense of order.

Russ was devastated when there was unanimous agreement that they wouldn’t antagonize the Collective in any way. The implication was obvious: Russ would have to break his pact with his demi-god patron. In hindsight, it should have been apparent that anything capable of imprisoning a tier 5 would be too much for any of them to handle.

In the end, Russ accepted his fate. The moment he resigned himself to being unable to free the Ancient One, his quest failed, and his class levels were taken from him. While Russ was physically fine, he was an emotional wreck. He had spent the past few weeks fighting the Troglodytes with zeal, and now all his hard work was for naught. Imri did his best to reassure him they would do everything possible to find his family. They both knew it was an empty promise; Imri hadn’t even had the time to find his own family, let alone someone else’s.

Imri thought he had gotten past the experience of being captured, but he was awoken by a nightmare each night. It wasn’t always the AI directly, but it involved being caged or boxed in. Other times, it was more literal, as he relived the experience almost exactly as it had happened. Fortunately, he didn’t need to sleep conventionally, and he would turn to meditation as an alternative. He could feel Emelia’s concern for him through their bond, but she didn’t press him to open up about it.

The rest of Imri’s time was spent on his own enchantment projects. The first was making some incremental improvements to the portal design. This mainly involved adding some additional safety features. The primary one was adding runes of true distance that acted like a laser. When it detected a solid object at a distance less than the width of the portal, it was presumably a person or cargo. When that was true, the portal wouldn’t open or close with an override being input, and that would hopefully prevent a catastrophic accident. Imri also added light and sound runes that would start blaring when the portal was about to open or close.

Imri also iterated on true-distance measurements, adding a feature that would automatically shut the portal down if an object hadn’t been detected for a set amount of time. He made that time configurable in the admin UI but defaulted it to only 5 seconds. While this feature wasn’t entirely necessary, Imri wanted it to safeguard against lax portal usage draining the entire mana supply. He did add a button that the portal operator could press to reset the time.

With those improvements made, Imri began to design another portal with a few modifications, primarily to function without the arch so it could be portable. It would only require the rune tablet, mana source, and a Spatial Beacon. While this wasn’t as safe, with open edges that could sheer off someone's extremities, it allowed the portal to be moved.

Imri considered reorienting the portal, similar to how he used the ground and sky to limit that particular risk with his own portals, but both presented problems that he couldn’t mitigate; if he created it in the sky, it would be effective a one-way portal for everyone but Imri, and if it were in the ground it would be extremely difficult to use for both sides with the strange orientation. The idea of gravity pulling in different directions on various parts of the body didn’t seem safe, and it gave Imri ideas for new spells to try later. No, the safest was to keep the portal as a doorway, people could still manage to walkthrough a door without hitting an edge, they did it every day.

The next problem was that it would require an enormous amount of mana to open a portal over the distances they were planning; enough that it would even be a strain on Celestia’s mana reserves, and it certainly wasn’t doable with an amount of Espeonite that would be portable. The solution was similar to what he had done for the radio tower. Instead of opening a portal for a person, it would open a micro-portal just large enough to get a signal through. It would then send a signal to Celestia's portal, opening the larger portal from Celestia’s end.

Imri liked this idea so much that he would implement it to scale his future portal network in Celestia. They had planned on linking every arch that was eventually created, allowing a portal to be opened between any two locations at any moment. The current plan had been to use radio to coordinate, ensuring no two locations would use the portal simultaneously. However, manually coordinating between every location wasn’t scalable once the network grew. Instead, he would use the micro-portals with unique locations to send signals and coordinate when the portal would be opened.

This portable version of the portal would be taken with Rayden, who had volunteered to go to New Chicago. He was sitting at a respectable level 21 and would be well-equipped to handle any known threats between their two locations. With the Baron only level 18, if even that high, a level 21 would attract a fair amount of notoriety. However, it seemed unlikely that anyone would escape notice while riding a nearly rhino-sized Starseeker, and Imri would prefer someone capable so they didn’t risk losing the portal.

Sending a larger group would also defeat the purpose, as they didn’t have enough domesticated Starseekers. As it was, Emelia would be lending Orion for the mission, who hadn’t been doing much besides grazing throughout the Seagrass Plains. Emelia took the opportunity to remind him about his promise to create a portal large enough for the massive creature so she could bring him up to Celestia. Imri mentally added that to a list of possible portal designs he needed to work on.

With the design work done and a plan in place, Imri spent the next few days implementing his ideas. While Imri was proud of the features he had designed, they did give him a lot of rune work to complete. Modifying the original portal and creating the second one took several days. While he hadn’t been solely dedicated to this project, it still took him far longer than any other enchantment he had created.

Simultaneously, he took breaks to work on other enchantments. He had a Perpetual Expansion trait and wouldn’t let it go to waste. Fortunately, this was simple in both design and rune work needed. When he told Naomi, the leatherworker, what his plan was, she was willing to sell him a backpack at cost in exchange for a percentage of the profits when it sold. With his new Drake skin bag, he got to work.

The new design wasn’t much different than the previous bag he had enchanted. The main difference was obviously in the new Dimensional Expansion rune. Instead of having a preset amount of space, it would create space as it was fed mana. In theory, he could keep expanding the space indefinitely. However, in practice, there was a limit: the bag could only get so expanded before the extra space became meaningless. No feature would magically summon an item, and even with a powerful Low Gravity rune, the items would still have mass. There were also diminishing returns on the space created per mana spent as the ratio of created space to existing space increased, even with the improvements from Dimensional Expansion.

Even with those limitations, Imri was quite pleased with how the final product turned out. He had expanded it so that the ratio of created space to existing space was 2. This meant the smaller backpack could hold 3 times the volume as the non-enchanted version. However, the rune had required over a thousand mana to achieve this effect. Still, it was far greater than the few percentage points his previous iterations had been capable of generating. It also could have a far stronger Low-Gravity running now that the mana generation and supply were strictly for that purpose.

While he considered this a good first prototype, the man representing the porters strongly disagreed. He offered Imri 100,000 credits for the bag and wanted more commissioned as soon as possible. While Imri could make more credits per hour slaughtering Drakes, the fact that the porters valued the item so highly was a great reassurance.

Imri gained 2 levels in Runic Engineer for all his enchantment work during the week and training new apprentices. He also managed to rank up his Spatial Beacon skill to E after creating one for the mobile portal. Unfortunately, he was starting to have to consider his beacons carefully, as the mana cost was starting to become significant.

As the week came to a close, Rayden embarked on his expedition. There was a small send-off crowd, though many were too busy with the influx of population to spare any time. Rayden was accompanied by a porter, who would help him on the first leg of the journey until they could reach Orion on the Seagrass plains.

While Imri didn’t think this mission would be difficult, it was critical. Everything would change when they reconnected with such a large group of people, and hopefully, it would be for the better.