Keiran

Unfortunately, just transplanting the mysteel pillars and expecting them to work wasn’t a reasonable assumption. Even if I managed to get them in the exact same formation, right down to the inch, there wasn’t the slightest chance of them activating once I fed them mana. Instead, I had to deep dive into their rune constructs to find the parts that controlled their connections to each other and the areas each governed.

Also unfortunately, mysteel was far more difficult to modify than stone. Given its construction method, I couldn’t even ‘borrow’ some of the material from the inside to patch up the runes I’d need to rewrite, since that material also had runes on it. And since no one had handed me all the shavings that had been carved off the metal during its original construction, that meant I needed an outside source of mysteel to update the rune structures.

In that, at least, I had some good luck. It just so happened that I’d come across an old mysteel door that had sealed a vault of mine a few thousand years back and reclaimed it. Then it had sat, forgotten, in my storage for a few years waiting for me to find a use for it. Today was that day.

Working with mysteel was difficult. It demanded a high level of skill and devoured mana to make even the simplest changes. If not for my demesne supporting me, I’d struggle with this project for months just trying to scrape together the resources I needed. With the mana not being a concern, however, I wouldn’t need more than a few weeks to rewrite the rune structures.

I hoped.

I’d already surveyed the whole valley and determined where I wanted to place the pillars, so the only thing left was to alter their relative positioning coordinates in their rune structures, which weren’t on the top layer, because of course they weren’t. That would have been too easy.

By the third day of work, I was starting to think I’d overestimated myself. By the tenth, I’d revised my completion time from a few weeks to two months. I had to take a break to finish Keeper’s potions—Senica had done a passable job tending my greenhouses, though Juby wasn’t going to last at the rate he was going—and deliver them.

Then, before I could get back to work, I had to return to New Alkerist to get the greenhouses going in the right direction and give another lesson on how to keep them that way. As I was going to leave, Ryla tracked me down to let me know they were having problems with the teleportation pad out in Beacon, which prompted another unscheduled detour.

It turned out the locals hadn’t been keeping the platform properly charged with mana, which was understandable considering how few of them were mages, but they’d inadvertently cut themselves off from contact with anywhere else. After taking care of that, I finally managed to get home, a full three days after I’d left.

Though there were still many weeks of work to do here, at that point, all I wanted was to fall face first into my bed for a day. So that was what I did.

* * *

“Moment of truth,” I said as I finished up the large, central pillar. Everything was perfectly placed, modified to precise specifications, and fed with weeks of mana production from the entire petrified forest. It might not be enough to run for long, but it would be enough to test the setup to make sure it worked.

Just as I was about to reach out to telepathically flip the switch on the whole thing, a divination scratched at my consciousness. I frowned as I turned to mentally focus on it, only to see a strange caravan passing through an unremarkable countryside. It took only a moment to realize it was the one I’d been trying to track from Ammun’s military outposts, the one with the secret destination.

“Of course you’d make your move now,” I grumbled.

I didn’t need to go rushing over there. Now that they were en route, I had an hour or two window where I could easily catch up to the supply train. That didn’t really leave me enough time to do all the testing I needed to on my new defensive system, even if it worked perfectly.

With a sigh, I turned away from my new project and headed for my teleportation platform.

* * *

I floated in the air, invisible and undetectable by anything less than active scrying from a master-tier divination. Unless Ammun himself was in one of those wagons, no one on the ground was going to notice me following them from a few miles back.

The supply train was a lot longer than I’d expected, easily two hundred wagons. That couldn’t all be food, but everything was warded to prevent snooping. Whoever had done those wards had invested a decent amount of raw mana into them in addition to being skilled in their creation, which made it difficult for me to thread my way through them. The fact that they were moving and I was so far away didn’t make it any easier.

On the other hand, I had a lot of time to keep working on it since it didn’t look like the soldiers were going to be reaching their destination any time soon. After surveying the entire train, I selected a wagon that had a set of guards hanging around nearby escorting it. The wards were even thicker than usual, and I was almost certain the guy sitting next to the driver was a mage at the fourth stage who was actively monitoring them.

I really couldn’t have picked a harder target to crack, but all the safety precautions just meant that this wagon was the one that could tell me what was going on here. I moved forward about two miles and got to work unraveling the defenses.

The first thing to do was take care of the mage monitoring the wards. Luckily for me, he wasn’t talkative. Instead of conversing with the driver, he was just sitting there, eyes closed and unmoving. If I didn’t know better, I could have mistaken him for being asleep. My hope was that the man sitting two feet away from him would do the same.

The hardest part of the magic wasn’t the range, it was keeping it undetectable. Mages in general were poor targets for various enchantments, because the best way to counter an enchantment was to rip the mana out of it. Anyone with good mana control could throw off all sorts of enchantments just by being aware of them.

The loophole there was to use enchantments that were, by their very nature, deceptive. In this case, I needed to rob the mage of his senses without him realizing it. As long as I could properly hide the enchantment and he didn’t grow suspicious, he’d sit there, blissfully unaware of anything going on around him while his brain tricked him into thinking he was hearing and smelling everything he was supposed to.

I used the mage’s open conduit to the wards on the wagon as a vector to slip the enchantment in, where it took hold without so much as a ripple. I could rip the entire ward scheme off the wagon now, and he wouldn’t notice. There was a risk of the driver poking at him and shattering the illusion, but that was a risk I was willing to take.

The guards flanking the wagon as it trundled down the road with the rest of the supply train were a non-issue, there only to guard against monster attacks or other physical threats. My work was subtle enough that as long as no one was actively looking at the wards, I was confident I’d slip through undetected.

The train carried on through the night, moving at unnatural speeds as they burned mana to lighten their wagons and empower the horses they had pulling them. While they moved across the dark landscape, I wormed my way through the wards on my target. Long before they were ready to stop, I had my scrying spell inside.

What I found confused me at first. The wagon was packed to the brim with wooden crates, each stuffed with straw and housing a singular component of what appeared to be some massive three-dimensional puzzle. Runes were inscribed across the surface of every piece, but without the whole structure to study, it was like seeing random words on a page with no context.

It was obvious that Ammun himself had created these. They were far and away beyond anything I’d seen from any of the tower mages during my time there, even their stage five rulers. This kind of skill had been lost to the ages, and only old monsters like the lich and myself retained knowledge of it. I supposed it was possible he’d just stumbled across something, much like I had when I’d found the mysteel pillars beneath Derro, but it didn’t matter much in the end.

I studied each piece as thoroughly as I was able, more to keep a mental record of them than to tease out their purpose. There were only twenty sections here out of what could be hundreds or even thousands of components. I didn’t know how much time I had left, but I needed to thoroughly check as many other wagons as possible while I still could.

None of them were quite as difficult to gain access to, though some were close. A few had more rune-scribed components, including one that was stacked high with panels of etched marble, and I found several caches of mana in the shape of storage crystals, batteries, and in one case, what seemed to be a mana wraith that had been compressed and imprisoned inside a phantasmal orb. That was no doubt draining to hold, but I couldn’t imagine what the purpose was behind it.

The problem with trying to predict Ammun’s decisions was that he had at least a thousand years of magical advancement on me before the whole world went to hell. I was playing catch up with some of the stuff that had popped up in between my death and the loss of mana, not that there was all that much of it just lying around.

Whatever he was making here, I just didn’t have the clues needed to figure it out. It was definitely supposed to be secret, so much so that the minds of anyone I dared snoop around in was completely devoid of useful information. Admittedly, I had to use the lightest of touches and could only skim surface thoughts, and even then, only on specific targets that demonstrated a lack of awareness of their mana, but the results were borderline useless.

There was one piece of information I managed to pry out of the lead wagoneer’s thoughts, however. He knew where the supply train was heading, which saved me another two days of slowly trailing along behind them. I sent scrying spells ahead, tracing the route I’d pulled from the man’s thoughts to confirm the facility they were headed for.

While my magic coursed over miles and miles of land, I debated what to do with the supply train. I could destroy it, and that would both set Ammun’s plans back a month or two and net me a tidy profit in stolen mana. But if I did that, it would tip him off that someone was aware of his secret base, and I doubted he had too many enemies who could wipe out the entire caravan without leaving a witness behind.

For now, it was best to cover my tracks. Once I knew what he was up to, I could decide where, when, and how best to insert myself into his business. That decision made and my target destination located a hundred miles to the east, I let my magic carry me away and watched the wagons dwindle to nothing behind me.