[NR] Bring It To The Surface - Chapter 641 (Patreon)

Over the next month, as Rosha put it, “Jason was quite a boring boy”. Though it didn’t help that whenever the pair were around, Jason would spend all his time preparing wood for Courtney to mend while it dries. Not that the rest of the time was all that interesting, either.

He built buildings, a wall, and dug out a lake. The walls being where the dirt from the lake went. After all, while a wooden wall was nice, a good thin layer of dirt between wood was much sturdier.

He read books. Those manuals on formations were informative, especially the runes that are shared or explained particularly well. A shame that these weren’t from a kingdom that doesn’t do much with Energy. There was no way the better runes would be hiding in the books.

He cultivated, both in and out of NeoRealm. Even managed to clear a couple meridians irl. Which considering that he was still bottlenecked in NeoRealm, was a relief. Sure, cultivation could take a long time, but at least you would be progressing, no matter how small. There is a reason those at a bottleneck tend to do dangerous things.

Then, at the end of the month, Jason was ready. Or rather, that was the deadline he gave himself. He hadn’t become competent at any of his now seven formations, but he had figured out the important ones.

His eight manuals at this point are small scale alarm, light, Energy gathering, physical reinforcement, building scale shield, building scale alarm, humidity control, and preservation. They all made sense, but horribly practical as their names pointed towards. A ritual to gather Energy as a power source if you're not on a ley line, is the first.

Then it was all about defense or maintenance. Long-term concerns that benefit it you could just automate them and ignore. A thing Energy is quite good at if you have even a minor leyline. After all, Jason only has a few points of Energy, while even the smallest leyline has many times more.

So now, a month on, it was time to put the finishing touches on a few projects and attempt to cut himself off from the system. First, the need for Energy. Now, there wasn’t a leyline close enough to the surface in the clearing, except Jason was going to cheat.

Because the idea of any piece of land not having a leyline below, it is ridiculous. You go down deep enough and eventually you’ll hit a leyline. In particular, it seems the Deep Wilds don’t actually have deep ley lines. They might not be directly against the surface, but you don’t have to reach far.

To take advantage of this, Jason set up the formations centered on the first building. Now, most times, having any kind of gathering formation this close would cause them to interfere with each other. This time, Jason spent an entire week harmonizing the three and forcing the center of effect to actually end up outside of the formations.

All three focused at the center of the clearing and the library. The draw it has once completed isn’t normal and begins to draw heavily on the leyline under the clearing. Satisfied, Jason leaves it to work as he turns to the wall.

From above, you could see that evenly spaced around the perimeter are pits. They reach all the way down to about two-thirds of the way to the ground. And into each pit, Jason lowers a stone cube.

While this might not be the most common use of the physical reinforcement ritual, there was a small aside in the manual on how to do it. Each square acted as a formation flag, extending the effect seamlessly through the entire wall and a distance into the ground. The ritual slowly toughening the wall and its foundation. Only limited by the ritual’s quality and the quality of Energy being used.

Not that this was the only formation in the wall. If someone was to pull off a plank on the inner side, they would notice unpowered runes. While it couldn’t be active all the time, having the shield formation could be quite the life saver. The only problem being that it has to be manually activated, because of course they wouldn’t have a version that activates automatically. Jason was not even able to set it so someone without Energy could activate it.

Not that Jason believed for a second you couldn’t easily modify it to do so. Rather, the kingdom obviously kept at least a few details to themselves. That or they sucked so much at Energy they only managed to get the incomplete version. Either way was feasible.

With the reinforcement ritual setup, the conditions are right and so Jason waits. See, the big ley lines, what he would call dragon veins, well, even tapping them requires great care. Let alone doing anything else with them. That wasn’t what was under the clearing.

What was under them was magnitudes smaller. So small that even Jason’s amateur attempts could affect it. Those three Energy gathering rituals pulled on the leyline below when just increasing the general density of Energy in the clearing. However, once the wall’s physical reinforcement ritual came online, the Energy was really being sucked down.

It was with that change, that the three rituals began to harmonize. When they no longer interfered with each other because of not having somewhere to sink the power, they were drawing in.

The ground shook.

While ley lines weren’t physically conduits for the Energy, rather just representing where the power was flowing through. You don’t have that much power in an area without it causing side effects. And this localized mini quake was the result of the leyline shifting.

Over the next five hours and change, shake after shake happened. Until the point at which the ground really moved and the three rituals fizzled out as they overloaded. The leyline had surfaced.

Of course, without the pull of the Energy gathering rituals, the leyline immediately begins to sink back to its original position.