IM2: Chapter #16 (Patreon)

They had already descended one level from the surface of the fourth strata, and now, they were heading even further down. However, they had not traveled too far when they ran into a problem. The stairs ended in what looked like a maintenance room with no visible exit. Just like the rest of the building, this room appeared to have been cleared out, leaving nothing but the furniture behind. Looking around, Thorn frowned.

“Someone must have been in here before and cleaned it out. Otherwise we’d be finding at least something. There isn’t even a paperclip in this place.”

“Given how long adventurers have been diving the ruins, I think it's a safe bet that every ruin on the fourth strata has been explored extensively,” Eve said, landing on one of the workbenches. “The only places that people haven’t gone are ruins that are hidden underground, like the giant plant ruin, or places that they can’t access.”

Nodding, Thorn kept looking around, but there was really nothing in the room apart from the workbenches that were fixed in place. Unwilling to give up, he scanned over the room with his mental sense, looking for secret passages or hidden doors. When he failed to find anything, his frown deepened.

“How do you get down to the next level if there is no passage? Or maybe we’re just in the wrong spot.”

“Or,” Eve said, pointing at a magic circle scribed on the ground, “maybe we need to use the travel system that the original inhabitants used.”

Walking over to the teleportation circle, Thorn crouched down to examine it. Just like the circles that he had seen in the hallways above, this circle was six feet in diameter, and featured a rotating disk that intersected with the larger magic circle. Unlike the other circle, however, this magic circle had an extra script set along the inside that gave Thorn a faint sense of danger. Carefully examining it, he quickly figured out what it was for.

“Oh, interesting. It looks like this is a restricted access teleportation circle. Look, the location disk has a few extra spots on it, which are probably the restricted areas. This script checks for a specific magical signature, probably generated by a badge or something. So long as you have that signature, it will send you where you want to go, but if you don’t then it dumps you somewhere else.”

“Let me see if I can reverse engineer the signature we need.”

“Sure. This is the script that checks for it,” Thorn said, transmitting a string of runic script to Eve.

While he waited, Thorn continued to examine the magic circle. He was more convinced than ever that whoever had stripped this ruin had seen this magic circle and taken it back with them after being unable to activate it. Without being able to get a sense for what it did, they had eventually abandoned the ruins after stripping it of everything that was not nailed down. The longer he looked at the magic circle in front of him, the more similarities that he saw with the set of runes that Master Artificer Levandi had shown him, causing Thorn to wonder why this world didn’t have a set of working teleportation gates.

With a wave of his hand, Thorn began to recreate the runes in the air in front of him, using his mental sense to replicate the entire circle. It was taking Eve some time to reverse engineer the signature they needed, so Thorn spent his time trying to get a better understanding of the spell construct itself. All of the magic he had seen in the ruins so far was incredibly sophisticated and shared more in common with the earth’s scientific method of thinking than the typical magic-first method that this world currently displayed.

There was little to no technology in this world, as magic was used for just about everything, but that had created a limitation of sorts as, according to what Thorn understood, there had been no real progress for the last few hundred years. While the artificers were clearly trying to push that boundary, their knowledge of runes was so woefully inadequate and segmented that they could barely inch forward. Conversely, the magic in the ruins showed a completely different spirit. Such complicated and intricate rune work could only have been developed by many people working together to test and improve their knowledge in a systematic way.

From what he had seen, artificers on Lestra were specialized, though not by choice. Rather, theirs was the specialization of ignorance. Their lack of knowledge forced them into small, insular groups that were terrified that others would surpass them or steal what they knew. The ruins showed the signs of specialization as well, but unlike the artificer’s guild, this was the specialization of choice for the sake of efficiency. Only by specializing and then sharing both knowledge and the results of the specialization could a modern technological system take shape.

When Thorn finished building his mental model of the teleportation circle, he began to pull it apart, highlighting sections as he traced the runes and the effects that they carried. Teleportation required a number of things, namely spatial coordinate locking, passage generation, spatial stabilization, and power routing. If any of the four pieces was missing, the entire thing would fail and the passage either wouldn’t be created or it wouldn’t be maintained for longer than a moment.

As he stared at the runes, Thorn’s forehead slowly furrowed. Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, he began to examine it again, only to come to the same conclusion. From what he could see, there was no way that this teleportation circle should work. Whoever had created this teleportation system had perfected three of the four pieces, but for the life of him, Thorn couldn’t figure out how the last piece, the power routing, was working.

The magic circle used a fixed coordinate system that took care of the spatial coordinate locking, and so long as it had enough power, the runes to stabilize space and create the passage looked like they would work well. Where the whole thing fell apart was in the power routing. If mana sufficient to power the runes was fed into the magic circle from any point, the intensity of the mana would cause the entire thing to collapse into nothing as it degraded the runes. Biting his lip, Thorn decided to test it out and as carefully as he could, he sent mana into the model of the circle.

Sure enough, the entire thing fell apart as soon as mana began to fill it. Waving his hand to reform the model, Thorn tried again, only to end up with the same result. It didn’t matter how carefully or even how slowly he inserted the mana, it would eventually build to the point where the runes would begin to degrade, causing the entire structure to fall apart. After a dozen attempts, Thorn paused what he was doing and began to think about it from the beginning. Since he had seen a few of these circles on the different floors, he could only assume that they had worked, which meant that people using this facility had solved the power routing problem.

Sending his mental sense into the symbol at his feet, Thorn was idly thinking about this problem when it suddenly struck him. The mana being used for this teleportation circle was coming from the building itself, not being provided by the person using the teleportation circle. Which meant that the solution had to reside in the system that the building used for power. Sure enough, Thorn quickly found a small network of mana channels that ran underneath the magic circle, connecting at thousands of spots. It didn’t take him long to see that the way the mana channels were set, the entire structure of the spell construct could be activated simultaneously. As soon as he saw that, he knew exactly what was going on. Hearing him laugh, Eve looked up from her work and gave him an annoyed look.

“Sorry,” Thorn said, still chuckling. “I just realized how this was working and what an idiot I’ve been.”

“I concur that you are often not the brightest,” Eve said, her tone serious, “but that is only in relation to me. What did you figure out?’

“I’ve been thinking about this spell construct as creating a gate that you would walk through, like Earth Step. But it functions closer to a long range Blink by creating the gate in a single instant. It doesn’t matter that the whole thing collapses as soon as it forms, since the effect still triggers. Look, you can see that it functions in stages, right? First, a barrier forms around the edge that acts as a kill switch for the spell if anything crosses it. Second, the spell checks for qualifications, and then, if the conditions are met, activates the entire teleportation spell by injecting mana into the entire thing at one time.”

“That causes the spell to collapse, which means that mana doesn’t have to be spent maintaining the spatial tunnel,” Eve said, realization dawning on her face. “You get the effect for a fraction of the cost.”

“Exactly. And it also illustrates why no one can figure it out. If you don’t have the mana injection system, it won’t work. It's quite ingenious. I wonder what other sorts of spells this would work for. If you could figure out a way to replicate the mana injection system you could do quite a bit with this spell.”

Flying up to sit on Thorn’s staff, Eve pulled up a virtual window and showed him a simple spell construct.

“I’ll add that to the list of projects. For now, this is the spell construct that gives us the mana signature we are looking for. All it does is create a specific elemental mix, which is what the teleportation circle is scanning for.”

“Got it.”

With a flick of his fingers, Thorn wove his mana into the proper shape and activated it, causing elements to bloom in front of him.

“Shall I activate this part of the mana network?” Eve asked.

“Yeah. Let's give it a try,” Thorn replied, stepping into the center of the circle.

A moment later, a thin barrier appeared around him, sealing him in as a shimmer of mana ran over him, scanning for the correct element composition. A faint green light appeared under his feet and he felt an intense surge of energy as the air around him shook. Though it only lasted for half a second, by the time the power faded, Thorn and Eve were gone.

Deep under the earth, they reappeared, standing on another magic circle in a small alcove. As the buzz of mana retreated, Thorn could feel the mana network absorbing the trace mana that was left. It boggled his mind that someone had figured out how to use what was effectively a failed spell to achieve instantaneous movement. As the barrier fell and Thorn stepped out of the magical circle, his brain spun with the possibilities. There was a lot that could be done with this new method, but almost all of it would need extensive testing.

Spatial magic was tremendously difficult, especially at range, so to see that the former occupants of this ruin were able to use it so casually, was impressive. Looking around at the hallway, Thorn was about to start walking when a thought suddenly struck him, causing him to freeze in place.

“Eve?”

“Yes?”

“Do you have the spatial coordinates for the great forge?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t. The great forge is a sealed space, so there is no way to get the coordinates.”

“What about the coordinates for the forge in Droukna?”

“I do, but before you get too excited, we don’t have the power to make that jump. I can put us just about anywhere in the city, or anywhere else we’ve been, but that sort of distance would take ten of you powering it for a week. Unless we can generate a massive burst of energy, we won’t be able to do it.”

“But if we could route enough power to a modified circle?”

“We could be on the great forge’s doorstep a moment later.”

A slow smile spread across Thorn’s face as he looked down the long hallway. He desperately wanted to regain access to the great forge to start generating destiny points again, so hearing that there was a chance to make it back without having to sneak past everyone on the lookout for him lifted his spirits considerably.

“Great. That’s our primary goal from now on.”

The passage that they ended up in was not very large. Like the hallways above them, it seemed to run the entire length of the building, but as Thorn traveled along it, he saw very few doors. Most of the doors he did see led into small rooms that gave access to the building's internal systems like the mana network that stretched across it.

Despite the lack of anything interesting, Thorn didn’t speed up as he was worried about running into another large group of monsters. Walking quietly forward down the long dark hall, Thorn eventually spotted a set of doors that looked nothing like the others. These doors were made of metal but they were much larger than the others and even more importantly, there were three large gems set above the door.

Just like the door that Thorn had used to enter the ruin, these gems were sending out traces of mana, scanning over the passage in front of the door. However, unlike the gem outside, Thorn could tell just by looking at them that there was no way he was just going to be able to walk past these ones. It was simple enough for him to read the spell construct carved into the gems with his mental sense, and rather than targeting life force, like the other gem, this one was looking for a specific magical signature, just like the teleportation circle had been.

“What do you think?” Thorn asked as he passed the information to Eve. “Can we spoof it?”

Looking at Thorn like he was as dense as a bag of rocks, Eve raised her eyebrows.

“Why would we need to spoof it? You can just bypass it by teleporting inside the room.”

“Sure, but what if there are defenses inside?”

“If it's a server room, they won’t have defenses inside. Can you imagine the fiasco if an enemy walked in and they blew up their own magical computer system trying to drive them out? Just step past them. And if it isn’t actually a server room, then teleport out.”

“Huh, I guess that’s true,” Thorn said, summoning a yellow doorway. “Earth Step sure has turned out to be convenient.”

Stepping through, he reappeared in a massive room that stretched for over a mile. Three quarters as wide as it was long and almost as tall, it held a gigantic metal orb carved with dense runes that were dizzying to look at. His eyes lighting up, Thorn strode forward, taking in the amazing sight before him.

“I think we just found something really cool,” he said, staring up at the giant metal ball.