The Path of Ascension

Chapter 240

While Matt and Liz were mostly kept near the hospital as anchors for Justinian, they weren't able to stay there forever, and they all knew it. Matt could see in Justinian’s eyes how he wanted to beg them to stay, but he never did. Matt wasn’t sure if he just knew it was impossible, or if he feared that asking would shatter the illusion, but they started spending some more time away each day.

The next week was hectic.

While they spent most of their time with Justinian, they were brought up to the floating island to talk to Frederic, who kept up his polite face in front of them even though they knew he was beyond angry at the general circumstances.

He explained what was needed of them, which didn’t go over very well.

“We will need you three to each individually give a testimony in the coming days. That’s all that will be required from you, per your request to not attend the actual trial, but note that this will be exhaustive, with both sides’ attorneys being given a chance to question you.”

Justinian took that news exactly as Matt expected.

In seconds, he started to drift into his own mind, where the horrors still had a hold of him.

“No. No. Nononono.”

As he started to go catatonic, Frederic gestured, and Justinian vanished, returning to the hospital and its attendants.

Rubbing the bridge of his nose, Frederic sighed. “I really hate that. We need the entire story, and it simply forces the victims to relive those horrors once more, but if we wait until they are in a better mental place, it can complicate all attendant investigations and allow accomplices to cover their tracks better.”

Matt looked at Liz, and she shook her head slightly. Taking her lead, he waited until Frederic spoke on his own.

“On to other things. You both are going to be commended for your work here once everything is settled. That means official military rewards and the like. The Emperor was watching this fiasco, and while we haven’t talked, word from the court is that he is quite happy with the conclusion of this mission.”

Hearing that, Matt had to ask, “Can’t he just circumvent this entire trial by winding back the clock and seeing who’s guilty and who isn't?” Seeing Frederic open his mouth, Matt continued, “I know the imperial bylaws, but Justinian can’t handle something like this so soon.”

Frederic waved off into the distance. “Beyond the fact not even the Emperor’s word alone is sufficient to convict someone, let alone a noble, his time is valuable, Quill. To make a trip all the way out here and spend the effort to look back five hundred years is more than even I can ask of him, not with war looming on the horizon. What few post-cognition abilities I have access to will be leveraged, but they are far from infallible. Mr. Miller’s testimony is crucial for a speedy trial. He stated when he was lucid that he wanted to get this over as quickly as possible, and while we will make all possible allowances for him, we will proceed with his initial request.”

Matt just nodded. He didn’t like it, but he couldn't force Justinian to change his mind.

Liz asked, “How do you think this is going to play out?”

“I know exactly how this will play out, sadly. I want this over and done with as well, but we must go through the motions. Linda is seemingly going to fall on her sword and plead guilty, while stating that she was one of the only ones who knew the full truth. That will mostly keep her son out of the crossfire. He's still being charged with smuggling, but the death penalty isn't on the table for that, which is all she really cares about. The entire family will lose the title and land, but that's small reparations to pay. The real issue is Ilkor. Linda is insisting that he personally knew everything and was taking a cut to not intervene. He’s stating that he was simply taking bribes to not look too closely at her.”

Frederic sighed, and Matt saw how weary he looked. “Which, sadly, is in character for Ilkor. He’s always been willing to turn a blind eye as long as things aren’t pushing the line too far. If I can find evidence that he was involved, I’m going to hang him out to dry and strip him of his titles and lands, but it seems unlikely.”

They chatted for a little while longer, but in the end, none of them could change the upcoming events.

The questioning was, as stated, thorough and exhausting.

Quill was asked a million questions about the event. From why they didn’t just ask to enter the estate, to why he punched down when attacking the trapped Tier 15s when drawing out Linda.

That one was at least an easy response. Combat proficiency had no bearing upon whether or not a given incident counted as punching down, legally speaking. Quill wasn’t entirely certain how combat prowess could be measured outside of Tiers, and asked just that, but the lawyer just changed the topic instead of answering.

After a while, the lawyer did return to addressing his combat strength, but this time by insinuating that Quill either wasn’t truly a Tier 15, or had the backing of someone high Tier enough to supply his talismans.

Quill had to keep himself from laughing in the man’s face. He was a Pather with a manager, arguably the manager. The idea that he was capable of subverting the rules of the Path directly underneath Luna’s nose went clear past absurd and into utterly laughable. He didn’t even need to say it, as the opposing lawyer beat him to it.

Despite that, he was still questioned relentlessly.

Not all of the pointed questions were from Linda’s lawyers. Some were from Ilkor’s, and others were from the prosecution. The latter were even more exhaustive in their questioning than everyone else, as they were trying to cover all of their bases before they let him go, but they were at least gentler in how they framed their questions.

Torch’s own questioning went about the same way, but Justinian’s was much rougher from what Quill could tell as he watched the recordings they were provided.

Despite the lawyers on all sides being far kinder in their questioning, the absence of his therapist and accompanying calm he provided simply was too much. Justinian broke down on multiple occasions, and needed several recesses before they could continue. Sometimes, it was when they were asking him to recount the worst of the times, like when they took away all of the amenities he had earned and tortured him with the sight of his revoked privileges through the confines of a glass cage . He broke another time when he was being questioned about the first few years of his captivity, and yet again when he described a time when they wouldn’t give him mashed potatoes without gravy. Despite behaving for years by that point, refraining from giving them any trouble and them treating him generally well in return, they kept failing on that simple request. Even just the memory enraged him and sent him spiraling.

One of the attorneys on the prosecution side had to be asked to leave after she accidentally let slip that Justinian’s parents had died several hundred years ago, which delayed everything by a full day, as he was immediately teleported to the therapist. Justinian had apparently been told by the Gerble’s that his parents had died, but he was fully aware that they were willing to lie to him in order to punish him.

In general, his education seemed shoddy, not that Matt was too involved in exploring the particulars. Naturally, the Gerbles had never informed him that it was possible for any cultivator to commit suicide by detonating their cores, and that the immortality of a Tier 15 wasn’t mandatory, but despite that, he seemed in no rush to figure out his Concept.

While all the lawyers kept up their flat expressions during the questioning, Matt and Liz hung around just outside to give Justinian some much-needed moral support during his breaks. None of the lawyers seemed pleased with the stories they were hearing, but they maintained a truly impressive level of professionalism throughout it all.

It took almost a week of questioning to get through the five hundred years of captivity, and Justinian was a wreck for another two weeks afterwards. He seemed to have held himself together as best as he could through sheer force of will, but when it was done, he collapsed in on himself. The emotional toll of recounting everything having hit him all at once.

Thankfully the Empire, or rather Frederic, had an expensive therapist available full-time for Justinian, and the fatherly, older-looking man seemed to be a beacon for him.

Matt and Liz stuck around for another week after that, but Justinian was in good hands, and had plans to travel throughout the Empire for a couple of years with his therapist. Justinian felt that he needed to get away, and exploration was all he had thought about in his captivity. The therapist agreed it could be good for him, and was willing to travel with him as a friendly ear and protector, as Matt suspected. There was no way the man wasn't at least a Tier 35, no matter how he presented himself as a run of the mill older gentleman.

Both of them gave Justinian a way to contact them, and made sure he understood that while they might not be in a position to respond right away, they would get back to him. That seemed to settle him a little, but Matt still worried for the man. He knew he couldn't babysit him forever, but he really hoped that Justinian would recover fully in due time. He had been through enough.

They, meanwhile, needed to physically recover, and Luna wouldn't let them just do anything while on a healing cooldown.

“You did well in that mission, especially in how you didn't break the masks.” Looking at Matt, she nodded. “I half expected you to do so when Linda went all out. Your planning and preparation weren't perfect, but you two did well for running the operation essentially solo. Stuffing Liz in your chest was a smart play, but not needed if you had better analyzed the wards. There was a gap in the wards on the North-western side that Liz could have slipped through, using the tools you had at hand. Though in fairness, it might have taken an unduly long time to find it. Your use of unstructured blood magic was good, Liz, but you should have moved your position more often. You stayed stationary too long several times, and would have struggled to get hidden quickly enough if things had gone a little different. I would have done the mission by…”

Their debriefing lasted almost a full day as they flew in Matt’s chaotic spaceship to an otherwise undisclosed location.

Along the way, Liz began to molt. She’d assembled a nest made of coals for herself, transformed into her phoenix form, and spread herself over the glowing cinders. She looked rightly miserable, though she reassured Matt that she was fine, coughing up clouds of cinders as her flames slowly died down and her body began to turn gray.

Liz slept most of the rest of the way to the planet, but was mostly awake when they arrived. In her brief moments of wakefulness she was more like a wet and grumpy cat than a bird, which he thought was adorable, but he was smart enough to keep that observation to himself until she was feeling better. He had kept a close eye on her during their trip, fascinated by the molting process. He watched as various parts of her plumage, and then limbs, turned into ash and flaked away, revealing healthy flesh beneath.

When they arrived at the new planet, Matt had expected Luna to send them into low Tier rifts, but instead, they arrived in an uninhabited low Tier system, leaving both of them confused.

Once they orbited around the planet Luna gestured below them. “This is your project for while you recover.”

Matt looked down at the planet sized brown ball of dirt and shot Luna a raised eyebrow.

“This world is fated to be a new training planet, and it is your duty to perform some of the base terraforming. Once you leave, more people will come in to finish it, but I want you to use this time to practice your large-scale magic. Mass-area manipulation flexes your skills in different ways, and this is one of the few activities outside of combat where you could feasibly utilize all of your mana on a single task. You are to create and establish rifts to match whatever themes you wish, but ideally in a naturalistic-seeming way. You have two years.”

Liz raised a finger in question. “Can we absorb the essence stones we won from the academies?”

At Luna’s agreement, they moved on to what terraforming actually entailed, and how best to tackle the project they were given, which wasn’t as easy as it seemed. Thankfully, Matt wouldn’t be working alone; Luna expected Liz to help and get her own practice with large-scale manipulations, even if she was more limited in mana reserves than Matt.

That forced them to take a crash course on terraforming. While most new worlds were low-Tier planets found drifting through chaotic space, some were made more or less from scratch, especially when there was a specific goal in mind. The general process, from what Matt understood, was:

Step 1: Get a ball of rock by finding a planet in the outer reaches of the system, condensing an asteroid belt, pulling a planet from a Tier 40 rift or higher, or simply making a planet using the relevant [Create] spells.

Step 2: Jump start the molten core.

Diverting stellar radiation through enchantments was oftentimes done for worlds in systems higher Tier than themselves, but wherever possible, a real molten core was preferred due to the lower ongoing mana costs.

There were even a number of formations that could slowly heat and spin up the core, which Matt found interesting and made a note to look at later for inspiration.

Step 3: Create the essence core.

That was mostly a natural process, but it could be kick-started by seeding the planet with approximately ten trillion mana, typically from a Tier 40 mana stone. Less total mana could be used by either adding essence directly or letting the process take longer, but when most people ordered a planet, they weren’t willing to wait a million years, so more mana was better.

Matt was slightly shocked when he realized that he could personally finish that step as a Tier 15 in a little under eight years, or in a second at Tier 43. That felt astounding, but the essence core for this planet was already forming, so he wouldn’t be needed here.

Steps 4 and 5: Make an atmosphere and oceans.

These were the steps Matt was involved in, as they were some of the most power-hungry outside of the actual core formation itself. Whenever possible, the appropriate material was taken from the nearby solar system and dropped onto the planet, but this one was relatively barren of anything useful. There was the nearby Tier 3 planet that held the tether to the wider Empire, an ice giant in the outer system, but it was outside of Matt’s current skill to harvest from. There would also be some isolated bodies even further out, but the system hadn’t been scouted enough to find any worthwhile ones. He’d be making the water and air himself, which was more than fine with him.

Rifts and enchantments were occasionally used for creating matter, but they had their downsides. Taking matter from rifts simply wasn’t efficient on either time or mana, compared to paying a half-decent mage of the appropriate specialty. Mostly, it was done for small scale operations where a company didn’t want to scout someone competent for a job that might take a year. Enchantments could do the job even less efficiently than a rift, with the upside of being nearly entirely automated. For the quantities of water involved in filling lakes and oceans, people were the clear solution.

At least Matt was starting from a blank slate. Replacing a whole atmosphere would have taken even more work, and adjusting an ocean to the right state would need skills he didn’t have.

Step 6: Seed the planet with life.

Given the effort involved with the whole process, letting bacteria, algae, and other basic forms of life do the work for you was preferred. Once those things had a foothold and had done their work, other life forms were added to the planet in stages, moving up the food chain. In one of the final but optional steps, wood and other relevant mages would come in and shape the ecosystems to the desired form, but it was unlikely that Matt would ever be too involved in that. It was a highly skilled job that didn’t benefit as much from his ability to push huge quantities of material around.

Step 7: Rifts.

Rifts weren’t really their own step, but it was easier to think of them that way. Rather, they tended to form naturally as the essence core formed, or as life took hold across the planet. But the relevant point was selection of rifts for ideal habitability. Under Tier 15, that meant most underwater rifts were destroyed, so when the planet created new rifts to fill that void, some portion would be formed on the surface. They’d just have to rinse and repeat until at least 95% of the rifts were above the waterline.

Matt was almost surprised at how easy the steps made it seem, but Liz dragged him back to reality just by pointing out the handbooks on details for each of those steps, and reminded him that the estimated timeline of terraforming a planet from scratch was three thousand years minimum. It could be ten times that before it was properly established and a place that people would want to call home permanently. Exorbitant mana expenditure could speed that up, but even Matt couldn’t afford the cost of time-accelerating the entire planet to allow the natural ecosystems to establish themselves, and didn’t have the multitasking capability to run [Grand Evolution] on the entire world the way Tur’stal was said to do.

Still, the first few stages could be feasibly done in just a few years, and that was why he was here.

There were other challenges, depending on the starting conditions and the end goal. Settling a higher Tier world taken from chaotic space would often require clearing legions of monsters from past rift breaks. Some people wanted ice caps, some people wanted ice caps to be removed, some wanted specific moons or special weather patterns, world-swallowing oceans, deserts that covered everything in sand, one large continent, many small continents, more or fewer islands… the list was endless. But, making a training planet from bare rock was about as simple as it ever got.

Together, they flew down to the planet, and Matt sighed into the void.

Standing on the planet felt very, very strange. He had visited dozens of worlds, but none had been so lifeless. With no blue or green in sight, it felt more like standing on a moon or an asteroid than a planet.

Craning his neck to look at Liz on his shoulder, he asked her through his [AI]. “What do you want to do?”

Liz hopped down, then nearly collapsed on the ground. “I’d really like it if I could just stay in my warm bed for the next few weeks. That sounds nice. Maybe you could make me a cup of hot chocolate? I’ll be your best friend if you do.”

He just looked down at Liz with a bit of pity. “You didn’t pick a line of work you can call in sick for. I do have an idea for someplace warm though. Here, climb back into your backpack.”

Liz just laid on the ground.

Matt shook his head. With exaggerated difficulty, he picked up the bird that he had married, and put her into his backpack. He even dumped in a few lit coals for good measure.

It reminded him of Aster so long ago, just warmer.

Matt flew upwards, following his [AI]’s instructions to where the orbital supply cache, outfitted for any active terraformers, waited. At three miles across, it held everything a crew would need to transform the barren hunk of rock into somewhere properly livable, including samples of the life the planet would one day hold. More pertinently were the living quarters, with apartments set up for anyone without their own portable house. They weren’t that common outside of professional delvers or other migrants, and while Matt planned on using his own house set up in what was nominally a common area, it was neat if eerie to see the habitation pods sitting there unoccupied.

Liz at least pretended to sleep during his tour of the station, but once his initial curiosity was satisfied and all of his flammable goods were offloaded, he dropped back to the surface of the planet.

The rock beneath his feet parted like water at the barest touch of his magic, and Matt dove down, and down, and down. Mile after mile, Matt burrowed through solid rock until it started picking up heat, then past that and to the semi molten, slowly swirling metal making up the core.

He couldn’t help but admire the sight.

To his spiritual sense, it was an enormous wall of incredibly compressed, impossibly hot metal, stretching out for as far as he could see. It took him a minute, but he eventually spotted one of the heating slabs off in the distance.

The slabs were highly effective, if intentionally crude and cheap. Simply put, they were massive amounts of radioactive metals held sub-critical via enchantments, but once activated that inhibition was reversed. The metals would heat up on their own, and in turn heat up the metal they were embedded in. They had been spread out every few miles by a previous work crew, and Matt swam to each in turn. After some tests to ensure everything was working as it should, and swapping out a damaged one with a spare, Matt retreated to the core of the world, where the heat and pressure was at its most intense.

With a nominal flex of willpower, his Concept pushed out against the surrounding rock and stone. While barely Tier 1 at the most, the sheer weight of the planet above him meant he could only sustain about twenty feet of space.

His wife felt cold, and that couldn’t stand.

Also he wanted to see just how hot he could really get when he went all out.

Contracting his bubble slightly, he flattened the bottom, then hit it with [Flamethrower], starting to melt the rock. He kept it up for a few minutes, to really create a magma pool fit to swim in.

Crouching down, he dipped his left hand in the pool, which felt only scalding. Then, feeling slightly foolish, he dipped his non-invulnerable right hand into it, and was relieved it felt the same. With no essence backing their existence, neither the molten stone nor the radioactive core just a few hundred feet away held any danger for them.

Setting Liz down into the magma, he slowly ladled it over her until she was mostly submerged, and then used a trickle of magic to make sure she didn’t float out.

“Oh. Ohhhhhh. Ahhhhh, we need to do this later. It’s like a massage and coffee and a nice bath allllll rolled into one.” Liz snuggled into the magma, tucking her beak under her wing.

Matt pushed himself into the molten rock, twisting his repulsion in an interesting way to actually reach the stone, and found himself agreeing. It reminded him of a really intense hot mud bath.

They stayed there for an hour, just enjoying the novelty of relaxing in a magma pool miles below the surface of a world, while Liz warmed up and he helped melt more of the crust.

Once they were back on the surface, Liz seemed reinvigorated, though not quite ready to return to being a human. Matt took a quick shower, then went back out to start with the rest of the work.

The first order of business was to create the air and water they’d be using for raw materials. They wouldn’t be making the entire atmosphere yet, or possibly at all, but they did need some to get things going.

To start, Matt made himself a small biodome on the surface of the planet. Beyond the additional comfort having a basic atmosphere would provide, it was much easier to create a habitable atmosphere when he had an active example around him, and it would be far easier to reference several of his wedding gifts when not in the vacuum of space. Tur’stal had given him a small bookshelf’s worth of textbooks on terraforming, along with a variety of relevant skills, so before he got past the basics, he wanted to hit the books and ensure he had a solid educational foundation. He cracked open Worldbuilding: An Introduction as he started absorbing a [Create Air] shard, and stuck his hand out of his enchanted barrier to start pouring his mana into [Create Water]. Once outside the biodome, it immediately exploded into steam and snow, but so long as the water was being made, it didn’t matter much what form it was in.

Luna had advised him on the trip here to clear out some space in his spirit, and a little less then two days later, he had absorbed [Create Air] into his inner spirit around the same time he had finished his first pass of the introductory textbook, and moved onto Moving Mountains: Large Scale Earth Magic for the Aspiring Terraformer. The snow had piled up around his circle of protection, and with his air skill now available, he started to make huge volumes of air, blasting the snow away and revealing the still-barren landscape. With a small sigh, he dove into the dense textbook, digesting everything he wanted to know about the composition of planets, and how to bend them to his will.

“Ahem,” Luna said from behind him.

Matt startled a bit, as she was directly out of his sight, staring into the back of his head.

“I believe you’re forgetting something.”

With that reminder, he finally got it. Matt was using all his mana for making air, and his brain for learning, but that was leaving resources untapped. Briefly considering his options, he chose to flex his Concepts repulsion, working to shape it so that it wasn’t simply omnidirectional. Before Minkalla, it had simply been too taxing on his will to get much real progress, but with the Mind Over Matter reward, it was entirely achievable to practice his repulsion nearly constantly.

“Better, but you’re forgetting one more thing.” Luna crossed her arms and tapped her foot.

A small sigh escaped him as he started modifying his new [Create Air] to better suit his needs, and continued moving [Create Water] closer to his core.

“There you go. Now, I’ll be with Liz for a while. She needs some instruction on asteroid composition and how to extract the valuables before sending the remains planetward. Keep doing what you’re doing. Work on your situational awareness though, I was behind you for a full hour before I said something.” With a small pop, his manager disappeared to go terrorize his wife on the mineral composition of interplanetary rocks.

Now that he was maximally using his resources, Matt turned back to his book. Even offloading making air onto his [AI], multitasking like this slowed down his reading. It was faster training overall, certainly, just more mentally taxing.

That was Luna, though. She could smell inefficient training from a million miles away.

***

Two months later, there a whisper-thin atmosphere was finally beginning to accumulate near Matt’s biosphere, though as it slowly dispersed across the planet it would become even more intangible. He was reaching the limits of what he could feasibly learn from just running [Create Air] at full tilt, and had come across an interesting enchanting project that was still within the scope of his current job, even if it was slightly unorthodox in this scenario.

There were a decent number of asteroids in the system, probably the remnants of some ancient moon, but very few were of any appreciable size. Liz had been working on some of the bigger ones, mostly in using [Earth Manipulation] to extract specific compounds from the rock for their uses in alchemy, but she had also purified some appreciable amounts of metals. The problem was, she didn’t have a great method of moving masses of metal and rock the size of a small mountain. At least, not quickly.

He’d had his curiosity piqued by the enchanting involved in terraforming mover drones, long distance haulers that used gravity enchantments to move huge quantities of ice, stone, or other materials around a solar system. It was usually for when a moon had to be broken up into raw materials and added to a planet, but they would function perfectly well for him here, as well as give him a new angle to learn on this job. Also, there may have been a slight ulterior motive involved.

The next time Liz, finally back to human form, returned to the planet, he filled her in on his idea, and she agreed. “It seems like you’ll need some additional supplies for this. There are some big rechargeable mana stones in the orbiting supply cache, but most of the rest isn’t on hand. I could grab some from… the Ryaga system, it looks like. Two weeks round trip, and I can even restock our food. Stupid cat, not telling us that we wouldn’t be able to refill our eggs. Or milk. Is there anything else we need?”

“Chocolate.” Matt resisted letting his smile slip out as he said it.

“Hey, you said it, not me. But… I’ll add it to the list. I need to let the asteroids do their thing for a couple weeks anyway. I’ll head out tomorrow, restock our pantry for the next year, and maybe grab you a pastry or two. Ryaga’s supposed to have some good bakeries..”

“Sounds like a plan. While you’re gone I’ll try to twiddle my thumbs slightly less than I usually do, and fruitlessly yearn for you to come back.” He turned to look at Luna, lounging in a sunbeam in her cat form. “Luna will miss you terribly, too. She just doesn’t show it as well.”

While he waited for his supplies, Matt changed up his work by mulching rocks with [Earth Manipulation], flying over swathes of land and turning massive, monotonous plains of rock into valleys and hills, into boulders, sand, and dust. Once the atmosphere was in better shape, the next crew would be seeding bacteria and lichen to get the soil-making process started, and having a bit of variety helped there.

He agreed with the Emperor, it was good, honest work. Best of all, it helped with his mana control.

Luna only moved to stay in her sunbeam and out of the dust clouds that floated around.

When Liz got back, Luna lifted her head to briefly glance at her. As Matt was hugging her, a small, gutted fish floated out of Liz’s bag and towards Luna. A flash of movement was all they got, as their manager ate the fish in a single bite and returned to her nap.

Though inefficient, Matt set his AI to a combination of [Create Air] and [Air Manipulation] to direct a torrent of wind outside of his biosphere as he set up his enchanting bench. The mana loss of running it through his AI was, naturally far more than offset by the enchanting gains he’d get from being able to work with his full attention on his project.

After that, he went to work.

Though his grasp of combat-related Tier 15 runes was slowly solidifying, gravity-manipulation runes were not in his limited library. Like all runes of his Tier, calling any enchantment a single rune was a severe oversimplification. It was more a complete language dedicated to a single effect, with its own unique interactions and syntax, interactions, and points of interference. It took him a solid week before he even had a trivial enchantment created, after burning through a lot of his raw materials, and that was by all metrics fast. His mana budget, or lack thereof, helped there, but he was still hoping he could have gotten something useful faster.

With a basic understanding of gravity runes achieved, Matt diverted about a thousand mana per second to his AI to translate the schematics and formations he had access to into something workable at his current skill level. It took a few iterations, but after about a month he’d gotten a design that he could make, would serve his objectives, and could be made with his remaining materials.

What he settled on ended up looking something like a beetle, with a glossy black main body the size of a taxi, and with six appendages for detail work and directing the gravity fields for thrust. Not his finest work, and he had messed up his first two attempts so badly that they weren’t salvageable. But after a month’s worth of prototypes, he had a squadron of six drones ready to do his bidding.

He had to complete the assembly in orbit, though. Ironically for a device made to manipulate gravity, making them outside of freefall would cause several of the runes to malfunction and generally make the physical construction of the devices much finickier. It did make installing the power cores a lot easier, at least, as the ten-million mana stones he was utilizing for a battery were stored in the orbital terraforming cache.

As the last of the hauler beetles hummed into action, Matt almost felt a bit melancholic. Gravity magic was fun, and while intensely irritating at first, the interplay between each rune in the entire formation had grown on him over time. He almost wished he could justify another project utilizing them at the moment, but he simply didn’t have any other experiments to tinker with now.

The hauler drones took off to the outer solar system, with most of them heading to the ice giant’s lagrange points, and Matt watched them go until they faded from sight. His drones would be moving asteroids into orbit around the planet for the next few months, and for the first hour, he was obsessively checking in on them to make sure everything was working as intended. Most of that was thanks to the logic cores he had just copied from the available sources, or he’d have spent decades working out bugs.

Just as he was turning to head back down to the planet, he saw Luna floating alongside him. “Not quite what I expected, though it’s good, worthwhile work. Still a little rough around the edges, but you were improving your technique with each iteration. I’m glad to see you branching out a little into areas where throwing mana at the problem doesn’t give you as large of an edge.”

“I already have a few ideas for how to improve them. I could squeeze another seven percent efficiency out of the propulsion alone.” Matt sighed, checking the readout his [AI] had given him.

“That’s the bane of craftsmen everywhere, Matt. If you get to the end of a big project and find that you’re totally happy with the final product, then you didn’t learn anything along the way and it's time to move on.”

Turning back to the planet, he pinged his wife and saw that she was carving out paths for rivers. It seemed fun enough, and he needed something to do while asteroids were herded around the solar system. And if he could work on the range of his Concept, all the better.

They took their time with it and had fun carving little valleys and nooks where streams could flow and animals could retreat into. They created caves that would be hidden if the giant lake beds they created worked as intended to form hidden waterfalls. They even created an entire tunnel system under a pre-existing mountain range for the fun of it. It would remain to be seen how much would survive the rest of their terraforming, but it was good practice and good fun if nothing else.

Four months later, Matt was hovering in a gorge he had made, letting a veritable river of water and air stream from his hands.

It was meditation week, and he hadn’t moved a muscle in four days.

Luna had probably known from the start, but there was a resonance between his Concept and the task of letting his endless mana flow into the creation of what would eventually become a life-bearing world. Focusing on that feeling helped with Concept development, and he needed all the development he could get in preparation for his Intent, letting himself sink into daydreams and rabbit holes as his mind meandered.

In the area where he was spewing out air, the air pressure was high enough that the water actually remained liquid until it hit the ground, giving him a nice low rumble to help him focus.

It was infinitely better than pure silence, which always seemed to turn oppressive.

A ping from the satellites interrupted him, but it was worth it. Slowly unwinding from his meditation position, he brought out his flying sword and started heading to where Liz and their house were.

He found her sitting with her eyes closed, concentrating over a cauldron of blood which she would occasionally bring out a dash of some ingredient or other to throw in. Matt decided it wasn’t a big priority to get going right now, so he went to make a pot of tea, then sat in a chair to the side of her crafting room to watch Liz work.

Matt’s knowledge of potions was decent, for someone who didn’t specialize in the field, but Liz was actually good at it by all accounts, and it was slightly mesmerizing to watch her work. The blood in the cauldron would boil for a second after she threw in a pinch of aluminum powder, and go briefly clear when she pulled out some leaf from her garden orb and tossed it in. Then she would use [Pressurize] to let some sort of reaction happen under high pressure, all the while she was casting her analysis spells to measure whatever changes she was making. Once the blood had settled down and turned an off shade of red, she levitated it out of the cauldron and fed it into the bracelet Matt had made to give her easy access to her veins without cutting her skin.

Potions were a core part of Liz’s melee fighting, and it took serious work to not only continue to advance while under Path time constraints, but to do so while utilizing a branch of potioncraft that wasn’t well established with millions of years of information backing it.

After letting her spend a few minutes to check whether her latest experiment had worked, Liz pulled out a notebook, wrote something down, and opened her eyes. The moment she did so, Matt thrust a mug of hot tea into her hands, which she happily accepted, and he finally got to talk about the thing he had come here for.

“Want to go throw rocks at the ground?”

Soon after, they were in orbit, with Matt on his flying sword and Liz sitting side saddle on her flying spear. He’d been back up here a few times since his drones had set out, just to refill them on mana between trips, but now, he actually got to reap the fruits of his labor.

The goal: throw asteroids at the planet to sculpt the landscape, and do it without ruining any of their previous work.

Planets were big, and this one hadn’t ever had oceans to sculpt its surface. The interior of the planet was heating back up, slowly, but as a mostly solid mass, it didn’t even have continental plates. The intended maps for the planet included lots of changes to the landscape, and large areas needed to be carved out for oceans and seas.

Throwing asteroids at the planet could allow them to make huge divots on the surface of the world with very little effort, and would be quite a bit more fun compared to doing so manually.

For the next three days, Matt and Liz had a blast flying between the clusters of asteroids that Matt’s drones had deposited in orbit, then slowing them down enough that they would fall and create enormous craters on impact, but not crack the planet. They limited themselves to mile-wide asteroids at a time, as they didn’t want to blast too much of the water and air they had made into space, but it was great fun to watch the huge rocks fall and create lakes of lava and huge clouds of debris.

Most of the time, they made a game of it by trying to aim the asteroids manually, with no AI assistance, and still hit their targets. Matt had an easier time eyeballing the trajectories and actually moving the asteroids, but Liz had better mana control, so in the end, he only barely edged her out on the scoring system they had come up with.

After they ran out of asteroids to use, they just sat there while the planet rotated beneath them, watching the glowing lakes of cooling lava spin past them. The work was far from done, they wouldn’t even see most of it, but they had made their mark on the planet. Matt just imagined what the new inland sea would look like once the craters were filled with water and life.

Matt collected his drones, returned the rechargeable mana stones to the supply cache, then went down to meet Liz at the edge of the nearest lava lake to their house.

Together, they set up a little picnic spot where they could breathe and talk normally, and ate a light lunch that they roasted over the edge of the lava patch. Sausages, toasted bread, and a dessert of smores browned to perfection.

For the next week, they went around to the craters, smoothing out patches where they weren’t quite as precise on their impact placement as they had wished, and shaping the ground while it was still hot enough to move easily under their magic.

Once things were mostly settled, as much as they could do in the first ten months, they started working on what Matt had been waiting for.

Aperology.