Chapter 719: Setting The Rune [Bonus - ]

Chapter 719: Setting The Rune [Bonus Chapter]

"Understood, my Lord." His stylus went scritch-scritch-scritch! across the page. "...And what aesthetic direction would you prefer for the re-furnishing?"

"Turn it into my personal executive suite for when I’m back in the city... Replace that absurd desk with something simple. Clean black basalt, or polished sky-iron... Put a proper strategy table in the center with runic projection plates for territorial mapping and over there, in the western alcove by the glass..."

She pointed at a wide sunlit recess currently occupied by a cluster of ugly bronze statues of mining picks.

"...tear out the stone floor and install an indoor mineral pool. Deep enough to soak in, lined with smooth river slate, heated by an adjustable thermal conduit... I spend too much time walking through the Sovereign Realm and fighting terrors to sit in stiff leather chairs every time I’m in Central City... If I’m going to review production quotas, I’m going to do it in hot spring water."

The Secretary’s hand hesitated for a microsecond.

In his head the numbers had already started to scream... tolerances, load factors, the price of titanium by the ton.

...He would need a plumber, three engineers, and possibly a priest.

An indoor soaking pool on the seventy-fourth floor of a commercial foundry tower was an engineering nightmare.

It meant rerouting high-pressure aqueducts and bracing the floor joists with titanium which was why it was absurd and flatly against standard corporate zoning law.

’B-but...’

He looked at Kara’s cold unblinking violet eyes.

He looked at the empty sleeve pinned across her chest as he remembered how casually she’d bullied a Council Head about two minutes ago.

’I can’t say that.’

He swallowed and pressed his stylus down harder.

"An indoor mineral pool with thermal regulation in the western alcove," the Secretary confirmed, without one shred of protest. "It shall be complete in forty-eight hours, Lord Vespera... I’ll contract the city’s finest masonry teams to ensure the load-bearing tolerances are absolute."

"Good man," Kara smiled.

"Does the pool require a diving board, my Lord?"

"Let’s not get ahead of ourselves."

"Of course... A railing, then."

"Yes that, and a towel rack wouldn’t be bad Alfred."

"A heated towel rack?"

"Obviously."

By the glass, Solenne had both hands pressed over her mouth.

"You can soak too, you know," Kara added over her shoulder. "Chief Artificer’s privileges..."

"I-I don’t have a swimming dress!" Solenne squeaked, and every one of her tails fluffed at once.

Kara glanced around the room once more, and a sudden brilliant realization hit Silas’s mind like a thunderclap.

’Wait a second,’ he thought, and his Gold Core hummed with quiet calculating excitement. ’The layout... The altitude... The isolation... This isn’t just an executive office... This is the perfect site!

His thoughts drifted to the Umbral Basin, to the dense forests and mist-veiled peaks of the mountains.

In the center of his territory stood the Keep, in his office, he had already placed the tile that Musvi gave him.

That tile was a masterwork of pre-Apocalypse spatial architecture... Once it was set into the ground of that specific spot territory, it acted like an immovable homing beacon like a cosmic lighthouse burning quietly in the spiritual fabric of the world.

Connecting to something like that used to require an absurdly complex fixed gateway that took years to build and millions of credits to stabilize.

’It already had a connection point but who knows where it was...?’

Silas didn’t have to rely on normal engineering as he had the System and, more importantly, he had Rowenna.

Blessed Land’s Grand Runemaster was a terrifying genius, an S-Rank master of the craft.

’Rowenna’s so cute... She needs a really good reward.’ Silas thought, If he was going anywhere really important next then he was going to invite her along for sure.

She’d made the flawless disguise runes that would let his party walk through Central City without tripping a single ward, and had shaved four inches off Morwenna’s chest in the process, which Morwenna took very personally.

She’d also worked with his guidance through the system interface to overhaul the anchor tile from top to bottom and together they’d built the Receiver.

Ordinary spatial gates were rigid and fragile and tied to fixed geographic conduits; however Silas could now open a Receiver point wherever he pleased.

...All he needed was a stable surface, a quiet room, as well as a focused pulse of his own Gold Core mana to seal the link back to the Keep and Rowenna’s protection was miraculous.

She’d woven a recursive seven-layered biometric ward right into the lattice.

The Receiver was inert to the outside world.

It would only wake for someone who belonged to Blessed Land, an official Troop or Hero whose soul was bound in the territorial registry.

The one exception was an outsider with a Blessed Land member’s mana flowing into them at the exact moment of transit.

An enemy who forced the runes, or a spy channeling raw mana into them to trace the coordinates back to the Umbral Basin, wouldn’t get an answer.

The recursive loop would collapse the conduit instantly as Silas was fairly sure at least one Council Head would try.

He was also fairly sure it would be the short one.

’It really is nice having a Grand Runemaster in the territory,’ Silas thought with quiet pride. ’A direct untouchable highway from the center of Central City straight into the Keep.

And this office, high above the industrial district, under the World Council’s administrative protection and guarded by his freshly acquired manufacturing tracks, was the safest staging ground he could ask for.

Kara turned on her heel and fixed her violet eyes on a pristine stretch of dark mahogany paneling along the eastern wall, hidden from the panoramic windows by a thick stone support column.

"Secretary."

"Yes, my Lord?"

She pointed with her right index finger.

"See that section between the pillar and the archive door? From now on that patch of wall is off limits to everyone... No painters... No cleaners. No decorators. If anyone drives a nail into it or sets a chisel against it, they’re dismissed and remanded to the Council pens before sundown. Understood?"

The Secretary blinked at the completely ordinary piece of dark wood, then bowed deep.

"It shall be entered in the building’s permanent structural covenants immediately, Lord Vespera. The entire eastern perimeter will be designated an executive restricted zone."

"And the pool?"

"The pool is not near the wall, my Lord."

"That’s good, I was worried."

"Shall I post guards at the wall?"

"No. Guards draw eyes... Plain staff, and nobody goes near it."

"Plain staff," the Secretary repeated while writing. "Understood."

She turned to Solenne, who’d been standing nearby with all nine tails tucked behind her calves, watching with wide curious eyes.

"Wait here a moment, Solenne. Both of you, stand back by the desk."

"Y-Yes, my Lord!" The kitsune scurried backward until her boots hit the edge of the rug, ears twitching with obedience.

Kara stepped up to the dark wall.

Her pinned sleeve hung motionless against her chest, and the silver-leaf crest on her lapel caught the dim light.

Silas closed his eyes for one heartbeat.

Deep in his dantian, his Gold Core began to turn in a slow heavy powerful rhythm.

He reached into his soul-space, grasped the spell of the Receiver blueprint that Rowenna had branded into his spiritual pathways, and a sound rolled through his bones.

Kara lifted her lone right hand and pressed her bare palm flat on the mahogany.

Huuuuuuum!

The wood seemed to drink her in.

From the center of her palm, thin brilliant threads of emerald and silver light burst outward!

Ssssssssss!

The Secretary gasped, and his spectacles nearly fell off his face again.

"It’s beautiful," Solenne breathed.

The light didn’t paint itself onto the surface like a normal light would.

It snaked through the grain of the wood like living mercury and burned microscopic hairline channels into the timber, with terrifying precision.

Glyphs of runes flared up, recursive spiral nodes and delicate compass arcs and interlocking containment bands twisting like winding ivy.

They spread into a perfect vertical rectangle six feet high and four feet wide which was the silhouette of an arched doorway.

Clack!

A central rune, the seal of Blessed Land, shaped like a sheltering bough around a silver star, detonated in the middle of the archway with a muted flash of pure starlight.

Snap!

It sounded like an iron lock clicking home in a fortress vault as the glow retracted and sank into the wood and disappeared under the polished cedar wax.

To the naked eye the wall looked completely ordinary.

The dark mahogany kept its lustrous finish with not one scorch mark and not one trace of residue in the air either.

The most sensitive detection crystals in the city’s monitoring arrays would have registered nothing but the building’s heating conduits but to Silas’s senses the link was alive.

’This is good...’

He felt it humming at the back of his mind, a steady clean unbreakable tether reaching across hundreds of miles, through the folds of the Sovereign Realm, and into his officer.

The Receiver was set so he allowed himself three whole seconds of smugness.

Kara stepped back half a pace and admired the seamless finish with a quiet smirk.

’Rowenna, you magnificent genius,’ Silas praised silently. ’Not even a trace of mana bleed... It’s asclean as a whistle.’

He looked over his shoulder.

Solenne was staring at the blank wall with her mouth in a perfect "O" and her nine tails swaying in slow starry-eyed wonder.

It was the way she looked at her own best machines, which from her was the highest praise in the world.

Beside her, the Secretary looked as though his entire understanding of dimensional engineering had just gone through a meat grinder, though he wisely kept his mouth shut and his quill still.

"My Lord?" Solenne whispered, ears tilting forward. "Was that... did you just...?"

"Is it a door?" Solenne asked.

"It’s a wall that likes me," Kara said, with an easy confident smile. "Just setting up our private express lane... Wait here a minute. Both of you."

The Secretary opened his mouth. "My Lord, in the event of a structural inspection—"

"They’ll find a wall."

"Yes, my Lord and if someone asks where you are?"

"I’m in a meeting."

"With whom, my Lord?"

"The wall, duh. What a stupid question..."

"Yes, my Lord."

’Let me try it out,’ Silas thought, curiosity winning. ’Rowenna said the handshake should be instant on the creator’s mark. Let’s see if the Keep’s tea is still warm.’

Silas sighed.

’If I mess this up,’ Silas thought, ’I end up inside a wall, and I really don’t want to explain that to Rowenna.’

Kara turned back to the wall.

She stepped forward, lifted her lone right hand and rested her palm flat in the middle of the invisible archway as she closed her eyes and sent one concentrated pulse of Gold Core mana into the wood.

Vuuuuuuum!

This time the runes didn’t flare.

The air inside the four-foot boundary just shivered and turned into a thin rippling sheet of translucent silver water, like a liquid mirror reflecting the office.

A cool breeze drifted through it that smelled of pine needles and wet moss and the fresh mountain rain of the Umbral Basin, and it brushed Kara’s black bangs.

The silver water surged forward and wrapped around her midnight-blue suit like a mantle of liquid silk.

Flash!

There was no sound of displaced air and no thunderous boom as in less than a single heartbeat the light collapsed to a microscopic point, and the black-haired woman was gone, leaving only a scent of rain in the air where she’d stood.

...

The silver watery light of the Receiver dissolved without a whisper as Kara White stepped onto the dark seamless flagstones of Silas’s private office on the top floor of the Keep, and the air hit her like a cold drink after a long day.