Chapter 1053: Chapter 1053 - Taming the Wall - Silence
General mid-level construction tamers did their best...
Unfortified wood and stone were the first category, available with a captain’s order for minor infrastructure projects without additional review.
Regardless, Ren also obtained permission from the sergeant, through Jessy and the "castle connection" and thanks to the experimental items, they liked the test equipment that was being sent through and was courtesy of the new arrival’s bureaucratic skills, that Red youngling and his "management work".
More runes and the paperwork for those had gone through separately.
Vehn signed the request with the efficiency of someone processing documents.
"What for?" he asked, in the relaxed almost dismissive tone of someone who had the right to know but no particular urgency about the answer.
"The new runes we received yesterday are for installing an exterior tower," said Ren. "A hundred meters from the perimeter."
Vehn looked at him.
"Exterior to the perimeter..."
"Yes, a hundred meters... To break the waves and defend our section more easily and automatically. Or that’s what the new rune-technology manual says."
Vehn held an additional second.
"They’re similar to the castle’s trial runes in the arrows," Ren added. "I submitted another request for experimental materials for field testing. It’s in the annexes of the previous order."
The annexes existed because Larissa had written them, and they were sufficiently extensive that verifying them completely in real time was a task Vehn was not going to execute in this moment.
"A very dense management class," said Vehn.
"Yes," said Ren, with the calm of someone who had learned that even at the wall, credentials from the academy were respected and rarely questioned.
Vehn signed.
♢♢♢♢
The tower stood thirty meters when they finished it, which was considerably shorter than what Ren would have wanted and exactly as tall as what the available soldiers could build without him contributing so much that he gave himself away.
At least the construction had the solidity of work done by people who had spent enough time with physical materials in wall conditions that the building itself was efficient, no wasted effort, no uncertain joints, the kind of structural confidence that came from doing the same kind of thing many times. The base was wider than a thirty-meter tower strictly required, because Ren had calculated the levels of impact the structure would need to hold if the theory being tested proved correct, and the base reflected that calculation rather than the standard specification for something this height.
He had accepted the constraint the same way he accepted most constraints at the wall: by calculating how much was achievable within it rather than spending time on what wasn’t.
Wood and stone, not the reinforced bright mineral that composed the main wall. Easier to requisition, easier to justify in the paperwork, and sufficient for the purpose.
The runes came after the structure was standing, he installed them at the top while the soldiers who had built it watched from below.
Ren worked with the slowness and precision that the work required, every placement measured against the geometric pattern he was building rather than against where the previous rune had gone. Extreme, millimetric attention he gave that kind of work, which was not very different from the attention he gave everything else except that it was slightly slower, slightly more precise, and completely quiet.
The soldiers who had participated in the construction observed with the look people had when they recognized they were watching something they didn’t fully understand, paired with enough practical judgment to know the person doing it understood it completely.
Nobody asked questions while he worked. The focused silence around that kind of work was a form of respect he had learned to recognize across different contexts.
There were three types of runes extra now, each with a specific function in the circuit.
The first absorbed ambient mana the way roots absorbed water: passively, continuously, without requiring any active operator once installed.
Ren had found this principle by reading through the system of cores and pedestals in the Starweaver ruin, which though still sealed in its final stretch had given him the pedestals that kept the white and black hearts running without wearing down. The geometry of that system had told him something about passive absorption that he had been sitting with ever since.
Pedestals that had kept the white and black hearts active without wearing down.
The second were related to the simplest seal-activation runes, the first kind he had publicly demonstrated repairing years ago, but in his hands turned again toward a different application.
Instead of triggering a specific seal, he activated the mana in the coiled wooden core of the structure itself, converting the tower into something that responded to what the first runes had been collecting.
The wood had to be coiled; this was not something the wall’s people understood easily, but it was needed for converting it into something that responded to the mana the first runes had absorbed.
The third drew on what Ren had learned from working with the purple crystal fragments: specifically, the method of recognizing corruption and converting it into elemental energy in combination with directed elemental mana.
Something like what Orion had done with the purple crystals to amplify elemental power, but the purpose here was conversion rather than amplification.
Once the circuit between all three closed, the tower stopped being a tower in the inert sense.
"Is that doing what I think it’s doing?" Dunn asked, watching the first movements of roots working their way outward from the base; slow, deliberate, searching the direction of whatever mana signature they had been told to follow.
"It feeds on the surrounding ambient mana from the top. I put it up high so we won’t approach it easily, since it pulls a little from our mana as well. Corrupted creatures that touch the roots are the only kind that will come looking in this direction," Ren said. "It’s not invincible. But it’s not something mutants will find easy to ignore either."
"And you got all of this through bureaucracy as well."
"Experimental materials permits have a fairly broad scope lately. The castle wants people to learn to use the new rune technologies, some new rune technologies that ordinary people can learn to use... so the authorizations for high-brightness crystals are more available than they used to be. The crystals are high-brightness rank and expensive... But it just required connecting the right requests."
Dunn looked at the tower for a moment longer, then looked at Ren with the expression of someone who had reached the outer edge of what they were going to actively investigate.
The management class was the explanation he had. It would remain the explanation he used until something gave him a concrete reason to change it, and so far nothing had come close to that.
♢♢♢♢
They waited for the mutants.
The tower absorbed ambient mana with the steadiness of something built for exactly that purpose, and the territory outside the wall, while not dense with it, was generating enough to keep the structure running indefinitely. The roots grew outward without stopping, feeling their way across the ground at the pace of something that had all the time it needed.
The mutant creatures didn’t come.
The territory stayed quiet in a way that didn’t feel like the quiet between incursions. Incursion quiet had a texture to it, a kind of held tension in the ambient mana that suggested things were present but not yet moving.
This was different; the presence itself was absent, the territory empty in a way that had no precedent in the recent pattern.
Garret watched the horizon with the expression he had when silence was a tactical data point rather than a good sign.
"The territory is empty. Maybe we actually eliminated all of them," he said. Not quite committed to it as a statement.
"No," Ren said.
"Are they hiding then? Doing this on purpose?"
"I think so."
Garret let that sit for a moment.
"Waiting for what?"
Ren had an answer forming, but it was incomplete, and an incomplete answer in this specific context was worse than no answer; it would direct attention toward a conclusion he wasn’t ready to defend yet.
"I don’t know yet," he said.
Garret accepted that with the patience of someone who had watched, over the past weeks, that "not yet" from Red Pathfinder had a reliable follow-up within a few days. Fast enough that the wait had a foreseeable end.
So he went back to watching the horizon.
But a message arrived at midday, and it came through the wrong channel.
A message arrived at midday.
Not the wall’s standard communication lines. Through the direct route the castle had established specifically for Ren; a fast bird that risked his cover, carrying a letter with Selphira’s signature at the top and Julius’s at the close.
That particular combination was the one they used when both parties had aligned on the content of the message and needed the recipient to understand, without additional context, that both had agreed to it.
Ren read it once.
He put it away and walked to find Vehn.
"I need to leave with the strongest soldiers in the sector," he said.
Vehn gave him the standard look.
"How long?"
"I don’t know yet."
"Emergency in another sector?"
"Yes."
