CHAPTER 1463: CHAPTER 1462: WATER

"You think you’ve figured it out?"

Brushing away some more of the soil, I took a deep breath of the crisp morning air and nodded, not looking up at the Elf above me and instead focusing on what I was doing, which was the Ritual Circle I was most confident in succeeding.

I needed to tap into the aquifers and hopefully begin filling this hole Anput created for me with water, all without using one of the more expensive and nice Water Crystals that we had stowed away; they could be used but I was going to be stingy with them, because if this worked I had bigger and better plans for something like a big Water Crystal.

"All I need to do is coax the water up from the aquifer and into this Ritual Circle, where it will then interact with the mana in the Ritual Circle to hopefully empower itself and ’grow larger’. Taking one drop and making a dozen through some rather complex shenanigans... I might be too hopeful here."

"Perhaps, but ’complex shenanigans’ tends to be what most of the magical wonders of the world today are. You never know if it works until you try it, and if it doesn’t... you still learned something or other for your next attempt."

Setting the circular clay tablet down amongst the soil, I began to scratch the runes into place with the Magic Pen to get this Ritual Circle completed, all while Mother Ria watched from nearby, taking this moment to be away from the very noisy and active children.

While I was here the others were finishing up the inside of the house, working on all of the various rooms that I wouldn’t have much interest in save for one of the smaller spots that I had claimed as my own, which I would work on later.

Anput needed to get her forge set up properly so that she could begin unwinding while Leone was likely doing the same for her lab, though where Anput would be making random things the Vampire had told us she was going to be concocting a vast supply of potions that we would ’need’.

Things like healing potions, stamina potions, mana potions and more that would find their way into a storage area just in case; on top of that she was going to brew a few different weaker batches to trade with the merchants when they arrived, alleviating some of the money troubles we had.

We didn’t have a surplus of hard money to fall back on, so if we could save ourselves from spending any coin then we would try and do just that whenever and however we could.

Nirinia and Adelina were going around the land and marking out where things would go, driving stone stakes into the earth to designate various buildings or roads so that we could know what we needed to build here in the immediate future.

The plan we had come up with was entirely center focused for this city, starting with our compound and then moving on to the various other buildings that would surround our home; we had a lot we needed to do before the month was over, so each of us had a lot of work cut out for us each day.

My part was primarily to worry about the land itself rather than the buildings, and that was currently being shown by the work I was doing in trying to get the water situation figured out; when this was something I was confident in I could then move on to figuring out where the waterways should be.

For now though I was focused on this tablet, where each line was painstakingly etched as cleanly as possible as I ensured it was done perfect; each line took quite some time despite being ’simple’, and as such I didn’t finish for nearly ten minutes despite the tablet being barely two feet by one foot.

Not a lot of space for something so important, and yet as I pushed it into the soil and gestured for Mother Ria to help ’fire’ the clay into something more permanent I was able to watch as it began to do... something.

Giving it that initial jolt of mana to kickstart its function, I stepped back and began to pray that it would just work without issue immediately, the soft blue glow that emanated from the runes giving me some sweet hope.

The soil around the tablet began to darken as it grew wet, and the tablet itself was soon coated in a thin film of water... but that was it; for a few long seconds that was all that happened, and I was very disappointed that I had failed this.

Another few seconds passed and I felt a bit of anger too, but then it was washed away as the soil began to ’sweat’, exuding a little bit of liquid that gave me hope again; it was a very slow process apparently, and while I would prefer something quicker I was just happy it worked.

"This would definitely do better with the Water Crystal powering it up, but this is... decent. At least it works."

"It does indeed work, and remember... you made it to be constant, so it’s actually preferable that it is slow. If it was faster you might end up flooding something... though there are crops that would benefit from that, aren’t there?"

We began to chat about random things as we continued to observe my work, the gradual increase of liquid in the shallow yet wide hole Anput had quickly made for me making me happier and happier with every passing second.

How I was going to improve upon this and make sure I didn’t inevitably create some ’natural’ disaster that would occur sometime down the line was one of the main topics that we were discussing, but for now I was more focused on where I would be putting these new ’wells’ and how to potentially connect them together... or how to create legitimate wells for the citizens to use freely...