Emerilia Series Box Set 4
Page 56
With that said, Dave appeared in front of the portal in a flash and stepped through it.
Dave looked upon the pure darkness that was all around him. The portal gave off a faint light as he looked around. The faint light was enough for his high-leveled night vision to pierce through that inky darkness, revealing that he was in a portal control area, just like the ones on the ice planet. These centers were made to control who came in and left through the portal.
Malsour appeared through the portal, right behind Dave.
With a wave of his hand, once again Dave and Malsour disappeared from their spot, finding themselves on what looked like a balcony.
To their right and to their left, there were golden lights that were eating into the walls of the asteroid. These were the miners that had been created in the ice planet’s factories. They moved as one solid entity, creating a tunnel through the massive ten-kilometer-long asteroid. Other miners that had come from the ice planet later were cutting in straight ahead before angling to follow their fellow miners.
Dave’s senses spread out through his Touch of the Land spell, finding the different areas of the asteroid. There was a fueling station for the miners, as well as three fusion reactors that had been laid down along the side of the asteroid Dave and Malsour stood on. There was no gravity within the asteroid yet but Dave was unconsciously using gravity magic so that they didn’t go flying away.
“Okay, looks like the reactors are just running at around five percent of their total output. Do you want to get with the soul gem constructs? We’ve got that shipyard plan from Sato and his people—we can use that in order to create this place faster and modify it as we need to. Then we also need to make soul gem factories. I’m thinking not the normal soul gem factories, but rather we take something from the citadels—see if we can’t create hybrid soul gems, linking together multiple vault gem-sized soul gems and then interlinking them with magical coding. If it works out, then it can create the kind of soul gems we need for our current power requirements.”
“I can do that. What are you going to be working on?” Malsour asked.
“I’ll get some of the soul gem constructs and I’ll start them working on making asteroid miners and spaceships to move material within the asteroid fields. Also I’m going to hook up some more powerful sensor units so we can figure out what kind of materials are hanging out around us. Then I can start working on the warships, proper warships, not just the arks that are within Emerilia and the moon,” Dave said.
“Aren’t you building battleships on the moon? Don’t they count?”
“They do, kind of. I modified them a bit. They’re not really true battleships but more of missile boats. If this goes down, we have a lot of targets to hit at once if we want to survive. Those missiles can take out a fair amount of the Jukal’s infrastructure in one shot,” Dave said.
“Okay. I’ll put down the soul gem constructs and have them run power lines out to the berths first,” Malsour said.
“Thanks. Well, we better get started then.” Dave was standing there one moment; the next, he disappeared, taking with him the artificial gravity.
Malsour had to hurriedly reach out to the wall, willing the stone there to create handholds. “And we’re making gravity and inertia runing after that so everyone else isn’t spinning off into space!” Malsour yelled to Dave, who was at a berth a few hundred meters away.
“What did you say?” Dave yelled back.
Malsour was about to yell back but instead waved his hand, giving up on it, and pushed himself along the wall toward the fusion powerplants, as he passed, ladders appeared along the walls and the rough outline of the walls firmed up, looking like polished stone.
Dave turned to the cart next to him. He opened up the storage crates, finding soul gem base constructs inside. He pulled them out one by one. As he touched them, a three-dimensional picture of what they were set to appeared in front of him. As he cut and pasted in different plans he had into the base construct, these images changed.
There were two types of automated asteroid miner. One had a simple drill bit that was covered in Dark Mana that would disrupt the bonds between inanimate objects like rock and metal; the drill section would grind these apart. Gravity scoops on either side would pull the materials into storage containers to the rear of the asteroid miner, which could be switched out.
It was covered in a variety of repulsors that would allow it to move through space and through asteroids. There were sensor units that would be built into the body of the miner so that it knew where it was at all times and, as it was mining, it could pick up the different materials that were in its path.
This miner was meant for two things: to open up asteroids for the second miner to get into it and to also be used outside of asteroids to cut into different ore veins. This miner used Dark Mana instead of Light so that it would be harder to detect. Unless someone was specifically looking for the miner, then they would have a hard time finding it, between the Dark Mana drillbit and the amazingly effective stealth runes that covered the exterior of its hull.
The soul gem constructs consumed the power that they had stored within them, making the base structure of the different things that had been programmed into them.
The second miner didn’t have these stealth runes. It was nearly ten times the size and it was hooked up directly to storage chests that would stay behind it, ready to be changed out by carts and cargo shuttles.
This had multiple Light drills that would create a beam of golden light that would cut through the interior of an asteroid at an alarming rate. These would be as fast as twenty of the original miners that were running through the asteroid. With it, hollowing out an asteroid would be much more efficient, taking much less time.
While it cut out the main thoroughfare of the shipyard that would be inside the asteroid, the smaller miners would be able to cut out the hallways and slips that would run down the asteroid shipyard.
Dave finished making ten soul gem constructs of the first miner and two of the large-scale miner. As he finished with them, they would disappear from his hands as he teleported them across the asteroid to the few catwalks that jutted out from the wall that the portal corridors and fusion plants were located behind.
These small little sections of rock that jutted outwards were about ten meters wide and one hundred long and were spread out every five hundred meters. These were what the slips of the shipyard would be built out from, the slips would then hold one or more ships as they were being held at readiness or were being worked on
It would take some time before all of the slips were filled with working ships. But now with the soul gem constructs, all it took was enough power. Their fusion plants were operational and the ice planet was refining enough fuel to meet the demands that Pandora’s Box’s creators needed.
They were stockpiling more for the fusion reactors that would be built within the different warships. The Mana expenditure was simply astronomical.
Once he had finished with the different base soul gem constructs that were now growing where the slips would be constructed, he started forming the cargo shuttles. These were automated creations that would handle most of the cargo within the system. So, Dave went ahead and put in the right coding so that Jeeves could command them.
They would be covered in the ovaloid-looking repulsor units and drive units that would allow them to cross space. Its rear section was one entire box of holding. They could be chained together, much like how train carts were attached to one another.
The shuttle could drop them off and then attach all of the filled containers and fly back toward the main asteroid mining base, dropping off the storage boxes to be separated down by ore and then stuffed into automated carts that would take these back to the refinery on the ice planet to be processed.
The shuttles were, like the miners that would operate outside the asteroids, covered in stealth magical coding. Even heat exchangers were being put in to simply make sure that the ambient tempera
ture around the shuttles wasn’t more or less than the surrounding area.
If someone was able to plot where the shuttles were, then they could figure out where the bases were within the asteroid belt.
Dave made three of these, teleporting them out to different areas to allow them to grow. Dave looked toward where he and Malsour had entered the center of the shipyard. The soul gem constructs powered by the fusion reactors of the asteroid base were now racing across the floor with runic lines in them, guiding the power outward. They spread out at an incredible speed, covering the floors and then reaching out across the interior of the shipyard. They reached the slips, diverting with the runic lines of power leading the way.
As they touched the different soul gem constructs that were resting against the slips, they started to grow at an incredible rate.
The soul gem construct from the fusion plant brought with it gravity and strip lighting as it raced toward either end of the shipyard, where the miners were currently hard at work.
Dave held a soul gem construct in his hands. Above it, there was a sharp-looking ship, with missile tubes and gun tubes that looked like bristles. The drive units on it were larger and the Mana barrier projectors were massive.
This was what the battleships in the moon should have been. It was a melding of the magical coding and technology that Dave knew of and matched with information he had got from Bob about the Jukal ships, as well as human ships and the information that Sato and his people had shared.
From all of this amassed information, Jeeves, Steve, Dave, Malsour, and Bob had created something that demanded respect. This melded technologies that the Emerilia AI would have freaked out over and that Dave wasn’t willing to use even in his secret bases within Emerilia or its moon.
The soul gem construct in Dave’s hands disappeared. Reappearing in a slip, it grew rapidly. From it, support beams that ran the length of the ship creating its “spine,” extended; other supports spread outward, creating the superstructure of the ship.
Dave created a half-dozen more of the soul gem constructs and sent them outward into the various slips.
In these slips, nearly twenty different items were being created at the same time.
Dave’s focus was not on the miners, nor the cargo shuttles or the impressive battleships. Instead, it was on the simple ring-looking three-dimensional image that floated above the soul gem he had just modified.
The Jukal made hundreds of portals. Let’s see if I can make one or two.
Dave lowered the soul gem construct into a groove at his feet. Runic lines flared around the soul gem construct as the asteroid base’s soul gem interior poured power into Dave’s soul gem construct.
From the catwalk, much slower than the beams or the other soul gem constructs, a base started to appear—a base, that looked similar to a portal’s.
His notifications, which had been blinking for a while but he’d forgotten about, now once again blinked rapidly.
“Seems that I’ve churned up a notification storm.”
Dave opened his notifications, blinking at the number of prompts.
“Lovely—stat points.” Dave rubbed his hands together and went through the screens.
Quest Completed: Librarian Level 7
Use research to prove a theory (8/3)
Rewards: Unlock Level 8 Quest
+10 to all stats
700,000 Experience
Quest Completed: Librarian Level 8
Use research to prove a theory (8/4)
Rewards: Unlock Level 9 Quest
+10 to all stats
800,000 Experience
Quest Completed: Librarian Level 9
Use research to prove a theory (8/5)
Rewards: Unlock Level 10 Quest
+10 to all stats
900,000 Experience
Quest Completed: Librarian Level 10
Use research to prove a theory (8/6)
Rewards: Unlock Level 11 Quest
+10 to all stats
1,00,000 Experience
Quest Completed: Librarian Level 11
Use research to prove a theory (8/7)
Rewards: Unlock Level 12 Quest
+10 to all stats
1,100,000 Experience
Quest Completed: Librarian Level 12
Use research to prove a theory (8/8)
Rewards: Unlock Level 13 Quest
+10 to all stats
1,200,000 Experience (5,700,000 Experience accumulated)
Class: Librarian
Status:
Level 12
Effects:
+120 to all stats
Read 10% faster
Understand 15% more of the information that you read
Quest: Librarian Level 13
Use research to prove a theory (8/9)
Rewards: Unlock Level 14 Quest
Increase to stats
Dave turned pensive.
“These must be not only from starting work on the portal but actually the anchors and moving portals around as well as my own teleporting around.” As Dave stopped talking, his eyes went wide. “Wait. If, if I had six theories I researched and proved, what were theories about?”
Dave’s voice shook a bit as he continued through his notifications.
Quest Completed: Master of Space and Time Level 15
Come up with new possible theory (6/3)
Rewards: Unlock Level 16 quest
+15 to Willpower
+15 to Intelligence
+15 to Endurance
+15 to Agility
1,500,000 Experience
Quest Completed: Master of Space and Time Level 16
Come up with new possible theory (6/4)
Rewards: Unlock Level 17 quest
+15 to Willpower
+15 to Intelligence
+15 to Endurance
+15 to Agility
1,600,000 Experience (3,100,000 Experience accumulated)
Quest Completed: Master of Space and Time Level 17
Come up with new possible theory (6/5)
Rewards: Unlock Level 18 quest
+15 to Willpower
+15 to Intelligence
+15 to Endurance
+15 to Agility
1,700,000 Experience (4,800,000 Experience accumulated)
Quest Completed: Master of Space and Time Level 18
Come up with new possible theory (6/6)
Rewards: Unlock Level 19 quest
+15 to Willpower
+15 to Intelligence
+15 to Endurance
+15 to Agility
1,800,000 Experience (6,600,000 Experience accumulated)
Class: Master of Space and Time
Status:
Level 18
Effects:
Greater understanding of Space and Time
+270 to Willpower
+270 to Intelligence
+270 to Endurance
+270 to Agility
Quest: Master of Space and Time Level 19
Come up with new possible theory (6/7)
Rewards: Unlock Level 20 quest
Increase to stats
Dave could feel as his body was already starting to change. Cold sweat fell down his back. He’d had four theories related to space and time that he’d proved; there were still two more theories that he’d proved right.
He quickly sent Malsour a message saying where he was as he felt a torrent of power only barely being held back. Knowing how dumping in stats could overload a person, Dave didn’t dare to think about trying to keep working with all the changes that were happening in his body.
He quickly continued onward, a mix of excitement and nervousness.
Quest Completed: Master of Gravitational Anomalies Level 11
Come up with new possible theory (4/3)
Rewards: Unlock Level 12 quest
+10 to all stats
1,100,000 Experience
Quest Completed: Master of Gravitational Anomalies Level 12
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br /> Come up with new possible theory (4/4)
Rewards: Unlock Level 13 quest
+10 to all stats
1,200,000 Experience (2,300,000 Experience accumulated)
Class: Master of Gravitational Anomalies
Status:
Level 12
Effects:
Greater understanding of Gravitational Anomalies
+120 to all stats
Quest: Master of Gravitational Anomalies Level 13
Come up with new possible theory (4/5)
Rewards: Unlock Level 14 quest
Increase to stats
Level 255
You have reached Level 261; you have 30 stat points to use.
Dave’s character sheet showed up as power started to surge through every part of his body.
Character Sheet
Name:
David Grahslagg
Gender:
Male
Level:
261
Class:
Dwarven Master Smith, Friend of the Grey God, Bleeder, Librarian, Aleph Engineer, Weapons Master, Champion Slayer, Skill Creator, Mine Manager, Master of Space and Time, Master of Gravitational Anomalies
Race:
Human/Dwarf
Alignment:
Neutral Good
Unspent points: 30
Health: