log 008

Staying at the fort for the last couple of weeks and I can see that the fort is beginning to show its deficiencies. The fort might be a work of art but the only reason for this is the way that it has been constructed. the fort itself leaves a lot to be desired. you can essentially call it half of an building, with only the skeleton of the building constructed.

the remaining things which one can take for granted in case of other buildings, such as environment control formations all are absent here and to anybody even a little versed in such kind of things, it is obvious that our present position is going to be very shitty.

the one thing that everybody forgets about the issue here is that it is not the enemy that is our main threat but the environment. after all it is more likely that person is going to freeze to death than fight an enemy. That means that The main threat that seems to affect those in these forts is the cold. Every soldier here essentially resembles a ball with the way that they are covered in coats. not like it is going to help us a lot. you can think of our present situation like us sitting in a ocean of ice mana. Our life mana is like a boat in this ocean, protecting us from the worst. The soldiers are essentially flimsy plank that might not even survive a single trip here and I much closer to the fisherman boat, capable of surviving easily if things are calm, but I am equally likely to drown here.

that is why this place is such an annoyance to handle and why this fort seems like a stupid idea. That is why these soldiers have to wear a surprisingly large number of coats inscribed with formations inscribed into isolate them from the ice mana outside. They certainly won't be able to fight in those coats.

While these soldiers are presently in a very crappy situation, I have something more important that I need to focus on. My main focus right now is to make sure that I don't the fort because I had to fight in it at my full strength.

Anyways Shamon has been spending the last week trying to manage the particular problem as well as he can, so i am sure that he can do that for a week or more. After that I think I will have a decent enough fix in place that shamon can focus on more combat worthy matters.

At least on that front I have pretty decent news to share, I have decided what spells I am going to inscribe onto the formation. I would have liked to claim that it was my own work, but this particular formation of mine is actually a druidic formation that is actually used by the druids to grow copper bark trees. Copper bark trees are supposed to be trees that grow from any part of their body, as long as they are placed in particular formations that provide them with nourishment.

Such kind of formations is literally the core of the druidic society. A druidic village will have one such formation acting as the core protecting an entire forest and the druids would protect this core formation. The older the druidic village is the stronger the druids are. If this formation of mine were to succeed it would be enough to act as the core for a druidic village, you know. Not a very strong village, but still it would be a village. Also, I can't predict how useful it will be able to work in such a hostile environment.

There is also the added benefit that it can act quite similar to an environment control formation. at the very least the formation will make the fort have similar conditions to a place where copper bark can grow, which is going to be quite warm and humid. It is actually a fascinating topic, since my formation is being supplied with majorly with elemental mana that certainly won't be able to increase the temperature, but still copper bark is able to do this. It is my master's theory that druids have somehow managed to embed microscopic formations well versed in elemental comversion in every inch of copper branch somehow that helps it regulate the weather. He has yet to prove that hypothesis of his. I am starting to realise that I am rambling about this topic. To put it into simple terms, there is something in the copper bark that allows for this environment to be created.

So shamon will not need to manage it for very long, maybe two months at most after which the environment is not an issue to be dealt with. That is a good thing since I would rather that the man focus on the creatures coming to kill us.

That is not a matter that I am going to be achieving any time soon, my present estimates put me at nearly two months to complete this particular task. Thankfully, I have two weeks to complete the formation base. (which in the present case would mean a set of three formations, one of metal, one of water and one of earth responsible for controlling their respective mana.)

The ice beast horde always nearly end up attacking after the first snow storms of winter have passed. That time is roughly around this time. Thankfully, the very first wave of the horde is always dealt with by the experts of the ice peak castle, in their very first hunts. That means that we have to deal with the second wave which is coming in two weeks. Until then we only have to face beasts that the hunting party might have missed, which shamon and his group can handle. In the worst case I can act as interference.

For now my plan is to begin the process by inscribing the metal formation on the copper bark. The formation that I am inscribing has one metal based spell, six water based spells and three earth based spells to act as the ninth class formation base. As for the class 8 spell, that is something that I have yet to decide. There are many options from many different sources. The druids themselves have like four spells that can be put on it and the black mountain records has like ten spells. I will need to consider very deeply which spell I have to use.

I would like to remove another misconception that non formation mages have about the classification system. A class 8 spell need not be as strong as a class 9 spell. What a class 8 spell is doing is essentially managing the set of class 9 that have been inscribed into the formation core to create a desired effect. It is therefore a very complex field of study and research of methods of pairing the correct lower class spell with the correct higher class spells to ensure that the lower class spell will even have the desired effect.

The metal based spell will not really take long for me, if I really focus on it it will take me like a couple of days and should make sure that the fort won't just collapse just because a ice beast breath on it a weird way( at its present durability I don't even need to use my armour to shatter a wall, just my mana powered fists are enough. Thank God there is no snowstorm yet.) What is going to be taking me the longest time in this process is to look for a elemental node.

Normally an elemental node is a stream of mana that is specific to a single element and beyond that I have no really idea what exactly they are and how they are formed. These are not really useful for the average mage since having too much mana of a single element can be quite deadly, unless you cultivate very specific magic paths and even then these mages tend to be pretty rare. Some people use it to power a few formations, yet even formation mages always seem to forget just how useful it for us formation mages.

Firstly, this way we would have a constant stream of mana powering the formation which means that I can reduce the strain on the mage powering the formation and secondly, with materials like copper bark it can be used to nurture the material itself. The formation that I am considering to build needs to have atleast a elemental node of each element that the copperbark has affinity. There is a reason that the druids always built their forts deep in the forests where it would be easy to find the relevant nodes. They can find elemental nodes for such formations very easily and it also gives them the opportunity to protect their formations.

It is this particular requirement of their formations that made the druids so territorial. I mean there are only so many places in the continent where you can find an elemental node to meet your demands.

This far north, I am not even sure that I can find any elemental node of an element other than ice and unless I want all of us to freeze to death, I cannot use a ice elemental node to power the formation. It is already freezing, this will leave shamon and his group as ice cubes. That would be like creating a geyser of ice mana right below the ships that are the soldiers.

That is why the dwarves are my last hope in this matter. Dawrves are masters of finding ore. They can find ore in places where the other races would not even dream to look in to find ore. Their arts are a secret even to me (not for a lack of trying), but we can still make use of the dwarves hardwork to find the elemental nodes I need. It is a common occurence for a ore deposit of elemental metal to have a node passing through it.

Even if the dwarves have emptied most of these ores, there is a pretty decent chance that the elemental node is still present there. Right now I am actually exploring one such tunnel, where the dwarves have acquired nearly a ton of an ore called as blue iron. It is a basic iron ore with certain water based affinity. That means that I am quite likely to find a elemental node of metal element or the water element. I can't really tell if the place will have a elemental node, but this a game of probability. There are roughly thirty such mines that the dwarves have operated and I am hoping that I will find what I need in atleast one of these places.

Normally, this would be not a task that I would be doing personally, but I cannot exactly send the soldiers in here. Firstly all of them are required above and while revealing such small secrets won't really cause me much problem, I have no desire to antagonise the head office more than necessary. The head office can be pretty petty If they decide that you are their enemies. You can already see me in my present case and I have no real enemity with the head office.

That means that I am trudging in tunnels that the dwarves would consider a tight fit, and in which I can barely crawl through to reach the point where I can detect whether the place has a elemental node or not. I won't even speak of just how frigid this place is. Let's just say that I am a single inch from becoming a block of ice myself.

That means that I am left with a lot of crawling and cursing, neither of which I have the desire to record so I will be taking my leave here. I will send my next log when I have managed to find a elemental node and have actually begun to complete the formation base.