The Runic Alchemist - Chapter 735: The Issues in Connecting the Continent

Chapter 735: The Issues in Connecting the Continent

Damian emptied the whole of Sanctuary’s steel and iron trying to make 50 waygate points—ten of which he placed in each direction of the Sanctuary city and connected them to major towns with dungeons, at increasing intervals, ending the last one with a connection to the border in all four directions.

Damian also wanted to make a giant wall all around the border so the issue of small territorial battles would be solved in a single move. But that needed a lot of steel—just like many of his projects that he had planned for the Sanctuary. Before he could get a good place to mine iron or steel, he would have to stop making anything new.

He still had ten extra dungeon waygate points left, though. These ten he had made with extra care—it had not just the blocking spell that wouldn’t let any runesmith or mage get a sense of the spell inside, it would actually zap anyone who tried doing that. Damian had not inscribed the waygate spell in them yet, but the plans were ready. Only two people could touch the lever on it to activate: one was Damian himself, and the other mana signature was left empty by him.

These ten waygates he was going to use to connect his borders and the three kingdoms. He thought about putting in safety spells that would root out weapons, but designing such a spell was a hassle, and it wouldn’t be easy to support either. Steel was already a poor material to make waygates out of—overloading it with such complicated spells would make them unusable in less than a month.

So finally, after a short discussion with his ’Brilliant house of Lords’, the most viable solution that came out was to make a security check area where the people from other countries would come out on the border. Damian could make some tools that would help them find anything suspicious going through their borders. And stop people in case they tried doing anything funny.

After a sleepless night’s planning, Damian made a few new runic tools from the suggestions he had received and his own thoughts on the matter.

First was a simple spell that he put in a scanner-shaped steel tool—the shape was his own fancy. Once activated and pointed at the spatial storage device, it would show the user what was inside the spatial storage in his or her mind. One could do that with simply their hands too, but that would use their own mana—his tool could work for more than a day if the small liquid mana tank was full. If the spatial storage was locked—which only happened in rare cases—the entry into Sanctuary borders would be denied.

Second, Damian made something akin to a metal detector. In reality, it would check the mana levels of each individual and suggest a rank of the man or woman. For pugilists, it would check their aura—Damian had reverse-engineered the aura-enhancing spell to determine how much aura a guy was exuding, to determine the rank based on that.

Along with that, Damian had planned implementing rules such as: the opening of the waygate would happen only for a fixed hour every day. Nothing bigger than a wagon with horses could go through. All people who want to go through the waygate must submit all their details before the waygate is activated—like name, occupation, address, and destination—to the person responsible for activating the waygate in each country. If anything looked sketchy, Sanctuary officials had the right to send the person back.

When the hour of travel would start, this list had to be sent first before anything. It was just an experimental thing—there was no way it would work to stop spies and other rogue elements from entering, but that was the best Damian could think of before he could make some spell that could make a special passport-like ID, with pictures and all, to recognize each individual in a unique way.

For that, however, Damian needed some special access and a bit of free time. There was something in his mind which, if it succeeded, would revolutionize data gathering and communications.

For that, he would have to go to Edgeheaven.

Since it was just an experiment to check how things worked, Damian decided he would only give access to the borders of Sanctuary to the three countries.

A border town at the east border of Sanctuary could be accessed by people from Eldoris. A town on the west border by Faerunians. And a town on the south border by the Empire’s people. In time, Damian would let them go through the Sanctuary land to reach other countries and his own Sanctuary city—but not right now.

He needed better security measures before doing that—not to mention, all kingdoms would want to have a say in how people crossed their borders.

Right now, at least, being contained to his border towns would also provide them much better opportunities for trading. It would even create many job opportunities for people of Santuary. He would have to make steel walls at all these border towns and separate market areas where people from other countries could enter and exit freely before doing that though.

Stopping them from going further inland on their wagons and horses seemed excessive, so Damian decided against it. People were already doing it—there was no need to stop them. He would, however, make sure no foreigners could use his internal Sanctuary waygates. Guess before he activates the foreign waygates, he should at least make some form of IDs for his people.

Which was why Damian had decided to put a pause on all plans he had made for the previous day and night for the foreign country’s waygates before visiting Edgeheven. If he could solve the ID issue in a few days that would be the best outcome possible but if not, all these plans he had made – he could at least try them out as an experiment.

First, he thought the unique ID’s each person had should work—but when he thought about the effort it would take for the whole Sanctuary to have these IDs, and how he would have to do this by his own hands – it was better to give them a permanent one. No one was going to do this tiring thing again and again. His presence should not be required for something like this.

So Damian put a pin on the plan of visiting the three kingdoms’ rulers to place the waygates and instead opened a waygate to Edgeheaven. He wanted to finish this thing before his soldiers and knights—diving into the dungeon along with the demons trying out the new ten dungeons—would find a place to mine some good metal that Damian could farm again and again. He wanted something that would work like steel to make big runic structures.