One Last System



"So?" Mia sat down on the edge of the bed and rested her head on my shoulder. "Did it go as you hoped it would?" she asked as she took a glance at what I'd written during the meeting. 

"More or less," I replied with a small smile as I tapped the inked end of the feather against the corner of my mouth. 

For some reason, this tiny motion made it easier for me to think. And if getting my mouth dirty with ink was the price of figuring everything out, then I was more than glad to pay it!

"How do you plan to provide for all of their demands, then?" Mia asked while moving around for a bit to find the most comfortable spot on my side. 

"I will start with…" I paused for a second as I moved the papers around in search of the blueprint that I prepared in advance. "I will start with this thing. It will serve as the literal heart of the entire complex."

The picture depicted a relatively simple formation that was brought to its limit by scaling it up. 

Just like the formation I destroyed roughly three hours prior, it served to transform the fuel inside of it into pure energy. It had all the elements necessary to purify and then condense the spiritual energy to a form that was essentially way too potent for any human to handle. 

In a sense, if all my previous formations were like small zapping toys, then right now I was planning out a proper electric outlet.

"I made it so that it can split the energy output into twenty different lines. There is even an automatic priority forwarding so that if one of the lines uses more than the others, the formation will adjust itself to match the demand," I explained while hovering my fingers over different parts of the formation. 

And in a sense, it was one hell of a behemoth. 

What would be a single formation stone in the old arrays of mine, now would become a formation in its own right. 

Every set of formation stones that would make up a single function now turned into a complex array all on its own. 

From a brief look, what I've painted was way too complex for any human to ever prepare and lay down. Only upon a closer inspection would one realize that everything… was just one big repetition of the exact same pattern!

In a sense, I only needed to lay down one, quite ordinary formation before turning it into a seed of a fractal, multiplying it enough times to achieve the necessary power. 

"Constructing this thing will take me at least a few days of good work," I muttered,  only now realizing the consequences of my ambitious plan. 

But this was the easiest way to achieve what I wanted. 

"Isn't it going to be pretty huge?" Mia pointed out the obvious problem with such a massive and complex design. 

"Yes, it will be," I admitted right away. "That's why everything will start when we will demolish the already destroyed parts of town to build a production center there instead."

In theory, bunching all the craft-related buildings into a single area was an extremely bad idea. As wood was the most common building resource that we had on hand, a single fire could wipe out the entire thing in one fell swoop. 

But I had no other choice but to take this risk, as there was a limit to how far the energy from the main formation could travel before dispersing. 

"Maybe I could fix it by building transformation stations?" I thought out loud only to then shake my head. "No, I already have enough work on my hands. No use risking a few more days just to test something."

The idea of using electricity when thinking about magic could only get me so far. And the principles that warranted the use of transformation stations when it came to electricity didn't necessarily apply to moving magic energy. 

"I guess we really have no other choice but to build it all in a single place…" I muttered, slightly dissatisfied by the concept. 

Still, it was the cheapest, quickest, and most straightforward way to kickstart the productivity of all the craftsmen. And for now, a single complex had to suffice for that task. 

"So we will throw fuel to a single building in the middle, the one that will shield the main formation from the elements. Then, we will set up workshops all around the place with secondary formations…" Mia whispered in a soft voice, taking on my quirk of speaking her thoughts out loud.

"You said that just this main formation… Wait, that's a pretty long thing to say, isn't it?" Mia suddenly pointed out. "We should think of a good name for it," she suggested. 

"You are right," I nodded my head as a certain name popped up in my thoughts. "But can you continue where you left off?" 

I was amazed by how easily Mia managed to connect the dots and figure out the purpose of my concept. 

On one hand, it was plain for everyone to see from how I planned the structure of the main formation. With twenty possible outlets for the mana to flow, Mia could guess that I intended to connect quite a lot of things to the main formation. And from there, arriving at the conclusion she did was a pretty easy job. 

Still, this line of thinking was easy only for someone who saw it before. And to my knowledge, Mia never lived in an early-industrial society where such schemes could take place!

"You will connect all the workshops to the main form so that you only need to maintain a single array," Mia kept going, only to twist her lips after speaking up. "No, this doesn't sound right," she muttered, unsatisfied with the name she came up with on the spot and even used already. 

"In this way, by connecting everything to the mainframe, we will only need formations to repurpose the use of the energy rather than an entirely autonomous system for each and every workshop!"