The air was perpetually thick with the smell of sawdust and mortar. The rhythmic thud-thud-thud of hammers and the screech of saws created a symphony that lasted from dawn until long after dusk.
The influx was staggering. In the first month, a thousand refugees had trickled in, skeptical of the rumors. But as word spread….word of free land & houses, fair wages, and a Lord who protected his own, the influx became a flood. This month alone, nearly five thousand souls had arrived at the gates.
Alaric walked through the northern sector, observing the madness.
"Faster on the roofing!" a foreman shouted.
To handle the sheer volume of humanity, Alaric had ordered the construction of massive temporary lodging halls. These were long, sturdy wooden longhouses designed to hold thirty people each. They lined the outer rim of the expansion zone, packed tight with families waiting for their permanent residence.
But the goal wasn't to keep them there. Further inward, the permanent housing projects were rising at a breakneck pace.
Alaric watched a team of ten workers with a mix of skilled carpenters and new laborers working off their mandatory two-year contract, raising the frame of a standard family home.
"Two weeks," Alaric muttered to himself, checking the schedule in his head. "They are finishing a house about every two weeks."
It was an industrial miracle, fueled by desperation and magic. The new houses were designed for three to five people, built on stone walls and foundations with wooden frame and flooring.
However, miracles were expensive.
Alaric knew his treasury was bleeding. He had completely abandoned the idea of profit for the current fiscal year. Every copper coin earned from the export of monster parts and high-quality stone was immediately poured back into buying timber, nails, and food.
He was running the city on debt. He had taken massive loans from the capital's merchant guilds and even the shadier underground lenders. Surprisingly, the loansharks had been happy to cooperate. They saw the speed at which Alaric had tamed the desolate mangrove forest and betting on his future success.
"Lord Alaric," a passing merchant bowed.
Alaric nodded. He looked at the layout of the streets. Before he had laid a single brick in Haven, he had spent weeks designing the grid. He had planned for a metropolis capable of holding 150,000 people, expanding northward. Every sector, every road width, every plot size had been pre-planned.
Now, that plan was filling in like ink on parchment. The agricultural fields were still small, only the original cleared land was farmed, so the city was entirely dependent on the port. Shipments of grain arrived daily, paid for with borrowed gold, to feed the hungry thousands.
It was a house of cards. But Alaric was determined to hold it up.
Inside the administration building, the chaos was less noisy but far more stressful.
Lex looked like a ghost. His skin was pale and eyes were sunken, and he was surrounded by towers of parchment that threatened to topple over and crush him.
Alaric was sitting nearby, but he wasn't doing paperwork. He was conducting interviews. He was constantly filtering the new settlers, looking for anyone with a talent for math, literacy, or management to throw into the meat grinder of bureaucracy under Lex.
"Next," Alaric said, dismissing a terrified resident. Lex didn't look up. He was writing with a quill in hand.
"Lord," Lex rasped, his voice dry. "A new shipment of barley just arrived, they need your sign."
Alaric didn't even look at the document. He trusted Lex implicitly. He reached over, grabbed the quill, scrawled his signature on the bottom of the invoice, and pushed it back.
"Good work," Alaric said absently.
Alaric’s mind wasn't on the barley. It was on the book open in his lap.
For the last four months, ever since the crisis in Ironhold, Alaric had been obsessed with a single problem, Speed.
He couldn't forget the Silver Serpent. The crime lord had managed to order a fleet of twelve ships from Buckland, a foreign nation in a matter of days. That level of communication was a weapon.
While sitting in Duke Thorne’s office sipping tea, Alaric had stared at the silver bracelet on his wrist, the one Lucia had given him. It contained a small Light Spirit she had summoned.
“I can feel your mana through the contracted spirit,” she had told him. “If you are in trouble, or fighting, or just alive... I know.”
That sentence had been the spark.
Alaric had asked Lucia for every book she had on Summoning Magic. For the last three months, whenever he wasn't physically building the city, he was studying.
He had two goals. The first was communication. The second was transportation.
He remembered Priest Raul of the Covenant teleporting away in the Blackwood Forest. Raul had used Dark Magic. A rare, affinity-based power that Alaric couldn't replicate. But Summoning Magic was different. It was Null Magic. Theoretically, anyone with enough mana could use it.
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Summoning is just pulling an existing spirit out of one place and bringing it to another through space instantly, Alaric reasoned. If I can master the mechanics... could I summon myself?
He turned the page of the ancient grimoire.
The research had been grueling. He had learned there were two distinct types of summoning.
Spirit Creation.
This didn't summon a real being. It used the caster's own mana to construct a spiritual entity on the spot.
- Limitation: It could only create spirits up to the Advanced Level.
- Nature: They had no true intellect at the time they are summoned but they can learn and gain intellect if they exist in nature after for a long time. They were like robots made of mana.
- Elements: Only Flame, Water, Air, and Earth. (Light and Dark spirits were naturally born and could not be created).
True Summoning.
This involved pulling something that already existed in the world to the caster.
- Potential: Anything could be summoned spirits, beasts, objects if the caster could be specific enough in the spell.
Difficulty: The problem was magic spells are actually Spirit Language command nature. Humans barely understood it. Magic circles were written form of that language and spell. The summoning spells were insanely complex and big, so it had to be exclusively written as magic circle to cast and humans barely knew any spirit language , only the ones for spells that are already established and translated by magic researchers till now. So even though spirit summoning was possible with true summoning, specifying anything else closely enough in spirit language was almost impossible .
Alaric’s theory was bold: If I can specify 'Myself' as the target in a summoning spell, and carve a summoning circle in a destination... I can achieve teleportation.
But there was a catch. The mana cost. Creating a spirit or pulling mass across space required mana far vaster than anything he had imagined. It was why most summoners capped out at Lesser or Intermediate spirits.
But, Alaric thought, looking at his hands. I am a freak of nature. My mana capacity should be enough to summon myself 1 or 2 times.
Today was the test. Not for teleportation but rather for communication.
Alaric stood in the center of a magic ink drawn circle on the stone floor of the training grounds. Lex stood outside it, watching with a mixture of exhaustion and curiosity.
"I am attempting Spirit Creation," Alaric explained. "An Intermediate Level Flame Spirit."
Alaric began to pour mana in the circle, visualizing the structure of the entity he wanted to build.
The air inside the circle twisted. Heat radiated outward, turning the damp winter air into steam.
Whoosh.
A ball of blue fire, about the size of a basketball, materialized in the air. It hovered there, pulsing rhythmically. It had no face, but it felt... alive. It was sentient.
Alaric felt a snap in his mind. The Soul Contract was formed.
Immediately, he felt a second heartbeat. He could feel the heat of the flame as if it were his own blood. He could sense its location, its status, and its "feelings."
"It worked," Alaric breathed.
He turned to Lex. "Spirit Creation allows the spirit to use the Summoner's mana to cast magic instantly, I don’t even have to use the Creo + element part of the spell. But that’s not what we’re using it for today."
Alaric gestured for the blue flame to float over to Lex. The spirit bobbed obediently and hovered over the secretary’s shoulder.
"The contract binds us by soul," Alaric explained. "I can feel what it feels, no matter the distance. This is how we defeat the distance problem."
He handed Lex a piece of paper.
In my past life, there was a system called Morse Code. It used pulses—short and long—to represent alphabets.
Alaric showed Lex a written chart.
A: Short-Long , B: Long-Short-Short-Short , C: Long-Short-Long-Short , D: ………….
It was a written manual Alaric had made for translation of alphabets into mana pulses of various size.
"I want you to take the spirit to your office," Alaric commanded. "I will stay here. You will send pulses of mana into the spirit. I will feel those pulses through our connection."
Lex walked back to the Town Hall, the blue fireball floating beside him like a loyal pet. He sat at his desk, staring at the chart Alaric had given him.
"This is insane," Lex muttered. "Communicating through a spirit?"
He looked at the spirit. It crackled quietly.
"Alright," Lex sighed. "Let's try this."
He wrote down the sentence he wanted to send to Alaric. He placed his hand near the flame. His hand didn't burn. He pushed a small jolt of mana into the bond.
Pulse. Pulse.
He looked at the sentence he had written down on his scrap paper. He had chosen something he truly felt in his soul, thinking the experiment would likely fail anyway.
He went letter by letter.
I... (Short-Short)
He paused.
H... (Short-Short-Short-Short)
A... (Short-Long)
T... (Long)
E... (Short)
He worked his way through the sentence, sweating slightly as he concentrated on the rhythm.
W... O... R... K... I... N... G.
When he finished, he sat back, rubbing his eyes. "There. Done. Probably just gave the Lord a headache."
Suddenly, the door to his office slammed open.
Lex jumped, nearly knocking over his inkwell.
Alaric stood in the doorway. He had run all the way from the training grounds. He was breathing hard, but there was a wide, terrifying grin on his face.
"You..." Alaric said, pointing a finger at Lex.
Lex froze.
"You hate working?" Alaric asked.
Lex’s face drained of all blood. He instantly dropped to his knees, pressing his forehead to the floorboards.
"I am sorry, Lord! It was just, I didn't think it would—I was just testing the letters! I love working! Please don't fire me!"
Alaric stared at the terrified boy for a second, and then he threw his head back and laughed. It was a loud, booming laugh of pure victory.
"Get up, Lex!" Alaric cheered, pulling the boy to his feet. "Don't apologize! It worked! It actually worked!"
Alaric looked at the blue flame hovering in the room, his eyes shining with strategic brilliance.
"Do you understand what this means?" Alaric whispered, gripping Lex’s shoulders. "We can talk across cities. We can coordinate armies across the country. While our enemies rely on birds and horses"
He looked out the window at his growing city.
"This changes everything."