Monroe

Chapter Four Hundred and Thirty-Eight. One problem at a time.

Jessica looked at the vertical gardens thoughtfully.

The Lovar had made the best use of the space they had available, with what amounted to curtains that lowered from the ceiling, emitting UV light from both sides. The curtains were being raised now as the garden was leaving its 'day' cycle.

She had volunteered to design and install an array that would accelerate the growth of the plants while at the same time not draining the soil.

Arrays were one of the things that Earth had figured out, while Thayland hadn't. Part of that, she knew, was because Earth had a huge population of people who weren't actually using their mana day in and day out. Sure, everyone had something they used it for, but most people didn't yet have jobs that leveraged it, leaving them with mana regeneration to spare.

To be fair the skill wasn't new, or hidden, but it was buried as a subskill of Persistent Effect, Cooperative Casting, and Mana Manipulation.

Bob's frequent complaint that the System they had access to being a shitty language translation of a truly alien way of thinking wasn't without merit.

To find the Array skill, you had to select all three of the required skills, which meant during a casual, or even an intensive investigation of the System, you were unlikely to find it.

Apparently, the young woman who had figured it out had more than a few choice words about that particular difficulty, stating that she'd worked for three months only to find out that she could have just leveled up and taken the Mana Manipulation skill.

Ultimately, Jessica had the prerequisite skills, and she'd been quite interested in the correlation between Arrays and Rituals.

The process of creating an Array was actually fairly straightforward. You simply needed to cast the spell or spells that you wanted the Array to maintain, while using Cooperative Casting to include enough people to provide the necessary mana, while also using Mana Manipulation to ensure that their mana regeneration was the only thing they contributed to the casting, which would have been awfully damn tricky if the System weren't doing the heavy lifting.

The interesting part was that while you could simply follow the System's design for the Array, much like Ritual casting, you could also modify it.

She didn't know why the System spellforms were designed the way they were. She'd spent quite a few enjoyable hours discussing the subject with Bob, and together they'd come up with their own explanation.

Their working theory was that the spellforms, as designed by the System, were created to work in every conceivable environment. Bob had suggested it, although he'd admitted it was more of a gut feeling than based on any real evidence. She'd been the one to demonstrate just how much more efficient a simple Create Water spellform could be made, while he'd pointed out that while her spellform was elegant (he'd actually said that it was almost as beautiful as she was, even managing to deliver the line with an almost Dave-like casual smoothness,) it wouldn't hold up if the mana density were three tiers lower or higher.

In comparison, the System's spellforms, while clunky and inefficient, did hold up, regardless of the mana density.

Considering that the Hurstall'kalwin was currently transiting what amounted to a universe made up entirely of mana, she would need to a bit more creative when it came to her spells.

"Ms. Jessica?"

The voice drew her from her thoughts.

The Hurry effectively had three populations, not two. The first was the crew, which consisted of the very few Lovar and Shallihs who had been trained or in training to maintain the ship, along with anyone else who had been interested after they'd escaped their planet. The second were the Shallihs who hadn't fully integrated into the Lovar's society. This group made up more than half of the people who volunteered to fight the monsters that had appeared on the ship, despite making up a bit under a fifth of the total population of the ship. The third were the civilians who weren't interested in learning the skills to maintain the ship, nor were they eager to risk life and limb fighting monsters. This was the largest group by far, and was comprised almost entirely by Lovar.

Somehow, all three groups had managed to coexist on the ship, despite being packed together like fans at the world cup.

Virdan was the young Lovar in charge of this cargo bay-turned-garden.

"Sorry, my thoughts went walk about," Jessica said with a smile.

"Do you think you can do it?" Virdan asked hopefully.

"Oh, I'm sure I can," Jessica replied confidently, "it's just a matter of giving it a go, yeah? If it doesn't work out the first time, we'll puzzle out what went wrong, and keep at it."

She looked back at the wall of plants. "I reckon we'll try with this one first," she continued. "Much as I'd like to have a go at doing up the whole bloody bay, we have to keep in mind that the people we're going to pull the mana from don't have that much to spare, so the Array is going to need to be relatively small."

There was a limit to how many people you could use to power an Array, which was the spellcaster's tier². Considering that she would be pulling a single point of mana per second to maintain the spell, that meant that she would be limited to eighty one points of mana per second to maintain the Array.

That sounded like a lot, but the fact of the matter was that there were several spells involved. Plant Growth was the primary spell, but it needed others to support it, namely Create Earth, to replenish the minerals drained from the soil, Control Earth, to monitor the condition of the soil and control the use of Create Earth, alongside Create Water and Control Water, for the same purposes, with Control Plant bringing it all together by monitoring and controlling the Plant Growth spell. Last but not least was a spell she likely wouldn't have known about were it not for Harv. Ashes to Ashes was a necromancy spell that caused rapid decay, but only to organic substances that were classified as 'dead' by the System. The decay was normally so rapid that a corpse was reduced to dust in a mere second. However, it was possible to slow it down. She intended to use it to recycle the few plants that Control Plant and Plant Growth couldn't turn into a repetitive harvest.

Stolen story; please report.

All told the Array was going to require seventy mana regeneration to be reserved for the spells while covering a vertical field eighty-one feet tall by eighty-one feet wide. Technically, she could have use the remaining eleven mana to expand the field by another eleven feet in each direction, but she preferred to have a bit of leeway to allow for a user dropping out of the array without causing it to stop working.

Ideally, she'd have had eighty-one people who each had eighty-one mana to spare, but she had to work with what she had.

Luckily, the cargo bay was roughly one hundred feet on each side, so her array would fit well enough.

"When will you need the volunteers?" Virdan asked.

"Now would be brilliant," Jessica smiled. "They have to be here for the entire process so that I can link them into the Array," she explained. "I reckon it'll probably take the better part of an hour, so soonest started, yeah?"

"I feel like this is cheating, somehow," Bob muttered.

'You expended just over four hundred mana crystals, which you aren't likely to see returned for more than month. During that time, you will have also had to have had three of your nine persistent effect slots reserved for this project,' Trebor replied.

"Still, I've basically automated the process of farming mana Crystals," Bob grumbled.

Bob had known that he could theoretically have Trebor pilot a trio of persistent effect summons and grind out monsters. Trebor had been unleashed when the update that accompanied Earth's integration had converted him to an assistant, and was further empowered by pushing him past the first threshold.

He'd never done it because the payout was abysmal. Ten to fourteen mana crystals a day might be worth it if he had nothing else to do, but when you considered that he could earn more crystals in a single twelve-hour day of active delving than he could in six months of passive farming, it didn't seem worth it.

Especially when you took into consideration the fact that he would have to create an old-school Dungeon.

It was incredibly unlikely that anything would go wrong, but if something did, Bob was unlikely to be close enough to take care of it before someone else paid the price.

In this instance, he was creating the Dungeon in his Summoner's Retreat, which meant that if something did go wrong, he could just dismiss the ship, which was a comfort.

"Well, it's something at least," Bob murmured.

If he had to write a list of the things he liked best about his life, post System, the first item would be knowing that he'd never lose Monroe. The second would be his friends. Somewhere further down would be the fact that money wasn't a concern anymore.

Having spent his entire life in poverty, he'd had difficulty adjusting to the fact that he wasn't ever going to have to worry about living hand to mouth again, budgeting every penny from his meager paychecks, living off of eggs and spaghetti when the end of the month was drawing near and he was waiting for his translation gig to cut him a check.

Somewhere during his mad rush to save Monroe, money had stopped mattering. He could build a Dungeon, kill the monsters that spawned, and use the crystals that coalesced to see to his every need.

At some point, he'd come to view mana crystals as disposable. He was delving to level his skills and tier up, not because he needed the vast wealth the Dungeons provided. The end result was that he'd gone from a spendthrift to a... he wanted to say a philanthropist, but he didn't really see himself that way.

Unfortunately, he now found himself in a situation where he couldn't delve a Dungeon over and over again, earning hundreds of crystals every few hours.

It was a serious blow to his normal method of solving problems, which was to throw magic at the problem, usually Ritual Magic, which meant Mana Crystals.

Luckily, Jessica was on top of the food situation.

Dave had been talking to the crew, and the food situation on the Hurry, while not dire, wasn't pleasant either. It was consumed as quickly as it could be grown and harvested, without ever having an excess, which meant that when monsters trashed one of the gardens, everyone went just a little bit hungry.

Bob could sympathize. He knew what it was like to go hungry, and to not be sure of the where or when of his next meal. 'Food insecurity' it was called. Most of the altercations aboard the Hurry were directly attributable to the lack of food.

'The Cow Level,' as Amanda called it, was already alleviating those issues, and by increasing the production of the gardens by ten percent, it wouldn't be long before there was a surplus of food on the ship.

Which was important because he had no idea how long they'd be out here.

He was focusing on the immediate needs of the ship and its inhabitants, but in the back of his mind, he was wondering just how they were going to get out of this place.

The only thing he could think of was that the mana was moving, which meant it had to be moving somewhere. The problem was that it seemed like the faster-flowing currents were also comprised of denser mana, which was something they weren't ready for.

He shook his head to clear his thoughts, before looking over his summoned monsters. There were three of them, a super-sized UtahRaptor tank, an adorable Koala bear healer, and a set of twelve UtahRaptor skirmishers.

"Ready?" Bob asked.

'Yes,' Trebor replied simply.

Bob guided a thread of his mana to the circuit that was currently charging a grid of one hundred mana crystals, and bridged the gap to bypass the grid.

Less than a second later, a monster appeared at the far side of the room he'd designated for this little project. It was an insectoid nightmare, the sort of thing you'd get if you took a mite, scaled it up to the size of a Clydesdale, and added some scythe-like blades to its legs, because why not.

The economy-sized UtahRaptor lept forward, drawing the attention of the monster, while the smaller UtahRaptors rushed to flank it from either side.

The monster was absolutely shredded in less time than it took for Bob to open his mouth to ask Trebor how quickly he could handle it.

"Well, I guess that's fine then," Bob said as another monster appeared and was dealt with in the same manner.

"That's amazing," Amanda breathed as she watched the material meld to the edges of the broken pipe.

She'd volunteered to join one of the damage control groups, reasoning that she could handle any of the monsters that might appear, which would allow the crew to repair the damage done to the ship's systems.

Youtube was a wonderful distraction, and she had watched the occasional video about welding and construction, so she had a little theoretical knowledge bolstered by the fact that they'd actually built a small village, complete with plumbing, back on the Eire world.

Amanda had been diligent to keep a division between magical and mundane accomplishments in her mind. While the two could, and should, be combined, she didn't want to fall into the habit of ignoring non-magical solutions for problems.

The repair crew were using a pair of pressurized tanks to effectively grow a new length of pipe joining the two broken ends. They'd begun by using the first tank and a long wand-like nozzle attached to a slender hose to create a framework running between the two jagged edges. It had been quick, as the Shallihs operating the wand had basically waved his hand back and forth a dozen times. Now, a Lovar was operating another tank, this one with a brush-like apparatus, placing a layer of what appeared to be sticky liquid metal along the lattice work and at roughly the same speed.

All told, it seemed like it would take only a few minutes to repair an eight-foot-long gap in a two-foot wide pipe.

"It's not magic, but it gets the job done," the crew chief, Gunsil, replied.

"Honestly, I couldn't have done it that quickly, and I'm a pretty fair spellcaster," Amanda shook her head. "This is another one of those things that you might just be able to use for trade when we get out of this place."

"Any guess as to when that might be?" Gunsil asked hopefully, her ears perked forward and her tail swishing.

"I'm afraid I don't," Amanda sighed, shaking her head. "But we are definitely working on it."

She didn't add that thus far, the only suggestion they'd been able to come up with was 'go with the flow.'