With Tamrie’s success, having unlocked powerful Ocean and Nature affinities with a more innate control, similar to Bevel's, I’d been hoping to start on the Tethered shortly after. However, after dealing with the… uh… mess, when I went to look at the display, I found it throwing up messages about the sarcophagus needing maintenance.

Something it insisted I needed Utility Access for. If I wanted its advice on how to fix it up.

Luckily, between Balthum’s notes and everything we’d acquired from Keeper, I didn’t need the facility.

Just a bunch of time, a few materials from the enchanting workshop and a whole lot of patience. When I’d first found Balthum, I’d already realized how much damage to the rest of the room he’d caused to get the sarcophagus running, the message just confirmed it.

With a fairly smug Tamrie in tow, we returned to Mount Aeternia. She almost didn’t let me go, but I convinced her there was still work to be done. After a few minutes, I recruited Banya, Bevel and Xoth to help with the repairs.

I’d even attempted to enlist Tamrie, since she was an ensouled now.

“Best to swim before I dive, my love,” Tamrie said, giving me a kiss on my cheek once she realized I was set on getting it done as soon as possible. “I’m barely able to draw forth a flicker, all this enchanting is a few fathoms deeper than I’d survive.”

“Right, sorry,” I said, not feeling sorry at all. Afterall, she was an ensouled now. And the other stuff. Hard for me to feel anything but happy at the moment.

“Enough for me to be about anyway. Might not have any more folk wandering about, but more than enough we need to set to rights,” Tamrie said, squeezing my hand. “See you for dinner.”

After giving her one last kiss, I brought the others back under the sea. There was no leviathan to greet us, so we quickly made our way down to the sarcophagus room.

Xoth’s eyebrows were constantly trending upwards as he studied the devices scattered about the room, which was the equivalent of shouting in excitement for most people.

It was a surprisingly fun time, the four of us working together to take apart the main sarcophagus before we started to reassemble three of the others.

I’d thought Balthum had ruined them beyond repair, but we quickly discovered that in truth he’d just tied in a lot of extra systems to get around the restrictions imposed because he was a Magus Dominus, and not a Protectus.

We didn’t get any of them repaired by dinner, but we were optimistic we’d finish at least one of them the next day.

All of us were excited about the prospect of having more ensouled around.

“It is a shame we did not achieve this while the storm was still present,” Xoth remarked as we arrived back in Mount Aeternia, wiping at his still damp hair. Despite the pools not getting us wet, the water from being submerged wasn’t removed by Secrets of Telthen. “It would have been a perfect environment for new ensouled.”

“There’s still next year. And even without the storm, we can make up for it the old fashioned way,” I said, holding up my hand and floating a bit of mana over it for emphasis. “Nexxa came up with a spell that’ll let us channel mana into others. We might need to set some time aside, but it’ll be worth it.”

“Ah, it is a shame we can’t put it in an enchantment,” Xoth said, shaking his head as he used one of the thin green patterns embroidered in his robe to whisk the water out. “But I suppose having a few newly ensouled following us around wouldn’t be the worst thing.”

“I don’t think I’d be much help with that,” Banya said, raising her hand. “Since I can’t even do enchanting without your special tools.”

“We could do an enchantment,” Bevel said, hands behind her head as she stared upward, eyes tracing over the still naked roof, as if plotting how best to hang nets in the pool portal room. “Papa told me they used to have them, back where he and auntie Nex grew up.”

“Those were used for powering enchantments, but I suspect we could modify them to work as reserves for spellcasting,” I said, leading the way to the room where we usually had dinner before stopping. “Wanna join us for grub?”

To my surprise, both Xoth and Banya accepted. As one of the refugees who Tamrie had hired to take care of our meals brought in dinner, we continued talking enchantments. Ultimately, we decided that it wasn’t worth our time to come up with an enchantment yet, since it’d be easy enough to simply have the ensouled follow us around.

Once the few people who Xoth had already started teaching enchanting to became ensouled, it would be a simple problem for them to cut their teeth on, as it were.

There were a lot of higher value problems for us to stick to for the moment.

Still, the discussion brought up something I hadn’t considered before.

“It is true. My specialization was actually in using nature mana to produce mechanical motions,” Xoth said, smiling as he pushed his plate away, having taken half as much as I had. “Since I’ve arrived, there has been a great deal of relearning what I thought I knew. It seems that there is a new challenge every day, and even the simplest of enchantments has its use.”

“But that’s all you were learning? Just how to enchant plants to move things around?” Bevel asked, waving her arms wide, her smoothie in one hand and several crunchy shoots in the other. “That sounds boring.”

“It was fulfilling,” Xoth replied, ducking slightly to avoid a loose shoot that slipped from Bevel’s grip. “Though not so fulfilling as my work here. Still, with a new crop of ensouled taking up the craft, it will benefit both us and them to have at least some measure of focus.”

“Whatever they learn, we’re going to need a lot of arcane focuses if we want them all to use mana draw,” I said, leaning back. We had lots of materials for that, so it was mostly a matter of getting them made.

Most of the time, I didn’t have to worry about focuses. Unless it was a rare affinity, such as Sun, Moon or Granitas, I had more than enough to cast the basic spells.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“If our repairs go smoothly, and you are correct about the requirement to transform them, it sounds as though acquiring enough focuses for your new wave of ensouled will be more work than actually turning them into ensouled,” Xoth noted, one of the vine patterns on his sleeve reaching out and plucking one of Bevel’s shoots from her hand while she was taking a sip from her smoothie.

When she looked back, he was crunching away innocently, his hands still on the table.

I was distracted as Vendil the dwarf asked me for clarification. Tamrie had decided it wasn’t appropriate for me to be dating my assistant, so Vendil had been assigned the position and she’d decided to train another for herself.

Dinner wrapped up, and Vendil assured me that he’d start talking to those we were looking to reward with ensoulment about what sort of focuses they would prefer, and if they were interested in enchantment.

Not everyone would be, though I suspected we’d get a fair few.

I also suspected the majority of the Tethered would want high air affinity, whether they chose to be enchanters or not.

The next day was spent working on repairing the Sarcophagi. By the time we went home to the mountain, we’d managed to get four of them to turn on, though the fourth was giving us errors. Considering we’d had to assemble the components we used to repair it based mostly on our rough understanding of how everything fit together, we all counted it as a win.

With the chamber online, it was time to start bringing ensouled through. Banya planned to remain in the chamber, studying. Partially to get the fourth sarcophagus working, but mostly to see if she could figure out how to help Barber.

With the Howl over, the Tethered were taking to the sky in droves. Despite limited resources, dozens of powered gliders flew over Cape Aeternia.

Which meant I didn’t have to ferry people to and from the site, though I did have to let them into the chamber. Instead of running back and forth, I brought groups up and down twice a day. It was unfortunate that they had to wait, but there was a lot for me to do.

One of the first things I did after the sarcophagi were repaired was send out teams of Tethered who weren’t waiting in line. Their primary task was to scout out the sites where the scan had listed folk living in Cape Aeternia. Specifically those that weren’t part of our settlements.

After the first Tethered came back reporting a small hostile force, I found myself moving to investigate personally.

An ancient ruin a dozen or so miles from Tetherfall sat suspended halfway down the valley, with staircases and terraces mostly overgrown with thick dark roots. There wasn’t a single bit of green to be seen, the storm having ripped any that would’ve sprouted away in its last gasp.

While there wasn’t any green, that didn’t mean there wasn’t life.

Among the ruins was a group of a dozen folk, along with their herd of goats.

Deciding to approach slowly, Bevel and I landed near the top of the cliff, which she scaled while I followed the overgrown stairs as best I could. They noticed me quickly, several calling out with bleating sounds similar to their goats.

Without warning, a rock slammed into a root just in front of me. Raising my gaze, I found a young woman balanced on a stone beam twenty feet above the trail, a rough sling already spinning another rock.

“Not taking any more of us,” she said, spitting to the side.

Bevel was hanging above her unnoticed, quietly looking towards me. I shook my head, glancing down to the mark the rock had left in the root. It was a deep gouge. Probably enough force to knock a person out.

Assuming they didn’t have a simple Shield spell, of course.

“You haven’t dealt with a Magus in quite a while, have you?” I asked, looking past her to the other people. They’d all stopped and were watching our interaction, though several had grabbed heavy sticks or slings of their own.

None of them could’ve been over twenty-five years old.

She squinted at me, but didn’t respond, still spinning her rock.

“Look, it’s obvious you don’t want us here. But things are changing. A lot. If you need food or clothing, all you have to do is come visit us. We’ll trade fairly. Or if you prefer, put you to work to earn your share. Roughly that direction,” I pointed back towards Tetherfall. I would’ve simply offered the food for free, but I still remembered Books’ lessons on making sure folk felt they’d earned their way. “Right in the chasm near Mount Aeternia. Hard to miss it.”

They all hissed at the mention of Mount Aeternia, but they stopped as I made my way back up the stairs. To my relief, they didn’t attempt to hit me with any more rocks.

On the other hand, they did gasp when Bevel dropped down from above them, flying down beside me and grabbing my hand while looking back at them.

“He took them from their families, didn’t he?” she asked, squeezing my hand. “Just like he took us.”

“Probably,” I said, squeezing back. “We’ll do what we can.”

Bevel nodded, shooting one more glance over her shoulder before we were out of sight.

Over the coming days, we’d find out there were hundreds of small groups just like them scattered throughout Cape Aeternia.

Most of them were understandably nervous, but otherwise peaceful enough, though one group had attempted to kill and eat the scout who’d made contact.

They hadn’t even been short of food.

After that, Bevel and I had taken on most of the actual meetings with new groups.

It wasn’t far from the Golden Halls that we ran into an even stranger group.

Bevel and I descended under the watchful eye of the Tethered who’d found them in the first place. The four folk who greeted us stood at the end of a shattered staircase of stone, one that had once led down to the ocean town below.

Like the stairs, the group had clearly seen better days. They were clad in clothes with fabric that seemed to almost shimmer, sleeves and seams held together with gemstones worked into golden clasps and buttons. Yet the gems were crusted over, the fabric torn and filthy. If they’d had footwear, it had been lost or destroyed.

A burst of babbling demands erupted forth from each of them upon laying eyes on me and Bevel. She’d noped out right away, leaping up the cliff to watch from above as I dealt with them.

After a few minutes, I was able to extract the story of who they were and how they’d come to be stranded there. They’d been guests on an ‘exclusive’ retreat that promised to deliver them to the safest place on the eastern coast. Each of them were the son or daughter of some important merchant from a city far to the south of Spellford by the name of Seven Rivers.

Behind them was a ruined hall, where they’d waited out the Howl. It was also where the ‘guide’ had dropped them off.

An immaculate tent sat just inside the entrance, clearly enchanted given the filth of everything else scattered around it.

Another few minutes of discussion revealed that they’d been left with enough food and water to last a year, though they were more concerned about how the quality had taken a nosedive after the first week than they’d been about running out.

Didn’t help that not one of them was a decent cook, from what I could decipher. One of the boys had figured out how to kinda do stew, and that was mostly what they’d subsisted on.

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the fact that whoever had done this had technically kept their word. Afterall, all four of the spoiled children were hearty and hale. They’d also been the only residents in their shelter until I happened to pick them up with the scan.

Safe and exclusive, just as promised.

To my further amusement, it was easy enough to get them to wait quietly with a simple promise that we’d get them to a proper inn with a bath and hot springs soon.

After settling them, I moved inside having noticed what I thought might be the remains of a Waygate, Bevel darting along between roots that clung to the roof of the hall.

Sure enough, down a set of stairs just past their tent was a mostly intact Waygate. More intact than most I’d seen. An easy repair, or a good source of…

My thoughts trailed off as my brain processed the area beyond the Waygate. A soft gasp from above told me Bevel had noticed too.

Light filtered through transparent stone overhead, though it was mostly blocked. To either side sat terrace upon terrace, retreating up the sides. Despite being underground, there was greenery all over. I would later discover that the complex stretched for miles. Though complex wasn’t the right word. It was a buried city.

I’d seen the marker on the map. It hadn’t been anything particularly memorable, simply labeled Overflow B.

It wouldn’t be long before it came to be known as Overflow City.