Chương 144: Chapter 140

Arcane Diving Bells were both easy and not easy to maintain, as Wade learned from asking non-stop questions to Medy and Bael. Yes, he would need at least five people as crew for a typical mining expedition. One would be a necromancer in charge of mining the crystals - basically remote operating their undead minion from the shoreline of a lake. One would be a guard, who would keep an eye out for potential danger while the necromancer was focused on not fucking up their work.

Scouting and navigating down the arcane realm was usually done by whichever of the pair were better at it. Most demons have been in and out of the arcane realm for years now, which meant they were all veterans when it came to figuring out where to go and signs for where to not go. But if they could have a dedicated scout that also served as a guard, that was generally the better practice. Home base required some additional crew. Three roles in specific.

"Anyone can do a realm transfer ritual with a bone, salt, a few drawn squares and circles, plus a few runes and then a good chunk of mana to power the whole thing." Medy said, tapping some scribbled out shapes she claimed represented the arcane realm. Then her pen tapped the line between the scribbled arcane realm and the equally scribbled spirit realm.

"Problem is this. The bridge between realms. You see, mana messes up coordinates. Usually there isn't enough of it to make that much of a difference."

"Going to guess the arcane realm is an exception given, well, everything?" She held the pen on that line for a moment, and Wade realized it was because she was busy with her other hand, shoving another spoonful of flan. Pens had been a wonderful addition to her collection of earth goodies, next to wrappers and junk she could stuff in the pockets. But for all the fun a pen and paper was, food was food.

"It's called Drift." Bael took the lead while she was busy squirming in place, eyes closed, enjoying her bite of paradise.

"Think of it as shooting a target. Easy when there is no wind. Absolutely not when you're in a storm. Your arrow will end somewhere else. The Drift's that storm. Predict the coordinates wrong, and that 'somewhere else' usually means 'something's already there and it's territorial.'""Yeah," Medy waved the spoon.

"It's really hard stuff to learn and it's only useful for the arcane realm. All the other realms are waaaaay more stable and understandable. I never need to know how much I weigh if I'm jumping from the spirit realm into the mortal realm. But you do for the arcane realm. And if you're off by too much, it's bad." Actually locating the right spot to travel from the spirit realm into the arcane realm was a headache and a half.

It needed smaller rituals to peer into where they would be traveling into, verify they would all fit there, and that there was enough resources on the other end in that region to make the trip worth it. And then came the calculations, which had to be perfect and could only be used for that one spot. And likely only for that singular day as well, since the Drift did exactly what it's name implied. The next day's variables would have already changed the equation.

"No second chances either." Bael grunted off to the side as Medy explained it all.

"The barriers between the mortal realm and the spirit realm weaken around death, because one poor soul traveled from the mortal realm to the spirit one, and in doing so they leave a hole behind. Same for Hell, there's holes where mortals keep traveling through, and we get drawn into those first. And the same happens to the arcane realm. Hard enough to calculate through the Drift. Impossible if you add a punctured hole in the local area."

"Yeah you can't actually land in the same location twice in a row. If you send another package to the same location while the hole's still there, it might never arrive or it might pop up somewhere completely other." Medy added.

"So it's an all-in. And an all-in for at the very least three to five days while the hole closes back up." And thus came the third crewmember in any expedition as Wade learned: The Captain. The one trained in calculating and preparing the jump, and the only one capable of returning the crew home after.

"Well, usually the crew don't exactly matter that much, we're all pretty expendable." Medy shrugged.

"What the Captains are there for is to make sure the mined crystals make it back to the right warehouse. Would be terrible if after one week of solid work, it all appeared a few miles off, right into someone else's hands you know?" So far, Wade could understand the basic roles: Captain, miner, and guard. They were somewhat normal, maybe even what he'd find on an Earth-based team. The next one took a step away from the norm.

"A warlock?" Wade asked, frowning.

"Well yeah." Medy shrugged.

"See, if we die, nobody on the mortal realm would know until the expedition returns and gives notice. That could be like, a week away."

"And a week spent in Hell. Ooof." Wade could imagine that meant no making it out.

"Yeah, when we get infected by blackrot you can't summon us anymore. But with a warlock on the team, they can summon anyone back to the mines within an hour or so if word gets back early. Sure you don't actually need a warlock technically, the Coffin will still work just fine without one. But it's kinda needed?"

"Even with one, any death is still a chance to be caught forever in Hell." Bael grunted.

"An hour in Hell is an hour. Anything can happen to you in that time."

"I probably won't need that part," Wade said, "I don't intend on dragging any demons with me back away from Earth." The pair looked relieved to hear that.

"So, miner, guard, captain and warlock. And the Gravekeeper is the fifth?" Wade looked over his quest name.

'The new Bellkeeper' was the name, and it had popped up right as they mentioned a Gravekeeper being missing. As Wade had suspected, the gravekeepers were officially called Bellkeepers.

"Unofficially, we call them the Gravekeepers." Bael grunted.

"They're the one keeping the Coffin in working order. When the Coffin turns into an actual Coffin on the miners, it's generally the keeper that made a mistake and turned everything into a true grave."

"Yeah, we do all know some ins and outs to keeping most Coffins in working order, like I know a list of noises to watch out for, or if heating stops how to start it back up." Medy added, scribbling a few words in english. A to-do list of items to maintain and watch out for.

"But there's always some more specific things that could end with the whole thing imploding on you. And there isn't really any kind of standardization among Coffins, they're really specialized things." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"So you bring in a specialist engineer in repairs?"

"Not just any specialist." Bael added.

"The ones that built that base. Coffins always come with their own keepers." It was more than just repairs and maintenance. Many of these habitats were larger than the teleportation ritual could fit. So they were forced to keep the habitat in separate pieces, to be assembled on the other side. And being expensive to build, the money behind these expeditions wanted to make sure they could reuse their asset for the next mining stake.

Once more terrorizing the chips, Medy continued her lecture, chewing them on and off.

"With one of the actual builders of the whole thing, they can make sure everything's put together right. They know what signs to look out for that we don't. Usually it's a safe job so the Gravekeepers have assembled and disassembled the same base plenty of times. They know where all the skeletons are in the closet." She giggled at the english idiom that had absolutely no real translation in Demonic.

"And there are skeletons in the closet, literally speaking." She continued.

"You need to bring a few to mine with." Wade got the fuller picture. The guards and the miners (Necromancers with their undead minions) would go off, the Captain, Warlock and Engineers would remain behind to keep the base running. And then came the divide between mortals and demons. In the past, all of this had to be done with nothing but mortals. Demons were fearsome, terrifying creatures capable of great cunning. None would bother with a contract that would exile them away from the mortal realm.

A warlock would need to be both powerful, and persuasive to make that work. Modern day Azdrial had far different priorities.

"Captain and Warlocks will always be mortals." Bael said.

"Warlocks for obvious reasons. They handle everything that comes with the crew."

"That's us!" Medy gave an excited wave.

"The good warlocks are sometimes even the crew cooks, on top of the task masters! The bad ones are really really miserable people though. They hate being there, and they hate us too." With the dead going nowhere, and Hell having its population desperate, it wasn't hard to become a Necromancer or a Warlock. Thus, a good warlock was good at other things besides summoning demons and keeping them in order. Being a good manager was apparently far more impressive than summoning demons.

"Captains tend to be nobility, or well connected mortals." Bael said.

"Always well educated ones. And never a demon. The cost to learn the arcane calculations required to safely transfer those amounts of mass is something they paid great sums to learn. Handing it off to a demon who could be compelled by contract is a poor investment. The Bellkeepers can be a mix of mortals or demons, depending on the desperation involved." And that was the five core roles in a mining expedition. There generally wasn't ever more than one Captain at a time, no reason for that.

Usually no need for more than one warlock, as Demons generally accepted most contracts. Thus the rest of the ranks were filled with guards, miners and gravekeepers.

"And we don't have that person for my base." Wade saw the land trap for what it was.

"Any replacement for a keeper?"

"You could hire a regular coffin builder, they just won't ever be as in-tune as the ones who built the base itself." Medy waved a hand at him.

"I wouldn't worry about that one too much. Think about it this way: That it hasn't imploded over time means it's been left in a well maintained state with nothing out of specifications..." She stopped, as if double guessing her words.

"Well, okay, so it might implode on you if you make a mistake or put your weight somewhere wrong. Like if some part of the superstructure weakened over time and all it needs is someone pressing too hard on-""The door order needs to be learned first." Bael grunted from the side, interrupting Medy.

"Almost all implosions happen from someone forgetting a step. Coffins are not built to break, they're built for profit. And there is no profit if it all collapses. It won't crush you by accident, it will by negligence. Do you understand?" Wade gave a slight gulp, reaching for a soda to clear his throat. The idea of just getting squashed out of nowhere with no warning was not a great one to think about, even if the odds were apparently low.

The Satyr then went down a small list of the most dangerous things to do in a Coffin up to the least. Bael had once told Wade the Coffin was the safest place in the Arcane Realm, and it was still one bad door seal away from becoming an actual coffin.

"Yeah, Bael makes a good point on that." Medy swallowed the food she had been chewing, and deliberately did not take another bite this time around, so that she could speak clearly. Frankly at this point Wade wasn't sure where all that food was going. Medy seemed like a black void.

"There's usually no windows in a Coffin, so it gets really dark. Like pitch black, you can't even see your hand. Since it's all sealed up. You have to feel around the walls and find the runes off the side, should be a round ring. When you find it, dump as much mana as you can into the circuit. It usually is a connected thing that goes all over the coffin, and it'll spread out the mana into all the lights.

Those are basically vials of light potions, they start to glow yellow-white for a few hours after getting exposed to mana. Just keep them topped off every now and then. You don't need to replace them ever unless they get cracked and leak."

"And heating?" Wade would prefer not to freeze on arrival.

"Handled with ventilation." Bael answered. Medy nodded her head, "Coffins have some really interesting architecture that just doesn't work anywhere else in the realms." She instantly went to drawing with her new pen shapes and squares that made no sense to Wade.

"What they've got to keep you warm is a mini-airlock basically. You turn a wheel and it mechanically pushes air from the outside into a vent shaft filled with thick mithril chains. That heats up as it sucks the mana flowing with that pocket of air, so what comes out is both clean and heated air. Just make sure you don't overdo it! If mithril melts, all the mana it's stored is released, which kind of sets off a chain reaction.

The other mithril anchors eat that mana, melt themselves and release their own-""Keep a watch for anything glowing dim red as you turn the wheel. Stop turning the moment that happens." Bael once more cut to the chase, keeping the instructions simple.

"There is much to learn, keep what you need to know on hand, ignore what you don't for now."

"All right, red glow bad." Wade said, trying to keep it all straight.

"So long as there's nothing glowing in the vents, I'm A-okay to keep going. And, uh, how often do I have to vent the place?"

"Every hour or two while you're inside, generally." Medy shrugged, done with her scribbles, and now interested in sampling soda.

"You could go a day or two without doing that, but people start to get headaches, start thinking really slow and then die in their sleep." Wade had an idea of why that was, but Azdrians clearly had no idea about the chemistry behind it.

"Only holy magic can heal that for a time, but, well." She tapped her forehead horns.

"Demon, you know? We can't use that kind of healing. Only the Captain and Warlock would get to stay alive if the mithril heat sinks melted. But don't worry, it's fixed by just replacing those chains with spare mithril in the area, until you can get proper chains put back on." There were multiple other systems to heat a base up, all of it involved mithril. Medy was the expert in all this, she'd been part of many different mining crews and had seen just about every different kind.

The wheel simply ended up being the most economical and easy to implement system, but she'd seen higher quality Bells have special variations in regions they knew would be far below simply freezing. In fact, as Wade learned, Mithril was Azdrial's version of coal. At least in this particular realm.

"So long as mithril is submerged in water, it generally keeps cool." Medy said.

"I mean, if it's got a lot of surface area, then it basically can't melt at all. Water just keeps cooling it off you know? But if you make a cube chunk of giant mithril, that might not be really prac-""The boiler is not something you have to worry for." Bael said, once more rolling his eyes.

"Leave that part alone. You are not a Gravekeeper. You are there for nine hours at most, and then you return here. You only need the minimum. Once you have the Coffin up and running, go straight to the armory and see if there are spare Arcanaut suits. You'll need to wear one to step outside, unless you wish to die early or you have a different plan." Wade was thinking more than just loot. That base was his.

He wanted to make sure it was going to remain functional for the rest of the round and be useful to plan his escape from the Arcane realm with. He might be stuck there for a few more days, or he might want to remain there even. By the time he stepped foot in the mortal realm properly he might be walking around with enough mana crystals to buy out a petty noble. That'd be pretty great. For now, he focused on what Bael was coaching him through.

"Lights. Vents. Armory. Door order." He said, tapping the table with each word.

"Get those in your head and memorize them. Because when you return, you won't have us there to guide you. You will have, at best, the notes you take and guidance of a petty goddess. And that will have to do."