Chương 94: Growing Pains

The Liminal Lands looked like a junkyard, which I suppose it was. Broken furniture was piled against the dimensional walls, and everything imaginable formed small mountains everywhere. I stood in the doorway and took it all in. Mort wasn't there, and based on what Pierre had told me, he was probably already on his way back from the dump with another load. The Liminal Lands were my divine domain. I'd built this space with my own mana and shaped it into something that was supposed to be a sanctuary for my people.

It was also the linchpin of our plague rat containment plan. Ninety mana-infected rats were heading south toward us, and the plan was to funnel them into this space where I could seal them in and deal with them on my terms. That plan required room, and right now there wasn't much room left. Lifna floated near the center of the domain. She was bigger than Pierre had described, much bigger. Damn it, Mort. I didn't mind the fact that she was larger. In fact, that was great.

What bothered me was the fact that Mort was bringing in more material than Lifna could assimilate. From one of our earlier conversations, she had to erase Gaia's mana signature and attune it to her instead. Doing so took mana, which took time to repentish.

"Stupid, freaking marsupial," I muttered.

"I'd expect something like this from Tala. Squirrels are known for stealing and hoarding." Fuck, I shouldn't have said that outloud. Lifna might use it against me. Speaking of, she was taking up a big chunk of the available space, and the junk piled around her was taking up most of the rest. I needed to clean this up immediately.

"Okay, Lifna, I'm going to let you borrow some of my mana. I need this space so you're going to have to absorb it, now."

"Thanks Mom," she said. I hesitated for a moment, and then and there, decided Mort had to pay. I reached out with my divine will and focused on the nearest pile of scrap metal. Then I directed it toward Lifna's orbit while feeding her a thread of mana. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough to start converting the trash into mass. When it reached Lifna's gravitational field, she pulled it in the rest of the way.

The scrap metal touched her surface and began to dissolve, breaking down into raw components that Lifna absorbed and reconverted. I could see it happening in real time as a chunk of rusted car door became a stripe of reddish terrain on her surface, with iron-rich soil forming where garbage had been a moment before. She grew as she absorbed it. Each piece of junk that entered her field added mass.

She was condensing the material down to a fraction of its original volume, which meant a washing machine that took up four cubic feet of space became a thin layer of new planetary surface that took up almost nothing. The math worked in my favor because Lifna was actually freeing up space by absorbing the junk and compressing it into something dense and compact. I started working faster, directing pile after pile into her orbit. Each piece dissolved into Lifna's growing surface, and the domain started to clear.

Then a shadow flickered and a new pile of junk materialized on the ground, consisting of a tangle of rusty rebar, three hubcaps, and what looked like a car battery. Mort was apparently still making deliveries. The opossum himself wasn't visible but his contributions were arriving at a rate that was almost keeping pace with Lifna's absorption. I was clearing trash from the left side of the domain while Mort was adding new trash to the right side. I couldn't help but growl. Yep, he's gonna pay.

For a moment, I considered shutting off his access to the portal entirely. I had the authority since the portal was part of my domain. I could restrict who used it with a thought. One mental command and Mort would be locked out until I decided otherwise. But I didn't do it. Mort's collecting wasn't just a compulsion. It was his contribution to the community. He was feeding Lifna, which was something that needed to be done.

The problem wasn't that Mort was collecting but that he was collecting faster than the domain could handle. Instead, I reached out through my bond with Tala. She was somewhere near the cabin, probably on the roof. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Tala, I need you to find Mort. He's at the county dump or on his way back. Tell him to stop bringing stuff in for the rest of the day. I need time to clear what's already here.

A pause came before her response arrived through the bond, dry and skeptical. You want me to tell Mort to stop collecting. Yes, I replied. She sighed through the bond. Fine, but you owe me cashews. Deal. Tala was the only member of our community who could consistently get Mort to listen. I wasn't sure how she did it, but I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. While I waited for Tala to intercept the opossum supply chain, I kept working.

Pile after pile went into Lifna's orbit, and the domain was slowly clearing. Fortunately, I was able to receive enough energy from my followers to keep up with the output. As I worked, I wished for the hundredth time that I had a way to communicate with everyone at once. The bond with Tala was useful, but it only worked with her. If I wanted to reach others, I had to use a phone. I hate phones. The Planar Store had communication tools, but even the cheapest one cost more crystals than I was willing to spend.

I made a mental note to dig deeper into the store when I could actually afford to buy something. The thought of crystals made me think about the economy, which made me think about the next wave of adventurers. For the first time since the whole mess started, I found myself actually looking forward to students showing up. At twenty-five crystals per lesson, every new adventurer was a step closer to the domain expansion, the sanctuary ward, and all the other upgrades I couldn't afford yet.

I caught myself hoping that Marcus' video would keep spreading. More views meant more visitors, and more visitors meant more crystals. If Raven's YouTube channel kept drawing attention to the Ozarks, even better. I'd never thought I'd be grateful for Raven parading my body around on the internet, but if it brought paying customers to Loki's clearing, I could swallow my pride. While I directed another load of junk into Lifna's orbit, something else caught my attention.

It was faint and almost imperceptible, but my divine senses picked it up. There was a thread of faith energy that I didn't recognize. I focused on it. The thread was thin and new, barely formed. It wasn't coming from Bambi's congregation or the Moon-Eyed People. It was coming from the werewolf pack. That surprised me. The werewolves were devoted to Luna, their moon goddess. Their faith was deep and cultural, and it bordered on fanatical.

Pierre had explained it to me once as something that went beyond religion into racial identity. Werewolves were Luna's children, and their transformations were her gift. Their pack bonds were her blessing, and asking a werewolf to worship another god was like asking someone to choose a different mother. But the thread was there. It wasn't the whole pack. There were just a few individuals. Also, it didn't feel like they'd abandoned Luna. It felt more like they'd added me alongside her.

It was more like their faith had expanded rather than shifted. It reminded me of someone who had grown up with one parent and then discovered they had a second one who also cared about them. I didn't know what to do with that information, so I filed it away and kept working on the junk. The faith thread was thin enough that it might fade on its own. Either way, it wasn't something I could control, and I had more pressing problems to deal with.

I worked for another twenty minutes, directing the remaining piles into Lifna's gravitational pull. The domain was nearly clear now. There was enough open space to contain ninety plague rats if everything went according to plan. Lifna was noticeably larger than when I'd started. She was growing up so fast. It seems like only yesterday she was beachball sized. Everything Lifna absorbed was compressed into planetary mass that took up far less space than the raw junk had.

As long as I stayed ahead of Mort's deliveries and expanded the domain when I could afford it, the situation was sustainable. That was when I noticed my fanny pack where I'd been keeping the fifteen crystals felt lighter than it should have. Really? I already knew what I was going to find but I unzipped it and looked inside anyway. It was empty. Not a single crystal remained. For a moment, I thought Mort had stolen them, which would have been entirely in character.

But Mort had been at the dump, and the fanny pack didn't look rifled through. It looked undisturbed. The crystals had simply vanished from inside it. Then I noticed something. The dimensional walls of the Liminal Lands, the boundaries that defined the edges of my domain, had shifted slightly outward. Not much, but they had shifted a foot in every direction. The domain was marginally larger than it had been when I walked in. The crystals hadn't been stolen. They'd been absorbed.

My domain had drawn them in the same way Lifna drew in junk, converting raw mana into expansion. Fifteen planar crystals had dissolved into the fabric of my domain, buying me a foot of extra space in every direction. I stared at the empty fanny pack for a long time. Fifteen crystals were gone. My entire savings. Lifna was saying something about I was the best mother ever but I completely ignored her. Instead, I stamped around. I didn't even know who to complain to or who to curse.

"The domain ate my money," I said out loud to nobody. Lifna had already gone quiet, apparently noticing my anger, which was probably for the best because I was not in a mood to be consoled. I sat down on a rock and thought about what I was going to tell Tala and Claire. They were going to be pissed. Finally, I stood up, dusted off my fur, and walked back through the portal. I could only handle one problem at a time, and right now the most urgent one was making sure Mort had actually stopped his deliveries.

After that, I needed to finalize the plague rat trap and then figure out how to earn crystals fast enough to stay ahead of a growing planet, an expanding religion, and a government that expected me to handle every supernatural problem in the Ozarks for the price of a gravel path. It was going to be a long week.