Back in town, Ace shuts down his scrying spell. This causes the highly polished copper surface to rapidly show signs of tarnish. Though thankfully this was only surface level and could be easily buffed out. He would need to either use the spell for days on end without stopping or thousands of times before the price paid by the mirror would become too much to just shine it again for another go. Of course, even then it would just require more copper being added.

  Though Ace does readily admit similar spells that use stuff like a pool of water are certainly more economical as the water just ends up evaporating and is easily replaced. Of course, there were also scrying spells that claimed no backlash. Those he avoided over all others as nothing in the world was free and something about scrying spells forced a cost when you tried to see too far. Kelly could go on about causality and the cost to break it.

  Ace simply knew the magical cost tended to scale based less on actual distance and more on karmic ties and effects. That was why most scrying spells required some form of attachment to the target in the first place. If you don’t have that, even a relatively short distance will have the price scale beyond measure. Though the opposite is equally true, where enough of a karmic connection can reduce the price paid drastically. That or you get a god to help.

  There was a reason many myths involving divination and scrying are about knowledge being granted from on high. Deities cheat when it comes to that type of thing. Though Ace wasn’t going to touch that kind of thing with a ten-foot pole.

  The more months that go by and the more reports from outside his town that he gets, the happier he is with how he handled religion. Just three days ago he got a report on one of the farther out settlements that had all converted to worshiping a god. The settlement is now almost a ghost town.

  Not to say the god did anything. Rather, Ace and his fellow humans on this planet for the most part don’t really have what it takes to truly worship a deity on the level such a conversion requires. Way too many people are used to paying lip service, if that, to the teaching of religion. On the other hand, these very real deities not only have much higher expectations of people following their religious teachings, but also the means to punish those who don’t.

  In a post-magic world, there are no corrupt pastors flying around in personal jets. Such a hypocrite would soon find all his riches reduced to ashes. It wouldn’t even necessarily be a direct act by their deity. Rather, the covenant between such leaders of the faith and their deity or pantheon will naturally strike them down with bad luck and worse. With only the most heinous examples, being personally punished.

  That isn’t to say there aren’t going to be religious leaders who end up being equivalent to those that have private jets. It is just that they won’t be corrupt. A god of wealth and privilege is going to almost require such a lifestyle. At least in those cases, though, you know what’s up and they’re actually following what they preach.

  Ace wasn’t going to have any of that nonsense rooted in his town. Well, it could be rooted, but more that he wasn’t going to give any religion any privileges. Except he had already sort of broken that rule?

  Ace sighed as he tried to sort his feelings out. He had literally just seen a plan a week in development come to fruition, and he was back to worrying. Yes, he did make it so that livestock within his town would worship an appropriate beast deity instead of the ranchers worshiping a ranching deity. Hell, he would have done the same for the crops if that was possible. However, it was quite a shame that a deity’s ability to bring in the unenlightened of their kind did have limits and a stalk of wheat was well past it.

  Not that Ace knew of any beast deity of grass. There should be such a thing, mind you. It is almost inevitable when the old eastern belief that if something survives long enough, it can gain a certain spirituality, happens to be true now. However, while not as rare as awakened dungeons, deities based on normal plants are quite rare and tend to spread around less. Plant deities, in general, being fine with a much slower rate of growth when it comes to their religion. Ace can only shake his head and wait.

  Out in the town, as dawn is just making itself known, a great ruckus starts up as Jim and the others return. The pigeon griffins were a well-known pest at this point and to hear that they were successfully removed raised the mood for everyone. While Ace and the other leaders were mostly worried about what would show up to hunt them, the common people had more common problems with them.

  In particular, they had taken to using the large number of wood and bone houses as their personal scratching posts. Is there a literal forest of trees right where they nest? Sure, but the nicely carved wood of the town’s many buildings apparently just has something trees don’t.

  It was almost funny. They had gotten rid of the rogue artists and nature decided to throw flying cats at them. Cats which didn’t mind scratching up everything. Worse, at least flying cats would have more common sense to them, what with being cats. These are pigeon griffins and so have the head of a pigeon. Sure, that doesn’t translate directly to being a pigeon, griffins in general having a more developed mind than either side that makes them.

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  However, you can only do so much when your base ingredient is a pigeon. They’re clever enough birds, but that cleverness isn’t exactly in places most people look for it. The saving grace being the feline part, though in this case, it isn’t a house cat, but rather a small wild cat which also doesn’t rate too high itself.

  So yeah, the townsfolk had been getting mighty irritated with the beasts. Which caused a bit of a blow up when they found out not all the griffins had died. It almost caused a riot as the crowd demanded the death of those remaining pigeon griffins that Bellinger had captured along with their eggs.

  Ace personally had to make an appearance later in the day to calm everyone down. Though even after revealing his plans to use them as messenger pigeons, people weren’t exactly all that excited about the prospects. The beasts had been too much of a nuisance over the last few weeks for people to easily accept this.

  Ace, however, held out hope that their opinions would change. Mostly because everyone had only ever dealt with the adults and the cuteness of baby animals could bridge many gaps. All he had to do was wait for the eggs they had brought back to hatch.

  Not that he had to wait long. There was a reason they had worried about overpopulation. The pigeon griffins bred fast. Kelly even posited that part of their magic was involved in it as a survival mechanism. A magical ecosystem was, in many ways, accelerated. Not just because magic allowed for faster growth, but also because the magic itself substituted for some of the nutrition that would normally be needed.

  Jim was honestly worried about this. Right now, the forests around the town were mostly standard animals with maybe a magical twist. However, he had occasionally traveled deeper into the wilds. Each level boosting how fast and far he can travel.

  This meant he was probably the first to what the ecosystem was beginning to turn into. Not to say it was a never ending riot of fights and savagery. The forest areas deeper in still felt like a forest. However, they were packed much tighter with animals and monsters alike. His best comparison would be the one time he visited a recently stocked river where it was to not catch a fish. Except instead of just one species being in abundance, everything was.

  Jim worried about this because despite Mana specifically and World Energy in general being able to support such abundance. It is not natural. Which, to be fair, integration isn’t natural. It is literally an outside force bestowing a god-like guiding force to an entire dimension so that the vacuum decay didn’t just reduce everything to dust.

  However, while this abundance of life was supportable in theory, creatures should instead be adapting to the higher Mana levels and instead of being so fruitful, become more capable of absorbing that power for themselves. You don’t need a thousand offspring right now if you can process more Mana and live long enough to have them over time.

  The slower approach not only increases an individual’s chance of surviving, but increases their later offspring’s power. While a high level rabbit won’t give birth to a high level child, that child will have a better foundation. To the point that sometimes the child is of a new species that has a higher base starting level in adulthood. Nevermind the chance of the parents themselves evolving at some point and giving their offspring that new species as a potential starting point along with everything else.

  The only reason for the wilds further out being so packed that Jim could think of, was that the increase in world energy levels was actually worse than they had thought. And Jim had an idea of why they got much lower results when they did the test. To confirm it though, he needed Kelly’s help and for now? He was focused on the griffin eggs.

  They were likely to prove a vital strategic resource in the future. Though even if the pigeon griffins weren’t able to do much themselves. Raising them opened the possibility of later on gaining higher forms of griffin. Sure, unlike some species, griffins weren’t actually a ladder of evolution to be climbed, but greater species could certainly be reached all the same.

  And so Jim brooded in what Kellinger dubbed the Aerie. It wasn’t the most impressive building, though it was a full story taller than any other normal building in the inner circle. Overall, the design of it looked shockingly like a fat air traffic control tower from an airport. Though instead of windows, it had leather squares scraped thin to let the light through only slightly.

  Out in the wild, the pigeon griffins kept their nests in the shade and so they planned to do the same. Though this brought up the biggest shame. Neither Jim nor any of the others Ace had brought had managed to take the six wild griffins even the slightest and they eventually had to be put down.

  However, Jim was hopeful for the eggs. There was a huge difference between trying to tame a wild animal and raising one from birth. If anything, at least the young griffins would be used to humans right from the start.

  Though the second Jim noticed that the eggs would be hatching, he skedaddled. He wasn’t too keen on having them all bond on him. Instead, gathering a small group of volunteers from the outer circle that the Barrais had vetted. While technically they would now be living in the inner circle, they would be restricted to the Aerie.

  More important, though, was their backgrounds. Miraculously, one of them had a father who raised pigeons and so had a decent foundation. The other three had more general animal experience with raising animals, though one had also spent time helping at an animal shelter and managing their cats so that might help as well.

  Jim, satisfied that everything was good, remained outside as he waited for the good news. They hoped that one in seven eggs would end up hatching as there was only so much they could do and even magic wasn’t necessarily as good as having an actual mother hen as it were.

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