Dinner with the captain was not at all what Kai had expected.

Captain Bell was a completely different woman when hosting.

She was amenable and pleasant and a whole lot more complimentary of his actions, stating had she been in his place with his abilities, she would have done the same in a heartbeat.

She even passed on the thanks and appreciation of those he had saved.

Apparently, the ship Kai had rescued wasn't even carrying anything of interest. Just mail and a shipment of grain from a well-known agricultural rift.

Agricultural rifts were an atypical rift that just so happen to have an abundance of harvestable crops.

Kai quickly made it clear this concept was alien to him.

Teams of adventurers would enter the rift, clear any threats, then hold that particular instance open for others to enter and collect all of the viable resources in a timely manner. Then once they had stripped a cost-effective amount, the rift would be completed and allowed to cycle so that another team or company that had paid for the privilege could repeat the process all over again.

The same was done with many other resources all over the planet. The act of stripping rifts for all they had maintained the needs of society. Thus this effectively eliminated resource scarcity when a repeatable rift opened up and was kept stable for its exploitation.

Kai was fascinated to learn that, apparently there were also dungeons that had the same or even more valuable collections of resources ripe for exploitation.

However, because of the difference in a dungeon's entry requirement and their locked-off instanced nature, it was much harder to exploit a dungeon for those resources.

That, of course, didn't stop well-practised teams of adventurers from doing just that.

Alicia revealed she was certain that with Kai's insane storage capacity their team actually stood to make a tidy profit in the years to come just from looting the otherwise mundane contents of the dungeons and rifts they explored.

All this explained why Kai had not seen any farms on their way to the capital.

In fact, while farms existed, they only accounted for resources that were not found within dungeons and rifts, and so were considered scarce.

The same could be said for other resources like metals and minerals. Why build a mine and the associated industrial complex when an effective rift run could retrieve tonnes of high-quality steel in the same amount of time it would take to just mine the ore itself?

The effect of all this meant Alea was significantly less developed than Earth, with airships being the primary mode of travel across the mostly untamed, wild and free surface of the planet.

Kai foolishly thought this might lead to some abundance of resources, creating a kind of established peace, with no one nation coveting the land of their neighbour for the resources they held.

He was abused of this reasoning quickly.

The conflict over the control of valuable rifts and their resources was a daily one. With companies, clans, guilds, city-states, kingdoms and empires embroiled in a never-ending conflict over the rights and access to those resources.

It was just like Earth, but more magical. Almost everyone was out for control, power and wealth in one manner or another.

That led to what had happened this morning.

Pirates were a huge issue, with the number of incidents only increasing over the last few years. The vast majority of reports tracing back to the shattered kingdoms. Their taking of prisoners who were never seen again concerning the other nations and raising political tensions to a breaking point.

The ship Kai had saved, The Cankerous Dwarf, was on a long haul, hoping to make a tidy profit transporting some rift grain to an area where grain was otherwise scarce. They were coming into the valley to refill their tanks when the pirates had broken free from the cover of a nearby mountaintop to engage them.

Fortunately, they had a team of adventurers aboard that were able to forestall the assault. But they knew they were outmatched and even offered to hand over as much cargo as the smaller pirate vessel could take.

But the pirates didn't seem interested and pushed to board. Their intent was to take the crew as well as the cargo was clear.

When Kai asked why they didn't seek to take the ship itself, he was informed ships had transponders and could be easily tracked and recovered by a determined charter. People, however, they unfortunately could not be so easily taken back.

Then there was whether the so-called skimmers that got away would be of any issue.

But it was revealed that they got their name because they were a small craft with poor mana capacity, usually having a crew of four or less; they typically favoured short-distance trips. They were inherently unstable and would often end up skimming the ground when pushed too hard.

With their batteries drained from the engagement and no mothership to return to, the pirates that fled would likely not make it far before they were skimming the treetops just above the dangerous territory on the ground below.

The use of the term mothership had Kai thinking of aircraft carriers, and he eased it into the conversation, thinking a large ship fielding dozens or more skimmers would be an obvious thing on Alea.

It wasn't.

While the concept wasn't a new one, it was not seen as a practical one.

Apparently there was a cold arms race to improve the design of skimmers. But the low mana capacity and drive systems of skimmers meant either the small vessel had to reduce its speed to a crawl to get anywhere long-distance or its battery ran out if it tried to get anywhere fast.

What was worse was that trying to deploy such vessels from another ship always caused issues, as the use of airframes, barrier systems and other necessary ship systems all packed into one small vessel wreaked havoc with the host ship, so much so that they were only ever used in limited numbers and only in certain situations, such as the Spirit of Exploration's landing craft.

Kai remembered the landing craft and the skimmers. They were little more than flying dinghies. The skimmers the pirates used were occupied by a pilot and a couple of ranged combatants firing attacks at their prey while they circled.

He asked why they didn't use planes. Sure, he could see why the landing craft would work with the way it was designed. But if they wanted something that was small, could travel long distances and possibly even engage in combat, the aeroplane was an obvious choice.

That was met with confusion.

So Kai was left trying to awkwardly explain his basic understanding of aerodynamics.

The breakthrough came when he used his mana conjuration to make a model of a World War Two Spitfire.

He had fascinated the table of Aleans.

Thanric, seeing the plane model, chose to askew the meal entirely to take copious notes as both Captain Bell probed his knowledge of how control surfaces worked.

Eventually, he was practising his telekinesis by moving the little model about the room in an approximation of what it would look like in flight. He even managed to get the propeller spinning and a plane's control surfaces to move, as he used an invisible force to move the plane in his little demonstration.

The conversation eventually circled back to aircraft carriers when a rather amused Syl made her own mana conjuration of a flying helicarrier that had only ever existed in fiction back on Earth.

She, of course, then displayed her superior abilities by having dozens of little aircraft take off from the flight deck, circle the room in a show of the crafts' grace and manoeuvrability and even a little dog-fighting before they returned and landed on her ship's deck.

That's about when The Sage concluded he could make it work. He would need to tinker with some old small drive designs, possibly adjusting them for vertical take-off and landing, and perhaps even incorporating some long-abandoned weapon systems.

The talk quickly shifted to patents and military secrets.

Kai left the meal in a state of confusion and a system oath promising him the appropriate patent once it was all finalised.

The information he had just unintentionally revealed was going straight to researchers of a collection of allied nations.

He was a little concerned he might have just changed warfare on his host world, but Syl just told him she was happy he hadn't introduced gunpowder.

Not that he knew how to make gunpowder; all he remembered from some documentaries was charcoal, saltpetre, and possibly some piss.

With the impromptu lesson of concepts that were apparently foreign to this world, the meal had gone on longer than expected.

Kai, Alicia and Syl, leaving a contemplative Arnella at her quarters, the three of them retired early after checking on the eggs.

Kai woke with a start the next day when someone blew in his ear.

Sitting up sharply, he checked on Alicia, thinking she was up to something mischievous.

But besides her dishevelled silken nightgown and an ample amount of exposed flesh, she was still cuddled around his waist, drooling on him without a care in the world, somehow completely undisturbed by his sudden movement.

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"You know, I think she prefers sleeping beside you. I had to introduce her to the hot water bottle to get her to stop putting her freezing cold hands on me when we were sharing a bed in the dungeon… Honestly, I have missed her these last few nights," Syl said softly.

Looking up from Alicia, Kai saw Syl on his other side, sitting back in nothing but her signature oversized clean white T-shirt.

Her beautiful, bright, fiery hair was now a sweet pink colour that just seemed to work on her.

"Looks good. You fancy a change of pace?" he asked as he relaxed back into the ample pillows.

She nodded. "I've finished setting up in the domain. Had some free time, exploring the new abilities the infrastructure offers. It still falls short of full physical manifestation, but I can do a little bit more than I could before," she said as she leaned in and gave him a ghostly kiss on the lips.

If he didn't know better, he would have sworn Syl had actually touched him, but it was strange.

Nothing about it was physical, and yet he felt her warmth more viscerally than he had ever felt the faint caress of her projection before.

Curiously, he asked, "What else can you do?"

"Not much until I have that anchor. But…" She leaned in and softly blew down the back of his neck. "This is fun."

The puff of air, her proximity and the fact that he could smell her sweat, spicy, intoxicating scent, had something in Kai rising.

Alicia, as his luck would have it, was starting to stir from her sleep.

Realising the trouble he would be in if the two of them discovered he was this out of control, he rolled out of bed and used his raiment to summon a towel tied perfectly around his waist.

"Does this mean the shower is accessible?" Kai asked, a little too eagerly.

Syl gave him a look as a groggy Alicia rose from the bed to look around in confusion.

"Only if the both of us can join you."

Kai summoned one of his hilts and dropped it on the bedroom floor.

Using it to anchor a portal like he had practised so many times before with The Sage, he waited a moment just to make sure it was stable.

He stepped wholly into the domain for the first time to have his first hot shower in months.

When they finally got to breakfast that morning, they drew everyone's attention. For Kai, his involvement in yesterday's incident with the pirates. The crew was led to believe he had merely made a successful shot with some weird device The Sage had recovered from a dungeon long ago.

Syl, it was because this was most of the crew's first time seeing her, and she now had deep purple hair and not the reported red or the recent pink.

And with Alicia, it was because she was still quite abashed from the hot and heavy pressure in the domain's shower. Her flushed skin and twitching ears, coupled with their unusual tardiness, told everyone present with the ability to read her body language that something had happened.

Not that they had done anything other than give each other a good scrub.

Beyond their short adventure into the domain's wet room, Syl had not allowed them to explore any further than that room.

She explained she wasn't prepared to give the same tour twice, and when Arnella and The Sage were invited in later that day, they would see the changes then, and only then.

Kai was just surprised she somehow manipulated the location of where his portal was, as he had first positioned it just in front of where the house was located. But by the time he stepped through, he was entering a glorious shower room he could have never hoped to afford in his lifetime back on Earth.

Bardrick complained about Syl finally exposing herself to the crew. It means he had to close off one of his more lucrative betting pools, and he was amusingly colourful about it.

Cillian couldn't take his eyes off Syl; the only time he looked away from her was to glance at Kai in confusion.

That earned the boy an earful about the character of a man being of far more importance than anything else from the three women currently allowed to sit at the boy's table. It being made known in the process that Cillian had in fact been found canoodling with some of the crew, despite Arnella's past advice to find women of a higher quality once he had established himself as a true man of quality, whatever that meant.

While Kai was a little disappointed in Cillian, he also couldn't blame him. The crew was gorgeous, and had he not been happy with things as they were, he too might have caved to temptation.

And it wasn't like a bit of casual fraternisation would harm Cillian if he kept to his plans to be a career adventurer, like he had told Kai in the past.

With Cillian admonished, Kai did his usual parade of morning examinations.

But today most of the friendly crew seemed to be coming over to investigate Syl, as they wanted to determine if she was a good pairing for Alicia and, to some lesser extent, Kai himself.

That only resulted in a few nods and noticeably more stare downs.

After seeing that Alicia was, in fact, capable of wolfing down her food, they just managed to make it to the morning training session on time.

As Kai and Alicia moved off to their respective specialities, he wasn't sure what Syl was planning. Part of him thought she might hang about him; she had always kicked his ass in their duels while they were crossing the abyss. But he didn't see her once.

When they were done and heading down to The Sage's deck to pretend to strip out of their armour, clean up and then go see Thanric, Syl explained she had gone to see what tips and tricks the mages had.

They were an eclectic mix of different schools of magic. Their limited authorisation to cast any significant spells that might affect the ship's standard operating conditions meant they had to keep their practices small, focusing on complexity on a reduced scale.Many in their number choose to practise with magical contraptions that somehow tested their understanding and control of mana because of the ship's restrictions.

Kai learnt he had flummoxed the core magical group of the ship's adventurers. They apparently could not understand his attachment to the sword. Especially after his first arcane display and then yesterday's use of some magical device that was the subject of much conjecture both before and after Syl had shown up.

He wasn't surprised to discover there was a betting pool open for when Kai would come over to train with them.

Unfortunately, they had shot themselves in the foot by betting with Katarla, the one teaching Kai the sword Kata, they would not need to convince Kai his time was better spent with them.

At least now Syl had a long list of devices and contraptions that would be worth looking into when they had the opportunity.

Arnella informed Kai the Sage was expecting him in his lounge. Kai moved down a couple of doors and knocked once before opening the door the moment he heard the little click telling him it had just been unlocked.

"Come… Kai, you're supposed to wait," Thanric admonished Kai from where he sat at his desk.

Kai shrugged as he made his way to his usual spot and collapsed into the comfortable chair.

"Today's the day. Did not think you would want to wait on propriety," he said as the rest of them funnelled in behind him.

Seeing everyone else follow Kai, The Sage immediately cleared away what he had been working on.

"Yes, the moment I received reports of Lady Syl joining you in the ship's mess this morning, I hoped it might be."

"Lady?" Syl growled.

"I apologise, Syl," Thanric sighed, "please understand it is out of respect for you and willingness to share. Our discussions on the nature of cores alone have been invaluable to me and will change Alea for the better."

Kai wondered when Syl had found the time for these discussions.

Syl took a turn at sighing herself before saying, "I wouldn't thank me yet, while the knowledge will help the people of Alea reach new heights and eventually join the multiverse, the knowledge, however, is indiscriminate in nature. Just imagine what will happen when someone like that slimy Caradin fellow learns what you know now."

"That is precisely why anyone who the information is shared with must agree to a system-backed non-disclosure agreement. It is, in effect, as close to forbidden knowledge as we can make it. I am, of course, not foolish enough to believe the information won't get out, but as we agreed, you should have more than enough time to reach the top."

It appeared Syl had been busy while he had been sleeping, as he was linked to her. He wholly assumed she must have been working in their best interest. Still, he put a mental pin in it and planned to ask her about it later.

"Personally, I can't wait to challenge that man's long-lauded and frankly over-inflated power with a staggering power differential of my own. But alas, I am years of regular meditation and core cleansing away from tiering up safely. I wish to do things right and recover from my ignorance in a timely manner, not a foolish one. It is just a shame many of my compatriots are too long gone to reap the benefits."

"I told you it's never too late. They merely need to reach a state where they can safely compress their core; they will find a new lease on life in the new tiers and beyond. Your sweetheart included." Syl winked. "They may not reach the same heights as fast as the next generation. However, as I am sure you know, there are many ways to reverse the effects of time… Now, would you like to see what I have been working on?"

Thanric turned to Kai with a grin. "Have you successfully tested the portal into the domain?"

Kai nodded, "I tested it first thing this morning; I was able to enter without issue." He gestured to a now-blushing Alicia. "She entered just fine, but that's not conclusive considering she can come and go as she pleases."

Thanric got up from his seat, collecting a clipboard. "That's why we have Arnella here as our next test subject."

"I'm sorry, test subject?" Arnella said, unable to hide her concern.

Thanric tossed something to Kai, who, with his growing stats, caught the lazy throw easily. It was a pretty blue stone inlaid with golden inscriptions that had somehow been carefully worked below the surface of the stone.

"Yes, you are, as Kai has called it, our guinea pig," Thanric said as he cocked his head. "Was my pronunciation correct?"

Kai looked up from his examination of the stone and gave the man a thumbs up as Arnella looked around in confusion at the uses of the strange word.

"Kai, use that as an anchor for your portal. It's made from a rare mineral, and I was able to make it stick to almost any surface when it has a mana construct attached to it. If it is stable, it should serve as a much safer alternative to using one of your wands when creating portals on moving platforms such as ships, lifts, and floating islands and so on."

"Do you think it will be that often?"

"Yes," Thanric snorted.

Shrugging, Kai tossed the pretty stone into an open spot in the room and opened a portal on it before it had stopped moving.

As the portal opened, the stone locked into place on the wooden floor where it had been skidding along. A cursory look through the portal showed a clear view of a path leading its way through purple trees.

"Looks stable, but I have no idea where it's connected to."

Syl suddenly appeared on the other side. "This is right where I wanted to start the tour."

Thanric rushed forward and nudged the stone at the portal's base with his foot.

It didn't budge. Thanric made a note on his clipboard.

Then he hit it with a spell Kai didn't recognise.

Again, it didn't budge.

He made another note as he then looked at the stone for a moment, grumbled, and then made a note.

"The portal anchor seems to work as intended," Thanric said as he turned to Alicia, "Apprentice, if you would. Try moving the stone; if that doesn't work, use your personal storage ring to loot it."

Alicia nodded and moved over to nudge the stone again.

When it didn't move, Alicia reached down to touch it. A moment later, she got up and shook her head.

Thanric looked up from his clipboard and gave her a gesture for her to make her way through to join Syl on the other side.

Once she passed through, Thanric turned to Kai, "For this next text, I want you to dismiss your familiarity with Arnella and intentionally think about not wanting her to enter your domain through the portal. Syl, can you please do the same?"

They both agreed with a quick affirmation.

"Arnella, I, in the capacity of Admiral of the Fleet, order you to enter that portal."

Grumbling something about guinea pigs, she approached the portal opening but was physically rebuffed.

Groaning, she said, "Slight physical discomfort, no effect on my status, and I got a notification stating I was trying to enter a domain without consent… By the tone of the message and the feeling I got, it might be possible to push through. But not at my level."

Kai also got a strange, unfamiliar feeling and a buzz from the system: "I got a notification; it actually said an entity known as Temra Arnella tried to access my domain through an undefined portal but was rebuffed due to intent."

Thanric made a note, "Interesting, and Arnella, clear and concise as always, thank you. Now, Alicia, invite her through."

Alicia, long adjusted to The Sage's antics, did just that, but Arnella was rebuffed again.

"Same, but with an added line to the notification that the invite was insufficient."

Kai nodded. "This notification said Alicia was inviting someone in and asked if I would give Alicia consent to invite others-"

"Great, but table that for now," Thanric interrupted. "Syl, could you do the honours?"

Syl said nothing but gestured Arnella through.

Arnella, expecting to be rebuffed, toppled into the domain. Stumbling, she was caught by both Syl and Alicia.

"Brilliant. Now Kai, were you still trying to deny access?"

He nodded.

"Everything falls in line with what Atheos explained to me; just a few more tests and-"

"Nope! We're wasting too much time with all these tests of yours. We know not just anyone can waltz right in; that is enough for now," Syl said firmly, her patience at its limits.

"But we haven't tested the effect on a stranger yet. I was going to have my new aide Smith come in to run some tests. And what if someone tries to smuggle something dangerous in? And then there is the possibility-"

"Thanric, I swear on the system if you try to run one more test on this portal, I will never allow you access to this domain."

Thanric practically jumped towards the dungeon; passing Kai, he mumbled, "I see why you like her; she keeps you on task."

Kai nodded.

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