The week after the council meeting was work.
I started with Eryndor's northern perimeter at dawn on the first day and didn't finish the full circuit until past midnight.
Every charging node doubled, the monster cores pulled from the Abyssal Forest reserves and embedded alongside the originals, the mana output from each node recalibrated for the increased load. The barrier didn't change in appearance.
It changed in depth, the layers thickening in a way that wouldn't be visible to anything looking at it from the outside until it tried to push through and found the resistance had tripled.
The beastfolk territory took two days. Jackal came with me for the first, mapping the eastern border coordinates he had brought to the meeting, the two of us walking the territory's edge in the early morning while the settlement was still waking up.
I placed the second grid of purifying stones at depth this time, not surface placement, driving them into the soil at a meter down where the contamination was already starting to affect the root systems.
The ground was better than it had been three weeks ago. Not well. Better.
The dwarven mines took three days.
Theron guided me through the lower levels personally, the two of us moving through tunnel systems that had been carved over generations by people who understood stone the way I understood mana, the particular intimacy of a civilization that had built its entire existence around reading what rock told them.
The contamination in the deep levels was subtle. Not yet symptomatic. The kind that showed in the mana strata of the stone rather than in the air, the dark energy bleeding in from the north through the rock's natural channels. I built the filtering runes into the tunnel walls in sections, working from the deepest levels upward, the rune work finer than anything I had done on surfaces because stone required a different approach than air, the equation embedding into the material rather than sitting on top of it.
Theron watched me work on the third day without saying anything for several hours.
Then he said: "That rune structure. I've never seen that configuration."
"I invented it this morning." I said. "For stone specifically."
He was quiet for another hour.
Then: "You invented it this morning."
"The existing configurations work for surface application." I said. "Stone requires the equation to read the material's mana conductivity and adjust the filtering depth accordingly. The standard approach doesn't account for variable density in natural rock formations."
He looked at the rune work in the tunnel wall.
"In one morning." He said.
"It took until noon." I said.
He looked at his mug. He had brought one into the mines.
He drank from it.
The elven forest took the sixth day. Elder Elfaine received me at the territory boundary with the Elder Council assembled, seven of them, the oldest living members of a civilization that measured time in centuries.
I walked the old growth section with them in the afternoon, finding the root systems of the trees that had been standing long enough to have their own mana signatures, embedding the filtering network into the root structure at points where the natural flow was strongest.
The elder trees accepted it without resistance.
Some things recognized what was good for them without needing to be convinced.
I was back in Eryndor by evening.
On the seventh day I went to find Aldren.
He was in the outer farm rotation when I found him, working the eastern plots with two of the beastfolk families who had arrived in the second wave. He had stopped asking for special consideration in the first week and had taken the work assigned without comment.
Whatever he had been before he came through Eryndor's gate, the man working the eastern plots was someone who understood that the work was the price of being here and paid it without complaint.
I stopped at the edge of the plot.
He saw me and straightened.
"The underground entry to the nexus." I said. "How confident are you in the route."
He looked at me.
"Completely." He said. "I grew up in that capital. I played in those catacombs as a child. I know every entry point and every passage between them."
"Can you move through them quietly." I said. "Without direction once we're inside."
"Yes." He said.
"We leave tonight." I said. "After the marketplace closes. Tell no one where you're going."
He nodded. No questions. The efficiency of someone who had been waiting for this and had prepared for it mentally long before it was offered.
I went back to check the barrier.
We arrived at the edge of Winterly's territory in the dark.
I had brought us in at distance. Not through the capital's outskirts, not close to the demon army's established perimeter. Far enough out that we were inside the territory but outside any patrol range the occupation had established.
Aldren looked at the landscape around him. At the territory that had been his kingdom.
He said nothing.
We moved on foot. My choice. Teleporting directly into the nexus risked disrupting the mana flow around the portal in a way that could produce variables I hadn't calculated for.
A portal at full output was a mana event, not just a structure. You didn't approach it the way you approached a building. You approached it the way you approached a river in flood, from the side, reading the current before you committed to crossing.
The capital's outskirts were quiet in the particular way of occupied places at night. Not the quiet of safety. The quiet of everything that used to make noise having learned not to.
Aldren moved through it without hesitation. I had expected him to slow, to check his bearings, to show the uncertainty of someone navigating a city that had changed since he last walked it.
He didn't. He moved with the certainty of someone for whom the layout of this place was written somewhere below conscious memory, in the part of the body that doesn't forget where it grew up.