Briggs looked over the workroom with approval.

  It had been some of his fastest work, getting a Forge up and working with only a couple days of labor, while soldiers, adventurers, Scour teams, scouts, and mercenaries were running all over Osteth and the North looking for scraps of paper that represented money that had vanished from existence long ago… cash that was being brought back now, when those slips of paper had long ceased to have any real meaning.

  Well, they’d located at least two more backpacks (24 stacks) of them now, with at least three-quarters of all the housing settlements accounted for. The rest were either more remote in the North or in dangerous territories, and hopes weren’t high for them, regardless.

  It didn’t matter. They already had enough money for decades without using the new Notes… and he had already turned in ten more stacks.

  Just unreal.

  The Forge he’d made wasn’t a Floating Forge, because it needed to be bigger. It had to melt tons of pyreal, something normally accomplished with blast furnaces, and it needed to do it fast and effectively.

  Ryin had carved out the Cooling Formation around the molds with eye-searing clarity and incredible speed, and then put in place the small army of ghostly Phantasmal Servants in overalls and construction hats now standing around to tirelessly haul away the molten pyreal ingots cooled by Chill Metal effects to accelerate the process.

  Each of precisely one goldweight in mass.

  The Forge he’d made had a Heat Metal effect that was basically always on. It was also up-Valenced for area, affecting a greater and greater volume of metal with great speed, and it was self-Investing off the very metal it was processing, upping the effective Caster Level and Valence bit by bit with every day that it existed.

  In half a year, it would be able to handle hundreds of cubic feet, tons of pyreal at a time, melting it down to bright orange metal. Then the basin would Filter it, a simple enough spell, and the dross would sink to the bottom of the lighter Air Gold. The valve would open, and the other metals alloyed into the coins, representing less than 10% of the mass of the coins, would flow out, already pre-seperated and feeding into their own ingot locations.

  Then the crucible would tilt over, and orange-hot liquid pyreal would pour down the sluice into the ingot molds waiting for it, grates in the floor of chariron hastily Energized to Fire, and the molten pyreal would wash over them and be flattened by rakes attended to by the tireless Phantasmal Servants.

  When everything was perfect, the Chill Metal would activate, and the molten metal would cool down to below room temperature in merely thirty seconds, taking on its trademark pale green hue as it did so.

  The grating would withdraw from the ingot bars and the Servants would pry up the ingots quickly, setting them on Mass Disks floating there ready for use.

  The current cube of pyreal coins was being siphoned by two Flow Hoops, circles of metal with a low-level but constant telekinetic effect between them, shovelfuls of coins fed through them constantly into a hopper of coins for the next load for the Forge.

  Emptied of molten metal, with Prestidigitation chasing out the very last scrap of any molten metals, the Crucible set itself back down, and the hopper was pulled over on its ceiling rig, its replacement sliding into place underneath the flow of coins.

  Coins clinked and clattered in a dance of pale green metal, flowing down into the Crucible. The instant the first one hit, the Forge began its massive Heat Metal effect to melt them down with furious speed, and a Permanent Topped Wall of Fire ignited inside the crucible, too.

  It took eighteen seconds to melt down four cubic feet of pyreal, the Wall of Fire taking the Isotopic metal up to the edge but not over by itself into a molten state, as normal gold had a pretty high melting point. It went a little bit faster after the first set went molten, as the heat of the first mass started to work on the later ones, and the coins naturally fell into the more molten metal to melt faster, while the Wall kept the whole thing plenty hot.

  They were only doing forty cubic feet of coins at a time, three minutes a run. In another two weeks, they’d be up to eighty cubic feet at a time, and it would only go up from there.

  It was a lot of work, getting the magitech into place, the spells needed activated, Formations carved… but paying for the Permanency spells was literally no sacrifice at all.

  Eighty ingots per cycle, approximately every six minutes. 40K of goldweight per six minutes, 400k per hour. 9600 per day, and it didn’t even need an overseer with the Phantasmal Servants having enough intelligence to do the whole process.

  It would only get faster with time, and the side ingots of copper, tin, and zinc also had value and use to smiths, effectively becoming minor mining production.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Ten thousand ingots had already been sent off to Freehold, where almost all of the Wizards and Artificers and other Matrix students of Ryin were located and eager to get them. The next batch was going to be spread to all the soldiers who’d learned how to use Naming Karma, to start the process of upgrading their Armor and the protective Amulets that were being made for them even now.

  One MMD Note was 500 goldweight/ingots. They had enough money to make it happen, they just needed to start the Investing and keep it going. Production was going to be a bottleneck if everyone who could Invested pyreal, as they still had to get master’s-work Craft produced to improve for everyone as stuff to upgrade.

  Eight hours of time, get yourself a simple magical item that could use Prestidgitation at will. Who would not spend eight hours for that? Just needed the batons crafted to QL 20 to Infuse. Suddenly all the rote tasks around the house would take almost no time at all, leaving time for doing other things.

  Like Investing full time and being paid for it, if you so desired.

  How much of this windfall was going to be allocated to the population in general was a subject of much discussion, but the big thing determining a lot of that was just how much pyreal they actually ended up with. Ten cubes so far… and potentially a lot more on the way, the Notes being hurried to gathering points so Ryin could Teleport over and pick them up.

  Huh.

  -Lord Mick, Kris, Ryin,- he /murmured in the Markspace. -Lord Mick, back of the hand calculation. Given how much pyreal your people went through, could it potentially have paid for the Infusing of all the magical structures of this island?-

  The Mick, on the way to his very last settlement, a distant Villa cluster called Celdiseth’s Beach, mentally jerked at the thought. The image they saw was actually of potentially millions of stacks of those Notes, pyreal flowing in a river over the years of adventuring, and all that loot salvaged or sold converted to coins that vanished into volumes of stacks of MMD notes.

  -With that rate of pyreal conjured out of nothing, no force that could generate that much raw goldweight would have had any trouble paying for everything that has been done to this island. A Spawn Point varies from fifteen to two hundred goldweight in cost, approximately. That’s less than one MMD note.- Ryin /told them coolly after seeing that. -One stack of MMD’s would probably pay for a mile of the Shoreward. There’s less than two thousand miles of Shoreward in place. I don’ t know how many Spawn Points are in place, or dimensional extensions made for Dungeons. Let’s say a hundred thousand of the former, and a thousand or two of the latter, with a spell effect to set up a Demiplane and making it Permanent costing 50 goldweight per Casting and 35 goldweight for Permanency.-

  -So one stack of MMD’s could have paid for up to eight Dungeons?- Princess Kristie almost /spluttered. -Damn, no wonder every damn Villa and Mansion had its own Dungeon! With that kind of money flowing through...-

  -A Wish-effect to create a magic item worth up to 25k costs 50 goldweight. If you’re going for more powerful things, it goes up… but who cares? Even if costs 500 goldweight, that’s one MMD note. You could do that all day and all night with the amount of pyreal moving through the system,- I /pointed out.

  “That is so much goddamn money moving through the System,” Briggs said aloud, shaking his head, watching another pouring of the Crucible begin. “Now we know where all those Quest items nobody remembers how to make are coming from. Just minor expenditures of sacrificed pyreal from something with no goldweight limits…”

  -A minor note,- the Mick /interjected, everyone listening to him intently. -Ye’ve told us that Life Diamonds an’ similar crystals an’ jewels be needed as components fer some o’ the greater spells.- All three of them /nodded back to him. -We used t’ be able t’ buy gemstones from the jewelers in the various towns, an’ weren’t no limits t’ how many we could buy, then. Also, jewels that fell as drop loot often had spells imbued into ‘em, an’ could be salvaged, but gems sold t’ us could nae be, just like any other purchased good.-

  -Did they ever drop coins, Lord Mick?- Kris /asked intently, and they all felt the mental jerk of something else in Lord Mick’s head breaking softly.

  -More fuckery,- he /grumbled in resignation. -Aye, once. An’ then they introduced salvaging, an’ suddenly the monsters no longer dropped coins, an’ the coins only came from the merchants, an’ didn’t weigh anything in our packs anymore, only took up space.-

  -You lived in a damn weird world, Lord Mick,- his Hag /grinned at the black Aluvian paramount.

  -Seemed normal as all fuck at the time, Highness,- the Mick /replied, a note of self-annoyance in his /voice still.

  “And that’s why the Fall was so damn hard, because all of that shit was so damn reliant on magic,” Briggs nodded gruffly to them all.

  -Ho, there’s a point t’ this, too,- the Mick /spoke up with sudden urgency. -The great Pyreal Pea Sale.-

  Briggs blinked at the table with everyone else. “What?” he had to ask.

  -There were a time all the sellers shifted their prices based on popularity an’ amount of traffic they or their towns had. Well, the archmage out by Castle Tethana made an error, an’ he priced his wares to sell below what the three High Archmages were buying things for.-

  We all blinked. That was a world with basically instant Teleportation, if not precisely point to point. -So… buy low, sell high? What was the spread?- Ryin /asked sharply.

  -About ten percent?- he /answered uncertainly. -Well, everyone an’ their mother piled in to buy pyreal Peas fer cash, run them out to the Mayoi Archmage there in her tower, convert as much to MMD’s as they could, an’ then Recalled back to Teth with as much gold as they could carry t’ do it all over again.

  -If ye were strong enough, ye could make a few MMD’s a trip or more. People were buying Peas an’ selling them fast as they could, pocketing the difference. The man must’ve sold tens o’ thousands o’ pyreal Peas in just a few hours, an’ those were not cheap, either.

  -Well, we all went t’ bed, an’ woke up in the morning with hazy memories o’ what happened the day afore, an’ none o’ the MMD’s, with prices rather hastily adjusted for the inventories of everyone concerned. Weren’t nowhere you could find a place t’ buy things cheaper than another merchant would buy ‘em off from you.-

  “So, someone was watching and noticed the idiocy and pyreal cycling through the System without inputs,” Briggs grunted.

  -First three words. Someone was watching,- Ryin /repeated softly. -Second point: they can reverse this if done fast enough.-

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