The moon gate activated at the end of the celebration week. It was a crude implementation, but the transference membrane worked exactly as Arlinch and the inventors had planned. They allowed it to exist in equilibrium for four weeks before they declared the first expedition up the hill.

  The portal membrane’s thickness was absurdly high. Hiking up the mountain and walking through it was in itself a journey. The construction of such a thing by all measures was quite the feat. No other civilization besides Petrah could have ever ascended to this level.

  Balor kept a close eye on the city for the next few weeks as Resil arranged the Source wielders most suitable for the first expedition. The pillar that they sent to the moon was just a thin slit a hundredth the size of the portal on Veilthorn. It was a temporary measure to transfer builders and Source wielders to the other side so that a similar portal could be built.

  Balor wanted to go with them, this time without assimilating. Mixing with them would be risking possible bloodstone contact. He couldn’t let them pass through by themselves either. He wanted to oversee them while remaining fully invisible.

  He could sneak through the portal before the expedition, but he didn’t want to step through an unverified portal. The warp space in between was perilous even for a godlike being. It wouldn’t kill him, but it could toss him somewhere far away with no way to get back to Veilthorn in a reasonable amount of time.

  He remained invisible where he was until the expedition group wound up the hill with a convoy of caravans. Resil had chosen three groups of five. Balor watched as the first group passed through the portal, carrying Sky Stone to power basic construction with elemental manipulation of the ground.

  Balor almost snuck through the portal with them, but the third group had a Petranova relative in it who could potentially see him. He didn’t want to tamper with their first experience of the portal.

  The first group ventured through the portal as the other two groups camped at the entrance. It took almost a day for the first group to send someone back, demonstrating the safety of the portal.

  A dwarf came back hauling the corpse of an elf who had perished due to some sort of accident. While it did raise some alarm back in Petrah, Resil seemed to want to push through any similar casualties.

  Their life support magics aren’t sophisticated enough for prolonged stays on the moon.

  The second group followed the dwarf as he went back with an additional backpack of Sky Stone.

  There was great irony in carrying Sky Stone to a moon that was full of it, but they hadn’t explored the place enough to find them yet. They thought Veilthorn was the origin of the Source. It would take decades for them to formulate better theories.

  The second group’s messenger seemingly brought back better news, and the third group followed them right away. The portal could fit a hundred caravans, but they wouldn’t fit through the barely man-sized gap on the other side. Material transfer through the portal had to be done manually, piece by piece.

  Balor darted into the portal a full day after the third group went through it.

  The travel through the portal was as unrefined as expected. The warp space had no Source barrier protections. It relied on the Source flow to carry the user to the endpoint. This could easily go wrong if they made the slightest move on their own. The portal, therefore, could only be traveled by fully surrendering one’s body to it.

  Balor had an easier time with his soul matter, but the portal was genuinely a fate worse than death for an unfortunate hominid who could end up in the void of space if they made a single mistake.

  He arrived on the other side, fitting firmly through the slit in the pillar which had crashed at an angle into the moon. Things were more dire there than he thought they would be.

  Resil had allocated fifteen competent adventurers for the first expedition. Only twelve remained. One had already died, and two more had gone missing in the warp space.

  A group of four Dwarfs were mining dwellings near the portal to set up a permanent base. They had rudimentary Source-based life support systems that gave them fresh air every quarter an hour, and just enough heat to keep them from freezing.

  The Petranova in the group, a young man named Nuril, established the naming plaque on the moon. They named the place with a word that Resil had wanted to give it: Cerethion.

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  The first few days went more or less smoothly until a second accident claimed another life. A Dwarf died in a Sky Stone explosion, leaving only pieces of himself behind.

  Running out of other supplies and the will to continue, Nuril gathered the remaining ten and retreated through the portal.

  Once they were gone, Balor inspected their crudely constructed dwellings under the moon-soil. They were as sturdy as the underground caves in Veilthorn, and he knew this was the right direction they should focus on. They were sure to find vast reserves of Sky Stone the further they dug.

  They’re going to need better digging methods.

  The fourth group arrived not even a day later, this time much greater in number. A hundred and fifty came through the portal, fifty Source wielders with a hundred prisoners. The construction of dwellings went smoothly afterwards, and within a week and thirty-seven deaths, they had the first life-supported underground base that could house two hundred and fifty.

  Nuril came back with the third group, two hundred prisoners and fifty new Source wielders. They began the construction of the great portal that would have an aperture equal to the one on Veilthorn.

  Balor hovered above them, skipping months ahead at a leap. He was keeping a close eye on the mining improvements. So far, they were content with the pyro elemental explosions. Wisely enough, they hadn’t brought any bloodstone for this endeavor yet.

  The dwellings continued to grow, almost triple their original capacity, and groups cycled through the pillar portal every day. They resupplied Sky Stone to maintain the fragile slit of a portal on the moon side as they hauled more and more construction material for the big portal to replace it.

  It took almost three years, much faster than it had been to construct the Veilthornian one. Balor had seen at least thirty thousand cycles through, each one performing some sort of critical action to grow the moon base. At the end, the new frame of the portal loomed a hundred times larger than the pillar.

  Arlinch and the group of analysts, arcanist inventors, arrived as the last group through the pillar portal. They began working on the new membrane. Balor couldn’t afford to skip time with them around. He could almost smell bloodstone on them. He knew they carried some amount of it with them, especially Arlinch, who thought it was a wonderfully powerful tool.

  Around the same time, the moon base excavation teams dug deep enough to discover the vast Sky Stone reserves. Balor watched in real-time as their focus momentarily shifted to mining more instead of finishing the new portal.

  It paid off really well for them because they realized how much was in the deposit that they found. They could mine as much Sky Stone as they needed for the portal membrane. Bringing in enough Sky Stone with the pillar portal would’ve taken years. Mining a similar amount here wouldn’t even take a week.

  Half of the prisoners were sent back to Veilthorn while a hundred different miners were brought in to replace them. Mining Sky Stone continued, and by the time the inventors were done with their theoretical studies, they had enough Sky Stone to build a castle with.

  Everything readied, Arlinch and Nuril opened the new portal with a massive Source explosion. The pillar was disabled only after confirming this one, and Balor knew he had crossed the threshold.

  The new crowds that filtered in through the moongate were nothing like the strugglers at the beginning. A thousand different people walked in per day, immediately engaging with some sort of moon activity that pushed them further and further.

  Veilthorn: First civilizational threshold reached.

  They had demonstrated their will to travel for more resources. Balor could almost taste the day he would become a Dragon.

  The first hints of things going wrong weren’t visible on the moon. He started noticing worrying patterns in the new people that arrived through the portal. Their discussions, demeanors, and behavior all pointed towards something happening in Veilthorn.

  For a moment, Balor almost skipped ahead, ignoring it. But he decided to go check it out nonetheless. He dashed through the new moon gate and appeared on the other side.

  Petrah looked as it always did, stable and strong. But something was bothering it. There were more Source wielders present everywhere. Resil had deployed the entire Petrahn military on its own streets and seemed to be rounding up suspicious individuals.

  Balor quickly assimilated one of the city guards for a few minutes to understand what had happened.

  Resil was facing the first signs of an uprising from all four continents. Balor had seen these people infiltrating Petrah, but within the last year and a half, they had gotten more numerous in number until the last month, when they had blown up an ancient Sky Stone mine with a powerful explosion that killed almost two hundred skilled miners.

  Balor knew what it could be the moment he saw ‘a powerful explosion.’ The usurpers had gained access to bloodstone. It was perhaps their boldest attempt to destabilize Petrah.

  This is no coincidence. It’s as if there are multiple sources of bloodstone.

  The corrupted Seedmaker had crawled its way through, and it seemed like things would only get worse from here. Balor spent a week in this more cautious Petrah, and the number of sabotage attempts grew almost exponentially. Several continental settlements fell to rebels, and Resil’s Kings were struggling to quell them with the forces they had access to.

  The usurpers almost seemed coordinated in their movements across all four continents, weaving their own network with resources from fallen settlements. Rumors came filtering through months later of ravenous crowds that mindlessly pillaged their way through settlements, dead rising from burial sites with glowing red eyes.

  The Seedmaker was corrupting the population itself this time, in the form of pathological magics that spread like a plague.

  Balor had several dramatic solutions to solve this new problem, but couldn’t intervene by himself, with the risk of coming into contact with bloodstone. He dashed into the Emperor’s private quarters through the window.

  He needed to talk with Resil about the future of the world and doing things that he wouldn’t want to do in his worst nightmares.