The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 505 - Hurricane Force Problems And Perfectly Spiced Hand Slaps

A hurricane of agitated essence slammed against the glowing spatial barrier at the edges of the Astral Exclave, with enough force to make the stitched together reality ripple. Elua sprinted frantically along this dangerous perimeter, carrying four dozen posts actively being tuned for Spatial anchoring to prevent further disaster. Weaving the sigils using her patented sliver of raw essence and stressing her field with so much ’weight’ set in Adhesion, her Breacher breakthrough in that energy was turning out to be what she usually referred to in hindsight as a *bad idea*.

She hadn’t spoken a word since she’d uttered a terrible curse in the Old Tongue as self-deprecation ten minutes before she slammed down the first sigil post. Not even to Madrigil, who happened to look quite fascinated at the cataclysm upon them when she rushed by in the tornadic winds to the construction storage zone. The brunette simply didn’t have the time to spare to answer his fluid dynamic questions!

Miscalculation was an extremely gentle word for it. Catastrophic oversight... was significantly closer to the mark. She knew that the moment in which the accumulation of energy collapsed inward in density would send out a burst of excess that would need contained for many reasons. First of which was that she hated the waste - and that is why she had prepared an area for it. One like she would have made for nearly any cultivator trying to lower the impact on the surroundings.

Spiritual energy barriers that made use of her superior techniques should have finalized her arrangements. After all, those were her specialty. She had even been modifying their method ever since a certain formerly mad - but still quite possibly a *little* insane - noble sigilist scholar had sliced through the simpler ones with his chaotic Parallel Astralism back during the initial realmshard incident.

That the ancient spiritualist hadn’t really *worked* as hard on something she was proud to be good at, all because of complacency, had made her feel quite... lazy. Which is also why it could be said that every serious attempt after that point to construct one was *exceptionally overwrought* in its design. Patterns that looped, folded and twisted into an alternating latticework of spiritual sheets made so needlessly intricate it would make common weavers weep at the prospect of copying them by hand.

Something which was rather simple when you could create memory fragment blueprints of the designs and were essentially able to be your own ’loom’. All of her cultivator-life experience was capable of pooling together in order to create great effectiveness at sealing away interference from other energies. And another, more specific barrier placed over her very body after the eruption would help her sit and consolidate the outburst many times more metaphysically dense in Concept than that of the outside Gas.

It was also exactly what caused her problem - more confidence, more complacency. She had protected herself, contained the released essence itself with a spinning barrier that helped equalize the pressure zones instead of escaping in a single shockwave, but woefully failed to take into full account that a quasi-vacuum of essence would be formed at the outer edge - and the full effect that would have.

That the *temperature* exuding from so much plasma-like Gas essence being stuck a step away from raw essence... would turn her little breakthrough positioning into a centrifugal pump. An ’eye of the storm’. One that had quite an amount of time to work on the environment while she would be consolidating the loose essence inside. All within the very much bounded and limited system that was an Astral Exclave, where she had also achieved some ’lucky’ constructive interference... through an accidental acoustic resonance of the turbulent air’s shockwaves with that of the Spatial barrier.

’I really wish I did the math better.’

Problems that intensified quickly without the mass of still, cool air needed to ’brake’ the winds - the excessive volume of any chill upper atmosphere that an updraft of heat would lance and spread against like a horseman tilting at windmills. Many of the helpful details that would have made this situation ’notable sudden wind, but no big deal’ on the continent, or even a planet of average size, had made the situation a veritable tornado-in-a-bottle.

However, unlike that sort of contained experiment, which she’d... ironically done herself a few times recently after starting up some material engineering on borosilicate glassware, fused quartz bowls, tubes, and crucibles... she was not in control of the whirling reaction this time. The volume of heated Gas was much too large to grapple with as a fresh Breacher strength Element.

Even though she *theoretically* could latch onto and ’rip’ just the most structural parts of the storm to shreds, it wouldn’t stop the existing, piling up damage. So after a few token tugs, she had shifted to this plan where many more half fabricated posts were being carried at speed by all eighty-eight of her centralized combat drone fleet to the temporary supply points along the way. For the reincarnator would need to constantly take in and start modifying them as soon as she freed up enough essence control from finishing others.

Or else, she had calculated more closely as someone that had done such realm boundary destabilizations *intentionally* in the past... finishing the fix in time, before ruining so much of her hard work these years was all but impossible. The sigil circuits on the climate regulation arrays of the main mansion’s spire were already going to need completely replaced. Shallow rooted plants had yanked out of the soil and weak trunked trees had snapped all across the forest acreage.

If it were only a normal contraction of available space like she’d seen these places do before, to lessen the strain on the bubble? That would be somewhat ’permissible’ to the illusionist. But ruining her own garden, her experimental food production chains, and that branch which had landed on top of the hidden dome and drawn the Metal cultivator’s attention to something she didn’t want him to see - all of that was small next to being exposed to the Void.

The Cepheid desert surrounding the cosmic center in which every Astral Exclave existed was nowhere near as empty as it looked. Not just because of the spatial bubbles that dotted its tens of thousands of lightyears of expanse. It was essentially the home turf of the Voidlings, the drastic emptiness in which all the Eldritch constructs waited to descend on worlds every cycle.

"I do NOT need to invite more Divinities into this place! They *should* have so much more important things to pay attention to than some little too young cultivator doing things she shouldn’t be doing!"

Angrily stabbing a pillar into the ground and slamming essence into the ritual that would self-sink and secure it, she leapt forward toward the next location in the growing chain of them. Each was exactly a radian apart from the last, forming them into a precessing hexagonal lattice... and while she was certain that safety could be achieved after setting about ten spiraling wraps of these anchors - or about sixty three of them total - she didn’t intend to stop until all six-hundred and twenty eight that her constructs had made were put into the ground.

"Prepare and prepare, get around to things at a whim. You’re seriously going to start messing with *chemistry* again with this sort of safety mentality? Oh, it’ll be fine. I’m sure I won’t burn my hair off again or anything. Absolutely!"

So angry at herself that she would have kept going until thousands upon thousands were placed, she was fortunate that such a ’small’ number had been a long-term plan for a while now. And that there were not more of the objects available to use to keep from *stopping* for a moment and dealing with her frayed emotions. Of course, eventually there was nothing left to do but that.

The brunette walked away from the final sigil post and collapsed on the grass of the nearest knoll. Feeling wrung out, the ancient spirited cultivator rolled onto her side and curled up in a ball. She was calmer, but no less petulant. Because after all that stress, she couldn’t even get a hug from her beloved. Nor would her husband-wife ever know what she just went through until the next set of people came and left...

"I want to eat something spicy... or sweet. Why does starting agriculture from scratch in a new place take so long? Everything here has to be toxic and taste like organochlorides. Speaking of chloroform, I’m starting to regret that I didn’t just go *that* route."

It had occurred to her more than once that she could probably go back home now that a lot of things were settled in her body and head. Should things become a problem again, she had conceived a scheme that would put herself to sleep for the intervening years until she reached Prime. In that way of things, she would be a sort of sleeping cutie that only Qat could wake... by gripping her forehead and deactivating the proposed ritual.

’But then she would be the only one *living* with this strain on our relationship. It felt cowardly. And I was at least being productive, in some ways, here.’

"Well. I should go stop that idiot from trying to break into the food laboratory. At least nothing should be broken in there. Though the different fields I’d been propagating outside of it are likely ruined."

Sighing and crawling to her feet, Elua er Goltbred took her time going back. For the combat drones swarming that way were more annoyance than real hazard to her Exclave resident. Yet, if she approached too soon and annoyed her, she might be a danger to him!

⟠ ⟠ ⟠

"I wonder what these taste-"

The man’s hand was slapped so hard when a certain Ogre found him pulling a gray colored tuber out of the barrel of soil she had growing in, that it *almost* dislocated his wrist that still wore the coiled Silver. A minute sooner to the scene and she wouldn’t have held back. A minute later... and she would have been dragging him to one of the nearby healing formations for an entirely different reason.

"Do you want to personally understand what it feels like for your stomach acid to be neutralized in an extra foamy explosion and the tissue lining throughout your gastrointestinal tract to oxidize more than a lifetime in a single meal? Don’t eat things just because you are curious!"

"...Why are you growing something like that in here?"

Picking up the dropped food, she dusted it off and dunked it in a bowl of water before scrubbing it off. Then she inserted it into an orb of inert Gas that she pressurized and cooked the root vegetable quite quickly within, while draining away some of the alkaline nature from what moisture had sat inside. When it was done, she took a bite to feel the still extra *shocking* tingle of starch from the other significant problem with them.

’I really need to create a strain of these that are not literal plant batteries. Feels like licking Lightning.’

"Food. My stomach and technique is better than yours. And a numb tongue is... almost like a spicy dish. Almost..."

Biting down once again, the illusionist tried to delude herself of that blissful lie. For weeks, she had been internally praying that, whoever Qatrand sent to her next, they would bring as much good, *prepared* food as her father had. But she would settle for the many barrels of expensive, dried and ground spices that she asked for desperately in her letters back this time.

El just hoped Qat didn’t think it was to be ignored - like the slight, kind of sort of not joking *begging* to come spend a month in the Exclave that proceeded it. Starting to prepare another tuber, she wanted to eat the memory into oblivion. The detail which she wrote about a plan to restrain her Aspects so that there was no risk of-

"What are these manacles for?"

"Never you mind. Will you kindly get out of my laboratory? Do you see me boldly walking into that studio of yours by that pond?"

"No. But you did drop a hundred foot tall tree on it with that display earlier."

...

"That was that, and this is this. Get out."