Mark jumped into the front row of Santa's Sleigh with Biggie, the iron elemental taking the whole of the backseat. He breathed in deep.

  "Sleigh, please take us to Complex Twenty in Reelfoot Rift below the New Madrid Fault." Bell's jingled, and they moved. Right at the stone wall of Complex Twelve. This one was a half mile below Kansas, and the distance of roughly five hundred to six hundred miles between the Twenty and Twelve at the speed of a hundred thousand miles per hour took just a little over three minutes.

  They rushed through stone, and magma, and empty caverns, and crude oil pools while dematerialized. No monster had the speed to get them in passing, and the Sleigh could sense wards and other defenses and slip around them. Eventually, the alien invaders would no doubt put solid ward walls down through the Earth. That would make what he was doing impossible.

  Arriving in the main laboratory of Complex Twenty he saw his second best alchemist lab. His best was in the deep under the Amazon River. Exiting the Sleigh, he ran into humidity thick enough to drown a normal human. The lab held dozens of stations, most covered in dust and mold despite the wards to prevent such problems. Once upon a time, it had been one of the main alchemy research centers for Mankind. Now, it had just two stations still ready to use which he approached after he had left the Sleigh. Biggie was behind him, and complaining that he felt like he was rusting on the spot.

  There in the corner, fully lit wards provided light and assured of still protection and potency. Glossy metal pans mirrored lights from the wards. All of it just as it had been four years ago when he last visited here to make a Pestilence Potion. If he could summon one of the Four Horsemen and set pestilence and plague onto the alien immigrants who had come to colonize his home, and exterminate his people, well, he would. He had killed a few hundred thousand, mostly weaklings, and boosted his strength from Level Sixty Eight to Level Sixty Nine before monster shamans had banished the Horseman.

  Being careful, he took up his largest unused glass bowl. Carefully examining the yard wide lead crystal bowl he checked for cracks and worse for any pollutants. Even the memory of a pollutant would be too much. It was, as he had hoped. Clean. Lifting it, he activated his own ability of Primal Directive which ensured that his body and his movements and the dead skin cells and the bacteria in his mouth and so forth did not interfere in the process of the alchemy he was about to do with a Prime Material.

  He carried ti outside, and went to the Pool. It was four hundred miles deep. The rock around it felt both everlastingly hard, and spongy at the same time. This rock, formed under great pressure could hold many times its volume of water. Water molecules collapsed together into a syrup, and eventually a slurry just this side of hard frozen ice cream under certain conditions. This could merge into this rock, and be stable with a mass many times greater than gold.

  Above him, this rock was drained of its water in the breaking open of the fountains of the deep. Asteroids had crashed all over the planet, and in the space of less than an hour giant surges of water had reached the surface. This water, driven by immense pressure, and then battered by supersonic winds had circle the globe many times laying down the continent wide strata like the Cambrian and many others. As the waters slowed, heavier stones dropped out forming more layers. Finally the steaming hot water had paused in its headlong rush after many days, and most of Earth's current geology was made manifest. Plates broken by asteroids and the subsequent fountains of the deep; layers of strata laid down in weeks. The draining water afterwards had done most of the rest along with volcanoes and man's efforts like how the American Indians had regularly burnt the Great Plains to keep them deforested.

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  From what he could gather, the continental plate that held up the eastern half of the United States had travelled around the world to come back to its starting location. Here, where one of the fountains had broken most strongly into the sky thousands of years ago. This made this the best location for a time machine.

  Time machines created great heat, and they needed power to dwarf atomic bombs. At least his did. If it was workable. He still wasn't sure he wasn't going to blow Earth into cinders in the solar wind.

  Walking out onto the Pool surface for the water was far denser than normal stone, he put his bowl down. Got out his pickaxe, and began digging at the water. As small chunks came up, he tossed them into the bowl. They steamed gently, starting to decompress slightly. This added to the humidity raising it from a mere 470% to 502%. The pressure here was extreme so much so that he could barely sweat as his body struggled to force water out of his body.

  But he had not lived for decades fighting and hiding from alien invaders to let a little humidity take him down.

  He activated Hypercut on his pickaxe. It began slicing far easier, and his titainum dense muscles slammed harder as he started to sing about Big John who was a mighty big man who was buried in a worthless pit. The song eased the effort by forty percent as he was a Jack of All Trades and basic bardsong was not beyond him. The bowl was filled, and Biggie carried it back. Mark continued to dig into the water, and when Biggie came back, they both just scooped the water chunks into the bowl.

  A dozen times the bowl was filled, and emptied, and the last time Biggie came back, he came back without the bowl.

  "All done, Mark."

  Mark looked at the remaining pile of water, and shrugged. No matter. He put his pickaxe back into his storage, and a bit weary followed Biggie back to the laboratory and inside.

  "The Mirror Arrayi is full."

  Mark nodded. It was the simple magic principle of 'as above, so below'. The heat from his time machine would be focused into the array. Now the array was a well done thing, but it never could hold the volcano vomiting force of a time machine. But it served as the 'so below' and the five hundred mile deep Pool served as the 'so above'. As the Mirror Array heated, the heat would get transferred to the Pool. Now undoubtedly, this would probably kill everyone and everything alive in North America. However, Mark regarded that as a positive. He might gain another level, and if they had not wanted to be steamed alive, or blown apart, or magmafried they should have stayed home.

  He said as much to Biggie who chuckled.

  "Harsh. Very unwelcoming." A man's voice said across from the laboratory.