At the lowest level of the Iowa Mountains Ruins, a fifty-meter-deep cave opened above a churning pool of magma. At its center stood a black rock, and atop it towered a Magic Furnace.
Landen, Osser Plagg, and three Earth Fairies stood on the cliff at the cave's edge. On the rock wall behind them, several Holy Emblems of Vili, the God of the Jade Moon, glowed gold in the light of the magma, set within a circuit-board-like Magic Array.
"Allow me to introduce myself again. I was once a Demigod member of the Empire's Mechanical Committee. My primary field of research was connecting Magic Furnaces to the Magic Web and exploring regional Magic Webs."
Osser Plagg pointed at a Holy Emblem and said to Landen, "The Magic Furnace and God of Craftsmen of my race was once a Subordinate God of Her Majesty Vili. Every Magic Furnace we built was meant to expand Her Majesty's Magic Web. I had no motive to steal Her authority. The Magic Furnace you see now, and the Magic Web throughout this mountain, were also built at Her direction!"
Osser Plagg, the last High-Rank mechanic of the Goblin Civilization, had taken part in a special project during the final age of his civilization.
"Our civilization built thousands of Magic Furnaces back then. You could say we connected all the magic on the entire planet to the Magic Web. But the Magic Council worried that the Millennium Magic Tide would cause the entire Magic Web system to collapse, which is why everything you see came to be."
Osser Plagg spoke at length about what had happened back then. "The plan proposed by our Mechanical Committee was to divide the Magic Web across the entire Eastern Continent into fifty to a hundred relatively independent regional networks. The