Hill stowed the Mage Tower in a compartment of his carriage, lured a tall, powerful black stallion from a nearby valley with energy-rich fodder, and bravely set off.
He needed to visit that city and learn how people here used crystals as engines!
It wasn't that Hill didn't know how to power a magic array with crystals. But even when Telashir had been at its poorest, it had used crystals of various elements as energy sources.
Energy had been plentiful, so the conduits had been straightforward. Otherwise, the Undead would never have used people as an energy source.
The array Falan had developed to control an entire city was among Telashir's most dazzling designs. Yet its energy conduits were wide enough for little maintenance puppets to run through!
Toril was even less of a concern. Though most of that world's resources had been consumed, to the point that people had begun using gemstone dust, there was still plenty of energy in the air. Besides, it had been rich once.
Its arrays were complex, but they generally needed few nodes and could run on a handful of gems. An Archmage was the strongest energy source of all, after all.
Oaisis was different.
Hill suspected this world's array diagrams looked like intricate circuit schematics and would eventually develop into something like microchips.
In short, the arrays Hill made were practically useless in this world. For now, he was using the civilian substitutes devised by Toril's First- and Second-Circle Mages.
Even the arrays he had used when he'd first become a Mage were no good. Any Mage with a little knowledge of alchemy could tell whether the power came from crystals or from a complex array.
Oaisis had not forbidden him from using crystals below the highest grade, but their energy began dissipating