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Sweat and cinders on red skin. The heat of the forge. Gifted (and repaid) wisdom drawn from a good woman’s black mark on the world.

In a cluttered workshop surrounding the 12th node, Xavior drew knowledge from the unearthly monolith and forged it into reality with his own two hands. Tool, weapons, armor and more forged from new alloys littered the room, as did other inventions, notably several contraptions with wheels, a set of kites, an umbrella, several types of rope and a bucket full of scented soaps which the god was very much looking forward to using after this hot and sweaty work.

While to the mortals outside would marvel at the innovations that had been piled up over mere hours of divine labor, it was the last and seeming smallest of innovations that Xavior was most proud of.

A small unassuming disk of metal cooling on a stone anvil as the god watched. He waited for just the right moment, before he grabbed it, flicked it up in the air and then caught it on his palm, before lifting a divine seal and stamping the metal with an image of a stylized bust of the god, then flipping it again and stamping the other side and emblazoning it with a rearing goat. 

Xavier set down the stamp, and raised his handiwork to the light to examine it

It was a small thing, a simple bronze disk, marked with iconography and empowered with the tiniest mote of his divine essence to prove its authenticity.

It was a simple bronze coin. 

And it would change the world.

[hr]

Money. It didn’t make the world go around, but it did grease its (newly invented) wheels. One of the problems Xavior and his council had been having was that promises and prepayment were all well and good for local commerce, but it was tricky to get people to go out and do things they needed done when most of the wealth and resources of their burgeoning city state was consolidated in, well, the city. 

Getting people to go out to do things for the city long term was tricky, and if they did it was hard to keep track of what they were owed for their time. And they needed long term outsiders who were still bound to the city. At a basic resource level they needed stone and metals to be mined, they needed wood to be cut, and they needed the wolves that threatened those operations hunted. It needed to trade with the only loosely affiliated nomads wandering the planes with their goats, for fur and meat, and with villages for their crops. 

And that was just what was needed to keep them going, to expand at home. Already eyes were turning further afield and worrying about what they could not see beyond the wolf woods. Everyone at this point knew the rules of the game of gods, but none knew the present state of the board, or that much about the players other than those they had traveled in the company of. 

Who knew what they were up to out there?  

Both Xavior and his council wanted information out of a mix of healthy paranoia and curiosity. So they wanted to send out scouts. Which had had the same problem as their logistical one, at least until now.

Money. It was easy to ship out, the ability to hold it in your hand was more reliable than mere words, even those of a god, and it was more flexible than barter. Make a deal for money and you could then use it to buy what you wanted when you wanted it, rather than rely on whatever your employer gave you or being paid in goods that rapidly lost their value due to technological advancement. 

It could pay miners, warriors, woodcutters and it could also pay people to take part in expeditions beyond the 12th realm. Forward camps could be set up, goods and money could be shipped there and then distributed to pay scouts to go out into the world, find out what was there, and bring the word of Xavior and the 12th realm with them via signed and stamped decrees that made assurances that that was who they represented. They found routes and paths, sniffed out resources, documented flora and fauna, made crude maps, met with people in-order to gossip with them to try and find out what was going on with their local gods Then they came back to camps and got paid for their efforts.

They learned the state of the world and sent a steady trickle of it back to the city. They also unintentionally sent a trickle of people back too, some were lured by stories of plentiful food, others coveted the more advanced belongings of the explorers and yet more simply thought their luck might be better someplace new. They drifted into the realm via the growing settlement on the shore of stone lake, and so the 12th realm grew even as it learned.

[hider=Summary]
Xavior works away in a workshop around the 12th node, making all sorts of bronze age stuff, but the main one is he invents money. Specifically money that has just a touch of his divine spark in it that makes it uncoutnerfittable. 

He and his city council then use that to expand their influence beyond the citystate formed around node 12. They start paying people to get them resources, and more impactful for the outside world, they start sending out scouts to work out what the heck everyone else is up to. This also spurs a small immigration movement, gradually boosting the size of the local population.
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[hider=Might]
1 mp used to give monica access to node 12
2 mp used to raise the people of the 12th realm to the bronze age
1 mp used to create a divine seal that infuses any stamp it creates with a touch of Xavior’s essence, guaranteeing the authenticity and legitimacy of any wax seal, coin, etc. on an instinctual level.
1/5 might remaining
[/hider]