Then he called upon his mana.
Earth answered first. The heaviest element, the most eager to settle into form. Mana flooded his channels and the ground far below trembled in response, ready to obey.
Quinlan held it there. He didn't shape it, didn't release it.
He ran the simulation in his head instead.
An earth dome over Whisperfield. He'd built structures before. Walls, platforms, pillars, entire hillsides reshaped in seconds. Small mountains of compressed stone rose from flat ground when the situation demanded it.
But this city was wide. Kilometers of perimeter. A dome at that scale would require continuous mana input to hold its shape, because earth had no internal lattice. No self-reinforcing geometry. Every square meter was dead weight fighting gravity, held together by nothing but his willpower and a constant stream of mana.
