Book 3, Chapter 52

The cave I’d excavated and warded for use as our base camp had gone undisturbed the entire time we were gone. As soon as we teleported in, I started going through the wards to ensure they hadn’t degraded or been tampered with. Senica didn’t appreciate me roping her into an impromptu lesson, but learning how to safely interact with strange wards was a necessary skill for any mage, so I overruled her objections.

 “But it’s boooooring,” she said. “And I’ve got better stuff to do.”

There was some truth to that. She’d been hard at work constructing a modular mana lattice to bring her core up to stage two, but since I didn’t have dedicated teaching hours and had to give lessons as they became applicable, that wasn’t a good argument.

“I’m doing ward-related stuff. It needs to be done and can’t be put off. You can work on your mana lattice just as well in three hours as you can right now, so we’re doing ward work first,” I told her.

“Ugh. Fine,” Senica huffed out. “What are we looking at?”

Let’s start with how the ward draws in mana,” I said. “This is somewhat unique, since I’m powering it with the ambient mana around us instead of any sort of mana battery. Essentially, it’s an inscription that will run forever unless the mana thins out or the ward stone gets broken. If you look here, you can see the runes are different than the ones normally used.”

As soon as Senica realized I was showing her new runes, her interest sharpened. Crafting disciplines like inscription and alchemy were probably never going to become her specialty, not with her love of conjurations, but spending half her life living in a home that had hot or cold water on demand and cool air circulating through each room had more than convinced her of the utility of learning runes.

Once she had a second to think about it, though, she realized that this rune configuration was essentially worthless. “You’ll only ever use this here,” she pointed out. “And it’s great for this area, but we never found anywhere else in the whole world with any ambient mana at all.”

“That’s true for now, but it won’t be forever.”

“Why’s that?” she asked.

I realized suddenly that I’d never really discussed my long-term plans with my family. I’d occasionally shared stories of what the world was like in my previous life, compared the state of the planet from back then to now, mentioned the different patterns the moons went through when there was still a sixth one up in the sky. I’d even shared what I’d discovered about exactly how Manoch had gotten into its current state once.

“I guess we should talk a bit about why we’re out here,” I said. “Kind of weird that I never really told anybody.”

“You wanted to know what your apprentice did,” Senica said. “I mean, you already knew, but not how he did it.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And what would I do with that knowledge?”

“You would…” Senica trailed off. Her gaze shifted back to the ward stone, to the runes that drew mana in from the air and cycled it through the device. “You think you can make our world like how it was in your last life?”

“I’m positive of it,” I told her.

“And that’s why we’re here?”

“That big tower out there with all those mages living in it,” I said, gesturing vaguely behind me at a rock wall that was probably in the right direction of the tower. “My theory is that it’s actually a giant spell frame used to channel the magic that broke the moon. From what I picked up, there’s an inner channel that takes up at least half of the space inside the tower itself that mana flows up freely from.”

“I’m not following,” Senica told me.

“Chances are good that when I go snooping, I’m going to find some clues about how exactly that tower was used as a weapon to destroy a moon and break the world core. And once I know that, I can come up with a way to fix it.”

“And then the whole world will be full of mana like this place is.”

I shook my head. “No, this is still low-density. The mana is thin here. This will be the baseline, but most places will have far more mana. There will be stretches of land where the mana is so thick you have to take special precautions just to travel through them.”

I’d even traveled some of those places myself. I had vague memories of caravans with giant crystals mounted on every wagon, drawing in mana and projecting wards to keep it away from the people and cargo. Guards wore bracers etched with runes designed to do the same things, all just to avoid mana poisoning while the caravan rolled down roads where the flora was constantly trying to claim the open space.

“So you’re saying that eventually all the enchantments and inscriptions you do will use this rune structure because ambient mana will be everywhere,” Senica said. “Which is why I need to learn it now, even though it’s totally useless except for right here today.”

“When you put it like that…”

“How long do you think it’ll take before you fix everything?” she asked.

“I couldn’t even begin to guess. Years, still.”

“Then this isn’t a priority,” she argued, “and we should move on to something else.”

I stopped to consider that for a moment. Senica wasn’t wrong, necessarily, but still, I was the master and she was the apprentice. Besides, it would have taken less time to teach it than we’d wasted arguing about whether it was worthwhile to learn.

“So this rune here,” I started, pointing to a specific section of the ward stone while she gave me an aggravated sigh.

  *

We spent the first few days taking advantage of the abundant mana. I taught Senica a dozen new spells, all of which she was easily able to practice to her heart’s content as her ability to draw in and process ambient mana grew. While she did that, I spent my time scrying the towns scattered all around the plains surrounding the chasm and finishing up my own project.

I was in no hurry to get into the tower, especially not since Senica was getting such a boost from just being in the area. Her skills advanced so rapidly that I started revising my opinion on whether she was a natural-born genius, but in truth, it was just that her theoretical knowledge of magic had far outstripped her practical ability to practice until now. She was merely catching up with years of lessons she’d dutifully learned despite not being able to anything with the knowledge.

For myself, I was finally able to complete my enormous mana crystal. At the end of the fourth day, I stood on the lip of the puckered scar surrounding the chasm, a sort of plateau that was a thousand feet wide, and stared up at the velvety black boulder I’d created. This was probably the last time I’d see it in all its glory, since it would be replacing my old primary mana crystal in the framework of living stone I’d created, and I’d be breaking my mana core’s connection to both that crystal and the bank of mana crystals I’d created to hold all the mana I’d needed to reach stages three and four.

I placed both hands on the boulder and channeled the magic that would shrink it down from being a thirty-foot-tall chunk of rock to something that I could hold in my hands, then pulled out my old mana crystal from my phantom space. It was the work of moments to disconnect it from its living stone framework and slot my new crystal in.

Then, I started draining the old crystals into my new one. I was pleased to find that they didn’t even fill a quarter of the massive crystal I’d just made. Once that was finished, I reached into my own mana core and severed the delicate connections between myself and my old crystals. Without so many of them latched onto me, the transfer interference all but vanished.

Perfect. As soon as I filled this mana crystal up, I’d have the reserves to throw upwards of thirty master-tier spells without stopping. Nothing short of another archmage would be able to stand up to me then. Admittedly, it was still going to take me the better part of a week to top my new crystal off, even with all the ambient mana I could process to speed the project along.

There was still some work to be done on my former mana crystals to finish converting them over to batteries, but I’d built them with their eventual fates in mind and I didn’t expect there to be any problems on that front.

My scrying had located no less than sixteen different towns with identical buildings that I believed housed teleportation platforms. With my new mana crystal finally finished, I was prepared to call on some master-tier divinations to penetrate the warding schemes protecting those buildings to finally confirm those suspicions. I just needed a bit more time to prepare.

So of course that was when something went wrong.

  *

There were seven of them, as far as I could tell. I could only see them through area scrying, and even then the figures were blurry and difficult to focus on. If I had to guess, I would expect to find some sort of equipment used to block scrying and divert attention away from them.

That was suspicious in and of itself, but the fact that it was the middle of the night when I’d spotted them sneaking through one of the towns I was keeping under surveillance made it all the more likely that they were up to no good. It took only a moment to pick out their destination. No surprise there, it was the suspected teleportation platform.

Sighing, I heaved myself upright and pulled on my clothes. Everything else I could possibly need was already tucked away in my storage space—I kept only some furniture in the room I’d fashioned for myself inside our base camp—so there was nothing to keep me there any longer.

It took me ten minutes to fly over to the town, during which time I switched over my scrying spells to something a bit stronger so that I could pierce the group’s anti-scrying wards. That was only moderately successful, but I did confirm their actual number at nine. Two of them were full mages, but I suspected the other seven all had dormant cores and were relying on enchanted equipment to keep themselves hidden.

Part of me was tempted to just observe. Watching them assault a platform could give me some valuable insight into what kind of defenses I could expect to find. On the other hand, it could also alert the Sanctum of Light and tighten security, making my own entry into the tower that much more difficult. I doubted there were too many attacks on their teleportation platforms; I certainly hadn’t seen any indications of trouble anywhere else since I’d been watching the towns.

Since I wasn’t ready to invade the tower myself yet, both because my mana crystal wasn’t full and because I still had some research to do, it was probably best to stop this group. Besides, I wanted to know who they were and what their purpose was. Were they smugglers? Assassins? Raiders? Rebels?

My understanding of how the tower worked was that everyone there was a mage, and that they thought of themselves as a superior race of people to the so-called ‘dirt people’ who farmed the land and provided them with the food they needed to survive. Most of this group being dims made it extra suspicious, and I expected tonight’s activity was motivated by some sort of societal tensions.

There was an easy way to find out. I dropped a dome of silence over the group, then let myself fall out of the air, only cutting my invisibility when I landed in front of their leader.

“Hi,” I said. “Do you have a minute?”