Book 3, Chapter 43

As we got closer to the Sanctum of Light, I got a better look at the landscape. It sloped upward like a puckered wound in the planet itself, rising in height to over a mile as it curled up around a hole that was easily thirty miles wide. That hole had no bottom, not that I could see, at least. Instead, it went straight down for endless miles until darkness shrouded its depths. For all I knew, it might pass through the planet and have a matching exit on the other side.

In the middle of that hole was the tower, roughly ten miles wide at ground level and gradually tapering to half that when it reached the clouds. It was made out of some sort of material that I couldn’t place, not quite metal, but not stone either. There were no doors or windows, or really any ornamentation at all. Other than the tower’s mind-boggling size, it was a plain, silver-gray pillar that dominated the landscape.

“Are they sure they built it big enough?” Senica snarked as we examined it.

“It does seem strange that it needs to be this huge,” I agreed. “I wonder what purpose that serves.”

“I wonder how they even managed it in the first place.”

“Magic,” I said. “Undoubtably. This isn’t something that could be built by hand.”

Mana cascaded down the outside of the tower, invisible to our eyes but easy to sense even from a few miles away near the edge of the chasm. Compared to what I remembered, it was still thin, difficult to process and unable to power anything but basic wards and enchantments. My sister obviously felt differently.

She waved a hand in front of her. “There’s so much mana just floating in the air, it’s like I’m flying in a cloud. I should be able to feel it.”

“I need to teach you how to properly pull in ambient mana and process it,” I told her. “That’s what you’ll be doing for the rest of the day. If you do it well enough, you’ll collect more than you could make in a month on your own.”

“My storage crystal can’t hold that much,” she objected.

“I’ve got extra you can borrow.”

Truthfully, I was setting Senica to a dull and boring task. I’d hated doing it myself when I was young, especially in an area with low mana density. But in today’s environment, it was like scooping golden nuggets up off the ground. Just the waste mana rolling off this tower was more potent than any harvesting operation the Wolf Pack had set up back home. A properly motivated mage could produce more mana than a thousand dims every day.

We needed a safe place to work, not in the least because I wanted to look around for these teleporters I’d been told of and Senica wasn’t fast enough to keep up with me. Since I suspected we’d be in this area for a while, and because it was so heavily infested with monsters, an actual base camp complete with wards and walls was a necessity.

There were no mountains to perch on here, unfortunately. The landscape was mostly lush grasslands and small stretches of forests only a few miles wide, all the plant life eagerly taking advantage of the extra mana to grow. The farther away from the chasm they got, the sparser they became, but it was a good hundred miles or more before the ambient mana grew thin enough that the flora wasn’t benefiting from it.

I considered constructing a home in the trees. It would provide us an extra screen of camouflage from anyone searching for us in the near future, but it was also an obvious place to look. Alternatively, there was the inside of the chasm wall, but I was concerned about Senica being exposed to that much mana continually. High density environments could be deadly, and I didn’t have a good read on how much mana was falling off the tower into the darkness, nor whether that flow sped up or slowed down.

I marked that as a potential location to fortify later, after I had more information about the mana fluctuations in the area. For now, I needed a more stable location. The outside of the pucker leading up to the chasm was my first thought. It was practically vertical near the top, but with a thousand feet of stone between it and the mana cascading through open air, it had a considerable buffer.

I could bore a hole into the wall, transmuting the dirt and stone within to something denser and stronger. That struck me as the appropriate balance between safety and resources, needing only a quick survey to make sure the location I chose wasn’t too close to anything dangerous.

For that survey, I sent scrying spells in both directions around the curve of the wall while Senica and I found an uninhabited strip of ground to land on. Once I was sure that we weren’t likely to be interrupted by any roaming monsters any time soon, we claimed a patch of grass with a single tree providing shade under its wide canopy.

“The thing to understand about collecting mana out of the air is that it’s a two-part procedure,” I told Senica after we’d settled down and I’d put up some basic privacy wards. It wasn’t that I expected to be discovered, but the effort was so minimal that it would have been foolish not to do it.

“Collecting and processing,” she said.

Surprised, I nodded. “Right. I don’t remember teaching you this.”

“I read about it a while back when you unveiled your whole ‘fill the valley with mana’ scheme.”

“I see. What book talked about this?” I asked. I’d brought hundreds of books back to the valley after my successful assault on the Wolf Pack, most of which I hadn’t done more than skim and almost none of which I recommended anyone learn from. I hadn’t realized Senica had been poking through them, and I briefly worried what bad advice she might have gleaned from their pages.

“I honestly don’t remember,” she said. “Most of what the lessons in there are… I don’t want to say they’re wrong, but they’re…”

I waited for her to finish the thought, but she just gave me a helpless shrug. “Inferior?” I suggested. “They accomplish the stated goal, but in an inefficient or overly complicated manner.”

“Exactly that, yes. But you were busy and I had nothing better to do, so I flipped through them anyway.”

That was something of a relief. Senica had a good enough grounding in magic that she’d been able to look at the information presented in those books objectively and determine what was useful and what wasn’t. In their defense, it wasn’t like the books were entirely without merit. Considering today’s standards, I was sure they were perfectly adequate for up-and-coming young mages. Adequate, however, was not good enough for my apprentices.

“I can’t imagine you’ve had much chance to practice,” I said. Then again, during my own ignition, Senica had absorbed mana out of the air around me just by being near it. Admittedly, that wasn’t quite the same as pulling ambient mana into her core—the mana she’d taken from me had been released from a storage crystal and was already processed—but I suspected she’d have no issue learning how to collect loose mana.

 “There didn’t seem to be a lot of use for the skill,” Senica said. “You know, on account of there not being any ambient mana anywhere – except here, apparently.”

“Yes, that’s why I didn’t bother teaching you how to do it to begin with. Regardless, we’re here now and this presents us with an opportunity for you to gather all the mana you could possibly need to create your mana lattice and advance your core to stage two.”

Senica’s gaze sharpened. “You think I’m ready for stage two?”

“Possibly, but even if you’re not, it’s not like the mana is going to expire. The nice thing about stage two is that, unlike stage one, you can fix your mistakes. It’s not easy or cheap, but if you’re dedicated, you can achieve a perfect stage two through sheer effort alone.”

“I thought you said I should wait until I was grown up to put a mana lattice in my core,” Senica said with a frown.

“No, no. I said if you do it now, it’ll break apart as you grow bigger. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it, just that it’ll be more work in the long run. Any mana lattice you create now will need constant maintenance over the next seven or eight years, otherwise it’ll start to separate. Or I suppose if you make it too thick, it might hinder your core’s natural growth, but we won’t do anything like that.”

“I’ve barely even begun redesigning it from my last idea,” she said. “I don’t see how I could possibly build a full lattice in the next day.”

“Oh no.” I shook my head at that. “No, you’ll just be gathering up the mana for it now. When we go back home, you’ll have plenty to work with. I’ve got a nice, big storage crystal for you to use. The transference rate isn’t spectacular due to the sheer size of it, but it’s less of an issue with all the mana in the air here.”

I’d also be filling up every single one of my own mana crystals so that I could finish my new project, then sever the connections and get myself back down to one single crystal with an almost perfect transference rate. Unlike storage crystals, mana crystals were limited more by the size of the core weaving them together than anything else. I’d had an obelisk I’d turned into a crystal in my old life that was a small mountain at its full size. It had taken as much mana as I generated in a day just to keep it portable.

As I instructed Senica on the finer points of collecting ambient mana by pulling it directly into her core and then integrating with her own mana, my scrying spells continued to sweep the outside edge of the chasm. I saw several villages and towns, most set around fifteen miles or so from the chasm, and every one of them had a single building made of what looked like polished steel covered with runes and guarded by someone dressed significantly nicer than the locals.

Likely, those buildings housed the teleportation platforms that would give access to the Sanctum’s interior, but I’d need to go investigate in person to determine that for sure. That would be a project for tomorrow, though, since I still needed to begin excavating our base camp for now. I also wanted to study the mana shrouding the tower itself to see if it was possible to cross the physical distance in my current state.

Human bodies were entirely capable of poisoning themselves with mana. It wouldn’t happen under normal circumstances since even if there was ambient mana, it would only slowly filter into the body and be easily cycled into the mana core. If the ambient mana was too strong, however, it could flood the flesh and overpower the core’s ability to handle it.

The results were not pretty, and often fatal.

However, a mage who advanced to the fifth stage didn’t have that problem, since that was the point where they began willingly converted their whole body into a pseudo-core. Essentially, it would increase my ability to hold mana ten-fold, though I would not benefit from a proportional boost to the speed at which I generated it. More importantly for what I had in mind, a body full of mana did a much better job at resisting high density ambient mana.

With that transformation complete, there would be almost nowhere outside of some artificially created environments that I needed to worry about the mana density corrupting my body. However, I had nowhere near the reserves needed to safely transition to a stage five core. Thus, I’d be doing much the same thing Senica was in the near future: collecting ambient mana and filling my mana crystals.

“I think I’ve found us a spot for a permanent base camp,” I told my sister about twenty minutes after she’d gotten to work. The location I’d chosen was between towns and didn’t appear to have any sort of flying monsters in the area, which was probably about as much as I could hope for. “Let’s head over and get started on it.”