Book 3, Chapter 22

The chamber was ten feet by ten feet. Each corner had a massive mana crystal in it, a black pillar glittering with pinpricks of light. Individually, they held ten times as much mana as the original crystal I’d made out of a rock in my mother’s garden so many years ago. Together, they represented close to a year’s work.

A great circle had been etched into the floor, its edges inscribed with runes. A square was inside that, with another, smaller circle forming the inner-most layer. More runes filled the space between the square and the inner circle, line after line of them. I’d spent three days carving them all with stone shape, and another day and a half going over them four times to ensure there were no mistakes.

The circle’s primary purpose was to trap mana. The reason it had to be so robust was that I was going to be draining all four of those mana crystals dry, and that was a lot of mana to put in a small space. There was going to be some pressure, and I needed the circle to hold against that.

It was time to begin.

My first step was to access the four mana crystals and pull the mana to me. It was far, far too much to hold in my mana core, but that’s what the outer circle formation was for. Mana clung to my body, practically physical as the rune structure called more and more of it in. Soon enough, all four crystals were empty and dark.

Now the mana was trapped in the circle with me. Step one was completed. Easy enough, but step two would be worse. I mentally reached out and leashed the mana to my will again, then pulled it tighter until it constricted my limbs and chest. My breathing was shallow now; my lungs weren’t strong enough to fully open against the pressure.

I started pulling it into my core, rotating it the same way I’d done for my original core ignition. Even at full capacity, I could only hold a fraction of the mana around me. But I would need all of it if I wanted to succeed, which meant finding room where none existed.

At this point, I could still back out. All I needed to do was release the ritual circle and let the mana flood back out into the rest of the room. I could recapture it inside my mana crystals and only lose two months of progress. Surprisingly, there was a part of me that considered it. During my first life, I’d had nothing to live for besides the magic, nothing to lose that I valued.

It was different now. I had a family who I loved and who loved me in turn. There were very good reasons not to risk this, and I could live a full life here with just the power I had now. But if I turned back now, so early on the path that I’d barely gotten started, I would never fix this broken world. I would never achieve true immortality.

I activated the square formation in my ritual circle. The mana was trapped here now, threatening to crush my core under the pressure and paralyzing my muscles. It was so dense that I stopped breathing completely, which was what made step two so dangerous. I needed magic to keep my body alive, but at the same time, my mana core was under just as much pressure. Casting a spell right now would be an effort of unmatched willpower.

So then, I only had as much time as my body could continue to function without my magic to aid it. Passing out was a very real risk. If that happened, the inscriptions would die within seconds, but I’d lose all the mana I’d saved up. Fortunately, this room was inside the borders of the valley. The lost mana would go toward enriching Sanctuary as a whole.

It was better if it went to enriching me, however. I pulled it tighter and activated the final circle.

My world went black and I collapsed to the floor, unable to hold my body up while the mana crushed me. I worked to keep pulling it into a core that threatened to rupture under the strain, so much mana that I couldn’t possibly hold more, not by merely spinning it to pack it tight. My core was already as dense as it could be.

I started spinning the core itself, tearing my lattice in the process. This was a necessary step in the process, even for my modular lattice. The pieces didn’t shatter, but they did separate. Without them in place, my own internal mana generation dropped to barely a fourth of what it had been when I woke up. That was fine. I’d fix it as part of my next advancement to stage four.

My core wobbled in place. There wasn’t really a better word for it. It spun, slowly at first and not at all stable, but as my will bore down on it, the spin picked up speed and smoothed out. I pressed down on it, forced it to expand. The walls thinned, and the pressure from the mana threatened to tear it. If my core ruptured, that was it. I was done.

The only thing stopping that from happening was my mind propping up the rapidly thinning walls of my core. They needed to be reinforced, infused with the mana I’d captured. I shaped it, spinning the mana inside even faster than the core and merging it into the walls.

And the core grew. It was subtle at first, almost too small to even measure, but I kept at it. Seconds rolled by as I teetered on the brink of disaster. A single slip would have resulted in irreparable damage. Letting off on the pressure for even a moment could have blown out the side of my mana core, and there were no do-overs if I made a mistake.

Perhaps it had been an error in judgment to reach for so much mana. I could have used less, but then, the result would be similarly less impressive. Certainly, I was reaching much further than I had during my original advancement to stage three. Equally certain, however, was that my current skills far, far outstripped those of my past life’s when I’d completed this ritual then.

And so I fought on, each second a struggle to keep life in my body and control the crushing mana both within and without. My core grew marginally larger until, finally, two minutes after I’d started, I’d pulled in enough mana to take the shallowest of breaths.

That was the worst of the process, but it wouldn’t be the only wall I had to break through. I was barely a few minutes into what would be an hours-long gauntlet of punishment, and regaining the ability to suck in the barest amount of air was only a momentary benefit. My willpower cradled my core, the only thing holding it together. If I let up pressure or lost control for even an instant, the mana would rip its way free.

I took only a few seconds to refresh my supply of air, then pressed down hard again, pulling in more mana and repeating the process.

  *

Six hours, I’d predicted it would take. Five hours and fifty-two minutes after I’d started, I lay on my back, staring up at a ceiling I could barely even see. My core was a massive ball of lead in my chest, engorged with more mana than it could possibly hold and seeming to spin sluggishly now, though that was an illusion of its large size more than an actual reduction in speed.

I was on the last set, now. The mana trapped in the circle with me was so thin that it was no impediment to my movement, but to pull it in was akin to eating far, far, far too much food and knowing I had to take just one more bite to clear the plate. I was fit to burst, but in a literal sense.

My core was ten times the size it had been at the beginning of the process, though that was more of a metaphysical change than a real one. Cores weren’t an actual organ in the body, so they didn’t have a real size. It wasn’t squishing my heart or lungs or anything like that, but it was hellishly uncomfortable. That was more because of the mana itself, not how far I’d stretched the core.

I pulled that last little bit in with a pained groan. The ‘weight’ of the mana did its job and dragged the core to its maximum size, kept smooth only through hours and hours of rigorous control. The core spun and spun, endlessly while I stuffed it with fifty times as much mana as it could hold. It took a few minutes for that last sliver of growth to stabilize, and with that, I was finally ready for the last step.

I’d waited years to complete this ritual for the simple reason that the bigger the core was to start, the bigger it could grow. Repeating this process wasn’t an option because of what I had to do at the end. If I simply let go right now, my core would rip itself apart. I’d appropriated a significant portion of the mana I’d been using to reinforce the walls, but there was a fine balance between enough mana to help me keep things from falling apart and enough mana that the core would hold up on its own.

Now that it was done growing, though, I needed exactly that. Having to hold my core in a cage of my own willpower for eternity would simply result in my death the first time I fought something that could actually challenge me. So I took all that mana packed into my core and did the same thing I’d done when I’d first ignited it.

I pushed it into the walls of my core while holding the shape together. The only difference between the final step and what I’d been doing for hours was that when I was done, a significant portion of the mana had fused itself into the walls of my core, thickening them a dozen times over and forever locking my core to its current size.

What was left was still far, far too much for me to casually hold, but now that my core was stable, I could release the ritual circle. I crawled over to a mana crystal, placed my hand against it, and vented the excess mana out in a torrent that filled the crystal to near half capacity.

My core emptied, I rolled back onto my back and just focused on breathing for a few minutes. The mana lattice had been shredded, severely reducing my mana generation in exchange for multiplying the amount of mana I could hold ten times over. The next step was rebuilding it, bigger and better than ever. That wasn’t stage four, however. It was merely a prerequisite for it.

A true stage four core was one that had been inflated to its maximum possible size, had a fully functioning lattice, and had the entire thing lacquered in crystallized mana. For a normal mage, it would be years of study and effort before they were ready to attempt such a difficult task. It took just as much mana as the advancement to stage three did, but it was akin to creating a mosaic sized to stretch across the sky. What I’d just done was more like a potter throwing a clay pot by comparison.

It normally took months of dedicated work to fully form the lacquering for a mana core after years of preparation, but I was an archmage, perhaps the greatest one this world had ever known. I was betting I could do it in under a week.