Book 3, Chapter 21

Over the next few months, I divided my time between monitoring my mana sealing experiment, practicing what I’d taken to calling lossless casting, and teaching the basics of constructing a mana lattice for those budding mages living in Sanctuary who were interested in progressing past stage one. Some of them were more than ready to begin working on their own lattices, but others weren’t quite there. That did not stop them from attending, anyway.

We couldn’t confirm it yet, but Hyago, Tetrin, and I were carefully monitoring the amount of mana in the flora filling the valley. We’d invested an enormous amount of time, effort, and resources into terraforming the forest so that the trees could grow without burning through mana as fast as they made it, and our progress was measured in the amount of mana we could feel in their cores. That amount had inarguably increased, but not as fast as I’d hoped.

My final activity was to squeeze as much growth as I could from my ointment of aging. I hit what was probably my final growth spurt, which resulted in me consuming vast stores of stockpiled food and outgrowing the entire wardrobe my parents had gifted me for my birthday not that long ago. It was such a dramatic change that even Grandfather remarked on it during one of our lessons. Considering his massive proportions, I was surprised he noticed an extra eight or nine inches over the span of six weeks.

From there, my growth slowed down and my mana core’s size stabilized. I had to do regular maintenance on my own lattice as it separated according to the modular design I’d crafted for it, but now that I was almost fully grown, I was able to put the final pieces in place.

I’d originally thought it would take longer, given the scarcity of resources I’d been dealing with, but it turned out that there were quite a few plants with alchemical properties that actually made for a superior product compared to my old recipe. I hadn’t taken the time to study it in depth, but my theory was that desert plants had a certain hardiness to them that allowed them to grow in adverse conditions, a property they’d imparted to the ointment.

Whatever the reason, I was about two years ahead of schedule by my rough calculations. I kept careful track of my body, so I knew to the day when I stopped growing. I waited another month after that to ensure I was truly done, that at this point, the ointment would do nothing but speed me to an early grave if I continued using it. While I waited, I began my final preparations.

  *

“I’ll be going away for a day or two,” I said one night over dinner.

Father, who now had to look up instead of down to meet my eyes, asked, “Another trip to the giant bird folk?”

“No, not this time,” I said. “I’m done growing.”

Mother had never been happy about my decision, no doubt feeling that I’d robbed myself of my childhood or something along those lines. Even though she knew, logically speaking, I’d already had one thousands of years ago, seeing her son grow up too fast had caused her no end of stress. Despite the fact that I was still a month or two away from my ninth birthday, I was physically an adult.

She hadn’t been the only one to grumble about it, but no one had confronted me over it. Any complaining they’d done had been behind my back, not that I hadn’t noticed simply because I wasn’t physically present. Some people thought it was ‘evil’ magic somehow; others were just creeped out by a child that did three years of growing for every year that actually went by.

Senica, on the other hand, had started out fascinated by it. That had quickly turned to annoyance the moment I grew taller than her, then begrudging acceptance since I’d been playing the older sibling anyway. That didn’t mean she’d been content to let me outgrow her, however, and I’d caught her on three separate occasions trying to sneak through my wards to get access to my lab and supplies so she could make her own ointment. On one occasion, she’d even tried to pilfer a jar I’d left out in my room, only to find that I’d deliberately placed it there as bait to test her ward-cracking skills.

They had not been up to the task, not even close.

“It’s time, then?” Father asked.

“Yes, finally.”

“You gave up a decade of your life. I don’t think ‘finally’ is the word for it,” Mother pointed out.

I waved off her concern. “It’s barely a blip at the end of a long, long line.”

“From your perspective, I suppose. But now I have to explain to newcomers that no, you’re not my little brother,” Father said.

“Give it another decade and you’ll all look older than me again. I’m going to look a lot like this for centuries.”

“That would be a neat trick.” Mother touched her face as she spoke.

“You’re still decades away from needing anything like that,” Father told her as he leaned in to kiss her cheek.

“Life extending magic isn’t too difficult,” I said. “You’ll want to progress to stage four sometime in the next fifty years, though. In the beginning, it doesn’t take much, but the older you get, the harder it becomes.”

When I’d released my hold on life as Keiran the Archmage, I’d been using more mana every day than this entire valley could produce, including all the vegetation and animals. The only way I could have possibly kept going would have been to advance to my core to stage ten, a futile quest I’d wasted centuries pursuing before I’d been forced to admit that it was impossible.

Impossible for the original Keiran, that was. My new body was already fifty years ahead of my old one, and that gap would only grow. More than that, this time I was going to complete every step perfectly. My estimates placed me at better than thirty percent stronger at stage nine than I’d been in my past life, which meant a few experiments that had escaped my grasp were on the table again.

Of course, that all depended on whether I could fix Manoch’s broken world core. I was confident in my abilities, but I only had some vague passages in history books that focused on the fallout of the catastrophe, not on how it had actually been done. Seeing the damage for myself was the whole point of my upcoming journey.

“I’ll… consider it,” Mother said. She shared a look with Father and added, “We’ll both consider it. I don’t think we’d want to do it alone.”

“Together or not at all,” Father agreed.

“Understandable. You should read up on my notes for forming a mana lattice either way. Properly done, it could more than triple your current mana generation.”

“I’m ready to make my lattice,” Senica told our parents.

“No you’re not,” I said.

“Oh yeah? If I’m not ready, then how come I’ve already started forming the pieces?”

“It’s going to fall apart when you try to connect them,” I warned her. “And you’re going to feel like you’re dying for hours.”

“You… You don’t know that.”

“I do. Did you think I couldn’t see your progress? You’ve got twelve pieces held in your core, but they’re floating around like vegetables in a stew and none of them are holding their shape. You need to let all of them dissolve back into pure mana and start over again.”

Senica scowled and muttered something under her breath, then turned her attention back to her dinner. She’d pout about it now, but if she listened to my advice—which she always did, eventually—she’d be better off in the long run. Truth be told, she could probably hack together a weak mana lattice at her current level of skill, but it was far easier to lay down a lattice in a blank core than it was to fix it after it had already been attached. An extra year or two of training would pay massive dividends down the road.

“When will you do your own stage advancement?” Father asked.

“Tomorrow,” I told him. “I’ll be getting a full night’s sleep and start first thing in the morning. It should only take six hours or so to do the first advancement to stage three, and if everything goes like I expect, I’ll immediately start the process to move on to stage four.”

Stage four was about as far as a normal body could progress. After that, I would need to alter my muscles, bones, and blood to turn my entire body into a pseudo-mana crystal, but that was a process a year or more off. The mana requirements utterly dwarfed anything I’d done thus far, but with a stage four core, I’d be well-equipped to handle them.

“Can I watch?” Senica asked.

“Absolutely not,” I told her.

“Come on! I’ll be quiet.”

“Not a chance.”

“Gravin, pleeeeaasse.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I make a mistake, it could cripple or kill me. And if you’re too close, it might kill you, too.” Everyone’s eyes went wide when I said that. “I’m not going to make a mistake, not unless there’s someone else there distracting me.”

The chances were low even then, but it made for a good excuse. In truth, I did not want Senica trying to experiment with the techniques I’d be using, and the best way to make sure that didn’t happen was to keep her from learning them. Besides, I’d be performing the magic in my secret sanctum, the one that no one knew about. Letting someone else in defeated the whole purpose.

“Maybe you should wait,” Mother said.

“I’ve been waiting for six years.”

“It sounds dangerous,” Father added.

“It is dangerous, but it’s also worth it.”

“We’re just concerned.”

“It’s no worse than when I hunted down that cabal of mages.”

“We were concerned then, too,” Mother told me.

“Look, I appreciate that you’re worried about me. Really, I do. But sometimes magic requires risks. I am fully aware of everything that could possibly go wrong. I have taken every precaution. I’ve done this before, and I’ve mentored hundreds of mages and overseen their own advancement. Trust me.”

“We do,” Father said after a moment of silence. “You’ll have to forgive us for worrying. We’re your parents. We’re always going to worry about you.”

Affection won out over annoyance, and I smiled. “I know. I love that you care. Think of it like this. Every time you swing a ho, there’s a chance that you’re going to bring it down on your foot. But you don’t. Why not? You know what you’re doing. You’re aware of your stance. You aim. You’ve practiced.”

“Yes, but if I make a mistake, it’s not going to kill me.”

“But have you ever made a mistake?” I pressed.

“Well… not that one.”

“So it wouldn’t matter what the consequences were, since you were never going to see them.”

Senica snorted. “This is a dumb argument.”

“She’s not wrong,” Mother said dryly.

“There’s no talking him out of it, though,” Father said. “All we can do is what he said. I trust him, and I understand why he needs to keep growing stronger.”

There wasn’t much more to be said after that. We finished dinner in silence and went our separate ways. I was preparing for an early night and mentally reviewing my preparations for the morning when Father sought me out.

“Gravin, I just want you to know that while I understand why you need to keep getting stronger, no one would blame you if you didn’t take all the world’s burdens on your shoulders. You’re already far stronger than anyone else. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to just live a normal life. You can always choose that, if you want to.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But my mind is made up.”

Father nodded. “I expect it is. You’re going to go out into the world and do unimaginable things. But when you’re tired of that, when you’ve had enough, you come back home. You’ll still be my son, no matter what.”

He pulled me into a hug, then said, “Good night, son. I’ll see you in a few days.”