Book 3, Chapter 66 (Patreon)

If I’d been limited to a single workstation, it would have taken me months to make all the potions and elixirs I needed to transition to stage five. As it was, I’d been doing the prep work on these transitions for years. I’d already made everything I needed that I could trust to remain stable for more than a few months. Unfortunately, that was a minority of the project. There’d been plenty left to do.

My original plan had called for another year of scrounging up mana to devote to stage five, but thanks to my time in the Sanctum of Light, and the absolutely enormous mana crystal I’d built to fortify my reserves, I was ready now. At least, I would be in the next day or so, as long as nothing went wrong with the final batch of potions I was working on.

I owed Hyago and his people for dealing with all the raw ingredients I’d consumed over the last week. Some of those plants had been ones I’d acquired traveling, and the druids had done a commendable job keeping them healthy and alive in my absence. Others had been in our gardens and greenhouses for years, but they still took attention and care.

In my alchemical frenzy, I’d stripped most of our resources bare. The end result was a giant box with close to a hundred bottles, jars, vials, and bags of potions, tinctures, powders, ointments, and, in one case, a fleshy rock made of formerly organic elements. That last one wasn’t strictly necessary to the process, but I wasn’t about to try out all these experimental new recipes on myself, not with all the modifications I’d made to them to use local reagents.

With all my preparations nearing completion, it was time to relax for a few hours, to rest and recuperate so I’d be ready for tomorrow’s task. Unlike stages three and four, stage five actually didn’t involve a lot of changes to my mana core itself. It was more of an alchemical transmutation of the rest of my body to become something akin to a living Keiran-shaped mana crystal. It wouldn’t increase my mana generation rate, but it would allow me to store over ten times as much mana in my body as I could now.

Finally, I’d be able to cast a master-tier spell without the aid of a mana crystal again. Additionally, my body would become physically tougher, and I’d be all but immune to most low-level magics. Much like regular mana crystals, a mage with a stage five core passively repelled mana that wasn’t introduced in a specific way, which meant weaker spells tended to fizzle. It wasn’t a perfect defense by any means, and it did introduce complications to using certain types of magic items, but I’d accounted for those problems years ago when I’d been outfitting myself.

 Over the next hour, I finished bottling the last few potions I needed and gave everything a once-over to ensure the potency was where I needed it to be. This particular operation was going to be tricky to do by myself, but there was no one to help, so I needed to make sure everything worked perfectly before I even started.

Once the setup was done, I made the final adjustments to the equipment I’d need to use tomorrow, then left my secret lab and returned home.

  *

Senica was busy regaling our parents with all the new things she’d learned and showing off how well-practiced she was at them. I doubted anyone in the room besides me could follow along with what she was saying, but they were encouraging and attentive anyway.

I was sprawled out in a chair in the corner of the room skimming through the history books Averin had obtained for me – not that I thought they were good for much of anything. Most of them didn’t date far enough back to even cover the relevant time periods, and the lessons contained in them were suitable for children and completely lacked any sort of complexity or nuance.

Interestingly enough, because they were primers for the children who were born in the tower, there were more than a few sections about the magical development of their civilization as well. I noticed plenty of similarities to how I’d taught my apprentices in those pages. It was nothing definitive, but it served to reinforce my suspicion that Ammun had carried my own lessons forward to his apprentices, and that many of the principles I’d instilled into him had become the foundations of the children of light’s own magical culture.

As it got later and I finished going through the stack, flipping through pages and using divinations to parse the data fast enough to absorb a book’s contents in a matter of minutes rather than hours, Father came over and sat in the chair next to mine. “How’s it going?” he asked.

“Just killing some time,” I said. “This is nothing but a few data points that support suspicions I already had.”

“Want to talk about it?”

I shrugged. “There’s not much to say. I’ll know more once I go back and investigate further. Hopefully, I’ll learn what I went there to find out.”

“How this place managed to destroy all the world’s mana,” Father said.

“Something like that. I don’t think it’s all the mana, but it was definitely most of it. Better than ninety percent, I’d say. This is just a guess, but I’m thinking it was better than ninety-nine percent a few thousand years ago, and the world core is slowly repairing itself. Even if I do nothing at all, in another ten or twenty thousand years, it might be like it never happened.”

“That’s a long time to wait.”

“Yes, which is why I’d like to be a bit more proactive. I’m hoping to have this fixed in the next few decades.”

Father thought about it for a few seconds before saying, “I can’t even imagine what a world of unlimited mana would look like.”

“Hopefully you won’t have to,” I told him. “I expect you’ll see it well before you die.”

“Think I’ll live that long, huh?”

“You are speaking to the master of life-extension spells. There is nobody who knows more about the subject than me. If you live less than two hundred years, it’ll only be because you choose to.”

“Huh… that long. Well, I guess it’ll give me plenty of time to spend with my grandkids, and their grandkids… and their grandkids…”

“I’ll leave that up to Senica and the…” I trailed off and glanced at Mother and Senica for a moment before continuing. “Have you told her yet?”

“We’re keeping it to ourselves for a little while longer. In a month or so, we’ll let people know.”

“Right. Well, I’ll leave them to the business of making grandchildren.”

“Gravin… You’re skipping so much of your life. You abandoned your childhood. Now you’re spending your early adult years trying to save the world. When do you plan on carving out some time for yourself?”

I let out an incredulous laugh. “Is that what you think is happening? That I’m sacrificing my happiness for everyone else? Let me assure you that’s not the case. I’m doing what I love, and I have already had more years to live my life on my terms than everyone else in this village combined.”

“And what you love doesn’t include starting a family of your own?”

“It does not,” I said firmly. “I’ve never been interested in romance.”

I’d learned how much of a lie love could be in my first childhood. Even if this go around had shown me what it was like to live in a family who actually cared, I wasn’t eager to make myself that vulnerable to another person, ever. I’d tried that once, when I’d been young and dumb. It had resulted in a few dozen deaths, yet another case of arson, and a vow of eternal vengeance from her family that had gotten them all wiped out over the next decade or so. Maybe the blame lay with me for not being able to give her what she’d needed. Regardless, I’d never repeated the experience, and I had no intention of trying again now.

“How’s work on the new farm town coming along?” I asked, changing the subject.

Father let it shift without fighting me. “Good. We’ve picked out a spot that doesn’t appear to have any competing interests and sent out a group of hunters to scour the area. As soon as we’re sure the monster population isn’t too thick to handle, we’ll see about getting a new teleportation platform installed there so we can start bringing workers and supplies through. Tetrin said he’d help raise the buildings and do the basic enchanting, though he’s charging us double the mana it takes.”

“That sounds like what he’d do,” I said. “I’ll make a new platform for you before I leave.”

It was too bad I couldn’t use any of the ones in my phantom space, but those were a different design, crafted to feed off ambient mana that just didn’t exist here. Still, it wouldn’t take too much effort to make another one, and it would be a good test of my capabilities once I completed my transition to stage five.

“I think I’m going to go to bed now,” I said. “I’ve got a big project tomorrow and I’d like to be well-rested for it.”

“Good night, son,” Father said. He stood and offered me his hand to pull me up out of my chair. I accepted it, spoke briefly to the rest of my family, and retired to my room for the night.

  *

There was a giant steel vat in the center of the room, two feet in diameter and seven feet in height. The cylinder was just big enough for me to fully submerge myself in. Considering that I’d built it for especially that purpose, I actually could have gone a bit tighter if I’d wanted. But if I did that, it would have necessitated multiple rounds inside it since it couldn’t have held all the materials I was planning on using.

I started by stripping naked and rubbing an ointment that was similar to wet clay all over myself. Following that, I drank three separate potions, then levitated myself up and over the lip of the vat. I carefully dropped down to stand inside it and reached out using telekinesis and scrying to align the top of the apparatus in place.

This was the trickiest part. It contained dozens of potions and vials all suspended upside down and plugged with corks made of force magic designed to dissolve at different times. It would pour the concoctions in one after another at predetermined intervals, thus bypassing the need to have an assistant to help.

Partway through, after the first apparatus was emptied, I’d need to layer a new ointment on my skin, then fill the vat with enough liquid mana to completely submerge myself. I had a whole tank of that already set up and waiting. In fact, that had been the bulk of my mana use – easily two-thirds of what I was spending on this process went into creating the liquid mana.

I was going to be markedly heavier when I got done, with bones as dense as stone and muscles like strands of steel cord. Stage five was the first step beyond human. When I emerged from that vat in roughly twelve hours, I’d effectively have a brand-new body, one that would be stronger, faster, healthier, and age slower. And this time, I’d do it perfectly. That alone would be worth easily an extra five hundred years of life without spending a drop of mana to extend it.

It was time. If I didn’t begin the process now, both apparatuses would release contents too late to work perfectly. With magic, I turned the valve that would start pouring liquid mana into the vat. It spilled in, rising up past my ankles, then my knees. The first of the potions suspended above me dumped amber-colored liquid down into the silvery mana filling the vat.

I got to work incorporating it all into my mana core and body.