Book 3, Chapter 67 (Patreon)

Everyone at the table was staring at me. I stood in the doorway, nonplussed, and stared back. After a few moments of silence, Senica said, “Go on, then. Let’s see it this time.”

“See what?” I asked.

“How crazy powerful you are now compared to yesterday.”

“There’s nothing to see,” I told her. That was technically true, but only because while my entire body could hold mana now, it currently wasn’t. All of my liquid mana had been used up in the process of recreating my muscles, bones, and organs.

“I don’t believe you. You jumped another stage and there were no changes at all?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said there’s nothing to see right now. It’ll be a day or so until my body is full of mana, and the other changes aren’t something you could see visually.”

“What changes?” Mother asked sharply.

“A stage five core basically creates a system of veins that stretch out through the body, which is enhanced to store mana like a big, mobile, squishy mana crystal. It doesn’t increase the rate you generate new mana, but it does greatly increase how much you can store, in addition to making you a bit tougher physically and more resistant to outside sources of magic.”

I got a searching stare from her while I explained, but since I glossed over the whole process and neither of my parents were magically inclined, they didn’t think to question the mechanics of how exactly I’d achieved that result. That was good, since I doubted they’d take it as calmly if I told them I’d basically turned myself inside out while floating in a vat of alchemically-enhanced liquid mana.

“Come sit down,” she said at least, her examination of me complete and the results apparently satisfactory. “I’ll make you something to eat.”

“That’s alright,” I said. “I’m just checking in to let you guys know I finished and everything is fine. I’ve got some business with Hyago and Tetrin to take care of before it gets too dark out.”

“Surely it’s not so important that you can’t spend fifteen minutes with your family,” Mother chided me. Her ability to guilt me into doing things I had no intention of doing was nothing short of legendary.

“Come join us,” Father said. “I wanted to get your opinion on diverting a river for the new farmlands anyway.”

“Speaking of watering crops, I think the underground channel for the south gardens is clogged,” Mother told Father. “Ayaka said she’d scry the pipe in the morning.”

“Again? That’s the third time we’ve had to clean that out.”

With a not-unhappy sigh, I let myself be drawn over to the table and seated across from my sister, who gave me a little smirk. While Mother was dishing out another helping of food onto a plate for me and Father was distracted watching her and talking about the farms, Senica leaned forward and whispered, “You’re never getting rid of us, little bro.”

I laughed softly. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  *

My talk with Tetrin was simple enough. It was mostly just checking in to make sure the ember bloom was still tolerating our massive, valley-wide enchantment to trap ambient mana. Once I’d confirmed that and the health of the tree itself, I tracked down Hyago to talk to him about a significantly more complicated project.

“I think I’ve got a viable sample,” I said after we’d exchanged pleasantries.

“A sample of what?” he asked, confused.

“Of a living stone-draw stone hybrid, of course. I’ve had experiments running for weeks. Most of them have been failures, but I’ve got one that seems to be spreading the petrification the way we want. It’ll be another few months before it converts the sapling I’m trying it out on over, but if it works, we’ll be moving forward with your idea.”

“An entire petrified forest,” he said, glancing up at the trees around us. “It’ll be amazing to see, but I suppose it won’t need much tending at that point.”

“Don’t get too far ahead of yourself. At the rate this thing is growing, it’ll likely be years for some of these bigger trees. Hell, even if this turns out to be a viable sample, it’ll be months of work just getting them into every single tree in the valley.”

“True enough. I suppose I’ll hang around a little longer before I retire out to that new farm community I’ve been hearing about.”

“I didn’t know you were interested in that,” I said.

“The farming itself? Not so much. Thought I might use the space to plant an arbor like the one in that village your family comes from. You know, something a little less wild than what you’ve got here. Besides,” Hyago paused and looked me in the eye, “I suspect that once we’re done, you’re not going to be so keen on sharing this space.”

“Let’s just say that I consider this village branching out to another location a good thing. We only ever settled here to keep my family safe from reprisal when the Wolf Pack was still in control of the island. Now that they’re gone, there’s not a lot of reason for anyone to live here specifically. The teleportation platforms help with the isolation, but that’s a stopgap solution.”

Hyago nodded and spread his hands wide. “So you see, it’s good to be thinking about the future.”

“Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. We’ve still got some work to do here,” I said. “Let me show you the sapling that’s taking to the petrification and we can try to determine if the stone portion is generating mana…”

  *

Much to Senica’s disappointment, I opted to return to the tower alone. She had more than enough mana to work with, especially considering I left her with a sizeable portion of my own reserves to top off every single battery and storage crystal we had, and since there was no real rush, I decided it wasn’t worth the risk of having her so close by when things had the potential to go catastrophically wrong if Averin and the Breakers somehow managed to accidentally turn on Ammun’s super weapon.

Part of me regretted giving them as much help as I had, but then again, the floor control rooms weren’t really a threat. I was far more concerned about that door down below the sublevels. I’d taken a chance and hoped they could get in there on their own, but that hadn’t been feasible then. I’d needed the upgrade to my core to finish my own exploration of the tower, and they needed weeks at minimum to gain access to the top floor of the tower.

I’d be checking in on them first, then continuing my investigation of the exterior of the tower. Now that my body could handle being in the middle of heavy mana like that, I expected to find a lot of interesting features at the crown and base of the tower.

After a series of teleportation spells brought me back to the artificial cave I’d created to use as a base, I flew straight up past the cloud layer to get my first look up there. From a distance, even with magic amplifying my vision, there was so much mana gushing out of the tower that it appeared more like a hazy mirage than a solid object. It was only as I got closer, my new body cutting through the heavy mana spewing out into the sky, that I finally got my first good look.

“Oh,” I said, coming to a stop. That wasn’t what I expected to find. Hidden behind the shifting layers of mana was an enormous skeleton, so big that it covered the thousands of feet of space the top of the tower boasted. It was curled around on itself, forming an ‘O’ shape that left the center clear where the mana was venting straight out.

If the enormous size combined with the long tail and the delicate wing bones that had fallen and lay scattered inside a rib cage big enough to hold whole houses wasn’t enough of a giveaway, the skull would have confirmed it for me.

That was a dragon’s skeleton – and a big one, too.

Few monsters consumed mana at the rate dragons did. I had serious doubts there was a single one of them alive today for just that reason. It was all too easy to picture them falling in droves and starving to death, weak and frail on the ground. This one had probably sensed the mana coming out of the tower back when it had been fired at the moon and winged its way over here, only to settle around the top of the tower and starve slightly slower than its cousins.

I flew closer to examine the remains, but it was pretty much exactly what I’d expected from my initial pass. The sheer size of it marked it as an elder dragon, around a thousand years old, with teeth longer than I was tall and a pair of ivory horns sweeping back from its skull thirty feet or more. After so many years, even this high up where the air was so thin that I needed magic to breathe, it was nothing more than bones. Dragon corpses took an incredibly long time to decay under the best of circumstances—even dead, their bodies were too tough to succumb to simple rot and deterioration—but this one had had millennia to get to this state.

“I wonder who you were,” I said to the skull towering over me. “Did we know each other in the past? Were we friendly acquaintances, or bitter enemies? Or maybe you lived, grew, and died long after my time ended?”

The tower that pierced the heavens seemed a fitting grave for such a creature, similar to the brakvaw’s own floating cemetery. Dragon bone had its uses, but it was nothing special, at least not to me. I could make ivory every bit as hard and good for channeling magic with a bit of time and effort, so I left the bones where they were. If I ever changed my mind, I knew where to find them, but getting anything bigger than some of its teeth into my storage space was impossible right now.

After a solemn moment of respect for the end of such a senior creature’s tenure in this world, I examined the center of the tower it was curled around. At casual glance, it seemed that there was nothing there, just the same plain gray metallic stone the rest of the tower was constructed out of, but that wasn’t true.

It was a thin veneer of stone, so thin that it couldn’t even support its own weight. Wards held it in place, just a cap to the massive column of mana rising up through the middle of the tower. I could force my way through that if I needed to, then fall the hundreds of miles to the tower’s base – or wherever it ended. With my stage five core, I was certain I could survive it.

I’d call that the backup plan. Before leaping into the core of what was probably a weaponized fortress powerful enough to shoot down celestial bodies, it might be better to examine it from the outside. Only if that failed to give me a new avenue of exploration would I revisit the whole ‘jumping into the part the death beam comes out of’ strategy.

I flew up into the air, cast one last look down at the colossal dragon skeleton to commit it to memory so I could show the illusion of it to Senica later, and skimmed down the side of the tower. It was somewhat like swimming down a waterfall, with so much mana pouring in behind me that I didn’t really need the magic to help me fall faster. I just had to let the current carry me where I wanted to go.

It was time to see just how deep the tower actually went.