Book 3, Chapter 70 (Patreon)

It had become a habit of mine after I mastered lossless casting to run constant divinations whenever I could. A person could seem to do everything right and still get outmaneuvered because they lacked the information to know that their choices weren’t going to grant them victory. The old adage of knowledge being power was perhaps the truest one I’d ever heard.

Scrying spells that were hidden from casual observation were harder to pull off. Ones that would detect mana were costly. Getting vision and sound through the spells was a tricky combination, not to mention successfully interpreting it while going about my days. In short, despite Senica’s professed hatred for the discipline, divination was one of the most useful fields to master. It was also one of the hardest.

“I’ll admit that I don’t spend a lot of time on these higher floors, but your staff is nervous, and there seems to be an inordinately large sentinel presence in the streets,” I said. “I take it you’ve been up to something while I was away?”

“You could say that,” Averin said. “We managed to infiltrate floor one-fifty.”

From my perusal of the tower’s history of politics, I knew that one-fifty was both the top floor and home to the four Great Houses exclusively. No one else was permitted to live there, and only select representatives of the lesser Houses could even set foot on the floor. It was a ridiculous waste of space, especially considering how crowded the lower floors were. Really, all of the top fifty floors were under-populated by a significant margin, but the top one was criminally so.

“You’re still working on getting through that warded door?” I asked.

“We’re making progress. Each family line has a… a seal of authority, I suppose you could call it. Something that is bound to the patriarch or matriarch of that House and transferred to their heir upon their death. It made sense to us that that physical object would be the key, so we managed to get our hands on one of them.”

“I’m surprised you breached their security so quickly and easily.”

“Oh, it wasn’t easy, let me assure you.” Averin shook his head and paused to think for a moment. “No, not easy at all. Regardless, we got the job done and got our hands on a seal. It looks like a simple ring with the House crest on it, but when I examined it, I determined that it was in fact a ward key. However, when we tried to test it, we discovered that it can only be used by the person it’s bound to. Thus, we have a problem.”

 Blood-bound seals were almost impossible to break. It was easier to mind-control the person the seal was bound to into cooperating – not that I thought that was a particularly good idea, either. Nor was it viable, considering the patriarchs of the four Great Houses were all at least stage four, from what I’d been told. Very rarely did enchantments of any kind work on people that strong, let alone ones that forced them to do things against their wills.

“So you’ve determined what the four ward keys are, but not only are they difficult to collect, they’re worthless without the head of the House they’re bound to,” I said.

“That about sums it up, yes. It’s also concerning, because those rumors that the Great Houses have some sort of weapon have shifted from it being research or in production to it being almost completed. It’s been a concern for the Breakers since day one, and the reason we operate mostly in secret instead of open defiance.”

“You think it’s hidden behind that door,” I said.

“It fits, assuming the rumors are true.”

It was possible. I’d already found the master control for the entire tower, so I knew that wasn’t what was locked away in that room. I was also almost certain that whatever it was, it had been added in later. The tower’s mana flows clearly weren’t built to accommodate it. Someone had made changes after the design was finalized and constructed. Maybe I did need to get in there and determine exactly what was in that room before I considered destroying the tower, just in case whatever it was survived and was unleashed on the world.

“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Something I don’t understand. You’re fighting to take control of the tower away from the elites living at the top, right? To redistribute some resources toward the bottom, make things a bit fairer?”

“There’s more to it than that, but yes, that’s correct in a broad sense.”

“Why haven’t you just left? I know your people have been outside the tower. You know there’s mana out there. Maybe it’s not as dense, but it’s more than enough to live a life of magical luxuries, not to mention dispensing with that ridiculous farce about being divine emissaries or angels or whatever while you send people out to swindle food from every village and town within a thousand miles.”

“Just… leave our home? Abandon the place where our ancestors were born, lived, and died? Where our entire civilization had grown from nothing over thousands of years? Why would we do that?”

That was about what I’d expected to hear. “Maybe it’s just because I’ve lived outside this tower my whole life, but I can honestly say I see no reason why the people living on the lower floors wouldn’t live a better life outside the tower than they do inside it. What are you all so afraid will happen if you don’t stay here?”

“It’s not about being afraid to leave,” Averin said. “It’s… This is our home. We want to be here, and we want it to be better. That’s worth fighting for.”

That was unfortunate to hear, but not unexpected. This tower was coming down in the next few decades whether they liked it or not. It was necessary to heal the broken world core. But I wasn’t going to argue about it today. The Breakers, like everyone else here, were convinced they needed to live in this place.

“Well, I don’t get it,” I said. “That’s just my outsider’s perspective, I suppose. The land around this tower is plentiful in mana and could easily support the population housed up here. I’m not saying you need to abandon your fight, just that offering people an alternative to waiting and hoping you win might not be a bad idea.”

Averin grunted, but didn’t reply. We sat in silence for a minute, then he sighed and stood up. “I have work to do. Are you planning on assisting us in getting into the sealed room?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to know what’s in there myself. Is it just some vault of magical armaments? Is it something more?”

“We don’t know. For all I know, it’s not some new weapon, but an old one the founders of the four great Houses cooked up many, many generations back. It might be a pile of dust by now, making this whole venture a waste of time.”

I somehow doubted that. Too many safeguards and contingencies were in place for it to be something that would simply fall apart if left undisturbed. More likely, it was something that was extremely mana-hungry, necessitating locking it up on a floor that deliberately had all the mana diverted away from it to keep it from doing whatever it was designed to do.

“If that’s all, I’ll contact you should we have need of your assistance. In the meantime, perhaps you’d like some manuals on adjusting to your new body? Congratulations on that, by the way.”

“Ah, you can tell? Impressive.”

I hadn’t been doing anything special to hide the fact that my mana core was stage five now, but the signs were subtle. I knew Averin couldn’t feel the mana collected in my body—that at least was covered by my natural shielding—but he’d noticed something about the way I moved or how much weight I put on the chair I was sitting in.

“The patriarch of the House of Sinell was also rank five. I had a run-in with him while absconding with his seal. It was… a difficult encounter. Regardless, it gave me some insight into how a rank five moves, and I know you didn’t meet the criteria when we first met.”

I smiled. “Fair enough. Yes, that was the crux of what I left to go take care of.”

“We may have to fight and kill other rank fives to get ahold of all four seals,” Averin said. “Most likely we’ll be abducting their heirs to forcibly bond to the seals and make them open the way. Can I count on your assistance if it should come down to a fight?”

“I will consider it,” I said.

“You don’t seem to have any… let’s call them ‘moral objections’ to this plan.”

“I am a practical person.”

“As am I,” Averin said. “Farewell for now, and congratulations again.”

As I watched the leader of the Breakers depart, I considered that perhaps it was time to stop relying on their largesse. Our paths were beginning to diverge, and I suspected that the last time we cooperated would probably be opening that door. Depending on what was behind it, we might be fighting immediately thereafter.

Averin probably felt the same way, at least judging by the number of discreet tracking spells he’d tried to put on me. We’d never been trusted allies to begin with, but now that things were coming to a head, we were slipping from allies of convenience to potential enemies. It was time to start preparing myself for an ambush in the near future.

I left the safehouse and explored the interior of the tower for a while, keeping mostly to the lower twenty floors. Though I stood out with my darker skin, I kept a simple cloak wrapped around me. That drew attention as well, but not so much as being recognized as an outsider in the tower would. Every so often, new tracking spells would pop up and try to latch onto me, though I couldn’t confirm the source.

I brushed them off easily, and when a trio of sentinels showed up in my general area, decided that I’d pushed my luck enough and retreated under the cover of a few anti-divination spells. I hadn’t really learned much that I didn’t already know anyway; the walk was more to stretch my legs and see about finding a place to hole up that wasn’t associated with the Breakers of Chains.

That idea didn’t pan out, which left me with the backup plan. I returned to the hovel of a safehouse on floor one and left a letter with a small communication mirror. I had its opposite, and they were linked exclusively to each other. I’d also warded it to hell and back to prevent any sort of tracing through the link, something I probably should have done earlier, but I hadn’t wanted to make it too easy for the Breakers to get ahold of me.

Now that I’d completed my own investigation, I had nothing but time left while I waited for them to finish gathering the keys to that warded room. If I could help in some way, assuming it didn’t involve directly risking myself in open combat with the most powerful mages in the tower, I was keen to speed up the process. In the meantime, I had the unenviable task of collecting as much mana as possible for future use.

I teleported back to the base camp I’d hollowed out of the outside wall of the cliffs ringing the chasm the tower was situated in, ate a quick meal, and flew back into the chasm itself where the mana was densest to begin harvesting it for my own use.

The next few weeks were sure to be tedious and boring.