Book 3, Chapter 75 (Patreon)

Averin had nerves of steel. I’d just taken out three dozen people, though admittedly none of them were actually dead. Maybe he thought that meant his life was safe, that in the worst case, he’d just be imprisoned. Whatever his rationale was, he didn’t show an ounce of fear over his plan to keep me at bay failing.

The door didn’t swing open so much as it just vanished on the spot, either teleported away or disintegrated; I wasn’t sure which. We peered inside to see an enormous room, empty but for a large box painted a flat, light-absorbing black. It was easily big enough for four or five people to lie next to each other on top of it, completely seamless and in pristine condition.

It was obviously some kind of cache, but what it could possibly have inside was a mystery. The divinations I tried to cast on it unraveled into mana, which was then eaten by the box. Even from the doorway, I could feel it pulling at the mana in my core, an effect that weakened marginally as I took a few steps back. Whatever that box was, it was hungry.

It also affected the petrification spells I’d placed on Averin’s elite mages. I could feel the mana in the spell tearing as the box consumed it. Within a matter of minutes, all five of them would be free again. The crystalline prisons I’d trapped most of the rest in wouldn’t be far behind. That was going to be an issue.

Before I could decide what to do, the mana coming from one of the statues spiked, and the stone shattered to reveal Seven. He spun in place, his spell already formed while he was still struggling to break free, and pointed a hand at me. “Block this,” he screamed.

An incandescent beam of heat and energy erupted out of his open palm, widening to a solid foot-thick pillar of superheated fire. I recognized it as the spell that had killed his grandmother, a mage arguably just as powerful as me and probably even better prepared for an ambush.

Anywhere else, that spell might have proven dangerous to me. It would have stressed my defenses in ways I’d prefer not to test in life-or-death combat. Here, now, with the door open, I just stepped backward into the room and watched the spell’s structure shudder. By the time the fire reached me, it was already unraveling into pure mana. My shield wards easily dispersed what was left of it, though they too were rapidly being leeched of their power.

“I’ll admit, I’m impressed at how quickly you broke out of that transmutation,” I said. The spell didn’t actually turn a person to solid stone. Even for a master-tier spell, doing that to five people at once was ridiculous. What it did was refashion their outer layer of skin into stone, trapping them in place and eventually killing them through suffocation if nothing else. Mages at this stage shouldn’t have a lot of trouble breaking out of it or surviving long enough to be rescued, which was exactly the point.

I still wanted to convince the Breakers to evacuate the tower before I destroyed it, and disabling without killing them—even though they’d technically betrayed me—was a way to leave the possibility of future collaboration open. If that didn’t work, well, there was always the real master control room. I could probably find a way to make the whole tower uninhabitable and force a mass exodus, but it’d be easier if they went voluntarily and in stages while setting up new homes rather than as a displaced population.

Seven quickly recovered from what I assumed was his most powerful spell dissolving into the air in less than a second, but not so fast that he was able to launch another attack before the giant black box in the middle of the room shuddered. The entire room seemed to rumble with it, stone grating on stone despite it being one solid piece carved out by magic.

“I see,” Averin muttered to himself. “Of course that’s what happened.”

Then, before anyone could stop him, he let go of all his shroud, baring his core for all to see. The box immediately latched onto him and drained him dry, then kept pulling as he started channeling mana from a crystal he’d had hidden.

“Maybe feeding that thing isn’t the best idea,” I told the man, but it was far too late.

Seven recovered from his shock and started hurling more spells at me, but he was too focused on conjurations, and none of them could remain cohesive enough to even reach me, let alone hurt me. The mana void had fully expanded beyond the bounds of the room now and into the hallway, perhaps growing stronger as it fed. Keeping my own mana from being consumed was becoming more and more of a challenge, and every item I’d crafted and imbued with a reservoir of mana was slowly leaking it away.

I reached out with my free hand to grab Averin by the shoulder and haul him away from the room. “Alright, I think that’s enough of this,” I told him. “Time for you all to get out of here before this thing explodes.”

I doubted it was some sort of tower self-destruct mechanism, but I hadn’t had a chance to examine it yet and I couldn’t rule it out. Whatever the box was, I didn’t want it eating more mana until I got a close look at it. Unfortunately for me, I’d underestimated just how quick it was spreading. At the same moment I was dragging Averin away from the room, the sound of shattering stone filled the hallway and the other four elites came back.

More mana filled the air, forcibly pulled from their cores while they cried out in surprise and tried to get the siphon under control. “Feed it!” Averin cried. “This is the culmination of our goals!”

The crystalline prisons started cracking as well. Those were easier to escape from in the first place, but also easier to drop on anyone who wasn’t well-warded against conjurations. They hadn’t been designed to last longer than needed to finish up the main fight. With the incredibly strong mana siphon coming from the black box, they dissolved within a matter of seconds, leaving a hallway full of confused and frightened Breakers.

Then, just as suddenly as it started, the siphon stopped. Everyone, including me, paused at that. Silence hung heavy in the air as we watched, waiting for something to happen. The seconds stretched on and the various mages started to murmur to each other quietly, only to be silenced by a single harsh glance from one of the elites standing amidst the stone shards of their own prisons.

A loud hiss filled the air, the sound of air under pressure escaping its container, and the box fell apart. The sides dropped away, leaving the top floating in the air for just a moment before it rose up to the ceiling and clung there. Standing in the middle of that open space was the last thing any of us expected.

It was a man, perhaps thirty years of age and dressed in a somewhat bizarre robe with a lot of excess cloth in the sleeves and so much length that it dragged on the floor behind him. He held a smaller, matching black box, only six inches across, in his hands in front of him. Though he stood there with his eyes closed, unmoving, icy fear clutched at my heart. I didn’t need to see more to know what I was looking at.

His skin was pale, so translucent I could practically see his skull through it. His shadow, instead of the normal black, was a dark blue and speckled with lights, almost like the sky on a moonless night. If none of that was enough, as soon as the black box unfolded, I could feel the mana in the tower shift, exactly like how it would in a demesne. That put him at stage eight, minimum, but all things considered, I was willing to bet he was stage nine.

After all, a lich as strong as Ammun Nescect wouldn’t be content at anything less than the pinnacle of power.

His eyes opened, revealing two fiery red dots for pupils. They scanned the men and women in the hall, dismissing most of them as inconsequential. Then they landed on me, and I saw a hint of confusion in their depths.

“How long?” he asked, his voice exactly as I remembered it even if his face was different.

“A thousand years, my Emperor,” Averin said, dropping to one knee and bowing his head.

“Impossible. My calculations predicted no longer than a few decades.”

“Our ancestors betrayed you. Once you began your repose, I believe they sealed off this chamber and diverted all sources of mana away from it.”

That wasn’t a hard scenario to puzzle out. I’d already known Ammun had built the tower to serve his own purposes. When he’d ruptured the world core and mana had started to thin out, he’d no doubt realized he would be the cause of his own death. Back then, the tower probably wasn’t drawing in a fraction of the mana it did now, certainly not enough to support a lich with a stage nine mana core. He’d gone into hibernation, trusting his loyal vassals to wake him back up once the mana levels had stabilized.

Eventually, they must have realized that they preferred to run things themselves, and taken steps to ensure Ammun’s sleep was permanent. That explained the diverted mana flows and why the ward on this room was constructed differently than everything else in the tower. His minions had stabbed him in the back.

And we’d woken him up. Averin hadn’t been surprised by what he’d found in this room. He’d known all along what they were aiming for. Claiming the tower’s master controls were behind the door was an excuse to sell to his colleagues to get them on board. Or maybe a few of the people at the top had known, but the ones here had seemed just as surprised as me at what we’d found.

It was clear that Ammun had figured out what had happened just as quickly as I had, maybe even faster. He’d actually known the vassals who’d betrayed him, but apparently not well enough to anticipate their treachery. It only took him a moment to process what had happened.

“I shall have to punish them, should any still remain alive,” he murmured. Then he looked out into the hall and added, “These people share your ideals?”

“All but one, Emperor.” Averin pointed at me. “He works against us.”

Ammun peered at me, his brow furrowed. “You… are familiar to me. How is this possi-”

The old lich cut himself off and recoiled. “No,” he gasped out. “You died. I remember it. I verified it myself. I cremated your body.”

“What can I say? It didn’t take,” I told him, putting on a confident façade. If Ammun realized I was no longer a stage nine archmage, there was no telling how he’d react.

“That ridiculous research of yours actually panned out?” he demanded. “You… Master…”

“That’s right, my foolish apprentice.”

“Apprentice?” Averin mouthed, looking from Ammun to me in shock.

“Incredible. When I read those notes, I thought you’d gone mad in your old age,” the lich told me. “Just… it was impossible. Every single part of that magic was theoretical, and a lot of those theories were shaky at best.”

“I’m sure it seemed that way to you,” I said. I needed to steer this conversation in a different direction before Ammun reached the obvious conclusion. “Now, what’s this I’ve heard about you destroying a moon and causing a global cataclysm while I was gone?”

Ammun wasn’t deterred. In fact, he was now giving me a shrewd look that I didn’t care for one bit. “You managed to successfully control your reincarnation, though not without a few problems. You’ve been gone for thousands of years, Master. Still, congratulations are in order. You have a new body, a young body.” He paused and stared hard at me. “A… weak body.”

Shit.