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This was Erick’s first true interaction with the Mind Mages, so he had no idea what that would look like. What he did not expect, was for barely any interaction at all.

A package arrived at the front door of the house and Poi picked it up. Erick had already seen that it was the scrolls for the clan mountain spells, but when the package came into the house, it was both the scrolls, and another, smaller case; another cold box, with another four vials. A quick check with mana sense into the past revealed a blip of [Teleport Other] magics (Erick guessed) delivering the cold box into Poi’s hand, alongside the vials.

Poi brought the vials to Erick, and said, “Here we are.”

“That’s it?” Erick asked, “No representative?”

Poi smiled. “I’m the representative for this.”

“… Ah. I see.”

From the comfort of the [Prismatic Ward]ed part of his house, Poi told Erick where to put the maps, and when to move the maps. Erick searched for DNA first, but then, upon finding the actual monsters, and seeing what they looked like and were, he was able to search for the monsters, instead.

And that was the extent of his involvement.

The Mind Mages didn’t talk to him except through Poi, or through code names. Erick did find out that Blue 81 and White 13 were out hunting tonight; Two of the Mind Mages who had helped him back when he was hunting Terror Peaks, when Poi needed a break. They were doing fine. Or at least they said as much. Erick watched as Mind Mages went to work down below, but he had no idea which one was Blue 81, or which one was White 13. Orange 108, the other helper on a few of those nights, was busy somewhere else. Maybe. Erick wasn’t too sure on that. It was entirely possible for Orange 108 to be somewhere down there, killing monsters alongside the rest of them, and him not talking to Erick.

Without much direction but needing to be involved anyway, Erick watched wherever he wanted to watch. Finding the monsters was much more difficult than killing them. The singular time Erick thought about helping, Poi asked him not to. The Mind Mages had been doing this particular work, hidden from the eyes of the world, for a long, long time. They were good at it, too.

For Mind Mages were very, very good at killing mental monsters.

- - - -

In the deep, clear night, the moons shone their crescent light across the Highlands and the stars sparkled in the void. One of the stars was not like the others. It was closer to Veird, for one. For another, it was magic.

Cascading light shimmered into the windy air, illuminating a map that was too far up for the people on the ground to see as anything but yet another star. It was one map of a dozen, scattered across the lands.

For down below, in the cold, desolate cities that had been rebuilt and yet remained unoccupied, and also in the warm cities, where people lived and slept and existed, monsters hid. They ate who they could, keeping themselves protected with dangerous magics, and deplorable means.

The maps found them all.

Blue dots scattered across fields of white light, showing the way to those that needed killing, and places where people needed help.

The Mind Mages acting on the intel of the maps looked normal. A baker, who had finished setting up for tomorrow’s baking. A fishmonger, resting after having cleaned up at the end of the day. A father, who had put his kids to sleep and then kissed his wife on the cheek, and who now walked on the street, flanked by his fellow Mind Mages. Countless others, coming off of work for the day, or waking up for their true job, or begging off of a family gathering and quietly slipping away…

If you didn’t know who they were, if you didn’t know, for a fact, that the tendrils of thought around their heads never fully went away, you would never suspect that they kept the world running, dealing with uncomfortable truths that others never noticed, and which the monsters made sure that no one ever noticed.

All across the land, the Mind Mages moved from their usual, comfortable lives, into the shadows.

- - - -

A mother came out of a fugue to see that there was a monster under her bed; a ball of flesh that whispered and toyed with her memories. She killed the monster in a fit of rage that was quite unlike how she had been for the past week, and then she went crying to her children who she had locked in the other room. Her kids were scared, and then, they weren’t; it was an unnatural transition, but it would pass soon enough. The kids spoke of how they had told her about the monster under her bed, but she had ignored their words and then locked them up when they tried to kill the monster themselves. Now, hugging her babies and out from under the spell of the puppet mind, she believed them. Now, she apologized for the tenth time in a minute. She barely heard the knock at the front door, but she did, eventually, hear it.

The mother and her kids went to the door.

A Mind Mage stood on their doorstep. The man, who was a baker in his day job, calmly explained how he was here to help her understand what had happened.

Perhaps uncharacteristically, the mother let the man into her home. A minute later, the man had killed and cleaned up a second puppet mind, growing under the grandmother’s bed. The woman atop the bed was ancient and bed bound. She thought that she was talking to her dead husband about the old days; not to a monster.

And then the Mind Mage went away.

Not all of the monster hunting ended happily.

Many of the mother’s neighbors had it much worse.

Three blocks over, an entire family had been replaced by the monsters under their beds. The puppet minds had become puppet masters, and those human-looking monsters had been carefully slipping eggs into homes, wherever they went, all the while acting like the people they had transformed into, subtly converting neighbors who had no idea what was happening until it was too late.

The final count for this monster infestation was 36.

If the village with the infection had been larger, or if a Mind Mage had actually lived there, or if the hundreds of Mind Mages lost in the recent war had not been lost…

Maybe this tragedy would have never happened.

The puppet master infection was tracked to four different main hubs. Two in Eralis. Two in Alaralti.

The final count of people saved was 5391. The final count of people lost was 1084.

In another part of the Highlands, in a small village of five houses, a man complained about a smell inside his house. He cleaned all the time, but even [Cleanse] didn’t seem to clean up the smell. If he had the Sight to see, he would know that [Cleanse] would never work on this smell, for the source of the smell was still there. The monsters were still alive.

They were everywhere.

Putrescent Slugs.

Green. Slimy. Pestiferous.

In the cracks of the man’s house, in the woodwork and in the kitchen, and all over the bed where he slept, green slugs nested in slimy films. They had eaten the man’s mother and father, his sister and his two brothers. They had eaten the neighbors one door down. They had eaten the cows and the chickens. The living neighbors were next, but even they didn’t know that they were under attack.

Inside the single man’s house, the slugs had eaten everything they possibly could, except for the man at the center of the infection, for he was an unknowing host. Slugs crawled over his skin, and eggs dropped from the wounds of his fingers, and yet he could not see the problem.

A woman stepped down onto the land, outside of the infected man’s house, her hooded coat fluttering in her own breeze. She filled the air with anti-antimemetic power, revealing the problem, uncovering buried memories.

The infected man rightfully panicked when he saw what had happened to him.

Putrescent slugs were almost worse than puppet minds. Even if the Mind Mages had told him not to get involved, Erick still imagined how he could solve the problem. He couldn’t simply [Withering] the house to kill the slugs; the slugs had no rads inside of them. Individually, each one was barely larger than a thumb.

The infected man decided fire was a good solution. He started blasting while he was still in the center of the house. He wasn’t fine, but he would be.

The Mind Mage got the infected man out and then sedated him; he would keep for a while. Then the Mind Mage went to the neighbors, half of which were also infected while the rest were already dead. Uninfecting the small village would take a week. Healing the mental trauma would take decades, but no one in the village would ever be the same. Most wanted to move.

The infected man was not the only one to burn down his house that night.

In another part of the Highlands, spiders lived on the backs of fully-cognizant hosts, half buried into flesh, their fangs latched at the base of the neck, their legs wrapped around the spine. The spiders were the size of dinner plates, and they had two modes to them. They inflicted pain upon their victims when their victims attempted to harm the spiders. The spiders inflicted joy when the people did what the spiders wanted.

The spiders wanted to experience sensation, which Poi did not explain in too much depth. That was fine. Erick saw enough of the aftermath of a spinal spider infection to understand the depth of the problem.

The spiders wanted their hosts to drink curdled milk, or raw eggs, or shards of bone. They wanted their hosts to make bread with rocks and sand. They wanted ‘art’, so they had their hosts bleed on the walls, and watch the red run down. They wanted colors and smells and tastes and touches. They wanted, and so they got what they wanted through their hosts.

After that takedown, after the removal of the spiders, some of the long-term affected went rabid because all of their pleasure was gone, and all that was left was pain. Others cried in relief. Others sat there, dull to the world.

Erick, and the Mind Mages, moved on.

As sunlight rose in the east, Mind Mages walked into libraries all across Songli. They pinpointed books with chitinous covers, with pages made of devouring thoughts. Erick was advised to check himself for odd, wandering thoughts, for watching through a [Familiar] was still dangerous, but not overly so. The Mind Mages could protect themselves, though.

The books fought against their destruction with scintillating images meant to charm and incapacitate, and Blood Magic that pulled at the interiors of the Mind Mages, but the images were no use against a trained Mind Mage, and the Blood Magic was easily healed through.

Book slippers were the most innocuous of the various threats Erick helped purge that day, but even so, there were many places where bodies had been hidden behind shelves full of chittering, scrabbling books that had too many tiny legs, and too much blood on their pages.

- - - -

Erick got out of his chair. The night was over. The monsters had been slain. Good had triumphed because Erick decided to help out. How many people had perished in these last months because he had forgotten to help? Too many. He did not blame himself, for the deaths were on the monsters themselves. But he felt like he could have done more. After a heavy think, Erick decided that Terror Peaks was ultimately to blame. And the Shades for making the monsters in the first place.

But Erick could have helped out sooner.

And now he knew that.

Erick said to Poi, “We’re going to have to do this everywhere we go.”

Poi said, “This isn’t your fault. The problem arises from the Underworld, and from travelers unknowingly spreading contamination. It’s a problem that has no real solution. All we have is vigilance.”

“… That’s true, too.”

Erick took a moment to let the events of the night roll away.

And then he noticed something smelled good. He sniffed the air. Breakfast!

Poi gave a small grin.

And Erick headed toward the kitchen, saying, “Smells great, Teressa!”

“Two minutes left!” Teressa called back.

Erick entered the kitchen where Teressa stood in front of the oven, looking at the cinnamon rolls inside. She asked, “Are you done, then?”

“I think so!” Erick said.

“Yes,” Poi affirmed. “The Highlands have just now become the most safe, most populous nation on the planet. Hunters, face stealers, warmongers and terrorists, pirates, larger monster threats thanks to Jane, and now, the worst mental threats. All gone. Multiple plagues; [Cleanse]ed and cleared.”

Poi’s voice was more joyful than Erick had ever heard the man; He was obviously happy in a brand new way. Erick felt his heart soar, to see that, and to hear Poi’s words spoken with such conviction. It was true. This land was safe from many monsters, now.

Erick hadn’t set out to do that, but he certainly had!

Teressa smirked, saying, “I’ve heard that Treehome is doing rather well, too. You’ve done a lot, Boss.”

“Still more to go.” Erick had an idea, and then he worked through it, and decided, “You two have helped me a lot, you know. How’d you like 50 points, each? I have a lot extra here.”

Teressa’s eyes went wide. “50 points!”

“No.” Poi repeated to Teressa, “No. Those aren’t yours.”

Teressa frowned at Poi, then said, “Okay. Well. I’ll take 25. And I decided on Constitution.”

Poi huffed at Teressa. “What! Why?”

“Maybe you raised the right Stats, but I went for a warrior build.” Teressa shrugged. “And I kinda like magic now, and I could use some Willpower. Not Intelligence, though. I’m not doing that.” She looked to Erick, saying, “I discovered my aura, by the way.”

Erick froze, and then he laughed out loud. “I haven’t done anything with that in two weeks!” Excitedly, he asked, “Show me! Show me!”

“I only figured it out a few hours ago, and then promptly Remade [Force Bolt]. But...” Teressa held her hands up in front of her, with palms facing each other and about two meters apart. With a faint smile, she said, “Let’s subvert the Script Second.”

A bolt of grey Force coalesced in her right hand and smacked into her left, followed instantly by another manually cast [Force Bolt]. Teressa’s faint smile expanded into a real one, showing off her lower fangs and her joy of the moment. And then she cast three [Force Bolt]s in quick succession, proving her capability.

Erick clapped his hands. “Good job, Teressa! Very good job!”

Teressa practically beamed as she shook out the hand that caught the Bolts. “I probably had it easier than you, since I don’t use a [Personal Ward].”

“Nonsense! You worked hard on it, right? Just like you did with mana sense.” Erick looked from Teressa to Poi, and said, “You both work very hard. You deserve something extra from what we’ve done here, and for what you’ve done for me. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for you, Poi, and your coordination. We would have been blindsided multiple times if it wasn’t for you, Teressa, and your Sighting and sensing of outsized threats.”

Poi looked unconvinced.

Teressa laughed. “I had to find some way to make myself useful.”

Erick frowned a little at Teressa’s self-depreciation. He said, “You’ve been great.”

She shrugged. “If we go to the Core, I need to be better than ‘great’. I’d have to have enough power and ability to rival Killzone, and I am not there yet, at all.”

Erick glanced between his people, saying, “I don’t expect it to be that bad?”

Poi had been looking at Teressa, but he switched to Erick. “It will be that bad.”

“When we find some level 90 monsters down there, we need to be able to fight and kill them. Every single one of us, individually.” Teressa said, “Think ‘Daydropper Queen’ for every single monster with the possibility that we might come across multiples.”

Poi shook his head. “Fight them? No. That is not how it’s going to happen. We’re doing delay tactics and running as fast as we can. We will need Killzone-level of power to be able to do just that much. But we won’t get there with points, Teressa.”

Erick frowned. “I was expecting to kill monsters.”

Poi frowned a little, too.

Erick said, “You know Ava Jadescale, that snake shifter in Candlepoint? She said that the wrought Geodes keep people from going that deep because then there’d be level 90 people walking around all over the place, meaning that the monsters are not that hard to kill.”

Poi said, “Any trip to the Core will cost lives unless the group is small, able to hide from everything, and exceedingly mobile. [Teleport] doesn’t work at that depth. [Teleport] is unreliable anywhere past the surface.” He added, “I never said it before, for it is not my place, but I say it now: Ava was delusional when she said that. Teressa has some of the danger level correct—”

“Course I do!” Teressa said.

“—But you also have it wrong. Our capabilities do not allow us to actually fight anything at the level necessary for us to be ready for the Core, and 25 points isn’t going to change that.” Poi said, “And you don’t need the 25 points, either! You’ve got nearly 250 extra from Erick’s rings; same as me.”

Teressa looked chastised at that. She looked at her hands, and the rings on her fingers. “Ah.”

“Oh! You guys deserve more than that!” Erick said.

Poi said, “I’ll take the Constitution.”

Teressa frowned at everything, and nothing at all.

Erick said, “Teressa. You want 25 points, you can have them. You deserve good things for the good work you’ve done. You want a [Blink] up on the path to being a mage? I will make that happen.”

“No.” Teressa said, “Poi is right about… a lot. I just…” Her voice trailed off.

Poi filled the silence, “We need a lot more preparation before a trip to the Core. Erick could probably do it on his own, but the rest of us also need Elemental Bodies. Getting to the Core isn’t even an option if you don’t have multiples of those. As well as redundancies in all of our spells, and items, and everything else. Food might not be an issue, but we should plan like it will be an issue.”

Moments passed in silent thought.

“I guess I hadn’t given it too much thought until now, but you might be right.” Erick said, “Anyway… Okay. Maybe a trip to Oceanside? They have elemental dungeons there with lots of slimes. That was already on the itinerary, but it could be moved up. I need actual downtime to work on my own aura control, too.” If he was at Oceanside, he’d certainly have to talk to the Headmaster, which might not turn out well, but… It would have to be done. Erick said, “We could each get new Elemental Bodies. You two could certainly use [Lightwalk] and I can help you get [Greater Lightwalk], for sure. Maybe I’ll get [Water Body], or [Stone Body]. Anyway. The cinnamon rolls are done.”

“Ah!!” Teressa practically jumped. She spun around to the oven and pulled out the cinnamon rolls. “Ohh~ Perfect.” She stared at the browned baked goods for a moment longer, her thoughts trailing away.

“If you don’t want the points, Teressa, that’s fine. But you still want Constitution, right?” Erick asked. “You too, Poi?”

“Oh yeah.” Teressa nodded, as she set down the rolls and slathered frosting all over them. “For sure.”

“Yes, sir,” Poi said. “That is one thing that we can do right now, that we cannot get anywhere else.”

“Then, here you go. Both of you.” Erick held out his hand, and a ring appeared upon his palm. Ophiel had made the ring while they had been talking. The ring was large enough for Teressa’s pinky, but small enough to still fit on Poi’s thumb. Erick sat down at the dining table, placing the ring in the center. “Constitution. I don’t feel comfortable letting too much of this jewelry out, though, so your rings are going to stay normal All-Stat rings.”

Teressa and Poi stared at the ring for a long moment.

Teressa said, “I wouldn’t want you to give us this ring permanently, either.”

Poi added, “I agree with this decision.”

Both of the intended recipients went silent, neither of them going for the ring.

Both of them were still apprehensive.

Erick broke the silence, “Bring over those rolls.”

Teressa eyed the tray of rolls in her hands, and then mumbled, “Oh. Right.”

Teressa set the cinnamon rolls on the table, along with three plates.

Teressa and Poi sat at the table. Teressa looked to Poi. Poi looked to Teressa.

Erick imagined what Jane would have said, if she were here. She had already headed off for Star Song before sunrise, so it was just the three of them in the house, at the moment. Erick was both sad and glad for that, for he wanted to ask Jane her thoughts on allocating points, but also didn’t want to have an argument about giving points to Teressa or Poi. Just by guessing… Erick supposed that Jane would have said that people were trying to kill him, not his guards, therefore he needed as much defense as he could get, and he shouldn’t be giving away any of the points he had gotten.

At least Teressa and Poi had decided to get Constitution, though.

Eventually, Teressa asked Poi, “Are you gonna go?”

“You can go first,” he said.

She furrowed her brows. “Okay. Now I’m not sure.”

“… Now I’m not sure, either,” Poi admitted.

“Oh really?” Erick snarked, “I couldn’t tell.”

Teressa scoffed, “It’s a big deal!”

Erick asked, “It’s not that bad, is it?”

Poi rhetorically asked, “You have a question mark on your ‘human’ Status, and you don’t think Constitution is a big deal?”

Erick thought for a second, and said, “No. It’s not that important. What happened to me will not happen to you. You’re only getting one New Stat. You should be fine. Everyone else who got one New Stat is fine.”

Teressa nodded, and said, “That’s true,” as she picked up the ring.

Poi watched, eyes a little wide, as Teressa took off her old ring on her right hand, and slipped the Constitution ring onto her pinky. Erick watched as sunshine yellow spread through the grey of Teressa’s soul, like sunlight flickering behind storm clouds. The moment passed, with clouds turning a bit whiter, a bit brighter, and then settled. Grey returned, but it was a different sort of grey.

Teressa slipped the ring off of her finger, then set it down in front of Poi. She breathed. She said, “You know what? That feels… odd. More solid. Whatever happens, I’m glad the decision is done.” She put on her old ring, and then her eyes crossed, briefly.

Erick winced. Yup. Stat Dissonance. Erick expected that. He said, “That should go away soon enough.”

Teressa blinked a few more times. She breathed, then said, “Oh. Yeah. It’s going away. Okay. There. It’s gone.” She glanced at the air and smiled wide. “Ha! I started off at 21! Didn’t know that was possible. This means 21% less damage taken from all sources, right?”

“Health damage only; but yes.”

Teressa giggled. “Then yeah! 21% less damage taken from all sources, for me! I don’t use a [Personal Ward]. Okay. This is awesome.”

Poi quickly took his ring off and slipped the Constitution ring onto the thumb of that hand. He had much the same soul experience as Teressa, except the sapphire blue clouds inside of him briefly turned golden, and then settled back down to the same sapphire blue his soul had always been. When he changed back to his own ring, his dissonance lasted a bit longer, but he, too, was fine, in the end.

Poi stuck a fork into his cinnamon roll, saying, “Constitution has benefits beyond the Health damage reduction. It helps with—”

“No no!” Teressa asked, “What was your starter number?”

“Unimportant.”

“Bah!” Teressa added, “I already bumped it up to 25. A quarter less damage from everything! That’s amazing.”

Poi ignored her and continued, “Constitution helps against damage, for one, but it also makes everything a bit more comfortable. It’s easier to be out in the blazing sun, or to swim into deep waters. It even allows you to not be bothered by sand in your shoes, or other small annoyances.”

“Oh. That’s why you went for Constitution?” Erick went, “I guess it does do all that, but I never noticed.”

“[Personal Ward]s also do this.” Teressa said, “So it’s not surprising you didn’t notice.”

Poi said, “My [Personal Ward] isn’t always against damage, though, so this is good for me.”

Teressa teased him, “You wanna prepare against a delve to the Core, you gotta make up some new spells, too. Can’t be using your [Personal Ward] for flight.”

“… Maybe.” Poi said, “Whatever the case, Constitution will make being out in the wilderness not so draining.”

“I can’t wait to get back out in the open spaces!” Teressa said, “Camping under the stars—”

“Under the ground,” Poi interrupted.

“We’re not going straight for the Core. We’ll be above ground most of the time!” Teressa asked, “Right?”

“Right!” Erick said, “I have Privacy spells.”

And then the good natured bickering started.

Poi countered how anyone with a mana sense could see [Sealed Privacy Ward], even if they couldn’t see inside. Teressa countered how ridiculously hard it was to find someone out in the wild, and then she added how Erick didn’t count for the purposes of the argument. Erick laughed.

They spoke of different places to visit.

After having two more cinnamon rolls, because he wanted more nice things in his life, breakfast was over. Poi went to bed, because he had spent the entire night awake with Erick. Teressa stayed up, since she had been able to sleep. Erick didn’t need to sleep, though. Staying awake for 48 hours was easy.

On the way to the clan mountain scrolls, Jane called, asking about the night. She didn’t get a chance to talk to him before she was requested for action, though she was getting a break now.

Erick was happy for the distraction. He readily gave her a breakdown of last night, skipping over most of the major details, but talking about what he had seen and how to counter a few mental monsters. Those mental monsters no longer existed inside the Songli Highlands, though.

He also spoke of the dragon attack, and the aftermath of his interactions with the Dragon Stalkers, which was another thing Jane had not been there for. That another 20 minute conversation.

As for what Jane was doing, she and some other Enforcers of Eralis were getting ready to assault some tangled hydras that had followed/chased some boats into the harbor. The hydras had briefly gotten past the Void Wall, but then the Singers were alerted to the danger, and they sang some special songs, pushing the tangled hydras back into the ocean beyond the Void Wall. The monsters were now camping outside the undersea Void Wall, poking around, looking for breaks in the defensive magic.

‘It’s the second tangled hydra in as many weeks as I’ve been doing this. They’re more of a problem than I thought they were.’

‘You’re good with your prismatic octopus form, right?’ And then, because Erick decided he could handle an argument, he said, ‘I spent 60 points, but I have a hundred and fifty points left, unspent. I want to give you some so you can be safer from mental contamination, and so that you can get a rivergrieve, and be even more safe in the water. I killed a juvenile rivergrieve not a few days ago, but I can get you an adult. They’re out there, somewhere.’

Thankfully, there was no argument.

Jane sent, ‘Nah. Thanks, though. Star Song is trying to tempt me with more points than what you bargained for, so I’ll get them on my own. You don’t have to worry about me.’

‘But I always will.’

After a long moment, Jane sent, ‘I worry about you too.’

Erick smiled, as he sent, ‘Physically, or emotionally? I don’t think you have to worry too much on either account, just like how I know my fears about you are unfounded. You could face anything.’

He must have put too much pain into his thoughts, or maybe the lie was simply too apparent. Jane had heard something in his words, and the conversation shifted in an uncomfortable direction.

‘… Dad. I’m scared all the time. I’m scared for you, and I’m scared for me, and I’m scared about the monsters that live under beds and in the dark.’ Jane said, ‘But I’m also doing a lot of good out there, and that helps me know that fear is just fear, and my anger is stronger. Back on Earth, there wasn’t a lot I could reasonably be angry with. All the problems were problems that you were equipped to solve. It’s a lot easier… Life is a lot easier here, on Veird, for me. But by that same measure, this life is harder for you. And I see what this life does to you, and I fear that you’re burying your feelings, and that’s not something I can power through with anger. You’re ignoring the stress you’ve put yourself under. You’re not ignoring the truths around you anymore, but even that is hurting you. Deeply.’ She added,‘What I truly fear is that some mistake is going to get made, and there’s nothing I can do if you make a mistake, just like there’s nothing you can do if I make a mistake. I can handle my small, melee problems. But you…But you almost died to a dragon, and now some dragon is out to get you.’

Erick wiped a tear from his eyes, and was thankful that he was having this conversation through a telepathic call. ‘I’ll be fine. The dragon won’t be fine, if I find him and his answers are unsatisfactory.’

‘That sounds like something I would do; not you.’ Jane asked, ‘Are you okay, dad?’

‘Of course not. This whole world is fucked with monsters.’ Erick said,‘But I’ve got plans. Would you like to hear them?’

‘I would like to hear them.’

And then Erick explained some of his dragon hunting plans.

Jane was on the fence about his ideas, but they would probably work. No way to really know.

Erick moved the conversation to lighter topics, like other places to visit.

They talked for a while, but then Jane had to go. The plans against the tangled hydra had been finished.

Jane ended with, ‘There’s been a lot more planning against this tangled hydra kill than the last one because this damned monster is staying in the ocean. My prismatic octopus isn’t suited for deep water kills, so I might be hunting for a rivergrieve later.’

Erick smiled.

Jane continued, ‘So if you see a rivergrieve, let me know. But don’t kill it! It’s mine.’

Erick laughed, sending, ‘I’ll keep an eye out.’

‘Okay. Good. I love you. Gotta go.’

‘I love you, too.’

As their connection faded to nothing, Erick sat in his chair for a moment, just existing. And then that moment ended. Erick glanced to the clan mountain scrolls sitting on the table beside him. He reached over and grabbed them.

It was time for magic.

- - - -

Sitting in his temporary library, with scrolls unfurled across the whole table, and Privacy spells around him, Erick read of the deepest secrets of clan mountain creation. They weren’t written in code, but they were written in standard magical notation and surrounded with arcane knowledge, which ended up almost the same as code.

The words themselves were basically Ancient Script, but slotted into diagrams along with a heaping amount of math and structure. It was the same spellwork that upper graduates of Oceanside used, but with a flair that was distinctly non-arcaneum, non-Oceanside. Erick hadn’t gotten very far much any of that sort of magic, and this stuff looked like the equivalent of post-graduate work.

Erick’s inability to be able to easily read this sort of writing, along with his lack of aura control, were likely his biggest failings as an archmage, and as an enchanter, too.

As Erick began to understand what he was reading, a supreme sense of vindication washed over him, for his earlier guess that the clan mountains were made of a [Stonetreeshape] spell was mostly correct. He was simply off by an order of magnitude, and missing a crucial piece of the puzzle that he had not known was a piece that needed to be included. The other complication was that there were two spells. The first spell was named [Eternal Stonetree]. The second spell was [Eternal Stonetreeshape].

On a separate piece of paper, Erick picked apart the spellwork in front of him, eventually arriving at the base formula for both spells. The first spell was necessary to nail exactly correct, but the second spell was the only way to make the first one work in practice.

--

(t1)[Watershape] + (t1)[Grow] = (t2)[Treeshape]

(t2)[Treeshape] + (t1)[Stoneshape] = (t3)[Living Petrified Treeshape]

(t1)[Lightshape] +(t1)[Shadowshape] = (t2)[Mysticalshape]

(t3)[Living Petrified Treeshape] + (t2)[Mysticalshape] = (t4) [Eternal Stonetree]

–

Despite the Shaping spells used throughout all parts of the first spell, [Eternal Stonetree] lost the ‘Shape’ part of itself, meaning that if this spell was anything like Erick’s own [Tree of Light], [Eternal Stonetree] simply grew the tree, without allowing Erick to Shape that growth at all.

Shaping was very much necessary in order to turn trees into mountains, though; to collapse eternal stonewood into solid hallways and such. And so, there was the second spell, to reintroduce ‘Shape’ back into the magic.

--

(t4) [Eternal Stonetree] + Mana Shaping + Mana Altering for Pure Illusion (also known as ‘Mystical’) = (t5) [Eternal Stonetreeshape]

–

Erick was very excited now, with a wild grin on his face and a rising heartbeat in his chest.

There were, as Erick had expected, a few specific tricks to making this magic. Among the scrolls were copious notes on how to specifically introduce [Lightshape] and [Shadowshape] to each other so that you would get [Mysticalshape], and not [Illusionshape]. Here, again, Erick’s experience with [Treeshape] came in handy to understand why this degree of perfection was necessary.

[Treeshape] and [Woodshape] were both produced through the same combination of spellwork; [Watershape] and [Grow].

Both spells had widely different uses.

[Treeshape] was for the directed growth of a tree, and you could do a lot with that premise. You could even direct a tree into growing a wooden salad bowl, for instance. The problems with that, were that you ended up with a lot of byproduct in that creation, namely, the existence of the entire rest of the tree that you just shaped out of the ground. Whatever salad bowl made by [Treeshape] would likely be rather rustic, too.

[Woodshape], though, was perfect for the carving and shaping of dead wood. With [Woodshape], it was very easy to make the perfect salad bowl. Smooth surfaces, perfect shape, good bowls.

A [Treeshape] bowl would likely have bark on it.

[Woodshape] was purchasable in the Script for 1 point; anyone could get it.

[Treeshape] had to be made by the mage who wanted it.

There was a difference in those spells. A fundamental difference.

There was a difference in [Illusionshape] versus [Mysticalshape], too. Erick didn’t have [Illusionshape], and it wasn’t available for purchase, either. Neither was [Mysticalshape]. He couldn’t just look up the blue boxes for those spells by searching the Script, either, to get an idea of what the difference was, but that was unimportant. The scrolls from Devouring Nightmare told him enough about the two of the better outcomes between combining [Lightshape] and [Shadowshape].

Illusions were a massive school of magic that Erick had never touched, partially because the vast majority of that school was rather weak, and partially because he would rather have the real spells, rather than their fake versions.

Erick mostly knew the broad strokes, though. Illusions could create false realities, and [Illusionshape] was most commonly used on basic Force spells. Their use was for a mage to have one spell that could do anything, though at low power. With Illusion Magic, a mage could have a single well made tier 2 spell that did almost everything for them, and they could try every single day to make that perfect tier 2 spell, until they got it right.

The typical example of the usefulness of illusions went like this: A mage is running across a field from a monster. The monster will catch the mage, for the mage cannot easily flee, but the monster is easily tricked. (Which is mostly true for every single monster out there, and one of the only reasons Illusion Magic was useful at all.) In this scenario: What spell is best to escape the monster? Or what spell can kill the monster, or what spell can trip the monster, or delay the monster, or— etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum.

For Illusion Magic, there is only one spell. It’s [Force Wall] + [Lightshape] + [Shadowshape]. This makes [Illusionary Spell]. That, along with some creativity, can make almost any low-level effect.

The fleeing mage can hide behind a tree that they create. They can send a duplicate of themselves running in the other direction. They can wrap illusion around themselves, making them appear as their own shadow. Another cast might string wires across a suddenly appearing grove of trees, with fake spiders and bad smells filling the air; which won’t stop the monster, but it will give the mage more time to flee properly while the monster is hanging back, fighting the ‘summoned’ monster. Because, yes, illusion magic can summon creatures, too. Shitty creatures, but even a shitty creature is still a body on the field.

In a variation of the first example, the mage could make an illusionary walkway into the air, into a hidden space that the monster cannot reach, while, with their next cast, they send off a duplicate to run away, allowing the monster to chase that duplicate down.

[Illusionshape] could be used in practically any basic tier spell to make something that was usable in all instances. But, there was a drawback. Any damage inflicted with Illusion Magic was quartered. Any defense provided was weak as paper. Any utility had to be treated with the delicacy of [Conjure Item], lest an errant touch shatter the illusion into motes of mana.

Versatility had its drawbacks.

Apparently, according to the scrolls in front of Erick, if you used [Mysticalshape] instead of [Illusionshape], that ‘quartering’ was instead a ‘halving’.

That was no reason for it to be in the clan mountain spellwork, though.

The reason for [Mysticalshape] came from its other intrinsic factor of being ‘unreal’, and thus it allowed the sudden growth and sudden creation of the [Eternal Stone Forest] without pumping millions of mana into making a real [Stone Forest], or waiting years for Stone to ‘grow’ to to appropriate mountain sizes.

Erick had to sit back after reading that.

And then he went back to reading.

[Mysticalshape] apparently allowed the final result of the clan mountain spell to be ‘fuzzy’, for it needed to be fuzzy, for [Living Petrified Treeshape] simply made giant, immobile trees, that were not truly immobile at all. This fuzziness allowed appropriate Shaping spells to be used to great effect, transforming arbor-sized trees into minor mountains.

And another thing!

For all their material strength, Eternal stonetrees were super light. You could build very high with them.

And another thing!

If one used normal stonetrees, as one could with [Living Petrified Treeshape], then anyone could come along to a clan mountain with a [Stonetreeshape] spell, which practically any decent mage could make, and the clan mountains wouldn’t be as secure from outside tampering as they were.

The inclusion of Illusion in clan mountains prevented this. Adding in Illusion was a wonderful solution to the problems of easily crafted Shaping spells. You couldn’t [Stonetreeshape] eternal stonetrees; you had to use [Eternal Stonetreeshape].

And to get there, it required you to add Shaping back into the tier 4 spell! Tier 5 was yet another hurdle that potential bad actors had to surmount if they wanted to break a clan mountain. Erick didn’t know the numbers, exactly, but he was pretty sure that 98% of people never made it past tier 3.

Erick wasn’t done reading the scrolls, though. He was finding secrets with every new readthrough.

The other major oddity in the spellwork was the necessity of [Living Petrified Treeshape]. Not [Stonetreeshape]. Not [Petrified Treeshape]. [Living Petrified Treeshape]. The living was important, for the normal [Petrified Treeshape] spell created normal-sized, dead wood, and dead wouldn't grow, and couldn’t be illusion’d into growing larger, therefore dead wood was a dead end to this spellwork.

Erick read over the scrolls a few times, picking up a few small bits of extra information about the spellwork here and there. None of the scrolls were in order, exactly, and each one referenced a different scroll in a mostly random way. Erick suspected that this discombobulation in the presentation was necessary in order to keep the clan mountain secret as secret as possible. If you only had one of the ten necessary scrolls, you had a hint as to the overarching spellwork, but you did not have the full story. If you didn’t have all 10 scrolls, and time to read them, and time to understand them, and the background necessary to understand them, then messing up a tier 4 spell was a hundred days lockout from another attempt. Messing up on the second spell, which was arguably more important, was a thousand day lockout.

… Erick wondered what a better version of this spell would look like. [Mysticalshape] seemed necessary, so he would keep that in there, for sure. Illusion magic was rather funky, though. Apparently, using Illusion to bring a base material more in line with what you wanted was a permanent-ish usage of that magic.

Permanent trees. Permanent illusions, that were therefore not illusions at all.

Erick had to digest that for a moment before he continued.

Apparently, when these Illusion trees were killed in the process of their final Shaping into a mountain, very little material was lost, because eternal stonetrees were very real. Usually, Illusion was very good at being not-real. Usually, crafting anything into Illusion was a good way to lose that material forever.

There was an example in the text to explain what was happening.

A woman wants a dress for a party. She crafts one of her old dresses with illusions of the new fashion trend sweeping the Court, completely ignoring that the new trends are about gold, and her dress is little more than cotton. The illusion lasts for a while, but the woman’s tattered original dress falls apart, leaving her half-naked in the middle of her dance upon the stage.

A second woman at that very same party also used Illusion on her dress, too, but her dress was a 40 year old gold dress she had in the back of her closet. After all, fashion comes and goes, so the woman has kept every dress she has ever owned. Therefore, her illusions are simple adjustments. A few more folds here, the changing of an embroidered fish into an embroidered cloud.

When her spell fails, she still has clouds upon her dress.

When Erick read that, he stepped back.

Illusion seemed really interesting. Not a way he wanted to go with his spellwork, for sure, but it was still interesting.

He couldn’t help but notice that this clan mountain spellwork contained a lot of lessons on Elemental Illusion, and that he had gotten it right after being attacked by a dragon that was all about illusions, who was his next target. He knew he needed to seek out the dragons, anyway, and he had been planning on seeking out the Mirage Dragon, for sure. But...

Was this serendipity?

It was probably the Worldly Path.

… Did Illusion have something to do with [Gate]?

… It probably did.

Seemed like an easy way to ‘make two areas similar in nature’… Or something.

Illusion also seemed all about either making Reality out of nothing, or shifting Reality onto reality, and making something. And wasn’t that an odd thought.

Odd, because mana was possibility, and worded another way, the best illusions were about possibility stretched into reality as far as it could stretch, and having that possibility sometimes become real in the process.

Heck! [Polymorph] was all about the illusion of a person becoming real, which was yet another lesson on ‘illusion’ he had recently been re-exposed to, and which was another thing that pointed him toward the dragons.

“Huh.”

Erick sat back in his chair and had a nice, long think.

He read the scrolls again, and he read about how the eternal stonewood of the clan mountains still remained slightly magical, even when it was cut down and processed into a mountain. It was even ‘enchantable’, in a certain sort of way, allowing it to project falsities into the world beyond. This was why the clan mountains of the Alluvial District of Eralis were shrouded in illusions when they were viewed from a far distance.

‘Enchantable’ because what was really happening was that the eternal stonetrees were still alive, even though they looked like mountains and had been made into homes. As ‘living’ trees, they were producing their own illusion effects to make themselves appear to be unassuming mountains.

Erick repeated, “Huh.”

The nobles around here lived in tree houses, eh?

He kept reading, and kept realizing new and novel methods for eternal stonewood.

Tenebrae had certainly come through here and made his flying castle out of something close to, if not exactly, this eternal stonewood. Perhaps that small tree in the center of his castle was a still-living [Eternal Stonetree]. There was a problem with that theory, though; to a mana sense, Tenebrae’s castle didn’t seem like it was anything but stone, and the tree in the center of it all was very much a ‘normal’ magical tree.

The answer to that, though, was that Tenebrae had taken this spellwork and made his own version.

Or perhaps illusions were much more powerful than Erick suspected.

… Illusions were probably extremely powerful in a few specific ways. Not in all ways, for sure, but in a few? Like with these eternal stonetrees? Erick could certainly see that.

He was already imagining using Illusion Magic to subvert the inability for Particle Magic to deal with individual atoms. For instance, instead of having his [Grow Diamond] work off of random carbon hitting the growing diamond just right, and sticking in place, and producing a lot of unknown byproducts that need to be [Cleanse]ed away, he could throw some illusion into the working and he could conjure diamonds straight from the air. No need for complicated, chancy atomic processes! No need to wait for growth!

… If he was reading these scrolls right, anyway.

For the third time, with revelation piling upon revelation, Erick whispered, “Huh.”

Eventually, he had lunch. After that, he played around with some magical ideas, including one where illusions were pretty much ‘Wizardry, but not’ in that illusions could do a bunch of stuff outside of the normal spheres of magic, and if that ‘outside stuff’ was close enough to reality in the end, then the illusions transitioned Subjective Reality into real reality.

That particular thought was a Big Moment for him and he had to come back to it more than a few times because it was just so… magical.

It probably wasn’t Wizardry, though. It was just magic that was truly magical.

He re-read the scrolls, because he kinda had to after the series of revelations that he had been having. And then he had a small nap, because that seemed absolutely necessary, too. Of course he set Ophiel up with defensive protocols and informed Teressa of what he was doing before he tucked in for a couple hours of shuteye. He slept a nap of the dead.

When he woke up, he made dinner, and then after dinner, it was time to make some magic.

- - - -

The sun set to one side of the horizon while the moons teased their presence upon the other, and a rainbow of reds, yellow, and blues stretched across the heavens between, covering the world in color. All around, grasses swayed under northern winds. Though this was Veird’s equivalent of Spring, it was still cold at night, in this part of the world. Erick’s breath fogged in the chill air, producing streamers of visible warmth that whipped away in the breeze.

In the distance, and all around, tiny dots of light danced among the grasses. They weren’t fireflies; they were much larger, each about the size of his thumb. Erick had heard them called lightbugs, and they were harmless. They flitted among the tall green grasses, glittering in whites and greens and yellows, bringing light to the deepening night. They had a few slim uses. About one in a hundred thousand had Light Essence in their glowing bodies, which was about the most expensive thing about them. Hunting for those specific lightbugs was like hunting for dropped gold coins on a beach, though; no one did it unless they were a rather odd person or had some method to shorten the search. Either way, only the foolish or needy would go hunting for such a specific payout, since hunting the monsters which were out here at the same time would provide a much more steady paycheck.

But the lightbugs were pretty to look at. Erick had chosen this spot because of those lightbugs, for they gave rise to the idea that even in the dark, there was light, and even when the world seemed empty, that was just an illusion.

Ah.

Yes.

There’s the mindset.

Erick relaxed into the moment. With one hand, he channeled his mana through [Lightshape]. With the other, he channeled [Shadowshape]. He found the harmony almost instantly, like someone else had taken the vocals and the instrumentals of a song and pulled them apart, and here Erick was, putting them back together.

He cast.

The world in front of him took on an unreality. Small natural damage done to the grasses all around him, like bent blades and chewed stems, vanished. The breeze turned more hospitable, warming up by degrees. Lightbugs appeared, but they were fake, too; all the real ones had stopped glowing around Erick, for they would not glow in the direct presence of others. That was one of the ways that a grass traveler could tell if there were monsters waiting in the deepening twilight, just out of sight.

A blue box appeared, but Erick ignored it for a moment, as he tested the control he had imposed upon the scene. He made the false lightbugs glow brighter. He made the night deepen. He made the air turn frozen, and chilly, sending the dancing illusions of lightbugs to the ground like scattered, glowing ice cubes, their glows rapidly giving out. And then when even the distant lightbugs noticed this and shut off their lights, Erick went the other way with his illusions. He warmed the world, bringing high summer to the night, making the world muggy and false, and bright with buzzing lights. He hid himself, Poi, Jane, and Teressa, in the illusion.

It didn’t take long for the lightbugs to notice the happening scene in front of them. The real bugs all began to relight. They moved into the area and seemed to love the false warmth.

The night danced with illusions of brightness.

The spell soon ran its course; Erick had asked too much of the Shaping magic. The cold night returned. The fake lightbugs vanished. The real lightbugs saw Erick, standing in the middle of their glow party, and they stopped glowing. They dropped into the shadowy grasses and hid, once again.

Erick checked his spell.

--

Mysticalshape, instant, medium range, 100 mana

A large illusion of the world is yours to command. Unreal control. Lasts 5 minutes.

--

It was a good outcome. The ‘unreal control’ is what made the spell Mystical, while [Illusionshape] would have retained the normal ‘fine control’ of its parent spells.

Erick played around with [Mysticalshape] for a little while, targeting the images he could see in the mana whenever he activated Meditation. Fake eyes and fake monsters in the mana became real, for a certain definition of real.

Tigers made of arms. Floating, swimming fish in the grasses made of scales and webbing. Lizards made of claws. Mouths made of tongues.

And then Erick shifted those unreal sights into something nicer. Tigers made of orange and gold, with gold that turned black in the shadows, and white in the light. Fish made of emeralds with diaphanous fins made of starlight. Lizards made of obsidian, that hid in the darkness like it was their homes, with bright red eyes like cherry red iron. The mouths and the eyes simply went away; Erick didn’t need those in his life.

As he got a feel for the magic, night deepened. Stars came out. Twilight was here, while the sun set far beyond the western horizon. In the half-light of almost-night, Erick went onto the next part of this magic.

He held out a hand and listened to the Growing tale of [Treeshape]. He mixed a tale of decades of easy life, under the sun and growing tall, with the sounds of [Stoneshape] producing a life that stretched out into time frames measured in eons.

A transformation. A mutation. A permanency of solidness that still managed to reach for the sky and make itself known.

He told this tale to a seed he had gathered from a tall, strong tree, back in Alaralti.

And then he set the seed into the ground, and cast.

Stone raised from the land like a sapling trunk, then grew tall, and strong. Erick directed the growth with a bit more trouble than he usually had with [Treeshape], but only because the stone tree did not want to grow as fast as a normal tree, and Erick was pushing against that limit. A blue box appeared but Erick was concentrating. He pushed the message to the side. With focus and goals, the stone tree grew. The spell ended. The tree stood mighty, thick of trunk and reaching of branch, with bright orange, red, and brown bark, and with black leaves that drank in the world, making the world just a bit more solid. The tree was ten meters tall and did not wave in the wind. Even the leaves were like chips of unmoving stone. It would take a hurricane to move this tree.

Erick looked at the spell.

--

Living Petrified Treeshape, instant, medium range, 250 mana

Direct the accelerated growth of a tree into a living petrified tree. Control lasts for 5 minutes. The living tree will continue rapid growth for up to one week after this spell ends, and then slow down. Recasting this spell upon a living petrified tree will temporarily invigorate new growth.

--

Erick nodded, then turned to his creation. With a swipe of his lightform, he grabbed a seed pod in the upper reaches of the living petrified tree. It was the shape of a walnut, but a bit bigger, almost the size of his palm. The outside was vibrantly orange but Erick’s mana sense told him the inside was crystalline white.

The scrolls from Devouring Nightmare had said using a seed from his first working wasn’t strictly necessary for the second working, but upon seeing the size, the heft, and the interior of the seed, some inner part of Erick knew that he had to use this nascent tree to grow the next.

He stepped away from the original tree. This next one would be much, much larger.

With the stonetree seed held in his palms, he channeled [Mysticalshape] into the seed from his left hand, while [Living Petrified Treeshape] channeled into the seed from the right. The seed began to glow. The interior crystal shone through the petrified surface; a white light under oranges and reds.

Ophiels danced around Erick, their eyes focused in reverence as they sang a syncing song to the night, to the seed.

Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye held in the sky above Erick like a fourth moon, gazing down upon the working with a focus to rival Melemizargo.

That Old Dragon was probably watching this, wasn’t he? Eh. Whatever.

—The seed shifted. The exterior turned black as the interior became as bright as the sun. Mana flowed from Erick into the seed; he had cast the spells in the middle of the working, somehow, only realizing that he had cast after the fact. The seed soaked in his power and greedily drank thousands of mana from his soul.

He felt a tether take hold.

He let the seed go.

The seed did not drop. It floated away, like a leaf upon a slow river. Ten meters, then thirty, then fifty; traveling like a coconut upon unseen waters to where it needed to be. Suddenly, the grasslands turned to liquid, swirling away like so much sand and mud, and the seed buried itself according to its own desires. Erick felt himself connect to the magic, and the magic asked what he wanted.

Erick spoke, “A kilometer tall, or more, and strong enough to withstand whatever the world brings to bear against you.”

The seed seemed to laugh, as though Erick’s request was too easy.

The tether snapped.

From one flashing second to the next, as though Erick had seen a bright light and his eyes were adjusting, the tree appeared. Fully grown. White as Erick’s magic, and almost as bright. Fifty meters wide at the thickest part of the trunk. A kilometer and a half tall. Its branches blocked out the sky with a million billion white leaves, upon branches that were just as brilliant. It was a version of Reality that was close to reality, but not exactly.

And then the magic faded. The white light faded.

The tree remained.

In the twilight purple sky, the tree was a lot less white, a lot less unreal. Purple shadows played in the boughs while dark wind played among the leaves. The tree had become real, and yet remained a bit inscrutable. It did not sway in the breeze, except in the smallest of ways. The Arbors of Treehome at least swayed a bit. This one was solid as, well, rock.

From an odd direction, Erick felt a demand.

Yggdrasil demanded; a wordless expression of need.

It was an overwhelming emotion, one that Erick almost gave into right away, but he did not. Erick looked at Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye and said, “You’re going to have to wait. The scrolls from Devouring Nightmare were very clear about what the good version of this spell looked like, and since the blue box hasn’t appeared yet, we don’t know if it turned out well. Even if it did turn out well, though, you only have one body right now, and I don’t want you experimenting on yourself when you only have one self to experiment on.”

Yggdrasil… still demanded, but it was less forceful. After a moment, Yggdrasil’s eye bounced along in reluctant understanding.

“Thank you for understanding.” Erick nodded at the [Scry] eye, and then turned to the open air, openly wondering, “Now where is that— Ah. There it is.”

The blue box had finally appeared.

--

Eternal Stonetree, instant, super long range, 5000 mana

Grow an eternal stonetree based upon your desires, or grant the properties of an eternal stonetree to a living tree, with variable outcomes either way. Targeting a sapient tree will grant control of this spell to the tree. Targeting a magical tree will produce wildly unknown effects.

Eternal stonetrees are extraordinarily resistant to any outside force.

--

Erick smiled. He showed Yggdrasil the spell, saying, “It turned out well. Soon as I get to Spur and grow you a new body to replace the one you lost, we can experiment. Okay?”

Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye tumbled through the air in reluctant understanding.

Erick added, “You know, if you grew up enough for me to plant one of you on this side of the world, maybe I could grant you the spell here. Would you like that?”

Yggdrasil’s eye went rigid in contemplation. Then he began to vibrate a bit like an excited child, rapidly transitioning into elated nodding.

Erick smiled. “Good. You work on growing, then. Besides that, it might be nice to have one of you on this side of the world. Less distance to cover with [Scry].”

Yggdrasil’s eye danced through the air, understanding a bit, but too excited to comprehend. He went to join Ophiel, who was already flying around the big white tree. Erick simply watched for a little while.

Poi, Teressa, and Jane watched from a bit further away.

Soon enough, the [Familiar]s all came back to Erick, and Erick moved on to the final part of the evening’s magic. He focused, he imagined, and he cast, transforming that which was partially illusion, partially real, into adopting a different form that was no less impressive.

The massive white tree transformed into a craggy white boulder a few hundred meters across, set halfway into the ground. It had only two architectural accompaniments; a staircase that led up to a plateau at the top, and a house upon that plateau. The house was a familiar three stories tall, with two mage towers on either side and balconies here and there.

Erick smiled as he gazed upon his craft. He had recreated his house at Spur, here, in this open land north of Holorulo.

--

Eternal Stonetreeshape, instant, super long range, 5500 mana

Warp an eternal stonetree into your desired shape or warp the illusions around a living eternal stonetree into your desired shape. Unreal control. Spell lasts 5 minutes.

--

“Ah ha!” Erick turned to his people and handed out the spellwork. “That’s the good version, too!”

Poi, Teressa, and Jane, had silently watched the whole time. Now, they read the blue boxes they had been given.

Jane read and discarded the boxed, then asked, “Why’d you make it like the house in Spur?”

“A summer home! Or something. I’m not sure yet. Maybe I’ll make a whole lot of these homes all across the world? It could work.” He started walking toward his own, private clan mountain, saying, “Come on! Let’s go see what it looks like on the inside!”

While Ophiels twittered and flew ahead of Erick, everyone else began to follow.

Erick stepped upon the white stonetree, onto some stairs he had shaped into the working that went all the way to the house at the top. Now that he was here… The stairs were a bit uneven, and a bit too shallow, like someone had hewn stairs out of a real rock mountain without any care about how stairs should be. OSHA would not approve.

Erick mumbled, “Eh. Good enough for a first try.”

Jane asked, “You didn’t use [Metalshape], did you? Why not?”

Erick hummed, thinking.

Jane let him think.

It didn’t take long to get halfway up the white staircase. While he was thinking, Erick saw room for improvement everywhere. Water would collect and putrefy in that divot over there, while those steps right there were a tripping hazard, and this whole place was rather unprotected. He could have easily made his clan mountain harder to assail if he had been thinking about defense when he cast. He could have made sheer walls on the sides, instead of slopes that allowed easy scaling. He could have made extra houses here and there, too. Guest houses. Garden spaces. Places that, with a bit of carving, or better Shaping, could be made into a nice set of waterfalls and small ponds and—

Ah. Erick realized Jane was setting up for a joke.

Erick asked, “Why would [Metalshape] have been good?”

Jane smiled. She stepped to her father’s side, and said, “You could have called the spell [Adaman-tree-um].”

Erick burst a laugh that filled the silent night sky. Jane smiled brightly.

Erick said, “Puns aside, the scrolls didn’t go into alternate versions, but I can imagine a ton of reasons that they didn’t use metal. When I researched for Yggdrasil, I found out about metal trees that grow in the deep parts of Nergal, as a way to protect themselves against the various toxic monsters and life that also grows all around down there. They’re probably not natural, though, so that evolution idea is rather thin. They’re rare trees, because they’re very easy to [Metalshape], because of their second property, of being living, magical metal. You can chop off a branch and immediately use it to make some magic item, or what have you. This is likely the main reason that metal trees are not part of the clan mountains; they’re not secure from a simple tier 2 spell that is purchasable from the Script.”

They had reached the house, and it looked exactly the same as Erick’s house back in Spur. He smiled as he looked up at it. And then he walked in, with the others following. With a flick of his intent, lightwards spread throughout the entire space, illuminating the house almost exactly as the house in Spur was illuminated.

This house was a mess.

There were many places where the Shaping had failed in the details. There were holes in many walls, and the staircase was half melty. Erick frowned, as he walked deeper into the house.

Erick continued, “Another problem of including metals into this magic is that such a spell might only produce small trees. The steel trees of Nergal are all stunted things that only grow large when you give them lots of metal. They’re not able to just take the rock in the ground, the water in the land, and nutrients in the air and make themselves as big as they can be. This spell can do that. Plus, eternal stonetree is electrically insulated. Lightning is not a problem for clan mountains.” Erick looked around the kitchen as he said, “There’s probably more reasons not to include [Metalshape] in the working but I can’t think of many.”

Jane asked, “But to include illusion would circumvent many of those issues, wouldn’t it?”

“Possibly. I’m not too experienced with illusions yet, but illusion seems to be able to make Reality into reality, but only if reality is already rather close to Reality. You probably have more experience with illusions than me. You made all of the Shaping spells, didn’t you?”

“I did, along with a few subsequent spells,” Jane said, casting a spell at the ground and achieving nothing. “Didn’t make anything that I’d be unwilling to break and try again, though.”

Erick walked into the main room, then up the central staircase. Everyone else stayed nearby as he explored. He said, “Anyway. I won’t be making a metal version of this spell; I’m almost 100% certain that the existence of [Metalshape] would invalidate the whole working.” He stomped his foot upon the floor and it sounded like stomping on a boulder. “Heh. This stuff is a lot more solid than I thought it would be.”

Jane cast another spell at the ground, then said, “Yup. None of my Shaping spells work on it. Not even [Illusionshape].”

Erick teased, “It’s only ten days to remake the clone spell you have at tier 3. Try to remake [Illusionshape] into [Mysticalshape].”

“I might.”

“If you had a truly good illusion spell, you could use it for practically everything.” Erick said, “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Yeah. When I read about it, it sounded like a good way to get myself killed.”

“Yup.” Erick said, “But the utility of illusion is not to be diminished.”

“Maybe.” Jane said, “Anyway. Let’s go home. I got monsters to kill in the morning.”

“Sure sure.” Erick looked around again, and paused.

He had felt a bit homesick the second he saw this remake of his house at Spur, but now it hit him pretty hard. Jane and Poi noticed.

Teressa did not. She asked, “Are you really going to leave this house here?”

“Sure. Why not?” Erick said, “It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

Poi said, “Operational security. Best not to have outside forces know what your house looks like because they can scout it out before an assault.”

Teressa nodded. “Yes. That.”

“… Oh.” Erick looked around. He frowned. “Well. I’m leaving it here. It’ll have a natural illusion layered over it, so it should be fine from most casual views.” He tapped a hole in the wall between the main staircase room and the sunroom. “After fixing these small problems, of course. Can’t have intruders come into a messy house!”

Teressa laughed.

The second Shaping went much better. Holes in walls were patched over. Staircases became normal, instead of looking like they had been copied from a funhouse. The sides of the mountain turned sheer and Erick erased the staircase leading up, turning the whole place into a miniature Holorulo clan mountain. Places for dirt for gardens and water for lakes were carved out on top, along with places for waterfalls and some small internal plumbings.

… A third Shaping, because he could, created two small guest houses in the local, pagoda-based style.

Another Shaping vastly improved on the plumbing, allowing for a system that cycled on the interior of the tiny mountain, and places in which Erick could place sand, and gravel, and various other filters, to allow the place to naturally clean itself, as well as funnel into the waterfalls and lake system he installed. There was no water yet. There were no fishes in that nonexistent water. But there could be! Theoretically, all it would take to keep the place stocked with water and fish and keep everything alive, would be some [Gravity Ward]s to draw liquid to the top of the falls, and some plant life to clean it all.

Another Shaping had the living eternal stonetree adjust its illusion of itself.

From far away, it looked like a mirage, with the parts closest to the grasses looking like grass and the parts above looking like sky. Once you got within a kilometer of it, though, that illusion was easily seen through.

Erick rapidly decided that he needed to get some more experience with this spell before he went and repaired Red Ledger’s clan mountain, but the night was here, in full, and he would have to gain that experience later. He bid his secondary house farewell, and lightstepped himself and his people back to their temporary residence in Holorulo.

- - - -

Erick’s eyes shot open. He was laying in bed, on his side, the sheets pulled up around himself. He had been dreaming, and then something happened in that dream. It had awoken him. The dream was already fading because Erick didn’t know why he woke up. He had woken up because… Something...

A quick check revealed that the world was not on fire.

No… He had woken up because of something… else...

“Oh!” Erick sat up, and laughed a little. “That’s how you Remake a Shaping spell! It’s aura control for Mana Shaping and Altering at the same time!” The formula used in the clan mountain scrolls that turned [Eternal Stonetree] into [Eternal Stonetreeshape] was the same formula that could be extrapolated to every other type of Elemental Magic out there! “Ha!” And then Erick thought a bit more, and mumbled to Ophiel, who was eyeing him, “I’d have to figure out aura control then I need to Remake Mana Altering and Mana Shaping. Not even sure how to go about Remaking something that is not a spell, but there has to be a way.”

Ophiel twittered unsure guitar twangs; he didn’t know either.

Erick nodded, saying, “Another question to ask at Rozeta’s Orrery, for sure.”

Ophiel agreed, singing tiny violin sounds into the darkness.

Erick smiled as he laid back down.

Eventually, sleep returned.

The next morning, Erick scheduled a meeting with Tsung Red Ledger.

It was time to apply his magic to practical applications.

He was already excited.

- - - -

The Alluvial District of Eralis was much diminished from how it looked before Terror Peaks attacked. The white bridge leading from the city to the noble district had been repaired, along with the winding roads that went around all the clan mountains. But the clan mountains were a different story. Some were fully repaired. Most were half repaired, and in the process of spot fixes here and there, using stone instead of eternal stonetree. That was why there were runes against [Stoneshape] inside Star Song; normal stone was used for repairs in most cases. A few clan mountains were broken beyond repair, reduced to little more than rubble and broken walls, their inhabitants gone from this world forever.

Everywhere Erick looked, people were rebuilding. Everywhere he looked, there was still a lot of work to be done. Apparently there weren’t a whole lot of people who could cast the spells Erick had learned last night, and they were all booked up.

There were clan mountains that had half fallen down in landslides, with rooms and hallways exposed to the world. In some places, the mountains had been cratered on the side, where something inside had exploded outward. Fixing this land was harder than fixing the rest of Eralis, for when the dirty bombs exploded everywhere, they tainted the land. [Cleanse] helped to get rid of the fallout from those dirty bombs, but [Mend] didn’t work here.

As he walked down the white road, toward his meeting, Erick saw where and how a few of the mountains had failed in ways that went beyond the simple trauma of war. Mostly, he noticed many perfectly smooth, cliff-like areas, that he supposed were some sort of fracture that went through the whole of the mountain. A stress break, along a fault line? Very likely. Some mountains had been exploded outward with massive, breaking spells, leaving jagged edges where the eternal stonetree had snapped away from its interior, leaving behind edges that looked a lot more like broken branches than like stone.

Now that he knew what he was looking at, the true nature of the clan mountains was practically on display. Surely, others would come to the same conclusion Erick had originally arrived at, that these were stonetrees of some kind, but how many would guess that there were Illusion Magics here, as well? Not many, for sure.

Eventually, Erick came to Red Ledger, and nowhere was the true nature of the clan mountains more evident than here, in the southern part of the Alluvial District. One of the [Gate] bombs had been planted just beyond here, weakening the area for a decisive strike against Red Ledger. It was here, upon the corpse of this clan, where most of the early fighting had taken place, by all the rest of the Alluvial District, against Terror Peaks, who had [Gate]d in here and established a beachhead.

The mountain had been cracked open like someone had taken their hands to a birthday cake, and pulled half of it away. All that was left of the original structure was a thirty meter tall arc of eternal stonetree that had been an outside wall, and which was now just a lonely spire, like a leaning gravestone.

Erick stood beside that arc of stone. Tsung stood on his other side. A man from Void Song, a Building Overseer by the name of Huu, stood on the other side of Tsung.

Poi and Teressa stood behind Erick, to the side, while a few other survivors of Red Ledger stood near a table that had been pulled from the wreckage. Those other survivors had placed a scale model of the reconstruction plan upon that table, along with architectural maps that detailed every floor and every pipe and every vent.

When Erick showed up, Tsung was already here with his people, and he had rapidly told Erick a few things about what was going to happen, showing him the model and acting rather informal the whole time. It was nice.

But then the BO showed up, and Tsung briefly turned contrite, before realizing that he was a patriarch now, and his words turned stronger. Huu was a bureaucrat, and he needed to be sure that Tsung had filled out all the proper paperwork, and gotten his models and architectural maps approved by Void Song.

Erick got the distinct impression that Tsung had spoken at length with Huu about the model and about the plans, long before today, and that Huu didn’t like something about what he saw. But Huu never said what his objections were, directly. Tsung had answers for all of Huu’s problems, and soon enough Tsung was speaking rather short at the man. Eventually, Huu accepted that everything was good to go.

Eventually, it came time to cast some spells.

Huu hadn’t spoken to Erick beyond a cursory greeting before this point. He did not make a great impression.

Huu said, “It is no trouble if you fail, for we have casters on standby. Please erect your Domain and ensure that this land is not spied upon by outsiders. Patriarch Tsung. Everyone else. You may leave the area. You are not authorized to see what happens here.”

Tsung did not argue. He simply gave Erick a pained nod, said, “Thank you, Archmage Flatt,” and walked away, down to a space in the white road that had been cleared of clan mountain rubble. His people followed him.

Huu spoke again after Tsung removed himself, “Your people too, Archmage Flatt.”

Erick said, “There’s no need for that.” And then he threw out a [Domain of Light], easily stretching his spell to the white roads that surrounded Red Ledger’s land. As the world inside the Domain turned saturated, Erick twisted his working, and the world outside vanished from sight. Every single nosy [Scry] eye in the area popped, except for Yggdrasil’s. Erick felt out his Domain, finding a few more esoteric sensory spells. He couldn’t tell exactly what they were for, or what they did, but he crushed them anyway. It took less than ten seconds before he said, “There we go. We’re secured now, Mister Huu.”

Huu glanced to Poi and Teressa, but said nothing. He turned back to the rubble. “Clean up comes first. Save whatever stone you can, but be sure to excavate every object that is not stone. Dump the trash over there.” He pointed to a mostly clear space on the white road, acting like he knew best.

Erick had included that part of the white road in his Domain, though, specifically because he knew he would have to clean out the remains of the clan mountain. Erick could tell a lot about Huu from what he had seen, and heard.

Huu liked things done perfectly, and that he brokered no disrespect from anyone. He valued his job, and from how Huu glared at the broken bits of the clan mountain around them, and how he had spoken to Tsung, it was apparent that Huu thought that his predecessor had done a shitty job. If the crafting had been better a hundred years ago, when the mountain was first erected, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

Unfortunately, Huu was completely unaware of how to not be a jerk about it.

Erick did not feel the need to respond in kind, so he said, “Of course.”

[Eternal Stonetreeshape] soaked into the grey and black rubble, spreading like an echo, chiming off of every bit of broken clan mountain. The magic soaked in, and the debris began to melt, to liquefy. There was a lot of rubble, and it had been gathered and piled back into the original space where the mountain had been, but most of the original mountain had been erased by [Cleanse], in the process of cleaning up the land from the dirty bombs. In effect, the rubble that was present was not the rubble of a full clan mountain. It was less than a quarter.

But it was still a lot of material.

Erick pressed the spell into a dome, first, turning a large pile of boulders and otherwise into a pile half the size it had been that bubbled upward in the center. In that center, it was maybe 35 meters tall. On the edge, the bubble met the white road, exactly.

Erick flexed his cast again.

Here and there, like surprises appearing, furniture surfaced. A broken chair tumbled upward, out of grey eternal stonetree, then rolled down the half-liquid slope of the mountain. A dresser shook grey goo from its top and began to slide down the slope. More objects came, faster and faster.

Furniture and carpets and fabrics and bodies—

A few bodies. Several.

Erick breathed deep.

Tsung and his people had cleaned up the land well before Erick came here, but they did not get everyone. If the broken bodies were of people from Terror Peaks, or from Red Ledger, Erick did not know. He maintained the spellwork, causing everything that was not eternal stonetree to float up onto the grey surface. And then, all at once, he understood the spell a bit better. With a flex of control, and a designation of the illusionary eternal stonetree as supremely dense (which it was not, at all), making everything else comparatively light (which was the opposite of the Truth), every last treasure and horror breached out of grey sands, everywhere across the kilometer-wide base of the clan mountain.

The magic faded.

The grey bubble turned solid.

Huu mostly contained his surprise as he said, “It takes a proficient hand to achieve that. You’ll still need to do that again to get all the debris, and then maybe a third time. Allow me to help with the cleanup.” He cast a spell.

A many-armed blue-noodle thing popped out onto the ground in front of Huu, looking like a jumble of ramen with gloves on the ends of its appendages. It barely came up to his waist. Huu silently gestured forward and the creature instantly rushed forward onto the grey bubble. The ramen summon grabbed the nearest object, which was a broken painting, and tumbled down the side, holding the broken painting above itself until it reached the edge of the area, where it dumped the painting onto the ground. And then the noodle boy went back into the mess.

Huu cast another summon, his voice oddly stiff as he said, “I am sorry you have to see this death again, Archmage Flatt. Nasty business, that.”

Erick glanced at the man.

Huu’s eyes were wide, and unnaturally focused on the job ahead of him. Ah. He was unsettled. The bodies had triggered something within him.

“Don’t worry about the bodies, Huu. Ophiel can get them.” Erick directed his Ophiel to where they needed to be, saying, “This war was quite awful.I hope to never see its like again, but I suspect I will before the year is up. Maybe sooner.”

Ahh… Maybe he shouldn’t have been that honest. Perhaps Erick had been unsettled, too.

While Erick was moving the bodies to a space to the side, Huu stared at them for a moment too long. He was at his breaking point, and then he broke. Huu turned and vomited onto the ground, apologizing even when he was in the middle of his second vomit.

Erick’s opinion of the man improved.

No more words were exchanged. Erick laid the bodies upon conjured white cloth, and then he helped to move out the actual trash from the site. Huu continued to summon more noodle boys and together, both finished the job of moving items to the side. There were a lot of items. Mostly furniture, but a lot of personal effects, too. Books. Papers. Letters. Clothes.

When the piles of trash had been collected, Huu went to the center of the pile and cast a large [Mending Aura]. Half of the objects returned to their original forms. The other half did not. They had likely been damaged by the Extreme Light dirty bombs. Still, he did not [Cleanse] the trash away. He merely separated the piles between broken and non-broken. Red Ledger could further separate the piles from there.

Erick went over the site with his Ophiel and his mana sense, then used another Shaping to bring up a few more items, but nothing of note. With everything cleaned out of the site, Erick helped move the bodies and the items outside of his Domain, to where some people from Void Song and Red Ledger were already waiting. Red Ledger was there for both the items and the people, to see what was salvageable and who needed to be mourned. Void Song was there to see if any of the bodies were Terror Peaks soldiers.

Erick left them to it, not wanting to be involved in all that, and went back inside his Domain to continue. It was time to begin the real work. He handed off a seed he had plucked from a tree outside, to an Ophiel, who planted it on top of the grey hill.

And then Erick cast.

In seconds, a kilometer tall white tree appeared, its branches stretching off half a kilometer in every direction, while its roots dug deep into the grey ground. Erick’s creation shimmered in the saturated white light of Erick’s Domain, its leaves glittering in sunlight like chips of mirrors. It was beautiful.

Huu’s eyes went wide, and then he resigned himself. “Ah. Of course. The white version. I suppose that’s appropriate enough.”

“Is there a problem?”

“No. No problem.” Huu said, “Gaining a white mountain is a sign of… Well. Magnificent prestige. I did not expect this. Perhaps I should have.” He discarded his wonder and returned to work, saying, “We will likely require two trees, and since your trees look slightly larger than normal, we will likely go over the target by 20%. Addendum B-25 through B-27 of the plans will be replacing Base Plan 25 through 27, resulting in a restructuring of the top, producing two pagodas instead of one, with the first being of larger size than the second. Do you wish to go over the plans?”

“I read them, and I can see them. I don’t need to read them again.”

Huu looked slightly unsure, but he professionally said, “Proceed with Shaping, parts 1 through 9; foundation first, and then Shaping the raw material upward as you can. Shove excess material to the center, and leave that area mostly unShaped; it will be supporting the weight of the second tree. They might be a lot lighter than they look, but they are still weighty things. You may conjure the second tree in that central location when the first floors are completed to my satisfaction.”

Erick gazed up at the tree, and smiled; this was fun.

A single cast of [Eternal Stonetreeshape] melted the tree, turning it into raw material that crashed down onto the grey hill, settling into a white cap that was three times as large as the grey hill. It glittered like a snow capped hill. It reminded Erick of taking Jane sledding in the deep winter.

He smiled again. This was actually really fun.

And then he went to work, casting [Eternal Stonetreeshape] again and again as necessary, using Ophiels for his eyes and the senses of his Domain to feel out where, exactly, everything needed to go. While the architectural maps provided precise measurements, it was the meter-wide scale model that helped Erick the most. That model was actually made out of paper and wood, constructed with care and precision. It had to be the work of some highly experienced Paper Mage somewhere, or something.

Erick formed the basement and the solid foundation, keeping the original grey rock inside the walls, and not visible. That was kinda tough. For the most part, eternal stonetrees, when in the middle of a Shape, acted like concrete, and when two colored concretes got mixed, it was impossible to unmix them. Not only that, sometimes that concrete had a grain to it, which introduced all sorts of odd problems when the material was stretched thin, like it was when it was stretched into walls. It kinda reminded Erick of bread dough being pulled too thin, and thus breaking.

Eventually, Erick roughed out the bottom floors, and then ‘washed’ them with white eternal stonewood. If Red Ledger went carving down there, they’d find the grey, but that was on them.

Huu watched the working with a bevy of [Scry] eyes and their accompanying [Viewing Screen]s.

(Erick still didn’t have whatever spell it was that made those screens. It was on his list, though.)

Erick continued to work; this entire event reminding him of when he used to work in construction, back when Jane was a baby.

Huu seemed to warm up rather fast after Erick showed off his obvious skill, and especially after Erick finished the fourth floor, and the beginnings of the water systems slipped into place.

When Erick got to the tenth floor they were a third of the way done. Huu insisted on a break, to inspect the interior from the inside, with his own eyes. Erick accompanied him.

As they walked down the newly-made hallways, Huu complimented Erick on the plumbing, and on the levelness of every wall, floor, and ceiling. There were even a few small flourishes here and there that Erick had included, like the sweep of some nice banisters, and the vault of a central gathering place. Those flourishes were part of the optional plans, but they seemed easy enough, so Erick did them.

Huu definitely noticed Erick’s competency.

“We only have one other person who can approach this level of craftsmanship, and one person capable of casting the White Tree. Thankfully, they are not the same person.” Huu said, “The sculptor is booked, for the next ten months; the downside of Scion of Willpower. The White Tree woman is not booked, but she works in Holorulo almost exclusively, and for exclusive prices. Her ability with the White Tree would be less prestigious if anyone else had been able to make the spell in the last thirty years, but no one has, so people pay, or they don’t get the White Mountains.”

“Seems like someone else should have been able to make it in thirty years.” Erick wondered what everyone else had done wrong, if only the one woman and himself were able to make the good version of [Eternal Stonetree]. He asked, “Are you privy to the spellwork that makes these trees?”

“I know the overview, but I don’t wish to know more. I care not for secrets and I cannot offer you any.” Huu said, “I’m merely an administrator, ensuring that the plans and the end result are well crafted.”

Erick nodded, and then his eyes drifted to the side, to where a grey streak marred the wall. He frowned at it.

Huu turned and saw the problem. He and Erick did not stop walking, though. Huu said, “There are fourteen more levels to go, with the first of those being right above us; you can Shape that mark away easily enough.”

“That’s not the first mark I noticed; it’s just the largest.”

Huu frowned a little, then his eyes fluttered a bit as he switched over to his mana sense. He wasn’t too proficient, so it was easy to see when the man switched over, but still had a mana sense, unlike almost everyone else in the world. Huu blinked hard and came back to himself. “It’s structurally sound, as is all the rest of your construction. I wouldn’t worry about it. Besides. A lot of people would appreciate the subtle grey. It is a reminder of what came before.”

Erick nodded. “True enough.”

Huu said, “I have seen enough. Good work. Continue?”

“Continue.”

Soon, another white tree stretched into the sky, and then, with another cast, that tree became a plop of white material upon the white cake of the clan mountain. Erick was kinda surprised that the plop didn’t break anything, but eternal stonetrees were truly lightweight, and truly strong. The perfect building material!

Three hours later, the clan mountain was finished. It stretched into the sky, 460 meters tall and a full kilometer in diameter. The exterior was shaped like several white crags but with lakes and balconies and windows and courtyards linking it all together. The interior had dormitories and offices and learning centers and training centers, along with all the normal bathrooms and vents and plumbing and kitchens.

The top had three pagodas. Two of them were planned, each situated atop the largest crags. The third one was a nice, small guesthouse, upon an out-of-the-way crag. It was still two stories tall, of course. Erick Shaped it to be exactly how he would want it to be, with spaces for a kitchen and several nice bedrooms, along with a viewing porch to watch the sun set across Eralis. It was a nice, normal home, but with quite a few nods towards defense.

When the whole clan mountain was as perfect as Erick could make it, he had Poi tell Tsung to get ready, and then he spent five minutes applying a general illusion. And then, Erick stepped outside of his Domain, along with Huu.

Tsung and a few of his people were there, waiting. They stood upon the white road, their eyes full of anticipation.

Tsung waited for Erick to speak.

Erick smiled, and gave no preamble. He simply dropped his Domain and allowed the world to see the mountain.

Tsung looked up and saw the white, his eyes going wide, and his mouth dropping open. He wasn’t the only one with a dumbfounded expression.

Huu broke the moment with a happy, “Your clan has a new home in Eralis. May it forever protect you and your descendants.” He bowed to Tsung, who was barely understanding that he had been spoken to, and then he bowed to Erick, saying, “It was a pleasure, Archmage Flatt. Thank you for all you have done for Songli. I will take my leave.”

Erick bid him, “Farewell, Huu.”

Huu nodded, then walked away, down the white road of the Alluvial District.

Tsung ignored the departing administrator, and exclaimed, “IT’S WHITE!”

Erick laughed. “You can paint it if you don’t like it.”

“NEVER!” Tsung exclaimed.

Soon enough, everyone was talking.

Some of the people on nearby mountains had similar reactions to Tsung.

It was a good day.

The night was even better. Surviving students and clansmen and otherwise would be moving into the mountain over the next few days, but a small gathering was held in one of the larger rooms with everyone who was available. Tsung had invited Erick to be the guest of honor, and Erick went. It was a small affair, marked mostly by speeches of thanks, and toasts, and decent food.

It was nice.

Poi informed Erick that he was now flooded with requests to rebuild more of the Alluvial District, if he wanted. People were offering upwards of 750,000 gold for his conjuring and crafting of new clan mountains. Erick denied them all, for now.

- - - -

Erick had a few more things to do before he went after the dragons.

And so, the morning after the remake of Red Ledger’s mountain, Erick sent an Ophiel to the House of the Wandering Soul, to check in on how the kids were doing with their new mana sense blockers.

Ophiel slipped down through the sky, toward the house, where dozens of confused spaces in the mana blocked his mana sense, but the house seemed more alive than ever. Sounds carried well, now that many of the generalized sense-blocking spells had been taken down.

Children laughed and played with each other inside, and outside. They took music lessons with teachers, or they read in the library. They were kids again, and they relished in their freedom.

A few of the caretakers who remained outside of the various obscuring spheres saw Ophiel, but all they did was look his way, then turn back to what they were doing; be it cooking, or cleaning, teaching, or watching over the kids.

From what Erick could see and hear, the children seemed to be getting on quite well.

But he was here for a specific thing. Erick found what he was looking for quick enough. A stone box, about half a meter square, had been built outside the front door and placed on the second level of a small 8-sided, two-tier pagoda. The box had been labeled ‘Charms’. It was quaint.

It was filled with letters.

Erick took the letters instantly and brought them back to himself, with a [Cleanse] halfway through because he was paranoid in an offhand manner. He opened the first letter. It was from a girl named Toori, written in precise brush stroke letters upon lined paper.

She was six, and she could finally venture outside of the bubble they kept her in, because otherwise she was too scared to be in the outside world. Her mother had named her after a water bird, and now she finally got to go to the lake, and see the toori peck the water to find fishes. They were pretty birds.

Toori had drawn him a picture, too.

It was a lovely picture, made by a child’s hand.

… And now Erick was crying. Ahh. Yeah. This was happening. He continued to read. He started bawling on the second letter. The third letter was from a brat of a kid, wanting a wand of [Fireball]s. Erick laughed at that. The fourth letter had him crying again.

There were forty three letters in the pile. Some of the letters were from parents of the kids, thanking him for making it so their child could come home for the weekend. Two of the letters were from Caretaker Shani, and Warder Azrin Severing Crescent. Shani expressed her thanks, and politely requested some variations on the charms (if it was not too much trouble). She included a list of desired Shapings. Azrin’s letter was a postulation of his own theories on how Erick had managed to make his [Delirium Charm]s, and a polite request to know if he was correct.

Erick decided that Shani would get her adjustments, but Azrin would not get any answers from him. Erick had already given the man enough hints, hadn’t he? Yes, he did. The main reason for denying the man, though, was that Erick didn’t want to start some cycle of questions and answers with Azrin.

For his reply, Erick had an Ophiel go out into an open space, outside Holorulo, and gather some stone. With a simple Shaping, Erick transformed the stone into some durable boxes. Temporary [Conjure Item]s were good enough for small, temporary applications, but Shani’s letter hinted that what she wanted might be more permanent than Erick’s original distribution of charms.

Erick started summoning Charms.

He conjured ten charms sized to their full, 3 meter radius sphere. He made ten of a 3 meter diameter sphere. And then, in the process of Shaping the spell into something similar to a [Personal Ward], a blue box appeared.

--

Personal Delirium Charm, instant, close range, 1256 mana

Create a charm which blocks the sensing of mana around the wearer.

Lasts 10 days.

--

“Unexpected, yet not unwanted.” Erick tested the charm on himself and was surprised at how perfectly it worked. He could still mana sense his insides, though. He smiled. “The kids are gonna love this.”

Erick took the charm off, then conjured forty of that particular charm. Shani only asked for ten, but he suspected that she would want a lot of this one. There were a few more variations of the original [Delirium Charm] that went into different boxes, but Erick gained no new spells for those simple transformations.

When that was done, Ophiel took the boxes and lightstepped them back to the small pagoda outside of the House of the Wandering Soul, along with his own letter, saying that he was very happy to receive the children’s words. He almost signaled to one of the caretakers, but it was unnecessary; they saw Ophiel fly in the first time.

The kids had seen Ophiel fly in the first time, too. They were waiting; some in the hallways in the house, by the front door, others in the woods, watching the pagoda from ten meters away.

It was a mad dash to the new toys—

A caretaker appeared beside the pagoda and cast some [Force Wall]s around the structure, after Ophiel left. The kids, naturally, objected. The caretaker told the noisy kids that they needed to wait, and that Shani would be here to distribute everything.

Erick smiled wide, back in his room in Holorulo.

And then he moved on to his next project: how to hunt a drag—

Ah.

No.

… Erick could wait one more day. He could hunt the dragon tomorrow.

He didn’t want to do that right now.

So instead, he tried a few of the aura control techniques he had learned from Kaffi. First, he went to Teressa, asking her how she had figured it out. Then he practiced with her for a few hours. Lunch came and went. Erick went back to trying to find his aura, though he did not drop his [Personal Ward], nor did he take off his rings, both of which were definitely holding him back.

Well… he did take off his rings, once, and then he put them on, and then he took them off. This repeated a few dozen times.

He frowned as he put his ring back on, saying to Teressa, “I don’t get it. Rings and other Stat accessories work by connecting to the aura of the wearer and powering up the soul, which adjusts the body in temporary ways… This should work! I should be able to feel my aura by doing this.”

“I agree. You should be able to feel your aura when you put on the ring.” Teressa said, “I don’t get it either.”

Erick left the ring on and went back to meditation, to ‘feeling out his aura’. Teressa’s aura was already manifesting outside of her body as a grey shimmer, but only when she wanted it to shimmer. She was already working on increasing her area of control.

This was frustrating.

… He could drop his [Personal Ward]—

No. He could be attacked at any time… Which was a reason for pursuing the dragon sooner rather than later. But...

Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would put out feelers to find the dragon. Some spells in the sky. Some illusions, perhaps. Something…

Or maybe he would go see how Tadashi was doing with chelation and all that.

Erick had a good reason for putting off this dragon thing. He wasn’t fully sure, but he felt as though finding the dragon would be another step along the Worldly Path. A step he could not take back. As soon as that happened, he would need to move on from Songli.

Therefore, before he went after the dragon, he needed to be sure that everything he needed to do here was done.

- - - -

At night, Erick slept.

He had a nightmare about dying daughters and sundered souls, and so, he woke up, covered in sweat and trying to purposefully forget what was easily forgettable. He laid there in bed, covers thrown to the side, air drying, now that he wasn’t terrified and producing even more sweat.

Eventually, he knew he was never getting back to sleep. So he got up, and got on with his day.

He hoped these nightmares wouldn’t be a normal thing.

- - - -

Light unraveled around Erick as he set himself and his little group down in front of the target house.

It was a quaint place, large enough for a single family. A growing house made of glass was set apart from the main house. Plants grew within, but also in the open gardens around the property. A woman stood on the front porch, wearing bright blue and subtle orange robes that looked a lot more expensive than her home. In moments, a man joined the woman, wearing clothes that were of dark blues and dark greens. The woman was clearly incani, with red skin and red horns. The man was human. Both of them were Erick’s age; in their late forties. According to their house, neither of them could have easily afforded what they were wearing.

If the hidden guards stationed around the property weren’t hint enough, the parents’ clothes were evidence that Star Song was treating Tadashi’s parents better than they were accustomed to. That was good.

Erick walked forward, with Poi and Teressa following behind and Ophiels fluttering about wherever they wanted to go. Only one of the little guys stayed on Erick’s right shoulder; Yggdrasil’s eye hovered above his left. Erick approached the couple.

The couple bowed; Erick did not.

The woman, Raniza, said, “We welcome you into our home, Archmage Flatt. Our son would come to greet you but he physically cannot.”

“I understand. I do not wish to stress Tadashi, or you. I merely came to assess his condition, to see if there is anything I can do to help.” Erick added, “I also came to extend my condolences for the loss of your son, Wabi. I heard Wabi gave his life in defense of his brother. I am sorry for your loss.”

Raniza froze, then broke in a hundred small ways. A tear escaped, but she controlled the rest of her reaction to a small sob. She whispered, “Thank you.”

The man, Oorol, had a reaction that was much the same. He gestured to the open doors behind him, and his voice cracked as he said, “Please come into— Into our home, and partake of our hospitality.”

Erick did so, without reservation.

Tadashi’s parents led him, Poi, and Teressa, to an open air gathering room, with a view of the garden and a tea set waiting upon a table. Raniza began making tea as Oorol gestured for Erick to sit. Soon enough, the three of them were sipping by a garden of flowers and pungent herbs. It was not a bad smell.

Erick had already checked in on Tadashi by looking for the hole in his mana sense. A tendril of light snaked in that direction to allow actual viewing of the man.

What he saw wasn’t good.

Tadashi was sleeping in what amounted to Veird’s idea of a hospital bed; it was more of a deep recliner chair, with Tadashi’s back raised on pillows and what remained of his legs raised on even more pillows. Both legs were shortened to the knees and wrapped in bandages, though a blanket covered that half of him. His torso was lightly covered, and a nasty scar marred half his face and continued down under the wrappings around his chest. He still had both eyes, though he looked terribly weak. His potions were set to the side, lined up and ready to be administered whenever needed. They were all mundane potions, too, not a single one of them glowing, along with a few jars of pills.

Oorol brought Erick back to the moment, saying, “I have heard that Tadashi’s colleagues have solved chelation without him, but I have not heard much more than that.” His voice was full of guarded hope, “Do you know when they will allow our son to take the medicine he invented?”

“I apologize, for I do not know any of that.” Erick said, “I have been busy with other matters.”

Oorol instantly said, “Of course, of course,” but he could not fully hide the hurt in his voice.

Raniza spoke with some strength, “We will get the medicine when it is safe, I am sure. Tadashi need not live a life like his grandfather. It is simply a matter of time. We will wait.” She said, “You will have to come back when he is walking around on his own two feet again, Archmage Flatt. We will have a huge celebration. Star Song is treating us quite well, so I am already planning for three hundred guests.”

Erick recognized a deep, perhaps delusional hope in Raniza’s entire being.

He would not fault her for that, though, so he simply said, “I look forward to receiving that invitation.”

“As well you should!” Raniza happily said, “It will be wonderful. We’ll have all his favorite foods— Ah! Do you have any favorite foods? I will be sure to include them!”

“I have enjoyed almost everything I have eaten around here, and I like new things, so whatever you plan would be good, I am sure.”

Raniza relaxed a fraction, saying, “Oh, good! That makes things simple.”

Erick nodded, then moved on. “May I speak to Tadashi? If he wakes over the course of our own talk, of course; I do not wish to wake him if he is sleeping deeply.”

Raniza almost spoke, but her temporary joy faded from her face.

“He will want to be awake for a little while, to speak to you; he has already told us this much,” Oorol said, taking the reins. “But if you do not mind, we would like to keep that short. I would prefer for us to answer any questions you might have.”

“I am perfectly fine with that.” Erick said, “How is his recovery going?”

Raniza found herself again. “The Doctors assure us that sleeping all day is normal for long term recovery. Star Song even gave Tadashi extra… I mean. After Patriarch Zalindi…” She was losing it again, but she mustered her composure, and said, “Tadashi visited a Registrar and— Patriarch Mirizo of Star Song gave him 8 points for defense of the realm. I understand they had a meeting, while Tadashi had enough potions in him to remain cognizant. Our son moved a few things around in his Status, planning for the long term, you understand.” Raniza brightened. “He’ll get better. Long term recovery is always dangerous, but our son will make it. I know he will.”

Raniza was utterly hopeful.

So Erick kept Oorol in the corner of his eyes, watching the man’s reactions. Oorol believed that Tadashi would make it, but he was more cautiously optimistic instead of openly optimistic. Erick had seen such reactions to medical problems many times before. Raniza’s and Oorol’s reactions were no doubt heightened by the death of their other son, Wabi, too.

“I know Tadashi will recover.” Erick said, “When this chelation treatment is perfected, I am sure that your son will be on the list. If he is not, I will be sure to talk to some people about that.”

Raniza wiped away a sudden tear and smiled. Her voice came out weak, “Thank you, Archmage Flatt.”

A soft whisper came from the other room, “Mother? Is he here?”

Oorol stood up, saying, “He doesn’t sleep very deeply.”

They moved to Tadashi’s room. The boy looked a lot better when he was awake, or at least he looked more lively.

Erick said, “Hello again, Tadashi.”

“Hello, Archmage Flatt.” Tadashi said, “I hope you can forgive me for not getting up.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Erick said, smiling. And then he lost his smile. “I am sorry about your brother.”

“It… It is what it is. He saved me.” Tadashi said nothing for a long moment, then he said, “I think I made him feel too much guilt over letting me get taken in the first place. He could have saved himself, but he saved me instead.”

Another silent moment passed.

Erick asked, “How are you doing?”

“About as well as can be expected. Wabi was my liaison with the other Alchemists, but without him here… Ving comes to see me every other day, to talk about particles and molecules and bonding forces. I think she would rather talk to you. I promised her that if I ever saw you, that I’d tell you that. And now I have.” He smiled, closing his eyes a bit as he leaned back. “Now I only owe Star Song 7 more points.”

Erick smiled, gently. “Maybe I’ll talk to her if I feel like it.”

“Oh!” Tadashi joked, “A favorable reaction. Only 6 points to go, now.”

… Erick arrived at a sudden decision. With a flick of lightform, he grabbed his half-drained cup of tea from the other room, and brought it to his hand. He asked Tadashi, “How would you like another 10 points? Quick, yes or no.”

Tadashi’s eyes went wide. “Uh. Yes.”

Erick set his cup of tea on the bed beside Tadashi’s hand as he filled out the Quest. With a gesture, the Quest floated through the air toward the bed bound man. The blue box fizzled a bit as it entered Tadashi’s antirhine aura, but it remained. Tadashi read it. Then he moved his hand and took up the cup. He strained a bit, his grip weaker than it should have been, but he lifted the cup and held it out to Erick, as far as he could go. He didn’t make it the whole way, but that was okay. Erick took the cup from him.

A blue box appeared.

--

Your posted quest ‘Hand me my cup of tea’ was completed.

--

Tadashi’s arm crashed to his side. He smiled, saying, “Thank you.”

“You spend those. They weren’t for paying off a debt.” Erick said, “Make yourself better, faster.”

Tadashi laughed a little. “Someone probably noticed the 10 point Quest.”

“Then they can feel free to complain to me.” Erick said, “With the extensive injuries you received, I would expect a recovery period of months, but that calculation is based on my own experiences with helping people with disabilities back on my home planet. With Health and Vitality and all those modifiers, I expect you up and about in a few weeks. And then there’s physical therapy to ensure that you heal properly. It is important to be active, once you can be active…” Erick wondered, then asked anyone who could answer, “Do you have wheelchairs?”

Confused looks met him, but one person had an answer.

Poi answered, “No, sir.”

Erick said to Tadashi, “Have someone in Star Song invent you a wheelchair. It’s just a chair with large wheels—” With an Ophiel, he grabbed a stone from outside, and brought it to his hand. He conjured a small lightsculpture of Tadashi on a modern wheelchair, pushing the wheels with his arms and with a tiny smile on his face. The scar was there, but it was minimized. Erick wouldn’t lie to the guy. He set the wardlight to the side, on a table, saying, “Someone should be able to look at that and make it for you.”

Small tears escaped from the corners of Tadashi’s eyes. Everyone pretended not to notice.

Erick added, “At least you don’t have to worry about bed sores here on Veird.” He paused. He asked, “You’re moving in your bed, right? Can you, yet? Don’t want to get bed sores.”

“I have none of those. With my new Vitality, I likely won’t ever get them. Thank you… Archmage Flatt,” Tadashi said, closing his eyes. He seemed to be breathing better now than when Erick first arrived. “Thank you.”

Erick said, “You rest up, now. I’ll see you around.”

Tadashi nodded. He was already halfway asleep.

Erick gave his farewells to Tadashi’s parents, then went on his way.

- - - -

Erick was feeling pretty good. The wandering soul kids were doing well. The university and its adjacent hospital were up and running with new staff; Erick’s money going to good purposes. Red Ledger’s mountain was back, and that whole clan was reorganizing under Tsung. Star Song was progressing with its chelation technology. Tadashi was doing… fine, for a certain definition of ‘fine’. Hangzi was learning how to be a patriarch of a High Clan. His little brother, Warzi, was doing a lot better. After Erick handed over one of his new [Personal Ward]-sized [Delirium Charm]s, Warzi started crying with happiness.

Eralis was healing. All of Songli was healing, in fact, and Erick had helped to excise all the small ‘cancers’ of Hunters and Face stealers that would have harmed total healing. All of Terror Peaks was gone, except for the people Erick had blessed, who were doing well in their paddy house, unlearning the brainwashing that they had been raised upon. The pirates to the south were no more. The warlord clans were organizing under the Compact of Songli, with an eye toward becoming the fourth main city of Songli.

A lot of problems had happened, and then solved to the best of Erick’s ability.

A lot of problems remained, not many of them were problems of other people, though.

Ari was practically chained to the Palace of the Eternal Court, and that sucked, but she seemed fine with it, for a certain definition of ‘fine’. Xue was doing better, though he missed his wife, Sikali, terribly. Riri was on her way to becoming a financial power all on her own, but that outcome likely leaned more toward the ‘good’ than the ‘bad’. She still missed her Pearlchan, though, to hear Jane tell it.

Jane was setting herself up to be a power in Songli…

Erick was worried that she would want to stay behind.

Erick had a lot of worries, and unfinished business of his own to work through.

Aura control still hadn’t happened. He would need that before he could Remake the Shaping spells, and thus gain those 6 points back. Understanding Illusion Magic was a new necessity, for it seemed way too useful. Even if it wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be (which would be exactly what Erick expected out of Illusion Magic) the ability to ‘nudge’ Reality into reality boded well for the creation of many types of difficult-to-make magics, including [Gate], and [Renew], and [Draining Elemental].

Erick more than felt that he was approaching a major marker in his Quest for [Gate].

He was at a crossroads, and not only because of everything he had learned and done, but because of what lay ahead. The answers to [Gate] were held by the dragons. Erick already knew this because of his time with Tenebrae, and now, there was a dragon gunning for him.

The Worldly Path would take Erick directly to that dragon, and then many of the others, for sure. Of this, Erick had no doubt.

It was just a matter of taking that first step.