Book 3, Chapter 69

I had to stop almost immediately once I was inside the tower, something that was actually a bit difficult to do. Heavy mana rushed by at such great speed that it affected the physical world around it, forcing me to expend some of my own magic just to keep myself firmly rooted inside the vent.

The reason I needed to stop was simple. The vent wasn’t a singular passage. It forked less than a hundred feet in, and a few seconds of scrying was enough to tell me that each branch was going to split many, many more times. No doubt the other vents would have similar constructions.

It didn’t take me long to understand the pattern. Each split terminated in a shaft shooting upwards a few dozen miles at minimum, and if I was lining up the floors correctly in my head, a feat made somewhat more difficult by the expanding circumference of the tower as I’d gotten lower down, that meant that the terminus of the final splits all lined up with the empty spaces between the halls in the maintenance sublevels, and that they were all spaced out just enough that each shaft could feed another rune.

This was a pretty glaring weakness. If I wanted to destroy the tower, blocking these vents was a fantastic way to do it. It might take months or even years before the mana finally ran dry in those rune constructs, but as long as the vents remained blocked, it would happen eventually. And when the runes stopped being fed mana, the wards would fall. It wouldn’t take much longer for the tower itself to topple, probably filling in a significant majority of the chasm it rose out of. If I had to guess, I would say the amount of stone it took to fill the chasm probably equaled almost exactly how much had been used in the tower’s construction.

Of course, it was far easier to talk about blocking those vents than it was to actually do it. For one thing, no one without at least a stage five core was even getting down here. It just wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t have done it last week, even with an absolutely massive mana crystal and nigh-perfect transference. That wasn’t even looking at any of the mana wraiths I’d fought off on my way down. Just surviving the heavy mana had required me to reforge my body into something with drastically heightened resistance to outside mana.

After that, there was the fact that I was pretty sure I was close to a thousand miles below the surface of the planet at this point. Disregarding the other problems, even just surviving the drop presented challenges that the average mage would fail to overcome. Controlling that descent while fending off hostile mana wraiths and the heavy mana was an especially potent defense.

And then, after all that, an attacker could begin the process of trying to plug up dozens of vents, each one a hundred feet tall and fifteen feet wide, in a stone that was warded so heavily it was essentially immune to being manipulated or damaged. And it had to be with a material that blocked a massive intake of heavy mana, not just barring physical access.

In short, if I wanted to use the vents as a way to bring down the entire tower, I’d need to think some more about how to accomplish it. Nothing I had available to me now would get the job done.

Once I figured out the pattern, it wasn’t hard to find the spot that didn’t make sense. I flew through the vents until I reached that shaft, then went straight up miles and miles until I hit a grate blocking me from entering a room. It was as heavily warded as the rest of the tower, but I wasn’t about to let it stop me. Working slowly and carefully, I peeled back enough of the warding structure to reshape the stone and let me slip through.

The grate snapped back into place behind me, but that was no matter. I could always pick it apart again if I needed to exit that way. I didn’t pay it much mind anyway because I was pretty sure I’d found exactly what the Breakers of Chains had been looking for.

The room was a hundred feet wide, and almost all of it was taken up by a huge interface similar to the ones in the floor control rooms. The difference was scale. Instead of one or two consoles, there were over a hundred arranged in a circle around a massive crystal pillar. I approached one at random and tried to access it, but didn’t have the credentials needed to make changes. I wondered if that was because the security was higher here, or if Averin did somehow have credentials that I simply lacked. If he was in this room, would he be able to use the interface?

I doubted we’d ever find out, because I had no intention of telling him about my discovery. For one thing, it would do him no good, since he couldn’t possibly get here on his own. For another, I didn’t need him mucking up my own investigation by doing something stupid like trying to take the whole tower hostage.

Finally, I wasn’t all that worried about what it was possible to control from this room because it barely took me five minutes to work my way through the wards blocking my access, and once I did, I discovered something far, far more interesting. I was directly under whatever was behind that warded door that I’d been unable to get through. I could see the mana flows moving up through the tower from here, all of it replicated in the crystal conduit dominating the room. With their patterns so clearly defined, the logic of the whole thing fell in place.

Strangely, the mana had been shifted away from that whole sublevel, leaving just enough to power the annoying wards on all the workshops. It had to be a deliberate act, one that had interrupted many other processes. Whatever was sealed away in that room, someone had decided it was worth the effort to divert mana away from it. Annoyingly, I was unable to manually break the wards from here, nor was there any information about the room itself.

As curious as I was, I turned my attention elsewhere. Hours flew by as I delved into the information stored in the interface. Finally, I found what I was looking for. My suspicions were confirmed. The tower stretched all the way down to the world core. Worse, it had broken the mysteel shell that surrounded it to access the core directly.

When it had been repurposed to fire a beam of mana into the sky and destroy one of the moons, the backlash had killed a huge swath of the world core. In a rare twist, I actually learned something new then and there. World cores were giant, molten lumps of something very similar to living stone. Just by cracking the mysteel shell, Ammun had caused damage when the molten stone had started to cool. Forcefully pulling mana directly from the world core had created a cascading imbalance issue where the core didn’t have enough mana pressurized inside itself to keep moving efficiently.

All of this had happened before the mana exchange between Ammun and the rebels, according to the logs. Things were on the decline for centuries from the massive amounts of mana being sucked up directly from the world core for the tower project, which I still suspected was meant to be some sort of fortress demesne for Ammun to rule from.

Being forced to retrofit the tower’s mana cycling system into a weapon had accelerated the damage to the world core to the point where, close to two thousand years ago, it had essentially died. Instead of a living heart of molten stone, constantly spinning and generating mana, Manoch now had a lump of dead rock with thin veins of life slowly being strangled. The fact that it had managed to recover at all was nothing short of miraculous.

The tower needed to go. There was no other choice if the rest of the world was to survive. And yet, paradoxically, the tower itself was acting as a plug to the damaged mysteel shell. The roots it had laid down in the core needed to be excised and the mysteel repaired before the tower was destroyed. It would take an almost incomprehensible amount of mana to power a spell like that.

I smiled to myself. Finally, after years of searching, I knew exactly how my stupid apprentice had screwed everything up, and I knew how to fix it.

  *

I’d technically gotten everything I needed from the tower at this point. The only mystery left to unravel was the door itself, and if I never solved that one, I’d survive. That didn’t mean the work was done, of course. For my plans to succeed, that meant the tower had to be destroyed, which meant the many, many thousands of people living here needed to get used to the idea of relocating.

It was time to speak with Averin about his long-term goals. I’d prefer not to be responsible for killing another city’s worth of people, especially in a world so desperately in need of mages, but if it came down to restoring the dead core or saving a city grown fat on mana while everyone else suffered, well, it wasn’t a hard choice to make.

I left a teleportation beacon down there, but not a platform. I did not want Averin’s people coming down into this room without my knowledge, so that beacon was as shielded and hidden as I could make it. No one but me would ever find it, and if they did, they’d better hope they were stage five or higher when they teleported to it, else the heavy mana down here would kill them quickly.

Then I returned to floor one and the safehouse I’d been staying in. There was no one there now, which gave me some time to rest, but when the central column of the tower started brightening into their version of daylight and still nobody had shown up, I decided to be a bit more proactive.

I’d left a dozen platforms with the Breakers, and they’d placed them all. Each one was dropped roughly every eight floors, and when I teleported to the one on floor ninety-five, a dozen Breakers jumped in surprise. Spells flared up around me, but I quickly countered them.

“Easy there. I’m just looking for Averin to let him know I’m back.”

“Averin?” one asked.

Oh, right. I’d forgotten that the Breakers divided themselves into cells and went by numbers. Also, I was almost certain Averin had given me a fake name. It seemed like all the cell leaders went by a few different names instead of a number, but my extremely delicate mind reading when I’d probed them on the custom had revealed that the names they gave weren’t their real ones. Whatever Averin’s name with this group was, I was unfamiliar with it.

“Just… get whoever is in charge and tell them that Keiran is back,” I said. “They can pass it up the chain until the right guy gets the message.”

One of the Breakers left, presumably to do what I’d asked, but the other eleven kept guarding the platform. Mana flickered around them, partially shrouded, as they readied various spells in case I made an aggressive move. I pretended I didn’t notice and mentally marked out which Breakers were the most competent.

Two hours of waiting later, Averin appeared on the platform behind me. He blinked in surprise at the tense atmosphere of the room, then chuckled. “So you’re back and making new friends, I see.”

“Something like that. How are your plans proceeding?”

“Ah, well, it’s a difficult task. Not that we’re not making progress, just not as much as I’d like. Why don’t we go somewhere more comfortable to talk?”

I gestured for him to lead the way. The Breakers might not have recognized the alias he was using with me, but they apparently knew the man well enough to not try to get in his way. I followed him out of the room, the guards’ questioning gazes boring into my back.

“This safehouse is a lot nicer than mine,” I commented.

“Yes, that tends to happen on the higher floors. We need to blend in, so having a hovel up here would stand out just as much as a fine manse down on floor one would.”

That all made sense, but on the other hand, there hadn’t really been any need to house me on floor one once I’d introduced the teleportation platforms. Before I could suggest a relocation of my person, Averin opened the door to a posh sitting room.

“Here we are,” he said. “Have a seat and let’s get caught up.”