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Book 4, Chapter 16

Most of the facility was underground, with only a few silos breaking through the dirt to squat amongst the rolling hills that made up the area. That did make it a bit harder to break in unnoticed, or at least it might have if I hadn’t stolen the knowledge of the site’s unloading grounds from the supply train.

It was an impressive—and wasteful—use of mana. Rather than unload the carts or let anybody into the facility, everything was parked in a single barn, one that was about fiv...

Book 4, Chapter 15

Unfortunately, just transplanting the mysteel pillars and expecting them to work wasn’t a reasonable assumption. Even if I managed to get them in the exact same formation, right down to the inch, there wasn’t the slightest chance of them activating once I fed them mana. Instead, I had to deep dive into their rune constructs to find the parts that governed their connections to each other and the areas each governed.

Also unfortunately, mysteel was far more difficult to modify than st...

Book 4, Chapter 14

I glanced around, curious to see if any other secret panels would open to reveal guardians that had long since lost any semblance of power. Whoever had been in charge of security must have decided that one was enough, or else the panels had malfunctioned in some way. It might be as simple as there not being enough mana to activate them, much like everything else down here.

It was honestly surprising that even this single door had held onto the flicker of mana needed to slide three feet ...

Book 4, Chapter 13

The cavern wasn’t natural, of that I was sure. It was another five hundred feet lower than the little pocket I’d claimed earlier, well below the sewer lines running under Derro. If Keeper’s theory was correct, it was part of the ancient machinery used to elevate the city from mundane to a magical paradise.

I doubted it had been like that, but what did I know? The only cities I’d ever seen with a subterranean mysteel infrastructure were ones that flew in the sky, and those weren�...

Book 4, Chapter 12

Senica and Juby followed me into the greenhouse. I’d explained what I wanted, and not only had my sister agreed to help, she’d volunteered Juby’s assistance as well. When he’d tried to protest, it had only taken a single look from her to silence him. Perhaps if our parents hadn’t been there to witness the conversation, forcing Juby to be on his best behavior, he might have fought harder.

Regardless, he’d agreed to help and it wasn’t like I was asking him to do it for free....

Book 4, Chapter 11

Unlike the old village, New Alkerist had only continued to grow since its founding a few years ago. I wasn’t entirely sure where all these people had come from, but the introduction of the teleportation platform network across the island had certainly encouraged traveling. With the knowledge of exactly how to ignite a mana core spreading and with the removal of the Wolf Pack agents scattered all over, just about every village was doing significantly better than it had been a decade ago.

Book 4, Chapter 10

Whatever faults she might have, Keeper was a thorough researcher. She’d pulled information from dozens of different sources, speculated on what hadn’t been written down, confirmed those speculations, and compiled everything into an entirely logical conclusion. I couldn’t find a single fault or unaccounted for variable in her chain of reasoning.

I just wished the entry point was anywhere else.

The Actalus family had no reasons to like me and many, many reasons to hate my guts...

Book 4, Chapter 9

There were three mages waiting for us at Derro’s platform, all of them with anxious looks on their faces. Zara froze for a second when she saw them, then asked, “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you, of course. Your father… he was not happy with your decision to leave…”

“I do not need his permission,” she snapped.

Before anyone else could say anything, I raised a hand and cut in, “I’m not terribly interested in this piece of drama. Zara, unless we...

Book 4, Chapter 8

When I’d first traveled to Derro, it was with the intention of breaking a cabal known as the Wolf Pack. They’d managed to set up a system where they were harvesting mana from tens of thousands of people all over the island, with agents installed in practically every village and town. Even Derro itself was using leech stones as currency, draining people of their mana just by handling them.

A significant portion of that had gone to their leader, Monarch, who was already several hundre...

Book 4, Chapter 7

I spent two weeks flying around the edges of the old Ralvost Empire placing scrying beacons anywhere and everywhere. Some might be found, but I went out of my way to make the objects they were attached to unobtrusive and to shield them from casual detection. If Ammun himself randomly stumbled across one, I doubted he’d be fooled, but I figured my efforts were too sophisticated for the rank-and-file shock troops marching through the countryside to see through.

I also made a point to in...

Book 4, Chapter 6

I’d stumbled upon lossless casting a few years ago when I’d encountered a flock of gigantic sapient birds. It hadn’t been a skill I’d needed in my old life, but now that I was living in a world without ambient mana, it was perhaps the greatest technique in my repertoire. Unfortunately, I’d struggled to bring my skill with it up to the level needed to use it in conjunction with master-tier spells.

Even now, after more than three years of practice, the best I was able to do was ...

Book 4, Chapter 5

Baviru sat in one of the dozen stone petitioner’s chairs I’d shaped for the meeting hall I’d built in their administration building while I leaned against the table where the town’s leadership would be seated.

“Alright,” I said. “I want you to walk me through everything that happened. Just start at the beginning.”

“The beginning,” Baviru muttered, more to himself than me. He heaved a sigh and said, “I suppose the beginning was when a Lightbearer showed up out...

Book 4, Chapter 4

Curious apprentices had asked me many, many times over the years what it felt like to be bonded to a genius loci. Place spirits, as they were sometimes called, encompassed so much more than the human range of senses, and connecting to one on a profound level had a tendency to fundamentally alter how we viewed the world.

I’d never come up with a satisfactory answer. I could talk about the expanded sensory information, how it dwarfed even master-tier divinations in terms of processing i...

Book 4, Chapter 3

If anything, the refugees were understating the precariousness of their position. It had taken me a few hours to look everything over, but by my rough count, they had close to five hundred people with them. That number included a hundred or so children who would not be able to contribute meaningfully to the construction of their new home.

Even with the best help magic could offer, they’d need a few months before their first harvest. In the meantime, they were living off what little st...

Book 4, Chapter 2

In the worst-case scenario, Ammun’s hunters finally caught up with me and came in numbers. Even if they were all stage fours, I still wasn’t worried about them actually killing me, but the fact that they’d found my family’s home was a different matter.

“What are they doing?” Father asked, rising to his feet and crossing the room to reach the farmer.

“They haven’t attacked yet. I saw them teleport in and ran to tell you right away.”

“So they’re still in ...

Book 4, Chapter 1

For two years, I’d devoted practically every waking moment to a singular goal. I’d make compromises, I’d sold my skills, and I’d begged favors to keep the mana I needed coming in. I’d sacrificed time with my family and secluded myself away to stay focused. And now, finally, I was ready to reap the rewards of that dedication.

I stood in the middle of a forest, in a clearing that had been made when a local druid had decided to relocate his home, treehouse and supporting trees bo...

Keiran, Book 4- The Broken Night

The man who broke the world has risen back out of the pages of history, and Keiran is the only one who can stop him from making things even worse.

Two years ago, in the process of determining exactly how to fix Manoch’s world core and restore mana to the planet, Keiran accidentally awakened the lich lord, Ammun Nescect. Now his former apprentice, an archmage in his own right, stands between Keiran and his goals of tearing down the tower roo...

Book 3, Chapter 80

Author's Note: Book 4 will begin tomorrow. 7/week updates will continue until August 23rd when book 3 reaches the end on Royal Road.

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For three days, I’d been overseeing the migration of Sanctuary’s population to their new town. I’d helped put up homes for the farmers fast and cast spells to prepare their fields for planting. I’d even transmuted the soil to match some of the samples I’d taken from other lands where things seemed to grow better.

Book 3, Chapter 79

I didn’t hesitate to send out a dozen more phantasmal swords from my cloak. They wouldn’t be very effective against a mage’s shadow, but they would do something. If it didn’t dodge out of the way, it’d be taking damage. If it did, it’d give me the time I needed.

Unsurprisingly, an insubstantial body not possessing things such as bones or joints was extremely flexible. The swords pin-cushioned the wall around Ammun’s shadow, but it deftly twisted itself around to avoid each...

Book 3, Chapter 78

Our new arena favored Ammun. While I could process the mana here, I couldn’t do it nearly as efficiently as he could. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he had an unlimited amount of mana, because even though a lich naturally drew it in, it still took time to trickle into his withered, dead mana core. But for the few minutes he’d been here, actively working on increasing his reserves, I was expecting a mage duel of master-tier spells.

Any spell we threw would have to be castable insta...

Book 3, Chapter 77

The reaction was immediate and violent. Ammun whipped both hands straight up and hurled mana out in a tightly controlled burst. Telekinetic force ripped down the hallway, hitting me and everyone else nearby in an ingenious, albeit expensive, attack.

Most shield wards, mine included, handled kinetic force by redirecting it, but if there was too much, it could also shove me off to one side. If I was pinned against a solid surface by it, the shield ward would hold steady until it ran out o...

Book 3, Chapter 76

“I can assure you, you’ve missed a lot while you were sleeping,” I told Ammun. “And I’m not even close to the age this body appears.”

That wasn’t even a lie. I just didn’t clarify and tell him that I was less than half my apparent age. Hopefully he’d think I was significantly older, but it probably wouldn’t make a difference anyway. I might be at stage six to casual observation; it was impossible to confirm I didn’t have a demesne while I was in the middle of Ammun...

Book 3, Chapter 75

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

The door didn’t swing open so much as it just vanished on the spot, either teleported away or disintegrated; I wasn’t sure which. We peered inside to see an enormous ...

Book 3, Chapter 74

I stepped off the teleportation platform and unleashed a spell through my staff. The dozen or so Breakers guarding it all crumpled to the floor, their shield wards overwhelmed and their minds battered into submission by pure pain. Their brief screams were a chorus to announce my arrival.

At the far end of the hall, Averin and his co-conspirators jerked upright from their work and stared at me with wide eyes. Between us stood a few dozen Breakers, surprised but already reacting to my una...

Book 3, Chapter 73

There were six people meeting at one of the safehouses I’d put surveillance enchantments in. One of them was Averin, and another was the man who’d introduced himself as Seven. Without the mask on, it was easy to see the familial relation between himself and the former matriarch of House Adylen. There was a story there, but I suspected I’d never know it. It was probably just typical greed and betrayal, anyway.

I didn’t recognize the other four, but I was careful to note their fac...

Book 3, Chapter 72

It took a week for my scrying mirror to let me know someone was trying to reach me. I’d expected them to try to drag me in much sooner, but apparently, I’d underestimated the Breakers of Chains. When I activated the mirror, it wasn’t Averin on the other side – yet another surprise.

“And who’s this? Another dark child?” The woman looking at me sneered while she spoke. “No, not with skin like that. An outlander then?”

She was old, her face a mass of wrinkles and he...

Book 3, Chapter 71

Storage crystals and mana crystals had a lot of similarities in function, but diverged in construction principles. Mana crystals were, for lack of a better word, a more intimate creation. At the end of the day, a mage who wanted a mana crystal had to build it themselves. It had to be tied to their core, and they were the only one who could use it. There were ways to subvert this, but it was practically never worth the effort.

Mana crystals had a delicate construction, almost like weavin...

Book 3, Chapter 70

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

Scrying spells that were hidden from casual observation were harder to pull off. Ones that would detect mana were costly. Ge...

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...

Book 3, Chapter 68

If I’d let only gravity take me, it would have taken me close to half an hour just to reach ground level after jumping off the top of the Sanctum of Light. Speeding it up with a flight spell got me there in about half the time, but I still had a long, long way to go. The true size of the tower defied comprehension, even just the portion that was visible.  It was one of those things that a person could know, rationally, could see the numbers and claim they understood, but never truly gr...