Chương 47: 47 loop 2, part 1

I woke up. Damnit. I was groggy, my head pounding, and then I remembered. I opened my eyes, braced for the dragon. Instead, I got a white ceiling and the smell of antiseptic. It was the infirmary, somehow. My hands went over my body, hunting for cuts and nicks and tears—some sign of the withered husk the dragon's breath should have left behind. Nothing. My body was fine, mostly. I'd shoved Finn clear of a death and hadn't expected to wake up at all… So what had happened?

I could have sworn the part of the school where the infirmary was had been destroyed. But here I was, and everything seemed intact. Despite no signs of physical damage, my body felt like it had been wrung out and hung up to dry. And under that was an achy tiredness that seeped into my soul—even more so than my general tiredness. I flexed my fingers. They worked, but they were slower than normal. My tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth.

Whatever had happened to me, it had taken the long way out and charged me for the trip. Underneath the general ache, something else clawed for room. A flash of memory hit me. Thane came apart in the dragon's breath, slow and patient, his wand rolling out of an open hand and clicking against the floor. He'd been the one who made me meditate that first time. I shoved the image down. It didn't go far. To find out how badly I had ruined myself, I pulled up my HUD.

It appeared in a kaleidoscope of colors—truly an assault on my senses as the display settled into place. [STATUS: LAZLO YARROW] Second Year, MIRKS Mana: 348/520 (172 reserved) Mana Regen: 25% per hour (while sleeping), 3% at all times Enchantment --- Level 49 Alteration --- Level 49 Soul Magic --- Level 24 Manifestation --- Level 24 Prestiges: 10 [Efficiency I] -5% mana cost on spells and enchantments. [Mana Pool III] +220 mana [Mana Flow I] +5% mana regeneration during rest or meditation.

[Feedback Loop — Passive] When you alter an active spell, recover 10% of the original spell's mana cost. [Ambient Draw I] Passively absorb ambient mana, maximum 3% per hour. [Recursion I] Each successive cast from the same school within 3 seconds costs 5% less. Floor: 50% of base cost. [Cascade I] After casting the same spell 3 times in quick succession, the fourth costs 25% less. [Dual Weaving] Cast any two spells simultaneously. Active effects: [Soul Tether] Mana reserved. -25% maximum mana. Can't be dispelled.

[Soul Tether] Mana reserved. -8% maximum mana. Can't be dispelled. [Soul Sickness I] Your soul is wounded. Family Trait: [Soul Sense] Subconscious Soul awareness; allows user to interact with and detect Souls. Soul Sickness? What the fuck was that? I'd add it to the list of things I'd deal with after a nap. Whatever was happening could wait. I just needed a real break. I closed my eyes. My body sank into the thin mattress like it meant to keep going straight through. Sleep was right there, close enough to touch.

And then the breath was coming down again. The dark fire pooling behind teeth the size of doors, and I couldn't get my legs to move. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Get out of my head. My eyes snapped open. So much for the break. I'd died again. The breath had come down, and somehow I was back at the beginning of the week. Except instead of waking up in front of Finn at breakfast, I was in the infirmary. With my levels rolled back. Again. Great. Fantastic, wonderful. Love that for me. I let out a frustrated sigh.

Oh, fuck me. I was going to have to meditate again, too. I let my head drop back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling tiles until they stopped doubling. But once I was done milking my invisible injuries, I had the realization I should have had the second I saw my stats. Time had reset. Again. The first time this had happened, I had figured it was time travel. Which was the coolest fucking thing that ever happened to me. But I didn't think that hard about it.

It wasn't worth losing sleep over or spending time on, because… well, fuck. Time travel. But this was twice now. Twice now, I had gone back to the same fucking Monday. At least this time, it had the courtesy to start me out somewhere different—you know, for variety. Last time, it'd been breakfast, in front of Finn. This time, it was an infirmary cot. I really needed to figure out when I was, exactly. But it was clear I had missed breakfast. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve.

Read this novel on Royal Road. That was the problem. How does a one-time thing happen twice? Time travel, the way I theoretically understood it, was a once in a life kind of thing. You could reset time back to a point, and you'd get a redo. Go back again, though, and things started getting a little wibbly-wobbly. But this wasn't a one-time thing. I had gone back once, lived the whole miserable week, died, and gone back again. Roughly the same starting line. Roughly. But it wasn't a line at all, really.

A line had an end. This just bent around again and again, start to finish, like some awful enchanted track with no way off the loop. Huh. I liked the sound of that. A time loop. A loop I could be exactly as lazy in as I wanted. I turned the words over and grinned. There was a better name in there somewhere. So I was in a loop. Great, fine, awesome, cool. But where had it come from? The obvious answer was my uncle, Corwen.

The Keeper had told me my uncle went down to the dungeon every time he visited and cast something huge. A spell that shook the walls. And the last time he'd cast it, it had cost him nearly double what it usually did. And then he'd fallen into a coma. And I had just tethered his mana to mine. But we'd reset, so maybe the fact that I'd cast—I trailed off as I saw two golden tethers attached to my soul. Fuck. I'd been so excited at the prospect of a golem that I hadn't stopped to think through the consequences.

Oh my God, did I kill my uncle? I nearly fell out of bed in a panic. Oh, wait. The tether was still there. And it wasn't erratic or anything. At least, not yet. That meant I probably had a little bit of time before the Froll started beating on my uncle. Okay. Back up a few steps, Laz, and think it through. So, the tether ran mana between connected souls. I'd tied mine to his, and now Flag's to mine. So when he'd cast his big, stupid spell, it didn't stop at him. Which meant time travel was connected to souls.

It ran down our tether and cast on me, too. And cast on Flag. So Flag was here with me? The Keeper said it had likely cost him double what it normally did, and even she couldn't explain it. Did that mean that when he'd cast it with Flag connected, it had cost triple? If it did, my uncle's mana channels would have melted completely. Right? It was likely my uncle hadn't done this on purpose. He didn't know I was connected to him when he'd cast the spell. So maybe the spell reset to the moment before it was cast.

I guess that made sense. Something about the whole situation still bothered me, but I needed to move forward. I'd been trying to figure out why my uncle had been acting so odd the first time through. But if he'd been casting this spell on purpose, then he had been looping through this week, right? Probably a lot. Though there was no way for me to tell how many times. It explained the ugly stuff, too. He'd taken Vex's head off in the Archives without even flinching, and that had bothered me seven ways to Sunday.

It also explained why he didn't just do something about Kalin. Because what if he had? What if my Monday was his fifteenth time through the loop, and no matter what he tried, the dragon still attacked? And then it hit me. The actual size of what I was dealing with. If I was in a time loop, then whatever I did, however the week went, everything reset.

Which meant the thing I'd been treating as a curse for the last two minutes—if you turned it sideways and squinted at it—was the single greatest thing that had ever happened to anyone ever. Especially to someone like me. I had time. For the first time in my life, I had all of it. An infinite, bottomless supply of the one resource you could never have enough of. Every test I'd ever not crammed for, every deadline I'd ever slept through… all of it was negotiable now.

I could fail upward forever, and the universe would tuck me back into bed and pretend it never saw me fall. I laughed. I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe. This had to be a dream, surely. I got to redo this week as many times as I wanted, and every time things went wrong, I'd restart with no consequences. Well, the soul sickness sounded a little scary, but besides that, nothing mattered. Fail the test? I'd get to retake it the next time through knowing the answers.

Spend a whole day napping on the Green doing absolutely nothing? Who cared? Everybody would forget it. Burn through all my mana, who cared? Say something stupid to Finn or Thane or Sarah I couldn't take back? They'd forget it by Monday. Kalin summons Eirkedross? Reset and try again. Nothing mattered anymore. I never even had to get out of bed ever again if I didn't want to. And then there were my levels. How the fuck did I luck into this?

I was just a few short casts away from leveling up all of my levels and getting a passive. Every single loop. I laughed again. Couldn't help it. How was this real? It felt like I'd broken the universe, and instead of getting slapped down for it, I was being lauded as a king. The grin slipped. Frost went face-first into the grass and didn't get up. Bain disappeared under a piece of ceiling the size of a cart. Both of them gone, and here I was doing arithmetic about my mana pool. I told the images to wait their turn.

There'd be time to fall apart later. I tried to get back to my line of thought: In just two loops, my mana had almost doubled, even with the soul tethers. So what about ten loops? Or twenty? A hundred? How much mana would I be sitting on by then? I couldn't help it. I was grinning at the infirmary ceiling like an idiot. The laziest person at MIRKS had just been handed unlimited do-overs. And then my brain, which had been walking on cloud nine, decided to ruin things. I had two tethers attached.

The big one was obviously Corwen. And then the smaller one was Flag. Which got me thinking. If 25 percent was the cost for Corwen, and 8 percent was the cost for Flag, then surely the cost to bring Flag back was nowhere near as bad as mine. Right? It had to be. But that wasn't what mattered. I was just doing mana math so I could avoid thinking about tougher things. I forced myself to reconsider. Flag was tethered. I sat up too fast, head swimming, and didn't care, because— Flag remembered. He had to.

He was tethered to the chain, same as me. That meant the spell had worked on him, which meant he remembered being my golem. Somewhere right now, in Thane's classroom, was a flagstone that remembered what it was like to walk. Oh, I wasn't going to be alone this time. I mean, sure, Flag wasn't human. But he was fun to talk to, and a genuinely curious being, which was what I liked about him. Okay. New plan. I would go find Flag, and then figure out the golem thing.

I shoved my blanket off and swung my legs over the side of the cot, and the whole room tilted. And I fell forward. I waited a moment for the world to stop spinning. Maybe I needed another nap. My legs had opinions about being asked to work. I decided to be nice and cast [Stride]. The air was cold through my socks. Someone had taken my boots. Interesting. Not interesting enough to solve right now. And definitely not as enticing as a nap. But there'd be time for a nap once I had Flag. And my golems.

If I had my way, pretty soon I'd never had to put effort in again. I got up and started moving. Hit the door at a slow float. A slow but hurried one, at least for me. I shoved it open and ran straight into something solid and sturdy. We both went down. I hit the floor on my back, and somebody let out a familiar yelp of surprise. I blinked up at the ceiling. A head leaned into view over me. Blond and worried. And very much not dead.

"Laz," Finn said.

"You're awake?"