Chương 126: One step at a time

Cal sat on the edge of his bed basking in the morning light, feeling the vast new reservoir of Mana inside him like a monument to potential. After resting for a while from the breakthrough, he closed his eyes and sank back into [Meditation]. His newly expanded Mana pool refilled with a speed that startled him. Healed Stamina channels allowed a flawless seal around his core, and combined with the quintupled Mana capacity it created an even higher pressure differential with the ambient Mana. Energy poured in.

The deep wellspring in his spirit filled rapidly, swallowing everything the currents offered. What had taken over half an hour of meditation at F-tier now took ten minutes for significantly more energy. Opening his eyes with his pool refilled, Cal called up the Spell he'd failed to cast. He recalled the memory of his first attempt: the dizzying collapse of the construct after just twenty-five runes, his Mana completely dry. Now, he had more than enough.

The new challenge was one of processing power, and whether his mind could bear the cumulative cognitive load of holding all one-hundred-seven runes stable. It was an order of magnitude beyond anything he'd attempted before, but considering what he knew about his mental Impartment and how it bolstered his rune capacity... he thought he had a chance. Sitting with his palms resting on his knees, he began. The first fifty runes came easily.

He drew them from memory, each one taking a fragment of his attention and holding itself with minimal upkeep, requiring only occasional glances to maintain stability once set. His Mana reserves dropped steadily but without urgency. The next thirty changed the game. Each new rune past fifty added compounding difficulty to the construct. The attention cost per rune climbed from a sliver to a fraction, and from a fraction to a noticeable draw.

By rune sixty-five, he was actively having to run maintenance on runes that had already been cast, and each new addition forced him to briefly reinforce two or three older runes. The magic had begun drifting at the periphery of his workspace, shapes going fuzzy and edges softening. He soon made it to rune seventy. Seventy-five. Eighty.

The pressure behind his eyes graduated from a dull ache to genuine pain, each new glyph requiring a focused burst of Intent to lock it into position while simultaneously juggling the wobbling architecture of everything that preceded it. He felt his mind filling up. The mental capacity that had always seemed limitless was developing borders, the first sensation of cognitive congestion he'd ever experienced with spellcasting. Pushing through, he persevered to ninety runes. Ninety-five.

The pain began to throb, and a spike stabbed behind his left eye. He narrowed his concentration to a keen point as that eye started to tear up. Each rune placement required him to hold the entire unsteady construction together through intense effort. Yet the structure felt precariously balanced, like a house of cards in a breeze, each addition threatening to topple the ones beneath it. Sweat ran down his temples. One hundred. One-oh-one.

The final seven demanded excruciating care, each glyph locked in with an application of Intent so precise it left no margin for error. His entire mind was engaged, every cognitive resource allocated, the pain red-hot needles behind his eye that he refused to acknowledge. Finally, he locked the last rune into place. The construct shone magnificently in the air before him, all one-hundred and seven runes burning with blue-white light.

The architecture was enormous, far larger and more complex than anything he'd ever assembled, an arcane landscape of interlocking glyphs buzzing with latent energy. And it just… kept on buzzing. Cal frowned. What am I missing? He recognized that while he had been able to observe and record every external action that went into the spellcrafting, he certainly had no true understanding of what he was doing. Luckily, the thing hadn't blown up in his face. Perhaps some more caution in the future was advisable…

but for now, he had to figure this out. Needed to figure this out. Slapping a palm to his forehead, he realized the most obvious thing to try.

"It probably needs a destination, dummy. Let's try… the boulder clearing." His words filled the bedroom, yet the Spell remained inert. Next, he tried articulating the words in his mind, each syllable shaped with deliberate Intent. Still nothing. The construct waited, patient and indifferent, as it continued to pull on his Mana. Instinct took over.

He reached into his mind and pulled up a vivid image of the scorched clearing southwest of the dungeon, with the charred and glassed boulders where Selara had transformed, the shattered treeline, and the earth torn by mortal combat. He saturated the image with his desire to be there and pushed it into the waiting construct. His Mana lurched. Through his connection to the Spell, Cal felt it act. His awareness was suddenly and inexplicably in two places at once.

The cool morning air of his bedroom on his skin, and simultaneously, the cold atmosphere of the clearing miles away. The Spell had somehow forged an instantaneous mental connection between two distant points in space, and with it came an intuitive awareness that he could adjust the far end's location within a small area. A safety mechanism, he guessed, preventing portals from opening inside solid objects. Or people. Oof… that's a scary thought. This feels like it could be a terrifying assassination technique.

With the link established and his selection made, the Spell began to pull. He felt the distance between the two locations strain against itself. The intervening space seemed to fold, like a sheet of paper being creased down the middle and compressed until the two sides touched. The sensation was nauseating and exhilarating all at once, a visceral sensation of physics being violated as the two endpoints were forced into contact through sheer magical might. A vertical seam split the air before him.

Its edges danced with chromatic aberrations and bands of displaced color. Through the widening aperture, Cal saw charred debris and morning sky. The air pressure differential created a soft whoosh as the atmospheres of two locations sought equilibrium. The Mana cost increased to a steady drain flowing from his core to sustain the connection. Significant, but against his E-tier reserves, manageable for a time.

[New Spell Gained: Portal (D) - Novice] [Your proficiency with Rune Scribing (E) has increased to Practiced] D-tier? What the ham? Shaking his head, Cal decided to deal with the implications of that later, continuing to stare at the portal for a long moment. A gateway to anywhere he could picture. It was… surreal. Even after all he had been through, all he had done and achieved and seen since coming to Veraxus—none of it compared to the awe of this moment. The power he had just wrought.

The doors it would open for him. He giggled at the pun, a touch giddy with his success, before sobering up with the next thought. The doors it could open for him. He reached for his pack. He still had work to do before that. Consuming two F-tier Mana potions brought his reserves back to barely half. The lower tier potions felt thin now, but he was just glad they worked at all. Mana was still Mana. He stored the empty vials, shouldered his pack and spear, and stepped through.

The clearing was almost exactly as they had left it. Then the stench reached him, sweet and cloying. The unmistakable beginnings of decomposition, muted by the cold air but still present. Inescapable. Nausea rose in his stomach, and he pinched his fingers over his nose. Unsurprisingly, the human bodies were untouched. They lay where they had fallen, scattered across the clearing in the grip of their final moments. No scavengers or disturbances of any kind. Not in a D-tier's territory. Except… the drake was gone.

Cal knit his brow as he took in the empty patch of scorched earth where the huge carcass should have been, or at least some sign of it. The beast had simply vanished, as if plucked clean out of the world. Macarious, probably. Or Selara or Aurelian twisting his arm to bring them back. He shook his head, realizing that he might not have as much time as he thought with the body missing. A hint of the red drake's presence would have kept every creature for miles at bay.

Luckily even with the beast gone nothing had been brave enough to come sniffing around. Yet. But that wouldn't last. The clock was ticking, and whatever moved in to fill the ecological vacuum left by that monster was likely nothing Cal wanted to meet. Not this deep in the forest and near the dungeon. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Working quickly, he moved from one body to the next in a grim harvest under the lightening sky.

He did his best to be respectful as he gathered plate armor, a powerful bow, coin purses and more. The relics of lives cut short. When he was finished, he handled each body with care, lifting and carrying them one at a time to a small depression in the boulder field. He laid them in a line. Kamari. Amina. Bryon. Jorik. Senna. Side by side, arranged as best he could, faces toward the sky. Cillian's body lay crumpled where Selara had dropped him. The forest could have it.

Cal stood at the head of the line and looked at each of them in turn, remembering who they had been. He vowed to honor their legacy and their bravery. Their sacrifice. He didn't have the words to do more than that. All he had was fire, and that would have to be enough. Before he began, he addressed a practical problem. The smell was already thick, and what was coming would be far worse.

He drew on the spellwork for [Light Orb], deciding to try a simple Spell modification that replaced the light rune with an air rune. Activating it near his head, he invested a modest charge of Mana into the construct and released it. The result was a sustained, omnidirectional current of clean air radiating outward from the magic that immediately pushed back the smell of death. [New Spell Gained: Air Orb (E) - Novice] Then he began the real work.

[Conjure Flame] was enough to light a campfire—or in rare circumstances fry the mouth of a snake—but it wasn't enough for this. Cal needed intense heat. He needed to build something new. He started with a [Control] rune, then layered in a [Project] rune for directional emission. Next, instead of the single [Ignis] and [Ventus] glyphs of the cantrip, he doubled them, stacking two of each rune in parallel within the construct. His first deliberate test of rune multiplication.

He'd observed duplicated rune types in Angelika's Spells, and assumed that stacking identical runes should amplify the associated effect. Paying careful attention to positioning, he placed the two [Ventus] runes in a line between his casting position and the target area, with the two [Ignis] runes set beyond them, closer to the bodies.

The idea was directional flow: his Intent would project through the air runes toward the fire runes, creating a pipeline of accelerating airflow that fed and carried the flame in the direction he intended. He added a [Condense] rune on the far end of the fire side to tighten the output into a concentrated cone rather than allowing the effect to disperse. Here goes nothing. He ignited the new Spell. The Mana draw hit harder than expected, noticeably heavier than a simple linear increase should have been.

But the effect was undeniable. A directed torrent of wind-fed flame roared from his outstretched hands and engulfed the line of bodies with searing intensity. The heat generated was enormous, forcing him to step back before he adjusted his Intent to exclude himself from the Spell's nearby area of effect, although he could still feel the heat where it burned. The fire roiled yellow at its core, orange at the edges, and slowly consumed everything it touched.

[New Spell Gained: Immolation (E) - Novice] [Your proficiency with Spell Crafting (E) has increased to Practiced] The analytical part of his mind cataloged the results, while he struggled with the macabre sight before him. The doubled runes produced meaningful gains, certainly, more heat and intensity of magic. But the Mana expenditure had scaled disproportionately. Roughly three times the cost for perhaps twice the output. Diminishing returns on multiplication, it seemed. At least with how he'd done it.

And his spatial arrangement, the Ventus-to-Ignis pipeline, helped with directionality, making channeling the airflow to feed the flame in a specific direction simple and effective. All worth knowing. Something to build on in the future. He sustained the Spell and tried to focus on what he had learned while the fire did its work.

One by one, the people who had died in an ambush meant for Selara and Cal were returned to the elements, their physical forms rendered to ash and heat and rising smoke that climbed into the air and was pushed away by his orb. Cal stood and watched somberly. The fire burned, and he maintained it until there was nothing left but blackened ground and the last dregs of his Mana. He stepped back through the portal with the salvaged gear bundled in his arms.

Releasing the [Portal], he watched the hole in the world seal itself shut and felt the folded space extend to its natural state, leaving nothing but the bedroom. He arranged the salvaged equipment against the far wall in a solemn pile, a witness to the adventurers who had carried it. Holding the Spells had consumed the last of his Mana reserves and he needed to resupply. He sat on the bed, closed his eyes, and sank back into [Meditation].

As he settled into concentration, a slow certainty took hold beneath his thoughts. It had been there since the breakthrough trial ended, waiting patiently for this moment. One more portal needed to be attempted. It was a long shot, but he had to try. When his Mana was full, he raised his hands and began again, buoyed by the fresh memory of success. He moved faster this time, forcing the runes into place with a confidence born of familiarity. The first fifty glyphs snapped into the construct cleanly.

But the haste introduced errors—tiny misalignments and fluctuations in power that he didn't notice at first, compounding with each addition. Past rune ninety, the entire structure began to shudder violently. He felt a critical connection snap. The headache behind his eyes lanced his mind with pain, and the half-formed Spell imploded into a shower of inert blue sparks that winked out before they hit the floor. The wasted Mana left his core feeling hollow. After another round of meditation, he went again.

It was still incredibly difficult, but he was careful to take his time, not wanting to endure another backlash from failure. The headache returned, and he rode it without flinching. The completed construct materialized, floating and ready. Waiting. Cal closed his eyes and reached deep into [Perfect Memory], drawing out the most sacred place he had. It started with a living room; small by some standards.

A worn leather couch with a tear in the left cushion, always covered by a throw pillow with an embroidered elk on it that they'd picked up on a road trip through Montana. A cluttered coffee table with soccer tournament brackets spread across one half, dog-eared fantasy novels stacked on the other, maybe a half-empty glass of something that was probably flat ginger ale.

The exact color of late-morning sunlight through east-facing windows, illuminating rectangles on hardwood floors that needed refinishing but never quite made it to the top of the priority list. The familiar creak of the third step on the staircase, and the sound of the dishwasher running. The smell of coffee from the kitchen. Two sugars and a touch of cream. A teenage girl, exasperated and imperious:"Jack, I swear, if you don't give me the remote…"

"I was here first! There's literally another TV downstairs, Katie." Green eyes in the kitchen doorway, tilting on a head with the particular expression that said you're going to mediate this, right? Cal pushed that destination into the Spell. Every ounce of Intent he possessed, every drop of willpower and emotion at his disposal burned with an unshakable conviction that this place existed. That it was real, and he belonged there.

That the distance between this bedroom and that living room was just space, and folding space was what portals were for. He fed it all into the construct. The spellwork strained. The Mana drain spiked as he felt the magic reach, a hundred and seven runes of coordinated purpose straining outward, searching, probing for the connection point that Cal's Intent demanded they find. Yet they found nothing. The construct hung in the air, flawless and stable and utterly inert.

A loaded weapon aimed at a target it couldn't find. Cal pushed harder. His temples throbbed. Sweat ran down his forehead and dripped from his jaw. He poured more Mana, more Intent, more of himself into the construct, and it accepted everything readily, only to return nothing. The Spell held. It simply had nowhere to go. His reserves dropped to a quarter. Then a tenth. The Mana eventually fizzled and died.

The runes winked out one by one, dominoing from the outermost ring inward like lights going dark in an empty building, until nothing remained. Cal entered [Meditation] again. Refilled his pool. Opened his eyes. He cast faster this time, more precise even in his desperation. The runes reformed, and Cal pushed the image once again, saturated with his burning Intent. Nothing. Again. Refill. Cast. Push. Nothing. The cycles blurred together, and each casting drained him to fumes. Meditation restored him.

His failures drove him to try again, always adjusting his approach. The backyard in summer. The driveway in rain. Katie's bedroom with its soccer trophies and pink linens. Jack's room and its minefield of Legos. His rocker in the sunroom out back, where he and Evelynn would sometimes share coffee before the kids woke up. He pushed until his head split with pain and his vision swam and blood poured down his nose.

His hands shook against the air where the portal should have been, trying to part the space with his own fingers. He persevered until he experienced etheric cavitation for the second time, and his Mana became unreliable. Cal sat in silence at the end, hands raised, staring at the empty air where his long-shot hope had winked out. Slumping his shoulders slightly, he brought his hands down to rest on his knees and thought of his son.

Jack, twelve years old, sitting hunched over the kitchen table with a length of cord and a Boy Scout handbook open to the chapter on knots. His face red with frustration. Glasses pushed above his forehead because they kept sliding down when he frantically looked at the book and then back at the cord. He had been at it for over thirty minutes, and each attempt had collapsed into a tangle of frustrated loops. He yanked the cord apart for the dozenth time and shoved the handbook away.

"This is stupid! It doesn't work!" Cal had pulled up a chair and picked up the cord. Hadn't said anything at first, just worked the length slowly through the loops and twists. Jack watched skeptically, like a boy who was certain the universe had rigged the game against him.

"The knot doesn't care how fast you tie it, bud. It only cares that you get each step right and make it to the end." Jack had rolled his eyes and snatched the cord back, shoving his glasses down onto his nose. Picking the cord up he tried again, just as forcefully as before. Cal grabbed his hands, stopping him, and looked him in the eye.

"Slow down, son. One step at a time." Cal stared at the empty air where the runes had been. The irony wasn't lost on him. He stood and slowly crossed to the window. Deadfall sprawled below in the light of highsun. Woven-root rooftops and cobbled streets. Adventurers and delvers, nobles and legionaries, and everything in between. The large trees of the Virethane pressed in from all around, but for once didn't seem so oppressive. The world had been opened to him.

And out there, beyond the forest—beyond the very horizon—the Sovereign Path stretched on. And at its terminus, the power to see his family again. One step at a time.