Book 4 Chapter 40: Developmental Hitches

++The question with any given feat of magic is not whether it can be done, but whether the cost of doing it is small enough to pay. I firmly believe that, given sufficient mana and a few hours to work out some sums, I could alter the very tilt of our galaxy. But there are more sensible uses of power.++

- Quote attributed to Aadan Farah, 1836 A.E.

Months passed. Long, productive months, and they were transformative. For both me and my work.

They began with me taking a tissue sample from Exyria and getting to work on her new body, something which posed its own obstacles compared to working my own, more familiar flesh. I had already begun perfecting Qaigor’s and was confident that my brother would have his body ready soon, but Exyria’s was somehow harder. Perhaps her old age had left the sample less effective, less useful in guiding my efforts?

Alternatively, she may have simply been harder to prepare a body for due to being totally unrelated to me by blood.

In any case, there is a vast gulf between hard and impossible, and then another one between seemingly impossible, the sort of problem that generations of normal people might give up on, and actually impossible, the sort of problem that tends to vanish once a genius of my magnitude focuses any great effort upon fixing it.

I was making steady progress.

And in other fields too, namely raw power. My magic was one thing—exceeding thirty five thousand vis at maximum output, now putting me proudly north of half Aravon Voret’s own strength—but my physical body was the true difference.

It simply flew up in power, almost without effort. An idle hour of exercise each day and I would be confident of noticing the difference in strength every other week.

I could, without much effort, now run faster than a horse. With a bit of exertion, I could perform a standing leap that took me a good eight feet vertically.

I could not avoid bullets, not even remotely. I thought I saw the flitting movement of pistol shots in flight, slow ones at least, but only as brief flashes in the air, and never clearly or quickly enough that I could actually take any significant movement in response to them before they would cross the dozens of yards typically needed to strike a target. I could probably avoid them from farther than that, but would most certainly not be seeing the projectiles at such range.

This was not so surprising of course. There were warriors in the world who could avoid gunfire, but rather paradoxically they were essentially all durable enough not to need to. It took about twenty joules per square centimetre for a bullet to defeat human skin. I would need to be a good few hundred times stronger before machine gun rounds flattened against my epidermis, but watching pistol shots bounce off me was hopefully an experience I could look forward to within the year.

For now, I settled for testing myself against more limited means of harm. Shards of glass simply did not cut me anymore, they shattered or snapped, or even pulverised, long before breaking my skin. High falls could threaten me, but not until I had dropped dozens of feet at least, and if I was able to land on my feet and absorb the impact with my knees I could actually withstand a drop of over a hundred feet unimpeded.

Sethira bet me that I could not withstand a normal, strong man swinging a sledgehammer into my face, and I won that bet without so much as a concussion.

My nose did bleed, though. A bit.

My magical studies were not forgotten, despite this. Putting aside my gradual process on the creation of new bodies, I was also working on expanding my general spellcasting abilities.

Flight was long behind me. Teleportation, sadly, was long ahead of me—I did think I could crack it in a single mortal lifetime, but not for at least another few years. That left me to consider a new milestone I ought to be focusing on.

I ended up settling on a meta-magical effect, something to enhance my existing spells rather than an altogether new ability.

Enchantment was the act of imbuing permanent magical effects into a physical object, and was very useful for the ability to augment a magician’s natural fighting powers by giving them readily available magical tools or effects that did not exhaust their own mana or eat into their natural output. It was possible to hold a spell together for a few moments longer than it would normally last without enchantment, but always an uphill battle.

That was where the middle-ground came. An extended effort could let a spell be cast that would linger, while having its matrix remain partly open and connected to the will of its caster. This allowed the spell to react to said will and make adjustments on the fly, while not demanding the long hours and exhaustion required to form an enchantment. It would still fade, eventually, but rarely in less than an hour or two. An especially skilled practitioner might make them last for over a day.

As Lord Dread, I could conjure a permanent effect that would linger for weeks on end. This was generally not a problem at the time, but my life as Isabel Vornholt had brought with it new complications. A fireball, for instance, that lingered around me ready to rush at an enemy on command would still be a fireball when not active. So much as nudging the volatile spell matrix would result in it detonating prematurely.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

That was not as much of a problem for a fifteen-foot-tall immortal lich as it was for a five-foot-ten lady of luxury, who had not yet revealed to the world that she treated molten lead the way most did scalding coffee. It meant that the challenge of perfecting my sustained magic was going to be considerable.

And very interesting.

I started with the basics, working on my ability to overlay and separate parts of a spell matrix to feed each other. Similar to building up a tower of blocks, there were ways of organising magic that were just more or less innately stable than others. Conditioning my magic into the more stable shapes was my first task.

I managed it in less than five minutes.

There were other hurdles; managing to juggle the modified spell matrix while keeping it connected to my will, closing up the vulnerability that left for any potential illusion attacks, stabilising my magic, of course, to prevent premature detonations, the works. These were all far more varied and difficult than my previous step. It took me only an hour to intuit them.

Once I was done, I checked my work. Then I checked it again. Then I headed outside and cast a few magic missiles augmented with fire magic—fireballs—to hover around me. I made them circle me with an idle thought, like moons orbiting a planet, and saw them loop around and drift seamlessly and easily.

And I realised that Isabel Vornholt’s talent, undamaged as it was by the early mishaps of Dread’s, was greater than I had suspected.

I realised why I had underestimated myself quickly. In this new age, magic was made complicated by technology. Advancing material sciences and mundane physics meant that there was more to spellwork than just moving mana around. This, though, was a pure form of the arcane, not reliant on engineering or mathematics. This was raw magic.

And it reminded me of my place in the hierarchy of talent.

That spurred me on to make an attempt at cracking teleportation. Such magic was certainly beyond my practical use no matter what, Isabel Vornholt’s Vessel simply lacked the mana capacity to use it more than perhaps once a day, and only then by exhausting itself, but if I could crack the technical effort then it may save me time later on when I was more powerful, or else come in handy for an emergency.

Unfortunately, teleportation drew me back into the cold, frustrating realm of natural law.

In order to teleport, to truly change place without moving, I had to imprint my physical form upon a distant point in space and then forcibly assert it there. This was obviously easier said than done, particularly because the forces at play on this scale of reality were not even understood by modern Garamon.

It is possible, with extraordinary application of mana, to observe the very building-blocks of matter and energy, but to do so brings its own complications. Consider a photograph of a javelin in flight. A blurred image, showing a motion streak cutting across the paper, makes it clear that the javelin is moving at speed, and even indicates its direction and bearing. On the other hand, this blurring makes it near-impossible to pinpoint its exact location. Taking a different photograph, a totally clear one depicting the object suspended in the air without so much as a distortion, makes this position perfectly apparent, but denies the observer any data on how or where it is moving. One must choose between either position or velocity, and knowing more about one directly takes from knowledge about the other.

Now consider this principle, but narrowed down to focus upon every molecule of a whole body. This is why magicians who can teleport are rare in any era, and generally eager to do anything except teleport.

I did not understand the full extent of it just yet, I simply knew that time on the finest level is a thing of still frames and frozen moments. Perhaps a God could trivialise these limits. If they could, then I would one day as well. But for now I had to work around them.

The method most used for this workaround was by simply applying mana until the problem went away. In theory, this works for any magical issue. In practice running out of mana is always the concern, and if it is possible to find a more efficient way, it is always preferable. The magician who insulates his plasma torch with a vacuum barrier to keep it from convecting most of its heat away will generally defeat the magician who simply pumps more heat into their spell in the hopes of succeeding.

It was something to continue working on. Not that I had an over-abundance of time in need of killing, there were plenty of other things to apply myself to. Sethira—Sakhent—had a cult built up over many millennia, strong enough to survive a hundred generations without his presence.

That cult was spreading now, recruiting, slowly but surely, and placing itself carefully along the spine of Garamon in anticipation for when we would make our move. My own Institute was hopefully a step to replicating this with my own little army of magicians, but for now Sethira’s was still the most immediately useful we had.

I put resources into letting them recruit more easily, giving her an allowance of hard currency—my coffers were now big enough that I could move about rather large sums without it leaving a noticeable absence—to continue their work.

And all the while, as always, I was amassing yet more wealth. Slowly now, having gotten to the point where my business was struggling to explode further under its own weight, but surely. In ten years I had no doubt I would be the wealthiest person in Garamon.

My first hitch came months after I made my offer to Exyria, when I made an effort to purchase yet more land to further my expansions. It was Alira who brought the report to me, looking as irritated as I soon would be. Earl Elqarth was trying to buy the damned land out from under me for half again its value.

And he did not stop there.

Everywhere in Poloira there were still opportunities to do business, Elqarth’s hand was present. He was using his money like a battering ram, smashing it against mine. Wherever I bid on land, he bid twice, even three times as much.

I knew it was all useless to him. In the long-run he would be damaging himself and his fortune, but apparently it was more important to him, for now at least, that he stifle me.

Anger flared up and gnawed at me, but I carefully forced it down as I thought the problem through. With a more deep consideration I soon decided that this was not the disaster it originally seemed to be.

The lands I already owned were still mine, he would not simply be seizing them from me. And he was not intelligent enough to do anything truly threatening with what he was gaining here. My business would continue to more than pay for itself, all this meant was a brief window where I would not be seeing it grow quite as fast.

Annoying, and inconvenient, and not tolerable. Not now of all times.

Because with my Institute finally up and running, I needed all the secure income I could get.