Book 4 Chapter 8: Progress

++The location is shit, the talent pool is comparable to an insane asylum, the resources are near-useless and everything smells like tar. It’s beneath me. It’s humiliating. But it’s paying a thousand crowns a year, so I suppose I’ll make do.++

- Professor Varylani, late 19th century A.E.

I spent the next few months in something of a standard routine, though of course the stakes were as high as ever.

One significant change to my general existence was that I had now started working physical exercise into my days.

I had always tried to keep my body in relatively good condition, of course, but in the past that had been merely to ensure it remained functional and fit. It had never been an advantage as much as basic, required maintenance. Now, though, I was as much a warrior as I was a magician, and that meant that if I wished to reach my full potential, I needed to incorporate physical training into magical exertion.

Fortunately, I did not need to worry about splitting mana between the arcane and the physical like a normal warrior would.

As long as I trained both, both would grow as well as if I was not putting any time at all into the other. This was thanks to deliberate tweaks made to my new body, partly physical—adjustments to the purely mundane elements of its composition—but mostly magical. What I did to Qaigor, carefully working to seamlessly work the mana through his body and disperse it evenly, my own body would now do by itself, and with far greater results thanks to there being precisely zero time between each exertion and this superior process occurring.

This was one factor in the explosive growth I enjoyed. The other was that warriors simply had a very different curve than magicians did when it came to honing their abilities.

A magician’s magic would never weaken for as long as they lived, and it would always grow stronger with use. It was possible to over-exert oneself and damage the potential of their Vessel, but never to lose power already gained. A magician’s magical abilities would always peak at the most recent moment of their existence, provided they continued to exert them throughout their life.

Not so with warriors.

Warriors gained strength at a sprint for the earliest stages of their training, then slowed to a jog, then a walk. Then, unlike magicians, the walk stopped. Going by the trends I had seen set by others, I would probably enjoy a decade or so of continuously increasing physical abilities before hitting my peak and being required to train only semi-regularly to maintain it.

After my first month I was strong enough to not just do a pushup—something that I was not, unlike most men, able to do without any training at all—but able to do several without effort. A few more months saw me churning them out with only one arm. I felt my body grow lighter more than stronger, as gravity became less and less of an oppressive force relative to the power my muscles could produce to counteract it.

The day I was able to jump over my own height without a running start was very satisfying.

It was also not the only source of satisfaction for me to enjoy. Day by day I continued receiving offers for marriage, apparently due to the Vorets no longer bothering with their ongoing display of declaring me off-limits to the other magician families of Garamon.

Most were utterly beneath my consideration, of course. Hilariously arrogant just as the Duke and the Vorets were, but not remotely powerful enough to so much as have me interested.

In fact, I was so uninterested that I found myself spending most of my time at my original refinery anyway. I would schedule an actual meeting with one of my would-be suitors only very rarely, and I was far more comfortable at the refinery than anywhere else when expedience did not draw me away. At the refinery, everyone was my employee, forced to scurry around in fear of my wrath. All was right with the world.

That, and it gave me the chance to continue working on my tissue cultivation magic, and that was advancing by the month.

I received my first opportunity to experiment with the developing technology when the Grandmaster of the Winzorth Institute, always considerate, was kind enough to have a heart attack and require emergency magical intervention to save him. His condition was barely stabilised, providing an excellent chance for me to make a few key replacements in his unconscious anatomy.

It was, I noted, fortunate that he had agreed to stay near the refinery in the hopes of having his life prolonged. Were he not right in my vicinity he may have died before I could reach him to intervene.

As things were, I had…bought him some time.

The now-former Grandmaster Aadan Farah was as grateful for this as I would have expected, and I rested easily knowing that Sethira’s efforts to slip him over to her side had been subverted. For now at least.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

This was only the beginning of my work however. Sethira had wanted her own warrior’s body, and I was reluctantly forced to agree that working on that project for her was a good idea. Sethira was one of the few people I could extract tissue samples from and know that I would enjoy total secrecy about the fact, she had as big an incentive to keep our illegal magics hidden as I did after all. My only concern was that anything that made her stronger may come back to bite me later on. Her loyalties were unknown.

That was ultimately a long-term problem, and though I did not need to be as blindingly short-term in my planning as I had been before, I could still not afford to slow my advances of power for any reason at all. Working on Sethira’s body would give me data, and therefore help me gain more strength later on.

By far the largest change was not actually related to me or my new project, however. That distinction belonged to the newly-forming Vornholt Institute.

Currently it was not much to crow about, more a set of vague schematics and outlines for a proper building situated some half-mile from my refinery than anything substantial. I had been acquiring contracts and agreements for potential Professors, however, and was pleased to find that several of them were high-end performers in their fields, even not counting Varylani. I planned for the Institute to open formally in another six months’ time, priding itself on intellectual openness and freedom from the overly conservative culture that stifled magical pursuits in the Winzorth and other established Institutes.

Just how many students that would attract, I could not be sure. I was not even aware of how interesting my own, current employees found the notion.

That first came to my attention when Alira requested a meeting with me, which I granted partly for expedience, and partly to make use of my new office.

This office was enormous. As big as the Grandmaster’s was back at the Winzorth Institute, though not quite as expensive in its decoration. Yet. I hoped to continuously update and expand it as my wealth accumulated, from now until I became the world’s first billionaire. When that happened, I fully intended to have my own palace already constructed and ready for habitation.

But I was, once more, getting somewhat ahead of myself by pondering that.

“What did you want to discuss with me?” I asked Alira evenly, seated beside my desk, which I fancied was thick enough to stop an elephant gun should someone fire one into it, and steepling my fingers. Alira could apparently tell how much I was enjoying myself, she rolled her eyes.

“Your new Institute,” she told me. “I want to join up with its battlemage program.”

That surprised me. “You already have rudimentary training,” I noted. “Are you interested in becoming a dedicated combatant?”

“Gods no,” she sighed. “But people keep trying to kill me around you. At some point my luck’s going to run out. No, I want to make sure I can defend myself well enough that it doesn’t come to that, that’s all.”

I had to admit, she was making a fair point. “Very well then,” I told her. “I will put your name down for it. You are aware that this means you will be under the instruction of Professor Varylani once again, though?”

I could have told her she would be tortured for information she did not possess, and Alira would probably have not looked so thoroughly disturbed.

“It’s fine,” she shrugged. “I can handle it. I handled it as a kid, right? Or…well, you know, as a younger adult.” I saw another flash of bitterness across her face. The old wound, it seemed, was still open.

“That may not lead to you being permanently crippled,” I told her abruptly. Alira frowned at that.

“What do you mean?” she asked me.

“Your concern is that you will never reach your true potential because you started practicing magic ten years too late to do so, correct?” I asked.

Alira’s smile had melted away fully by now, replaced completely by a familiar, furious look. “Yeah, that’s right,” she said darkly. Her anger was not directed at me as much as the whole world, an indiscriminate sort of rage that was too big to aim at any single target. I knew it well.

“Well,” I said slowly, “I am working on a way to hopefully offset that problem.”

I had her interest instantly. Perhaps ‘fascination’ would be the more accurate term.

“How?” Alira asked at once.

“The specifics are…too sensitive to share now,” I said evenly. I still remembered what Alira had asked me to do. I had forgiven her, but that did not mean I trusted her.

Her face scrunched up. “Are you just fucking with me here?” she asked me evenly. “Is this a lie or a trick to earn my loyalty or something?”

“No,” I told her, and I found myself bristling as I answered. “Why would I bother with that? I gave you everything you have already and you still asked me to submit to the Vorets.”

She just looked at me, and I just looked at her, and she turned and took her leave without another word. I watched her go, feeling an unpleasant cocktail of emotion.

It was not just the normal, manageable feelings of this new body that I struggled with. Those were easy by comparison. Even with their overwhelming intensity, I could manage them.

No, what was tripping me up were these self-contradictory and internally-at-odds ones. The ones that left me unsure what I even wanted to do. Infuriating.

I got back to managing the finances of my refineries, feeling calmed as always by the experience of watching myself rake in masses of money. I had not purchased any more in the last few months, but several new acquisitions had finished their upgrades, and my income was looking better than ever. If all remained constant, I was set to make seven million crowns this year even if my business did not expand any more.

The major question, of course, was how I could go about raising that to eight million.