Get me out of here.

Really. Not joking this time. Commander-Priest Alanaeon is going to get me killed; the bad part is that I don’t think it will matter if she catches on to the theft or not. She’s running out of test subjects again. Apparently the last batch she got is “not comparable to the local population” and “excessively resistant” so she needs more to act as “normal people” for her tests.

She’s threatened that if we don’t find enough people for her tests, we’ll be next!

I don’t see what her problem is. The six survivors so far - five from the new group and one that we caught - are absolutely terrifying and completely under her control. This was bad enough when she could only threaten us with her authority; I don’t want to see what it’ll be like now that she has powerful … modified people … working for her. They’d even use one of the new overcharged-spell weapons.

There used to be seven of them until last tenday.

The drawings and notes you wanted are after this, but they’ll only show in the light of the eclipse; I used that greenstone spell to hide them.

This is the last greenstone I’m sending you; the next greenstone that comes out will be with me when I come out. You got me into this, now get me OUT.

Once he had a starting point, Aide had no difficulty decoding the message at the top of the scroll. Everything after that, however, was a mess that didn’t make any sense.

It was easy enough to understand why, now that the note was understandable.

Serenity leaned back and stretched. Sure, he didn’t really get sore easily, any more than he had in his early twenties, but stretching still felt good.

He didn’t want to wait for the eclipse to decode the rest of the scroll; sure, it was less than a month away, but there might be something useful in it. It was obvious that it would have something to do with greenstone, and greenstone had to be the material of the World’s Core.

From what Blaze had found, it was also a powerful but damaging physical enhancement drug when powdered. They were pretty sure that was what was happening to the man they’d rescued from the infirmary, but they didn’t know why he was still alive when everyone else seemed to have died at significantly lower doses.

The note seemed to be a partial answer to the question: he was probably “excessively resistant” to the greendust. Serenity assumed that “the last batch” was the Earthlings that had been redirected to Alanaeon in the complex that led to Lyka’s World Core. He knew they’d been selected out because a stone like the one that imitated Earth’s World Core reacted to them, but that still didn’t explain the resistance.

It was strange; sensitivity didn’t mean resistance. If anything, it usually meant the opposite, though it also made training resistance easier. Why would a bunch of people from Earth be unusually resilient against greendust, dust made from a World’s Core?

Serenity buried his face in his hands. He was missing the obvious; of course Earthlings would be resistant to World Core dust. Most of Earth’s World Core had vaporized centuries ago - possibly millenia, Serenity wasn’t certain on the timing. Either way, that meant that Earth itself probably had elevated levels of World Core dust. Whether it was in the atmosphere or the ground, it existed and that meant it would find its way to people.

Even in a low-mana environment, adaptation happened. This wasn’t as extreme as evolution, but it was possible, even likely, that Earthlings could simply handle more World Core dust without any issues. Serenity had an odd thought for a moment: could that be why Earth seemed to have more bloodlines than any other planet Serenity could think of?

Naah. It might well explain why more of them were expressed at low Tiers, but the bloodlines had to be present in the first place in order to be expressed. So it was at the most a partial explanation. Still, even a partial explanation was good.

“Ekari, Rourke? Here’s the plaintext. What happens during an eclipse?” Serenity slid the single copy he’d made over to Ekari and relaxed against his chair’s back. He’d seen eclipses on Earth, both partial and full, but he hadn’t exactly been able to study what happened to magic during an eclipse to figure out how it would make a hey to a secret message. Vengeance and the Final Reaper had both seen eclipses as well, but he couldn’t remember if he’d ever done more than notice the obvious changes.

“It’s strange,” Ekari started. “It’s not obvious at first, maybe a little dimmer but not anything obvious. Then the shadows change. They become crescents instead of whatever shape they should be. The world seems quiet for a moment, almost like it breathes out. I don’t know if that’s real or just what it feels like. Then you hear the voices of the night speak, as though it were nightfall.”

That description reminded Serenity a lot of the eclipses he’d seen as Thomas, especially the full ones. He waited to see if she’d say more or if Rourke would chime in.

Rourke seemed content to let Ekari describe it while he read Serenity’s decryption of the note.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“It lasts long enough for you to wonder if maybe it really is nightfall, then it gets brighter and everything goes silent again. The morning birds will call, sometimes.” Ekari shrugged. “From there, it’s just the reverse of what happened before. The shadows point the other direction and then the light comes back.”

Serenity nodded. “What happens with magic?”

Ekari seemed puzzled. “Magic? Why would magic be affected?”

Serenity didn’t even know where to start with that. Rituals would be hugely affected by the symbology if nothing else; even beyond that, anything with that large an effect would affect magic. The magic in an area could be affected by as little as an announcement of something people cared about or a minor earthquake; there was no way an eclipse didn’t have an effect. “You’ve never checked, then?”

“Why would I?” Ekari sounded puzzled.

Rourke tapped the note as if in answer. “You think you can replicate it to reveal the hidden message. Whatever these drawings are.”

Ekari grabbed the note and read it quickly.

Serenity nodded. “Yeah, I think it’s possible, if we can figure out what it’s looking for. Any ideas?”

Rourke shook his head. “Something to do with greenstone, from the message, but I’m no mage.” he frowned and looked almost constipated for a moment. “I can try to find one that might know, but it’ll be tough to keep that quiet.”

Serenity chuckled, startled by the insight into Rourke’s character. He must be upset at the idea of revealing information. He shook his head and grinned. “No, it’s not worth it. The greenstone’s a starting point. He said it was … ah, here it is. They’re hidden by a greenstone spell. Since he said it was revealed by the eclipse, greenstone is probably used to hide something instead of being an ingredient in revealing it.”

Serenity unrolled the mystery portion of the scroll out in front of himself. Well, the beginning of it, at least; the whole thing was far too long to look at at once. He knew greenstone was really bits of Lyka’s World Core. If an eclipse would reveal the text, that meant that something about Lyka being between Aeon and the system’s sun mattered. “Why wouldn’t an eclipse be the same as night on Lyka? Or underground? Yet this doesn’t reveal itself; no one would make a spell like that.”

Serenity noticed but didn’t really register as Ekari stood up, tapped Rourke on the shoulder, and pulled him away from the table with the comment, “He gets like this sometimes. Just leave him alone; he’ll figure it out but he’s no decent company while he’s working on magic. At least, not for nonmages; Blaze seems to like it.”

The thought of the spell was far more interesting than the casual (and probably accurate) near-insult. Serenity knew quite a bit about World Cores by now from his conversations with Gaia while he traveled Earth, closing portals and connecting dungeons. It wasn’t nearly as much as he wanted to know, but it should give him a starting point.

A World Core was the heart of a world. Like a heart, it was the physical location that pushed “blood” through the system; for a world, “blood” was raw mana and essence. Dungeons were sort of like lungs. They exchanged something with the more mobile creatures and thereby changed the raw mana and essence-turned-into-stuff into something a bit more stable.

The Sun was still one of the most important sources for energy, but it went mostly to the plants and weather systems, the outside of the world; it didn’t directly affect the raw natural mana and essence, even though storms could definitely disturb them.

At night, the influence of the Sun was no longer directly felt, yet it was true that the Sun’s light still touched the other side of the globe. Was it possible that that was enough to affect the hiding spell?

Well, of course it was. Spells could be tied to anything.

Why would you use greenstone for that? What possible benefit would it bring?

It couldn’t be for the World Spirit’s mind; that wouldn’t make sense. It had to be for either the mana or essence.

There were many other ways to manipulate mana. Affecting raw mana was harder but not at all unknown; Serenity’s Arcane Affinity was high enough that he could do it. Poorly, but poorly was enough. Perhaps they couldn’t, but there were other materials that could be used.

No, the answer had to be essence. There was no other way to manipulate it, at least not that Serenity had known before he went back in time. Using something rare to achieve an effect you couldn’t otherwise manage made sense. How could they have known it would end up in the hands of one of the very few people who actually could manipulate essence?

So what would happen to essence during an eclipse?

Serenity wasn’t sure, but there were really only a few options. It might lose an Affinity, but that seemed unlikely; he wasn’t sure how long essence would hold Affinity, but mana would hold it for a lot longer than hours. Far more likely was movement in some way.

Perhaps it had to all move in the same direction, but then how would it know if it was the right direction? And what if you ran into somewhere that happened to have an essence flow, like a ley line? No, that wasn’t it.

Perhaps it just needed to be still, then? Serenity shrugged to himself; that was easy enough to test and very unlikely to hurt anything. It would also be good practice for his rudimentary essence-manipulation and spellcrafting.

Two hours later, Serenity had his answer: it either wasn’t the essence being held in place or his skill wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t certain which, but he needed to move on to other possibilities.

Rissa’s hand on Serenity’s shoulder got his attention long enough for her to hand him a hot cocoa. He hugged her in thanks before he went back to the surprisingly interesting project.

The break was just what he’d needed to refocus on the problem and ask the question differently. The diagrams were supposed to be visible only when Lyka was between Aeon and the sun. They weren’t supposed to ever be visible on Lyka. What was different?

Well, Lyka isolated the moon from the Sun. He’d already guessed that it was something involving essence, and the Aeon’s World Core was made from Lyka’s. What if there was still a link there? What if that isolation was the only time greenstone from Lyka really resonated purely with Aeon?

Would flooding the scroll with essence work? Should he filter the essence through greenstone first?

Serenity thought about the greenstone for a moment. He’d try without first.