The red books were, if anything, even more dull and tedious than the blue ones had been, but there weren’t quite as many of them. More importantly, since they’d fused together, Nym’s mental processes were much faster now. Part of his mind was devoted to catching up the part of him that used to be an echo, but the overall gains more than made up for that. He was reading through them faster now, taking less time to understand and making more connections to other information with each new page he read.

Nym thought about rebuilding the clock now that he understood a bit more about adjacent realities. It might even be accurate this time, but in the end, he decided against it. The passage of time would be marked by his progress through the shelf, however long that took. At least, that was what he intended.

Those plans lasted through about a third of the books. Then Niramyn himself appeared in the center of the room. “Slow,” he remarked, eyeing up the bookshelf. “But you’ve successfully become a multi-reality entity, so I suppose there is some hope for you.”

Nym paused his reading and looked up at his past self. “I wasn’t aware that I had any need to rush. I was told I had as much time as I needed to get it right here.”

“You have as much time as I allow,” Niramyn corrected. “And I will only allow more time if I see a return on the investment of arcana I’m spending keeping this sanctuary from collapsing. Trust me, you wouldn’t like that to happen while you’re inside. You wouldn’t survive being ejected into another layer of reality, not this far from the core world.”

He could argue that point, but it wouldn’t do anything but anger the ascendant. If Niramyn decided to collapse the sanctuary, Nym would have to open up the tunnel and step down each layer until he got back to the core reality. He could probably do it, as long as nothing interrupted his work. The hardest part would be forging a conduit from the wrong side to get down to the fifth layer, but he thought he could pull that off if he absolutely had to.

It was easy enough to do in the sanctuary, which had little tendrils his own conduits could be threaded through to each layer without him having to manually break through membranes and navigate the layer’s natural environment, but outside it, it would be extremely difficult to pass from the sixth layer to the fifth.

So for all practical purposes, Exarch Niramyn was correct that Nym couldn’t stand on his own yet. That wouldn’t take much longer for him to correct, he thought. He already knew enough to reach his echoes on the second and third layer and was working on figuring out the fourth. It was a unique challenge, in many ways harder than connecting to the fifth layer reality’s echo.

Once they were one being though, he’d be ready to make the jump into the sixth layer, Transcendence. He’d had a peek at the far end of the red leather-bound shelf. They all discussed that one act, the preparations needed, the dangers to be avoided, when to activate the contingencies he would need to build, and how each piece of his six-dimensional body would need to work together.

It was a daunting task, one he was nowhere near ready to attempt. Once he finished the second shelf, he would establish the connections needed to merge with his other echoes, then return one final time to the sanctuary to learn the intricacies of the final step to ascendance. Then, and only then, would he be useful to Niramyn, and so have his freedom to go back to his life.

It was hard to picture that now. His old life was so… limited, always in one place and one time. It was no wonder ascendants were basically mythological figures. They had practically no reason to interact with mere mortals who couldn’t even comprehend an immortal existence, let alone relate to it. Even if, no, when, he made it back to the core reality, it would be a hollow victory. His friends were safe, but he didn’t think he’d ever talk to them again.

“Why are you still here?” Niramyn asked.

“I… what? I’m not finished yet?” Nym gestured at the shelf of red books.

“You should know enough to have bound another two echoes into your being by now. Why haven’t you?”

“Last time, we were attacked by another ascendant. I thought it’d be better to know as much as possible to have the highest chance of success and minimize how long it takes to cast the spell.”

“Your priorities are wrong. Do not worry about interruptions from other ascendants. You need to advance faster. Connecting to other parts of you will help you do so. Do that first, then come back and continue learning.”

Before Nym could reply, he found himself standing on the top of a mountain, one that had a smothering amount of heat coming from it. Niramyn was, of course, nowhere to be found. Nym simultaneously cast a few spells to protect himself from the heat and the fumes he noticed coming up from cracks in the stone. It looks like the mountain was a volcano, and not a dormant one. Pockets of lava dotted its features, and the bowl was a mess of leaking cracks from the pressure building up.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

It wasn’t where Nym would have chosen to cast the spell to create a tunnel to his second layer self. Ferro was also nowhere to be found, but Niramyn hadn’t said anything about waiting for him, so Nym immediately got to work. As before, he built the tunnel, but this time the other half of his existence modified the spell, extending its target through the first layer to reach the second.

It went off without a hitch, and the tunnel opened. Nym stepped through, only to find that instead of a volcano steadily building pressure, he was in some sort of old monastery. Another version of him sat there in the air, eyes closed. He looked like Nym, but in a way where someone might mistake them for brothers rather than mirror images.

“It will only get worse, the farther you go,” the seated Nym said without opening his eyes.

“That implies that I will go farther,” Nym pointed out. “Does that mean you’ll be joining me?”

“I think I will,” Nym said. “I don’t think I can go much farther on my own.”

“It feels like cheating, doesn’t it?”

“It does, a little bit. Come on then, let’s get it over with.”

And just like that, Nym’s existence expanded again. He stepped back into the core reality and took a moment to collect himself. So far, he’d been handed the best locations to form a tunnel between realities, but no one was showing up to direct him to the next spot. That wasn’t an insurmountable problem, but it was inconvenient. There were spells designed to help, but they could only give a general direction.

Whatever the ascendants were using to figure out where to send him had pinpoint accuracy. Nym couldn’t have been any closer to his second layer echo without actually stepping into the lava. He flew a mile or so away from the volcano, just so he didn’t have to deal with the heat and the smell, then started casting the spells that would narrow down which part of the world corresponded with where he needed to end up in the third layer.

Niramyn was no doubt watching to see how he did. Maybe Ferro was too. On some level, Nym recognized that he needed to impress his past self, but it was hard to make himself pretend to care what the ascendant thought of him. He knew he should, considering his fate was in the man’s hands, but Nym did not like his past self and wanted nothing but to get away from him. It was too bad the only way of doing that was by giving the jerk what he wanted.

Nym was thoroughly annoyed that he was going to give Niramyn anything at all, but that was the deal. He could make the best of it and get to the point where ascendants couldn’t push him around, or he could let them snuff him out. If he was lucky, they’d stop at him. That implied threat was the lever they used to move him to their wills.

He’d inherited a stubborn streak and a large measure of independence from his progenitor, no doubt the reasons Niramyn himself was sitting at the top of the heap. Nym would get there too, and then he wouldn’t have to play these kinds of games.

He teleported across thousands of miles, casting the inter-reality scrying spells and following their vague clues to narrow down a radius. The more he looked, the farther away from land he got, until he was floating over the ocean and preparing to go straight down several miles underwater. He layered spells on top of himself, one after another.

First and foremost, he needed to account for the pressure of the water, then he needed to be able to breathe. Sight would also be nice, though not strictly necessary. Freedom of movement was probably more important, though he fully planned on teleporting to the appropriate location. Add to that a few spells to keep him undetected by anything living down there and a few reactive defenses just in case the obscurement magic failed, and he was ready to go.

Nym teleported straight down to the ocean floor. He could see through the water about a thousand feet in every direction, though only in shades of black and white. There were things out there, some small, some not so small, but all of them ignored him. He’d see if that lasted once he started really working his magic.

This being the third time he’d cast the spell, and now with two echoes incorporated into the whole of his being, it was easier than ever to build it. Something rushed through the water as the magic built to a crescendo, only to convulse when a current of lightning coursed through it. The proximity ward reset itself a moment later and the sea monster retreated.

Nym ignored that and finished the tunnel. He willed himself forward rather than attempt to swim until he passed through the boundary and found himself dry again. Only he could pass through realities with the spell, which thankfully included his clothes. He could fashion himself new ones out of magic, but it was nice to be spared the hassle.

The Astral Sea waited for him on the other side. Unlike the literal ocean he’d stepped out of, it was a void of stars with currents of solar winds drifting through them. His opposite wasn’t present and waiting for him, but that was what Nym had expected.

He let himself drift off into the void, guided by his magic, until he fell to the surface of a planet below. Rushing up to meet him, feet first, was his reality echo. They were just slightly out of alignment, enough that they’d pass by close enough to touch if nothing interfered. As they reached an equilibrium of height, both slowed down and pulled themselves back to center.

“Was it fun?” Astral Sea Nym asked. His body was more of an outline of a person with no features, but Nym could see fragments of his personality in the being. If nothing else, it had his penchant for mischief, only amplified many times over.

“When I figured out where I needed to form the tunnel, I knew you had something to do with it. You went there deliberately to make me work for it, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did. It wouldn’t be worth doing otherwise.”

“I do like having fun,” Nym admitted.

“I know. Me too. This next part is going to be even more fun.”

And then they were four.