The new fetus died even before it reached the same progress as the one before it. Edward stared at the remaining vial of essence blood, and he cursed loudly. His rage and desperation overcame his good sense, and by the time he shook it off, his steward was dead along with half of his staff.

He coldly ignored the mutilated bodies, though he did pause to admire some of the more twisted ones that were created by his powerful Affinity and spells. His favoured tactics of freezing an opponent in time, then accelerating just one part of it until it killed itself wasn’t obvious, but if he accelerated half of the body and kept the other stilled…why, the unfortunate fool was liable to rear himself apart just from trying to move. The blood spatters formed arcane patterns that connected to his personal Truths of Time. It would provide insight to others who viewed it and might subvert their own understanding and Truths if they weren’t strong enough to hold on to their own.

It was a pity that he had to have this cleaned. It was his residence, after all. He called for the assistant steward, but no one responded to him. He glared around the hallway and realised it was deserted of everyone but the dead.

Scowling, he quickly wove a Message spell and sent it to the palace. It might take several hours before his replacement staff could arrive. Once they did, he could either continue with his work…or he could sleep and recover his senses.

When was the last time he slept? No, he didn’t have enough time left to waste on sleep. Restoration spells worked for both mind and body, there was no need to waste a third of the day when that spell, as well as an hour’s meditation, could suffice.

Ah, when was the last time he meditated? Was it not before he received the blood? He had been too hasty, and his modicum of success with the first droplet, when it reacted to the shard, had spurred him on. Now, after three consecutive failures, he was left with one last chance.

He entered his meditation chamber and closed it off from the outside world. The walls and the ceiling faded away and were replaced by an approximation of the ambient Elemental Energies around him. The clear streams of the Time Affinity and the violet colour of Space Affinity dominated the surroundings, but the basic Nine Elements, Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Wood, Metal, Lightning, Light, and Dark, were still prevalent.

His thoughts skittered to the academies in the neighbouring region, who only focused on four or five elements instead of the entire gamut. Well, specialisation had its place, and it certainly made advancing easier. It was only when one reached the ceiling of their potential that lack of knowledge, and biases shackled them.

He was a victim of that, too, and it was the unknown biases he had that held him firmly to the ground instead of allowing him to soar into the heights of power.

Affinities were inborn, but many of his studies showed that they could be nurtured and grown too. Not as fast, or as painlessly, as those one was born with, or those one inherited from their lineage. Time Affinity was rare and he certainly had not been born with it. Instead, he nearly killed himself gaining the first Insight. Touching upon the Truths of Reality could grant Affinities too, but getting close to the Truths without a matching Affinity was also quite difficult. One could not learn a Truth while having no Affinity for it without great difficulty and gaining an Affinity for an Element was much harder without touching on the Truths. It was a paradox, but one could bypass that rule by fortuitous events, or by risking life and limb.

Both had happened to him, and it was also why he’s had difficulty refining his physique. His body wasn’t powerful enough to Ascend, but with the knowledge he’d gained from the shard…

He felt his emotions start to boil…he needed to continue his work. He felt his mind retract from its meditative trance, and he was hard-pressed not to stop it. He gestured at the wall and it retracted to reveal a grandfather clock. A couple of hours had passed since he entered and he supposed that was more than enough rest. He sighed as he deactivated the room’s enchantments and he left it to head to his laboratory.

There was a new butler standing at attention outside of his meditation room, who bowed as soon as Edward made an appearance. “My liege, the new staff is ready and waiting for your orders.”

Edward waved dismissively. “Have them take up the slack from the previous staff.”

“As you command.”

With all his thought processes spinning, Edward strolled to the library several flights below the meditation room. He could have slipped through a dimensional stream to get there immediately, something he could reliably do only here in his place of power. The folds between the layers of reality shifted constantly. Those patterns were Chaotic, as evidenced by the fact that behind the layers of the fabric was the all-encompassing Chaos. He wondered what lay beyond the Chaos or if it was effectively unlimited. Those things he could only know if he Ascended.

Hah! He didn’t even know what levels an Ascended being had. It was a great divide between those who had true power and those who reached for it. Mortals remained mortals no matter how powerful, and he posited that Ascended weren’t only unaging and undying, but truly unkillable. Why else would myths and legends speak about how heroes of old did so many things to contain, banish, or defeat their foes? If they could have killed them outright, why bother going to the extent of sealing them? Or splitting their Anima into uncountable fragments and banishing them into the Chaos?

His steps faltered as a sudden revelation lit up his mind like the Radiant Sun.

Cut up and banished.

Was the shard…the divine shard, a true fragment of a defeated God Monarch? It was almost completely inert, save for its protections. If it were, then the treasure he held was far more valuable than any fortuitous encounter he had over his millennia of life. And the key was still out of reach.

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He was tempted, sorely tempted, to throw everything to the winds and charge into Bresia to capture Yuriko Davar. Only the fact that he still couldn’t scry her location accurately, and the fact that once he entered the country’s borders, the four Grand Magi of Bresia would know, and they would come out to fight before he could have the time to locate her. There was more than an even chance that she would escape, and then a greater chance that she would flee.

She came into Bresia through the Shattered Realm and if she went back, there would be no way to get to her. He had no artefacts to allow him to delve into that realm, and Arcana Weaving would be next to useless.

So no, he could not take more risks. And his previously reckless action of persisting in an experiment that had already proven incorrect was the height of folly.

Bloodline control weakened the farther it was from the source. He could nearly completely control his son, but his grandson was harder to control. The former had eventually proved too unstable to continue to make use of, while Roland had proven rather useful in running the country.

If he had succeeded in creating a child through his laboratory manipulations, he would have been able to use his control to wrest all of the secrets from the shard. He had little choice now but to proceed with the new plan.

He arrived at the laboratory with his mind now clear. The walk and the brief rest had done its job; he was more than ready to continue his work. He entered the lab, ignoring the varied cylinders filled with life-preserving fluids and the bodies within them. He opened the vault, which required him to see into his future, a potential one only, and his past, to find the ever-shifting codes to unlock the door. Once he had it, he keyed in the codes and opened the vault.

The vial with the last droplet of blood beckoned to him and he carefully cradled it in his hands. He slowly undid the protective spells, though, of course, he kept the time stasis. It wouldn’t do for the sample to lose Essence, which it would do almost immediately if it left stasis. Transforming the blood essence into something that could hold everything essential he needed required all of his knowledge and skill, but since he had already succeeded in that step three times already, this would be no different.

His hand held his most comfortable spell-casting tool and began to weave arcana to his Will. The gaps he intentionally left in the vial allowed him to weave and hold the spells at the cusp of activation until he removed the stasis. Then the prepared spells would be cast immediately, bypassing the degradation. He had about six seconds before the blood lost all power, but since he had everything ready, the spells to contain and transform the blood into an ovum from its origin would happen in a split second.

As he wove, his thoughts returned to the previous failures. His seed was both too potent and too feeble to create a viable fetus, so there was only one choice left. He only had one living relative left, after all.

Once the spells were ready, he took a deep breath, scanned the lab’s protective spells, and proceeded with the next step. The blood droplet was bombarded with his spells, each accurately hitting the necessary points at precise intervals to avoid overloading the sample, and then the transmutation spell did its work. The blood droplet shrank into itself, becoming tinier than the naked eye could see.

He waited a couple of seconds for the spells to finish, then triggered the last step. Spell circles wove around the invisible ovum and a new container materialised around it. It kept the ovum floating in the middle, untouched and uncontaminated.

A few more seconds and it was done. The process had been identical the last three times, but efficiency and practice actually shaved off half a second during the transmutation. Whether that did anything was yet to be seen.

Now…

He placed the new vial in a protective array and cast a message…no, a Sending spell.

“Roland, attend to me immediately.”

He puttered about in his lab, fixing things that didn’t need fixing and cleaning things that desperately needed it. Five minutes later, he received a response. Well, it was the Objective Time rather than the accelerated personal Time he used to do his menial chores. He couldn’t trust just anyone to enter his laboratory after all.

“I’ll be there in half an hour, grandfather.”

There had been a note of wariness and frustration behind the boy’s tone, but Edward paid it no heed. He reviewed his plans for the ovum a fiftieth time, hoping that he wouldn’t make a fatal mistake. He contemplated applying a temporal acceleration spell on the new project so that he wouldn’t be stuck waiting for a dozen years before it could bond to the shard, then decided that he couldn’t use a simple spell like that. If the shard was the remnant of a God Monarch, then there was no way it would give its inheritance to a blank slate. But his time was drying up, and there was no way to wait that long.

“Ah,” he gasped as he realised where he could bring the child to accelerate its growth naturally. Well, not him.

“I’m here, grandfather,” Roland said boisterously as he strode into the laboratory.

Edward hid his smirk, but perhaps he was too manic to succeed with that. The emperor froze for a long moment but shook it off.

Edward took one of the sterile beakers from its container and handed it to Roland. “Expel your seed into that. Hurry up, I need it as soon as possible.”

Roland blanked out. “Eh?”

“Just get to it!”