Felix quickly verified that the last seal wasn't in the king's corpse then collected all the starmetal he had strewn about the room. Once he was done with that, he didn't bother checking the random rooms all around and instead focused in on the mana within the castle walls.
He could feel it being pushed up from below so he head for the stairs. A couple dozen meters away, the castle realized where he was heading and tried to seal the entrance but Felix launched himself towards it and managed to stop it short. The stone floor stopped moving and finally crumbled as he sucked all the remaining mana from it.
Heading downstairs, Felix watched the castle attempt to stop him by moving walls but he could feel he was already too close to the seal for it to matter. He crumbled all of the castle's feeble attempts with his mana control and made his way to the center of a large open room filled with crates, barrels and sacks.
There were four doors all around the room but Felix could feel the seal wasn't in any of them, it was about a meter below him. He reached down and pulled all of the mana out of the stone below him. The castle tried fighting back, and it was much stronger this close to the seal, but it didn't make any difference against Felix's mana control. He suspected it also had to do with the ring being sealed, if it was unsealed or an actually sentient being, it would have been much harder.
With the castle neutralized, Felix began drilling into the floor below him as carefully as he could. As he got closer, he heard stone grinding against itself and smashing into walls above him, the tantrum and resulting sounds growing louder the closer he got. He needed to find the seal but also needed to avoid damaging it at all costs.
Once he could feel it was just a few centimeters away, he stowed the drill and started enchanting the rock to be as flexible as possible. It took thousands of mana, but he managed to make the rock soft like clay and simply reached his fingers into it. His hand clasped around a small golf ball sized object and he pulled. The sounds above him immediately stopped as the seal was freed from the castle.
Felix took a brief glance at the bright white diamond looking seal before storing it in his soul space, along with the other two seals. With the king defeated and the seal secured, Felix finally took a look around the basement. The door to the left seemed to be guard's quarters, judging from the weapon racks and beds, though nothing of value remained. The door to the right contained contained a dungeon with a few skeletons in the cages along with chains and torture tools. The two doors on the far wall were more interesting though.
The first one seemed to have once been a trophy room with stuffed beasts, book cases, weapon and armor stands all laid out neatly around the room. Nothing of value was left but Felix suspected Erolan had already sorted through it and had stored anything of value in the sarcophagi above or in vaults throughout the city.
The interesting part of the room though, was what was laid out over the floors and hung on the walls in front of the trophies. All over the place were large sheets of paper with arcane diagrams and figures. There was also a large book lying on the ground with hand written notes. Upon closer examination, Felix confirmed that the book was just over halfway full and had been written by Erolan.
He made sure everything was scanned and stored safely on the permanent storage shelves in his mind then left the room and let Grim sort through it all. Felix walked over to the last door and walked down a long staircase that was clearly not part of the original castle. At the bottom, he heaved open a thick metal door and walked into a large square room lined with the same metal as the door on all surfaces.
All over the walls were recessed cubbies that were just big enough to hold their contents. Looking closer at the objects stored in the room, Felix realized why this room was almost a kilometer further underground from the rest of the castle, they were unfinished and experimental vaults.
Felix left the room and closed the door behind him then ascended the stairs back into the main basement. He set himself up in the middle of the room and slept while Grim sorted through the notes. He had lost over half of his health just from being banged around the inside of the suit and his arm was still healing from begin stabbed earlier.
He slept for just a few hours but it seemed to be all he needed as he felt much better afterwards. He ran through his daily workout routine along with stretches and the dragon dance steps, adding force to the movements as he did. Once he was done with that, he talked to Grim about what they had found in the basement.
Grim confirmed the notes were all about Erolan's discoveries and experiments with stealing vaults and getting through their defenses afterwards. It seemed Erolan had been looking into how to create portals of his own but stopped when he realized he couldn't use them to teleport behind enemy lines.
Apparently, it was possible to set up an anchor for portals and teleportation so that all teleportation of any kind was redirected to a specific point. According to Erolan, almost all empires used the anchors to create kill zones for anything that tried to teleport in. Erolan had tried to circumvent this but by the end of the notes, he hadn't found a way to do so.
Felix read through the notes himself, both from genuine interest and in the hopes that there was something to help him deal with Erolan in them. Erolan didn't have much in terms of how the portals themselves worked and he seems to have mostly been piecing together what he could find.
All of his experiments involved splicing together spell forms he had found and not much on their actual function or structure. He had come to some interesting discoveries though, like the anchors. This was all new to Grim too as the only form of teleportation he knew was short range and was apparently completely different from portals.
Along with anchors that certain empires created and used to protect themselves, there were also natural anchors all around the universe. The biggest natural anchors were black holes, followed by stars. Planets were also anchors but apparently they weren't strong enough to redirect anything but childish attempts at teleportation by any noticeable amount. Felix had an idea but kept reading through the notes a few times hoping to find anything better but ultimately decided it was his best chance.
You mentioned one way to destroy a magic item is with a black hole. What if we open a porta-
No. Seriously? Think that through. You really want to open a portal within the vicinity of a black hole. Best case scenario, the black hole interferes with the portal from the other side and makes it unusable. Worst case, this entire planet is sucked into it with no hope of getting out. Judging from Erolan's notes too, it wouldn't be possible to open a portal anywhere close to a black hole because it would just get redirected into it.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Yeah, you're right. Would a star be enough to destroy it?
Probably. Almost definitely. Same problem though.
Ok so we open a portal near a star and throw the seal into it. We could even throw Erolan's body into it too.
That sounds like a slightly less terrible but still awful idea. You would need to be sure you don't open it too close. There's a fine line between too far away for it to pull him in and too close where the portal itself get's pulled into the star. At that distance too, if my rough math is right, it woiuld take years for his body and the seal to fall into the star.
Years? Damn, guess we need to figure something else out then. It would destroy the item though, right?
It should destroy the item.
Should?
I've never heard of anything capable of surviving that but I had also never heard of anything like you before so…
Do I pull it out of the seal before I throw it in or?
No, definitely not. The second you pull it out, he wakes up.
That's another question, which one do I get rid of?
I'd be inclined to say body, but we don't actually know what they do yet. You should probably open the soul seal first.
Won't that wake him up?
You just need to keep the item in your soul space. Do not remove it until we are certain he's gone.
Let's figure out the portals first.
Felix and Grim started poring through Erolan's research notes along with all his diagrams and experiments in the metal lined vault room. The vast majority of vaults Erolan found and all of the vaults used in Ky'bel were based on anchors. The portal to enter the vault and the one within it each used anchors and pointed to each-other. This made it so it didn't matter how each of them moved relative to each-other. As long as neither of them were too close to a larger anchor like a black hole, the portals would always lead to the other anchor.
The other type of portal was one that didn't target an anchor. These portals targeted specific locations either relative to their origin or with absolute coordinates. Relative portals were more cost efficient to make so long as the distance was small. Portals targeting an absolute position were always consistent in their mana cost. These types of portals were apparently rarely used though because of how much more complicated, dangerous and expensive they were.
There was a spell for measuring the coordinates of an object you could see but even then, portals targeting coordinates were finicky. The risk of the portal exploding or being sucked to an anchor were very high. Anchored portals were consistent and easy to use, all you needed was an anchor at the destination that you knew. Unfortunately, Felix didn't have any anchors in range of a star so he would have to figure something else out.
He thought about using relative positioning but he didn't know what was outside of the bubble that contained the world event and didn't want to risk it. The issue with absolute positioning was that he needed some coordinates to start from that he knew weren't too close to a black hole or anything. Luckily, a few of the remaining vaults in Erolan's metal lined room had been repurposed.
Erolan had repurposed a few of the vaults to point to specific locations he was interested in. There were two that pointed to cities he traded with and a couple that pointed to locations in the orbit of random planets that he had listed as potential escape routes. The only problem was that when Erolan was creating these they might have existed, but it had been so long those points could be anywhere now. Unfortunately it was looking like that was a risk he was going to have to take. He had time to figure it out though because first he needed to figure out how to create a portal.
He started with a short portal, one that would simply travel a few meters across a room. Theoretically, that should make it cheap and Felix hoped would also be the safest. The spell form was far too complicated for him to simply cast in front of him like he did with other spells so he instead settled on using his quill to inscribe it into the wall.
His hope was that by casting one portal, he would be able to get a sense for how things should work. Then when he had to cast a portal into the universe, he would have a good idea if things were working properly. Erolan had some notes on short range portals, though none as short as what Felix planned. Erolan had once looked into using this type of portal for trade routes and travel throughout the city. Ultimately, he had decided against it both because the mana cost was too high and because anchors were simpler and safer.
Erolan's notes detailed portals that would bridge a distance of a few hundred kilometers in a straight line along with how to change that distance. The distance of the portal's destination was dependent on minute changes to the spell form. Felix simply replicated one of these highway portals on the wall and altered the distance to be a much shorter range. He checked over his inscriptions a dozen times and had Grim look over them as well before he even thought about using it. Once he was certain though, he climbed back into his starmetal suit, just in case, and began pumping mana into the inscribed spell.
As mana poured into the spell form, Felix paid careful attention to how it spread hoping to detect any small flaws before they caused a massive explosion. As the mana spread out, the small sections he had made the minor adjustments to, the coordinates, continued to suck mana into them like nothing he had ever seen before.
By the time he had poured in half a million mana, the spell form didn't even seem close to full but he started to notice the inscription was starting to degrade. Felix immediately stopped pumping mana and pulled as much as he could back out of it. It wasn't any specific flaw in his inscription that was failing, it was the entire inscription itself. Felix realized a spell form inscribed into a stone wall was simply incapable of handling large amounts of mana. It wasn't nearly stable or precise enough.
He realized he would have to create the spell form itself out of a material, like how permanent enchantments used inlaid metals. He had some enchantment inlaying metals from the dungeons back in the tutorial, but not enough malleable inlay for this venture. He had unmalleable inlay but he didn't have a good way of molding it at the moment.
What he did have was starmetal but when he tested it, the starmetal's mana conductivity was awful, possibly even worse than stone. The other material he had on hand that was easily moldable was solid mana but he was pretty sure it wasn't safe to use mana to make the spell form, for a spell that consumed mana. What he could do though was use it as a mold. Felix tested the method with a few simple spells like Fire Bolt and Gust and it seemed to work perfectly.
First, he used solid mana to form the spell form, then he covered and encased that in a sheet of star metal. When he removed the solid mana, he was left with a perfect mold of the spell. From there, he simply filled the mold with mana, using his mana control just to hold it in and keep it moving, and the spell would cast.
Moving back to the portal spell form, Felix formed the mold and set the sheet of starmetal against the wall so the other end wouldn't be under ground. He began filling the mold with mana and paid careful attention to its flow. This time, the spell form filled out perfectly with no apparent issues other than that he completely ran out of mana. He had poured in just over two million mana and if he had to guess, the spell needed another million or so more.
He started pulling out batteries to complete the spell form but once he was about 90% of the way there, he started to sense minor flaws in his spell form. He almost tried to fix them on the spot but ultimately decided against it. He solidified all the mana he had used into batteries then went about fixing all of the minor flaws he had detected.
Then, he used the same mana to refill the spell form. He had to iterate a dozen times and consult Erolan's notes twice before he was ready to fully cast the spell. The last half dozen iterations were just him reassuring himself because he hadn't actually found any flaws. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .