After some deliberation, I returned to the tesseract.

The Time Eater possessed a rudimentary intelligence capable of adapting to my attacks. Better to continue my experiments elsewhere, rather than allowing the demon to evolve along with me. It seemed satisfied enough to be left alone; no fly followed me farther than twenty paces.

Since I had already turned back time, the arena was much the same as when I left. A few people had stood up and stumbled in my direction like drunkards, not yet fully recovered.

“What’s happening?” shouted a middle-aged man with the pompous air of nobility about him. After I refused to respond, he stared down at his hands and clenched them into fists. “Am I still dreaming?

The other three who approached wore the robes of the clergy. A woman and two young men. Despite their disheveled appearances, they maintained a dignified air. A priestess and her attendants? Their stares drifted from my bare sword to my face, expressions switching from hopeful to suspicious

“Who are you?” the woman said.

Her words brought the nobleman back to reality. “Those clothes. Look how young he is. He’s a disciple of those damn philosophers. Are any of the adults with you?”

“That’s right!” One of the young men took a step forward. “I hear some of them are renowned warriors. Are any of the others with you?”

I resisted the urge to brush the situation aside. Truthfully, it was nice to listen to normal humans bickering, the same way I had derived comfort from my one-sided interactions with the old man. No cryptic explanations that raised more questions than they answered, no demon lords monologuing about the true nature of the universe.

“I woke up a little before all of you.” Honest enough, if a touch light on the details. I jerked my head back in the direction of the exit and injected a hint of uncertainty into my tone. “Tried to go through there, but there’s something wrong. I came across a big, creepy swarm of insects covering a statue. Decided to head back.”

“Increate save us,” the woman murmured, clutching the sun-faced pendant around her neck. The others nodded and echoed her words.

Such false piety. When the tesseract had first engulfed the city, the innocent and pure-hearted citizens had been spared. They abandoned the city and milled about the outskirts, not quite sure what had prompted their departure. Those who remained in Odena, especially those brought to the Amphitheater, were sinners and sacrifices. Though I did not have much of a moral high ground from which to judge them--these were my peers.

I smiled politely. “Increate save us. Now, if you’ll excuse me?”

They parted, more interested in the exit behind me, as if the Time Eater was about to follow in my footsteps. The priestess called out in my direction as I approached the invisible barrier around the arena. Without glancing backward, I waved my hand in farewell before reaching out to touch the tesseract.

A blink later, I stood within the same checkered environment as before. No shadows awaited my return. Glad for the moment of reprieve, I slashed the air a few times with the blade. It felt the same as before. Confirmation I could bring objects within the tesseract, which made sense given I hadn’t been stripped naked on arrival

The second step of the experiment was far more interesting. I reversed time to the beginning, when I first entered the tesseract. My migraine resurfaced with a new intensity, a reminder that abusing my power came with consequences. I needed to stop using it as a crutch whenever the mildest inconvenience cropped up, or I would become too reliant on it. The Time Eater proved that weakness. I had been confounded by a larva.

This experiment, however, was worth it. Since I had not possessed the sword on my initial entry, it vanished from my grasp as expected. A moment later, an exact shadow replica of the blade and its scabbard formed in my hands. As if the tesseract contained a memory of the object thrown into time’s current.

The texture of the replicas felt off to the touch, soft and pliant like Felix had been, but they were otherwise perfect. Pricking my finger on the tip of the blade elicited a drop of blood, vibrantly crimson against the drab surroundings. The blade was sharp as steel.

A dark obelisk erupted from the ground in front of me. I assumed a defensive stance, prepared for a new phase of the trial. The pillar stopped growing at around shoulder height, high enough to spot the off-white shard resting upon its flat top.

I glanced around. Nothing else had changed. I sheathed the shadowblade and, after a moment of hesitation, picked up the fragment between my thumb and forefinger. It was a small crescent, slightly yellow in a way reminiscent of old ivory. I rotated it between my fingers. Hard, but brittle, as if it would snap if I applied too much pressure. One side was smooth like polished stone, the other jagged, with uneven edges.

A bone fragment, almost definitely. Too small to guess what anatomical landmark it had broken off from, but the smooth edge made me think of the tip of a fingerbone.

An absurd smile crossed my face. One of mother’s morbid gifts when I was a little child had been an extremely detailed anatomy book. It must have cost a fortune to have a scribe copy out each illustration. The only real reason I remembered it was because of how creepy I found the drawings of hands, with their little cap-tipped phalanges--for a while there, I had ridiculous nightmares about a skeletal hand clutching my face.

I could still remember when my mother rushed to my bedroom in response to my screams in the middle of the night. The sheepish expression on her face after I blurted out everything. The book had vanished from my room afterwards.

I shook my head, refocusing my thoughts. What was this object supposed to be? It was intentionally presented to me on arrival. A reward for defeating Felix?

Finally, Brother Augur had decided to offer some token of appreciation to his supposed disciple. Unfortunately, I had no idea what the bone fragment was supposed to do.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Directing the entirety of my focus on it revealed little more than an ancient aura emanating from it. The sensation was bizarre, and I was not certain my interpretation was correct. Regardless, it resonated with my time magic; in my imagination, the silver orb hummed pleasantly.

The only parallel to the sensation I knew was from when I learned the massive tree in the back of our family manor was over a thousand years old. I had stood before it, so young I could barely stand on my own two feet, staring up at the distant top of that towering monolith. It had lived long enough to have been a sapling when the first humans rebelled for their freedom. I had experienced, in that moment, pure awe unlike any other experience.

The weak aura emitted by the bone reminded me of that awe, transcribed into a tangible form. Shaking my head, I unceremoniously pocketed the fragment, unsure where else I was supposed to store it.

Afterwards, the strangeness of my previous thoughts occurred to me. Why all the reminiscing on my distant childhood? Did some mysterious aspect of it bring old memories to the forefront? Was I just losing my grip on reality? Between the migraine and the strain of previous encounters, my mind felt like it had been wrung out like an old rag.

I plopped down on the floor, the shadowblade resting across my knees. Too exhausted to even bother entering the lotus position, I began to meditate.

Piece by piece, I reconstructed my memory palace. It had been a while since I explored the imaginary building. While Brother Augur had taught me how to build one in what seemed to be a mental exercise, it had provided multiple unexpected benefits. It had served as a bridge to connect my mind with Desolada, an entrance that for some reason existed inside my father’s study. My own bedroom contained a library of books that organized my knowledge in a way

I struggled more than usual to form the image of my family manor. An oppressive quality permeated the air within the tesseract, as if gravity in the region conspired to punish my indiscretion. The pressure relented the moment I stopped. Yet another mystery.

I took a few deep breaths and began once more. The pressure returned, annoying but not enough to cause concern. Usually I could summon the image in a few seconds. At my current rate, it would take at least a minute. A section at a time, the memory palace materialized into my familiar home with its verdant yard.

An idea struck me halfway through the process. My hand slipped into my pocket, grabbing the bone fragment. The contours of the manor grew more defined and certain. I was in the middle of rebuilding the central atrium, and the sight of its little fountain spurred a slew of mundane memories--reading on the little bench beside it, flicking a little copper coin into the water and making a wish, and so on. As distracting as they were, it doubled the speed at which I constructed the room.

So, the bone fragment served as a focus for meditation. Or, at least, that was one way to harness the ancient aura and its tendency to make relevant memories bubble to the surface.

Its usefulness seemed limited to an extent, especially in the outside world where it would speed up the formation of the memory palace by a second. Such a discrete unit of time meant little to me when I could simply enter a loop. But, hell, it was an improvement, and each bit of progress added up. I hadn’t expected anything from Brother Augur in the first place.

The benefit from the bone fragment allowed my mind to wander a bit as I worked on the rest of the memory palace.

It made no sense that the environment within the tesseract actively interfered with the formation of my memory palace to such an extent. It had no perceivable effect on basic meditation or visualization. The resistance was a response to some specific aspect of the specific mental exercise.

Why? It was a figment of my imagination. Why would my location matter?

Brother Augur was the one who taught me the concept of the memory palace in the first place. He was the creator of the technique, or at least an advanced practitioner. Perhaps some underlying principle linked the two?

I halted my construction on the memory palace after completing my bedroom. Sinking deeper into a trance, I imagined myself standing inside of the imaginary room. The obnoxious pressure continued to weigh down on me, but I ignored it as best as possible.

A quick perusal of the library revealed my target: a tome labeled Tesseract.

The format of the tomes had two specific benefits. First, they laid out the details as objectively as possible, though it was always possible the information I had gathered was wrong. Second, the precise illustrations helped correct any mistakes in my conscious memory.

I could only speculate on the true source of the books. Perhaps the human mind contains different types of memories, some of which are more malleable and prone to corruption than others. Or perhaps the knowledge was pulled from my soul, a nebulous ‘true self’ independent of the mind.

Reading the entirety of its contents took a depressingly short amount of time.

Paimon had called the tesseracts four-dimensional constructs, an expression of time and space magic powerful enough to overwhelm the usual laws of reality. Brother Augur constructed them from interwoven threads of time magic that he had learned to manifest into physical form.

The one within Amelie in Yellow had an internal loop, though it was not perfectly self-contained. They also demonstrated temporal dilation effects, where time passed differently compared to the outside world. This hinted that Brother Augur could imbue them with his techniques, and they could function without his conscious attention.

Another short page detailed what I had discovered about the bizarre environment I was currently in. Skimming through that section offered no new real insights.

I closed the tome and leaned back in my reading chair. The session had revealed at least one useful fact; I focused too much on the time-related details and the implications for my own potential path.

Spatial magic formed the other half of the tesseract. I perceived the constructs as being formed from interwoven strands of time energy, because I was blind to the appearance of spatial magic. The two were woven together, forming a seamless barrier. I saw the existence of spatial energy through its absence--it was the gaps between strands of time energy.

A simple revelation. One that would not necessarily help me become stronger, which had made it undeserving of my attention.

Brother Augur wove these two magics together through his own control, using a mental image to guide its form and function. The tesseracts were his own memory palaces--or shells of them--imposed on reality.

That explained the difficulty in forming my own memory palace. Our mental ideas were having a conversation, and the tesseract was a domineering master. It criticized every nook and cranny I usually rushed over until it was perfect enough to pass inspection.

I almost laughed at the ridiculous thought.

Then a memory resurfaced; the corpse statue, and the profane seed within its womb. Threads of time energy being absorbed to nourish the embryonic horror.

Except it was not time magic alone, was it? Because I could not see it, I assumed it was not there. But the demon fed on the tesseract. It would not be a time-attuned demon for me to worry about. It would be a space-time demon. A parasite and, in a twisted way, Brother Augur’s karmic progeny, the cosmic consequence of apparently betraying one of the Goetia.

That bastard needs to die, I thought.