No mage, not even me, had the mental capacity to weave a mage’s shadow on their own. It was just too complex a task to be done without assistance. That was why the sixth stage was the forming of a genius loci and binding it to my mana core. It helped focus my magic, allowed me to pull off feats of mental gymnastics that I never could have anywhere else in the world. Without my demesne, the artificial resonance point hanging in the air overhead wouldn’t exist.
Even that wasn’t enough in and of itself to accomplish what I was trying to do here. That was why I pulled a device of my own invention out of my phantom space. I’d made the prototype about seven hundred years before my last death. At the time, there was nothing like it in the world and I was advancing through uncharted territories. I doubted I was the first archmage to reach stage eight, but all those who’d gone before had taken their secrets to the grave.
That had forced me to come up with my own solution: the mana loom. It looked nothing like an actual loom, of course. There was no need for it to mimic the shape when its purpose was to organize mana, not threads. My original version had been a sprawling, clunky thing almost the same size as the hut I’d been born in as Gravin. Since then, I’d made numerous improvements and helped no less than four other archmages follow in my footsteps.
Suffice to say that the new design was considerably more elegant.
From the outside, it looked like a simple jewelry box, one that easily fit between my hands. It was made of gold and silver and glinting gemstones, far too ornamental and tawdry looking to be practical. There was a reason for that, however. Certain metals influenced mana drawn through them, and in the case of gold, it made the mana more rigid. It would help the threads I wove keep their shape for just a little bit longer as long as I concentrated.
Silver, on the other hand, made mana more malleable, which I needed for the parts where I sculpted mana into shape around that inflexible base. Similarly, the various gems studding the box both inside and out were designed to hold mana and alter it in different ways. To be more specific, they worked with heavy mana, which no mage below stage seven could reliably shape into magic without immediately exhausting themselves.
I placed the box on the ground in front of me and activated it with a mental command, causing it to unfold itself repeatedly until it formed a ritual platform for me to stand on that was far bigger than the outer dimensions allowed for. In between the sapphires, diamonds, garnets, and more were rune structures, deep channels carved into the wood that were waiting to be filled with liquid mana.
I sat in the center, inside a circle with lines of runes radiating out from it in a sunburst pattern. Compared to my original mana loom, this one was barely more than a carpet placed under a kitchen table, but it was undoubtedly the most powerful loom I’d ever created. It would have to be, seeing as to how it was personally designed to take advantage of my mana reserves, willpower, and knowledge.
Back when I was just Keiran, my first try at becoming a stage eight archmage had taken me two weeks and failed in the end. It was only on my fourth attempt that I’d succeeded after a month of effort. But now I knew every mistake I’d made on the road to success, and I was older and stronger. I was getting this done in the next week.
I pulled the first thread of mana through the loom and started weaving my shadow. In the Astral Realm, my opposite mirrored me.
* * *
No spider had ever woven a web to match what I sat in the middle of. It connected to my body at a million different points. A single twitch would ruin it. Even taking a breath would be too much. I’d been feeding myself air using a combination of conjuration to force the air to move and invocation to cycle it through my lungs without actually inhaling.
Slowly, delicately, I mentally grabbed hold of two strands of mana being held in place by my loom and twined them together.
* * *
I was trapped in a cocoon of mana so dense that I was oblivious to the world around me. Or maybe ‘trapped’ wasn’t the right word. It was so delicate that I could easily rip my way free if I had to. But the waste… It would set me back months if I gave up at this point. No, the only way out was forward.
My astral body shifted on its own for the first time, not in mirror of my actions, but in response to my thoughts. Good. It was beginning to break free.
* * *
No longer was the mana a cocoon. Now it was a fine suit, tailored for me and so flexible that it was practically a second skin. I could move again, but not off the ritual platform. My weave was done, and my astral body has mimicked that using pure mana suffusing the Astral Realm. Now it was time for the penultimate step: removing myself from the second skin of mana without ruining it. Emergence was as much a mental act as a magical one. Like wards that only I was allowed to pass through, I needed to part the heavy mana around me, to take that step without disturbing what I left behind.
There would be no second chance if I made a mistake here. This was the step that I’d bungled in two of my four attempts in my previous life, and even when I’d managed to do it successfully, it had been a near thing.
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The loom was fully engaged, holding everything in place. I just had detach it from my physical body now without breaking it apart. Carefully, I snipped the first thread wrapped around me, then smoothed out the loose end. With it sealed and the weave still stable, I cut another one.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
* * *
I stood face to face with myself, or rather a copy of my astral body, but fully in the real world. There was just one step left. I needed to take that connection between my mana core and my astral body and flip it inside out, to pull the astral body into this world so it could inhabit this body made of mana that I’d built for it.
Saying it and doing it were two different things. There were no words to describe the sensation of reaching into my own mana core to grab hold of a mirror of myself, but that was what I did. Our hands met in the middle and clasped, and then the mirror broke. I pulled, and instead of exerting equal pressure pulling me back, my astral body moved independent of me.
It slipped through and was flung into the vessel I’d prepared for it, the me that was made of pure mana. Now it was out of my hands. My astral body could draw on my power, but it would have to acclimate on its own. The only thing I could do was wait to see if it would survive, or if I’d just broken myself back down to stage six.
I wasn’t worried. After all, that was my astral body. In a very real way, it was me. And I had plenty of faith in my own abilities.
* * *
I stood on the ground, my mana loom now closed up and back in its compact travel form. Behind me, my shadow flickered back and forth of its own volition. It leaped across the grass, merging with the shadow of a fallen pillar that had been part of the creation process back when Querit and I had forged the artificial mana resonance point.
My shadow was perfectly invisible, swallowed up in the larger shadow it was hiding in. Despite that, I knew exactly where it was. In many ways, a mage’s shadow was a living creature. It thought like me, almost perfectly in sync, but it wasn’t me. And the longer it existed independently of me, the more we would diverge. Mages who never took the time to merge with their shadows again often found themselves with a companion possessed of its own opinions and desires.
Most archmages agreed that letting a shadow run wild was a bad idea, if for no other reason than because we were technically sharing mana cores. We had a pair between us, and each could draw from either or both. Both cores also regenerated at the same rate, meaning I’d effectively doubled how much mana I could hold and how quickly I regained it.
My shadow pulled on our mana core, and a needle of stone rose ten feet into the air. With a thought, it shattered the temporary construction back into mana. Good. As it should, the shadow possessed all the skills I did. Lossless casting was no problem for it, and together we might even manage to cast master-tier spells without giving up any mana.
We experimented for a few more minutes before I was satisfied with the results. It looked like true lossless master-tier spells were still out of reach, but we were up to something like seventy percent efficiency. This was as close to my true power as I was likely to get in a dead world with a stage eight core.
I slipped through my demesne to appear in the bio testing lab. Querit wasn’t there at the moment, but he was good about keeping records. Our monster specimen was still alive, but it didn’t look like we’d made any progress. Maybe I could fix that.
The problem had always been getting mysteel dissolved to the point where the monster could assimilate it and start producing it for its biometal. We kept failing at that; even our most refined mixes weren’t producing any metal at all.
Mysteel’s defining quality was that it was nigh-indestructible to both physical and magical forces. It was in fact so difficult to do anything with it that a thin shell of it was enough to contain the mana core of the entire planet. It had taken a force powerful enough to destroy a moon in orbit to fracture that shell.
I couldn’t generate that kind of magic, but then, the mysteel piece I was working with was much smaller. I could—and had—reduce it to a fine powder. That wasn’t really the issue. The issue was getting it to combine properly with the elixir instead of remaining inert. In order for that to happen, I needed to fully suffuse the mysteel with mana.
That was something I could probably do. And even if not, the attempt would be an excellent test of the maximum amount of mana my shadow and I could handle. I selected a vial of powdered mysteel and considered which alchemical bases were ready. Some of them were incompatible with the method I was planning, but I had a few that could handle the stress of that much mana being moved through them.
My shadow and I both started cycling mana through the mysteel dust, more and more of it each second. Rather than let it flow back into me, I forced it to be more compact, denser, heavier. Then I added another layer, and another, and another, so many that it was a fight just to keep it all from venting out. If that happened, the glass vial would shatter, pelting me with the world’s most expensive metallic sand.
The only thing stopping it was our combined efforts. And slowly, ever so slowly, the mysteel was infused with so much raw mana that it couldn’t hold. Carefully, I poured it into the already-prepared alchemical mixture and swirled it around. Its resistance overcome through sheer force, the mysteel couldn’t resist reacting.
The liquid turned from a rich blue to a murky silt-gray. Working swiftly, I started heating the elixir while stirring it with a slender glass rod, the end of which was flattened into a paddle. At the same time, my shadow starting casting the spell needed to engage the catalyst.
Thirty seconds later, there was a burst of mana, so strong that it triggered my shield ward, and the elixir was a solid, sparkling gray. Subtle currents swirled through the bottle, barely visible even to my mana sense.
Querit rushed into the lab, then froze when he saw me. “You’re done,” he said. With a glance at the elixir I’d crafted, he added, “I’m assuming your core advancement went well.”
“Very well. I was able to apply a new level of pressure to the mysteel thanks to my shadow’s help. It’s not a clever solution, but I think it might work.”
He studied the elixir intently, then straightened and said, “You might just be right. The mysteel is actually alchemically bonded to the regeneration elixir this time. It’s not going to separate no matter how long it sits.”
“There’s only one thing left to do,” I said with a grin. We both turned to look at the plant monster safely contained in its pen. “Try it out.”