Being attacked while working was an expected event and we’d figured out what to do thousands of years ago. It was well known that things lived in the Astral Realm even before the first archmage reached stage nine, and had in fact been one of the driving forces behind developing a mage’s shadow in the first place. Nobody else could go in with us, not when the gateway to the Astral Realm was our own mana cores.

So when the baby serpents, each one at least a hundred feet long and with a toothy mouth big enough to swallow me whole, descended on us, I was ready for them. My shadow took over maintaining the mana construct I’d been building in addition to its own, and I started casting my first spell.

Magic worked differently in the Astral Realm. First, I had no core while I was here. Instead, I—and everything else—was pure mana. That meant I didn’t need to worry about things like running out of mana or how quickly I could release it from my core. It also meant that I was operating in something like a totally saturated environment, far worse than the haze of heavy mana that had shrouded the base of Ammun’s tower.

Spells could and would go awry simply from the currents of mana washing over them. The only counter to this phenomenon was an unbreakable will and absolute focus. Unfortunately for the serpents coming at us, I had plenty of that to spare. I targeted the front of the swarm and unleashed my magic.

Something I’d learned during my first time becoming a stage nine archmage was that spells which affected mana cores directly were worthless here, but the phantasmal line, which had reality-warping properties revolving around phasing through solid matter, were not. In fact, they worked even better here than they did back on Manoch. That was why I poured an absolutely incalculable amount of nearby mana into the spell.

Needles appeared in front of me, hundreds of them. Each one was the size of my forearm and tapered down to a deadly point. By themselves, they might account for one of the serpents if it held still and took the entire spell to the face. That wouldn’t do, of course, which was why the instant the first wave shot off, a new one materialized in its place.

At a speed of roughly three waves per second, I launched thousands of needles into the swarm and tore apart better than half their numbers before the rest scattered in every direction. Of those that got away, I doubted any but the ones in the very back did so unscathed.

With my opponents now circling around in every direction, it got significantly more difficult to keep track of them. In a normal fight, I would have relied on divinations to see around me. Here, that wouldn’t work. My body didn’t have its normal senses. The spells were designed to show me the world in visible light, or even in the absence of light, and those that detected mana would simply detect everything in a world made of nothing else.

I made a mental note to research combat divinations for use in the Astral Realm someday, though that was going to be a difficult field of study since I’d need to simulate the environment and noncorporeal entities made of pure mana that moved through it. For now, I simply relied on the senses my astral form came equipped with.

Instead of forming more needles, I cast a different spell. A porous sphere of phantasmal essence bloomed around us, not as solid an aegis as I’d normally use, but if I did that, I’d block out all the mana my shadow needed to maintain our work. At that point, we’d be starting over and I wasn’t willing to waste the time. This was a compromise between offense and defense.

As the first serpent looped around to study us from another angle, a long, whip-thin tendril of phantasmal magic whipped out of the barrier and sliced through the entity’s face. It flitted away like a frightened fish in a pond, injured but still alive. Another one took its place, and another after that.

In moments, I had a few dozen tendrils flailing around, hacking at anything and everything that dared to get close. As a strategy, it was a losing one. Eventually I’d falter, and all the serpents had to do was wait outside the radius of my magic, then close in once I was vulnerable. Fortunately, this spell’s purpose was more to buy me time and protect me when I couldn’t see in every direction at once. The true attack was something else.

Those holes all throughout the barrier had a second purpose: port holes to fire more phantasmal needles through. It wasn’t a concentrated salvo, but at far greater range and with new salvos shooting off in every direction, it served its purpose. The serpents that were too slow were killed and the rest were driven off.

I considered the benefits of relocating, but the truth was that we were adrift in an ocean of mana. Movement was possible, but we wouldn’t be able to work at the same time, and I had no way of knowing where the next threat would come from. We could drift right into something I couldn’t take care of, or we could find a safe harbor twenty minutes away. I’d never know if I didn’t go personally explore.

With that thought in mind, the only true safety was leaving the Astral Realm. Since we couldn’t do that without finishing the ascension ritual, the best thing to do was get it done as swiftly as possible. It was possible the giant serpent would come back, and if it did, I’d handle that, too, somehow. For now, every second delayed was another second we were vulnerable.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I reclaimed my half of the ritual from my shadow and we got back to work.

* * *

At the beginning of my new life, I’d been weak. Then I’d ignited my mana core, the first stage. After that, I’d built my lattice, expanded my core, and lacquered the whole thing for stability. That was the limit for most mages, those first four stages, because stage five was when I’d stopped being human. First, I’d transformed my entire body into a living mana crystal. Then, I’d formed an artificial consciousness that spanned the length of my entire valley and forged a bond with it, turning it into my demesne.

That was the second bottleneck, where those who went beyond mere humans remade themselves in body and mind. The last three stages were to bind a mana core tightly to the Astral Realm, to use it to become something more than any single mage could ever be. Stage seven laid the foundation, and stage eight formed the twin shadow, literally doubling a mage’s ability to multitask. But that didn’t grant the mana reserves two entities required.

That was what stage nine was for – one mortal body reforged in magic, one ethereal body made of mana and shadows, and the mirror held up between them that reflected two more. With those doppelgangers completed, it was time to braid everything together into a unified whole.

This was the part where I’d be most vulnerable. My shadow couldn’t guard the ritual while I worked, not when it was such an integral part of the process. Anything that attacked us now would disrupt the process and force us to start over, and in the Astral Realm, there was no such thing as guaranteed safety. Arriving out in the crushing depths of this ocean of mana was just my bad luck, but at the same time, if I could pull this off, I’d be all that much more powerful for using such a strong, pure base as the building blocks of this final transformation.

The sole saving grace here was that this final part of the ritual would take bare minutes at most. We’d been attacked five or six times over the last few days, always with hours and hours between each battle. Unless we were extremely unlucky, we would have plenty of time before the next interruption.

The ritual began, and all was well. I intertwined with my reflection, merging it into my being, and opposite of me, my shadow did the same. The process was quick and efficient, even faster than when I’d done it the first time. Unless something went wrong, I’d drastically overestimated how long it would take to complete. We’d be done in under a minute.

My shadow, facing opposite of me, spotted it first. It was a bare glimmer off in the mana, a subtle shift in the currents that flowed out of sync with everything around it. Within seconds, that glimmer took on the undulating, miles-long form of the massive sea serpent we’d seen when we’d first arrived.

I’d been expecting to see that thing again after we’d chased off or murdered the clutch it had sent back to snack on us. When days had gone by and it had failed to make an appearance, I’d started to wonder if it had simply drifted too far away to find us. On the off chance that my luck hadn’t miraculously turned good, however, I’d done my best to buy myself some time in the event that it did make an appearance.

Blocking the flow of mana through the Astral Realm was impossible, both because we needed that mana for ourselves and because any truly solid wall would have to withstand the pressure of an impossible amount of mana pushing on it. Forming a wall was no better than raising a sail to let the current speed us along the way.

Instead, I’d littered the mana round me with twisted knots of phantasmal energy, all tied together into a huge net that let everything flow through it, at least up to a certain size. The serpent was impossibly fast, especially swimming against the current like it was, but when its snout hit that first knot, it got a face full of razor-sharp phantasmal blades.

The serpent was more surprised than injured. More importantly, it checked its own advance a mile or so away, which gave us a few extra seconds. My mirror image was almost completely merged into me. Once that was complete, my shadow and I would come back together to bring all four pieces that were ‘Keiran’ together, completing the ritual and creating a stage nine mana core.

All we needed was another twenty seconds or so. If the serpent bulled through the defenses I’d scattered around, it could still disrupt the ritual. I was gambling on its caution at encountering something unknown and hoping that it wasn’t intelligent or malicious enough to understand what it was capable of doing.

Based solely on the wicked grin it flashed me as it nosed forward and set off another of the phantasmal blasts, it knew exactly what the score was. Something its size couldn’t really weave through the traps, but then again, the traps couldn’t do much to actually hurt it. They might sting, but they couldn’t stop the serpent.

It figured that out with ten seconds left to complete the ritual. Suddenly growing bold, it lunged through my net of improvised phantasmal explosives. With an unhinged jaw big enough to swallow Grandfather whole, its mouth closed around the entire ritual.

Five seconds to go.

Being inside an astral entity was a novel experience, one I hadn’t thought to ever go through personally. We were tossed around, but thanks to the strange rules of reality in the Astral Realm, the ritual wasn’t anchored to a specific place. It was anchored to us, and it came with us when the serpent swallowed us whole.

Zero seconds to go.

The biggest danger here was actually that the serpent would sever my anchor, but the merger was complete now. My shadow, our reflections and myself were a singular entity on this plane of existence. There was nothing left to disrupt.

Phantasmal energy exploded out of me in every direction, ripping and tearing a thousand feet out and shredding the serpent’s skull. Pieces of it drifted around me as its corpse was slowly pulled away by the current. I watched it dissolve, half of it already gone in the next minute, just to see if the battle drew any scavengers looking for an easy meal.

When nothing showed up, I settled back and started calculating the time I’d need to wait until the next beacon call came through. It wouldn’t be long now, an hour at most. Then I’d follow it back home, step through the portal that was my own mana core, and return to Manoch as a fully realized stage nine archmage.

Something resembling a puffer fish swam past me, a few hundred feet away. I glanced at it. It looked back at me. Suddenly, its speed tripled as it shot off in the opposite direction. With a satisfied smile, I resumed counting down the minutes until I could return home.