"You heard that?" Ran asked, upon returning.

"Yep. I can't believe he butchered my name like that."

Pinning Firdon's death on Jair was absurd, but it didn't surprise him. Even if he hadn't foreseen this exact scenario, he’d come to expect this kind of idiocy from Larenok. He didn't doubt for a moment who was responsible here. No one else would have the necessary information, sway, and position to make such an accusation. No one but Larenok could possibly have arranged it.

He still wanted an excuse to grind Jair under his petty little boots.

Yet despite the many times Jair had run through this time period in the past - albeit with Ran not surviving - this was the first time the headmaster went so far as to involve the Hyperion. Absolutely ludicrous. How much of his ill-gotten fortune had it cost Larenok to pull that one off?

Ran snorted in barely restrained laughter. "Your 'victim' act isn't fooling anyone, it seems."

"Time to drop the act and get rid of this poison already, then." Jair hefted the stack of books. "We have someplace to start, and this one journal looks very promising. Just need to find a safe corner to study in."

"Returning to the Institute would be a bad idea,” Ran said. “We can stay at my place."

"Will your father really be okay with that? Inviting an assassin into his home?"

"You're not an assassin."

Jair raised an eyebrow.

"Well, you aren't yet. Even if you have been and plan to become so again." Then Ran's expression turned to concern. "Right?"

"No assassinations yet, correct. I'm not sure if I killed anyone the night I returned, it's a bit of an angry blur at the moment, but I wouldn't call that an assassination since it was five against one and they're the ones who attacked me."

"They're all alive. You made quite an impression, though."

"Well, good. They deserved it." Probably deserved worse, if he were going to be specific about it, but even if he couldn't ever fully forgive the wrongs committed against him, he didn't have to hold onto them forever either. There were others later on who deserved his full vengeance,

They sneaked around the city, avoiding any main thoroughfares that could be patrolled by the Hyperion, but they only spotted one more pair who they easily evaded before arriving in the upper district.

Ran's house was a place Jair had visited before the loops began, but not often afterwards. He studiously avoided Lord Ajriol Serin after Ran's death, hating the idea of trying to use Ran's memory as a bargaining tool even more than hating the rest of the nonsense he had to go through to finance his future undertakings.

Ran proposed Jair take one of the guest rooms - of which they had three - for the duration of their stay.

Jair proposed pilfering a mattress and camping out in Ran's room.

Ran didn't need much convincing. His room was big enough to accommodate the extra mattress with only minimal adjustment.

With sleeping arrangements decided upon, they took their new acquisitions down to the Serin family library. It wasn't nearly as extensive as the twin library towers back at the academy, but had enough books on most basic concepts to be valuable as cross-references if necessary.

"You should go back to the Institute," Jair suggested. "At least to a few classes. If we're both missing, they'll probably suspect I'm here."

They might suspect it anyway, since Ran and Jair's friendship wasn't a secret from anyone, but better to raise as few questions as possible.

"I'm recovering from a traumatic experience," Ran insisted. "I've been given leave to attend as many or as few classes as I please."

Jair tried to convince him, even resorted to leaning hard on the 'but you need to graduate properly' thing, but Ran was having none of it.

"We are going to solve this thing as quickly as possible," he insisted, until Jair gave up trying to persuade him otherwise.

He couldn’t help but feel this was uncharacteristically reckless of Ran. For someone who so often insisted on following every rule and convention, he seemed very cavalier about things all of a sudden.

While Jair sequestered himself in the library, Ran disappeared to discuss the situation with his father and arrange for funding, then sent out to the connected cities for any other technical documents about dragon blood poisoning of any kind, or any healer with a known expertise.

The first book was a medical text, which only had a single chapter on dragon blood poisoning, but that was still more than the entire school library had managed.

The dragon types were listed, the specific treatment types that were known to be effective, and the best ways to slow their spread.

Though known, the method for shimmer dragon blood removal turned out not to be nearly as simple as just 'overflow yourself with foreign mana until the poison goes away'. Fully removing it also required a specific combination of herbal and magical tinctures, exotic ingredients every bit as rare as those used in reforging Maelstrom, and a good bit of luck.

Fire dragon blood did almost entirely physical damage, so its solution required using particular potions and constructs to compensate for blood loss while removing the tainted blood rapidly enough to outpace the spread. Basically the same kind of full purge as for a shimmer dragon, but blood instead of mana. It always resulted in physical scarring, but the biggest problem would be how drastic both cures were.

The purely-physical fire dragon blood could be counteracted physically; the purely-mana shimmer dragon blood could be counteracted magically. The combination would be the hard part.

It described poison dragon antivenom in concise detail, the creation steps, how to distill it quickly from starvein plants synthetically cultivated from a few drops of the attacking dragon's blood.

It was a very specialized cure, focused in each case to the specific dragon. There wasn't a way to prepare it in advance without access to that exact dragon’s blood, no universal antivenom that could be kept on hand. Each dragon was unique, on a magical level, whatever other similarities they held.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

There was an equally specific page for the measures to curtail storm, frost, shadow, and even sub-types like sun or whisper.

Some countermeasures were more effective than others - storm and sun couldn’t be slowed for even a week, while frost and poison could be delayed for up to a month - but all were ultimately only postponing the inevitable.

Still, the more he read, the more excited he grew. This was a puzzle that only someone with his abilities could solve, apart from stumbling upon the solution through blind luck.

How had he never thought to apply his skillset to medical study in the past? Sure, there was always some pressing chaos taking his attention, but to have completely written off the field of study after a handful of half-hearted attempts before he even knew what he was doing now seemed incredibly shortsighted.

Well, no time like the present.

The hand-bound journal was where things got really interesting: the personal research journal of someone trying to break down and isolate the magical and electrical properties of a storm dragon's blood.

The high mana content made storm closest to shimmer in makeup, but there wasn't any reaction with attempts to mana-flood it. As if the electric blood itself was physically magic, somehow remaining in the outer layer, and it attacked the bodies differently than the other dragon types.

Ultimately unhelpful for Jair's specific circumstances, but invaluable for the descriptions of techniques for figuring out the makeup of the blood samples.

It listed the steps with incredible precision, the equipment needed, the different tests that should be performed and more importantly the order in which to do them. Some were destructive, and needed to be ordered carefully so the samples didn't fall apart completely before each aspect had been measured.

Ran returned with a large allotment of funding for their investment, which Jair casually suggested they split for efficiency purposes and Ran divided without pause.

“How’s it coming?”

“As I thought, the other three major types are all a mix of both magical and physical damage, which is the biggest reason that they haven't been cured. Anything that touches both body layers is going to be harder to balance."

“Right, which is why no one’s solved it before now.”

Jair gestured to Ran’s still-bandaged arm. "Like with your ruptured pathway, any time things are out of balance the damage can become more drastic much more quickly. As long as manabody and physical body are in full attunement, both can weather a lot.”

Ran nodded, brow furrowing as he caught up. “And that’s why you can't simply cure the remaining types using both methods simultaneously.”

“Right. Even aside from their esoteric natures, the substance of it is beyond reasonable methods. The strain would be dangerously destructive to both, shifting out of sync two different ways at once. Either could compensate for the other over the short term, but pushing both out of balance at the same time in opposite directions would cause severe, lasting, and likely deadly consequences."

"So it's impossible."

"Not at all. It's ultimately a very simple solution. Decipher the exact proportions of mana and physical damage being done, remedy each in perfect proportion, without causing imbalance, while also remedying the non-similar elements simultaneously. The two complete purge methods work because it doesn't matter if you use a little too much or a lot too much, it still does what it's meant to. With this, the slightest imbalance will only accelerate the destruction."

"You sound far too excited about dying faster."

"This is exactly what I've been missing! A whole new field of study, untapped, ripe for the plundering. Just think, Ran! We can be the pioneers of a whole new field of medicinal manalogy."

“Yeah, good for you.”

Jair considered saying something, but he’d already argued enough for one day. Better to give his friend space, he’d bring it up when he was ready to discuss it.

He handed Ran the journal to look at and turned to the last book, a thick tome which turned out to be the autobiography of a dragon hunter from several hundred years ago. A self-proclaimed master hunter who claimed to have killed more dragons of more varieties than anyone else in recorded history.

The writing was incredibly dull, the author overly enamored with himself, propounding at length and not hesitating to waste pages on trivialities.

Between the anecdotes and meandering into imagination with no basis in fact, Jair still found a lot of good information. It never delved deeply into any individual type, but it still included diagrams and charts of the various dragons.

The section on dragon blood specifically was long and largely disorganized. But it did include something the others did not: a chart tracking the makeups of every type of dragon blood. Not in full detail, only a moderately advanced overview of the biggest elements, but it still gave someplace solid to start.

Between the medical text’s details on how to oppose each dragon variety, the biography’s graph on the makeup of each blood type, and the journal’s full breakdown of the process for obtaining more detailed information, that was more than enough to be getting on with.

By the time Ran started to look dazed and bored, Jair had moved on from reading and started instead cross-referencing and compiling the information into a clearer form for his own use. He looked up and noticed the darkening sky outside, realizing he’d lost track of time. Stretching, he set the project aside.

“We can finish this in the morning. Time to get up! Still need to do our exercises for the evening, and you haven’t meditated on your soulspell attunement yet.”

“I have,” Ran protested, but he got to his feet and stretched expansively, then led the way out into the back courtyard.

They first spent some time running through Jair’s strict regimen of physical training. Ran still needed to rest his manabody while it recovered from the ruptured pathway, so he moved immediately into soulspell meditation.

Meanwhile Jair traced out his complex imprints with the help of three different measurement tools.

The attunement process wasn’t something that could be narrowed down to anything simple or specific, it was more a way of feeling your way to the imprint of your soul, while creating it at the same time.

For Jair, he’d simplified the envisionment to a golden mote of light, but if he focused fully he could see it spread out throughout his entire body, dense and complex. The pattern he’d seared into Maelstrom’s blade represented only a blunt simplification of a small portion of the whole that was his soulspell, but that was enough to bind them together.

Once Jair finished tracing his imprints, he sat down to join Ran. While he had no need of further attunement for Temporal Reversion, Maelstrom itself might have secrets hidden within its spiritual representation that its physical blade couldn’t show. Inspect could only show so much.

It took a surprisingly long time to focus in on the silver star in his soul that represented Maelstrom. The blade’s soul was constantly in motion, orbiting Jair’s stable soulspell in erratic patterns that made it hard to unfurl.

But Jair had spent long enough wrangling magic of every kind to be able to handle something like this. It only required patience and focus.

Maelstrom slowly spread out before him in his inner sight, the silver star slowing and becoming a complex diagram that filled Jair’s head and chest, most concentrated on the connection point in the center of his forehead.

Maelstrom’s diagram was also broken. Ragged edges where whole patches of the pattern had been burned away. Dull sections that weren’t connected to the rest, drifting aimlessly off in the corners of his soul.

He found the dragon’s influence immediately. It was still silver, but tinted with a faint green hue, and the shape of it was both more complex - dense with lines crossing and recrossing - and simpler, no curves or symbols, only straight lines. It looked entirely alien and out of place amid the elegant whirls and waves of Maelstrom’s natural patterns, yet he could see how the section fit perfectly into the overall fabric of the weapon’s soul. It replaced something that had been absent, filling one of the empty spaces. And… if he wasn’t mistaken, it seemed to be still growing.

Jair backed out of soulsight. He needed to verify his suspicions.

“Soulblade, manifest.”

Maelstrom appeared, silver and glowing. Jair checked the tip where the greenish stain had spread, but the visual change seemed to have stopped. It looked exactly how he remembered.

“Inspect.”

─ Maelstrom

─Type: Ascended Soulsword (3rd Form)

─ Rank: Legendary (13%)

Imbued with the pure energy of Mount Sanctum at its ascension, this blade has transcended its humble origins and become a weapon of *****?

Slaying an ancient poison dragon has altered this weapon, empowering it with its venom and **?

– Class Requirement: Mageblade

─ Bound to Jair Welburne

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