I wasn’t out for too long, but when I did awaken, I felt… Amazing. My strength had surged in a way that it never had before. This had to be what it would have been like to take a Fundament Foundation Pill, but thanks to the power of the deep mana, I wasn’t suffering from a week’s worth of mana toxin.

Many of my spells that had been on the border of ready to advance to the next stage, like Burn Future or Material Echo, had been pushed forwards, and the overall power jump meant that the only spells I still needed to master before I was ready to break into third gate were Spatial Tripwire and Lesser Psychometry.

I hadn’t gotten much use out of either of them, and I didn’t think they’d ever be a core part of my power, but each of them had enough utility that I wanted to make sure I integrated them into me, at the very least.

More important than the spell progression, every bit of my mana felt entirely different. It was denser, not quite enough to be a full ascension’s worth, but noticeably stronger. It was vaster, stretching further than it should have, even with the walls being higher. It was smoother, flowing like water instead of air, even with my Beast Mage’s Soul.

I conjured Briarthreads around me and felt the power burst out faster than ever before, fill a larger area around me, and be more tightly forged.

I dismissed the spell a moment later, not wanting to waste any mana, and felt the imbued effect of my harvesting spells churn quickly, outputting mana faster than they ever had before.

Even my body felt stronger and tougher, and I had a spring in my step as I headed through the gate and appeared outside, along with Travis, Liz, Dusk, Kene, and Siobhan. As my mana senses swept over them, I could feel just how much stronger each of them had grown.

None of them had choice legacies, of course, which left them with both an advantage and disadvantage. They’d gotten less overall power than me, but unlike me, all of the power they’d gotten was that of destiny.

Their growth had been markedly different than mine. Liz had invested heavily into her own full gate spell, and I could practically feel the power it was putting off, enhancing every one of her offensive spells. That choice was too limiting for me, but for a dedicated combat mage like her, I thought it was a wise choice.

I’d expected Travis to do the same thing, but he seemed to have made an entirely different choice, using the power to burn away the mists in his third gate mana-garden.

Third gate was supposed to be one of the longest and hardest ones to push through, so I could understand the logic, I just… didn’t entirely agree. I thought it would be better to have invested the power, rather than burning it for something that he would have gotten eventually through training and dedication.

Kene had clearly put some of his into his tattoos, since they now possessed a shimmering golden color, but he’d invested some of it into his mana-garden. I thought he’d spread it around, targeting a bunch of different spells, since I could tell he was stronger, but it wasn’t entirely clear how.

That just left Dusk, and I had to stop myself from smiling. Dusk had very clearly done the exact same thing as I had, investing almost all of her power into the soil of her mana-garden. With the fact she was pushing in entirely destiny mana, her mana’s density had exploded. While that had been harder for me, it seemed to suit her, and I was almost tempted to compare her to Ivy’s absurd power.

It wasn’t quite there – she was still a rank beginner in third gate, and this investment wasn’t quite enough to match him.

But the mere fact that it was close was impressive enough to my mind.

“Well done,” I said, looking at everyone. “I admit, a part of me was expecting for things to go horribly wrong, and for us to get thrown out.”

Travis cracked a smile at that, and Liz grinned.

“Come on, you had me on the team. We could have taken on Kamal and his cabal.”

“I categorically disagree,” Kene said. “I…”

As they trailed off, all of us looked up.

The air itself was starting to crack, and on the other side I could see… things. Shapes moving through the void of nothingness. Light peering through, then vanishing. For a moment, I thought I saw an eye staring at me, but then it resolved itself into the shape of a nebula galaxy.

As the cracks began to spread, Travis’ eyes lit up.

“They’re freeing themselves,” he said softly.

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“What?” I asked. I didn’t see how he could possibly know this – he might be way stronger than me, but I was confident my senses were stronger than his, and I had no idea what was happening.

“Please remain calm,” Idyll’s voice said, ringing out from everywhere and nowhere. “A powerful spell has breached the dimensional integrity of this realm.”

She appeared over the top of the tower and thrust her hand into the air. Power exploded out of it, a beam of prismatic light that sank into the void. The cracks began to slow, their speed moving to a crawl.

Then a bird with the face of a human, glowing with seventh gate magic that blended knowledge, mental, tempest, and temporal, appeared in the sky across from her.

“Release it, sister!” the bird cawed. Unlike Idyll, her voice didn’t come from everywhere, but it still somehow managed to reach every ear. “Some may die, but if you act swiftly, you can–”

A multicolored beam of force and fires struck the bird, and I saw the old form of Elio rising up into the air. He appeared to be mostly human, but as I used Surveyor’s Eye to get a better look at him, it became clear that his hands and legs were tipped in claws, and red gemstone scales lined his arms.

“No,” he said, and his voice was loud enough to explode across all of the land. It actually hurt my ears slightly, with him so close, and it left a tinnitus-like ring.

Idyll looked distraught as the dragon and the bird dove at one another. Elio forged a massive draconic claw and slashed out at the bird, who quickly spat out a word that resonated in the air, and a cloud of lights crowned around Elio’s head.

Elio’s claw dissolved, and a massive wave of dragon’s breath coated the sky, filling it like the sun, so bright that it was impossible to look directly at.

Idyll let out a cry, and I could hear the pain and anguish ringing through everything. The cracks began to surge and spiral, and then a new person flew up in the battlefield.

I focused my Surveyor’s Eye onto them and slammed my mana-senses at them. They were a very pretty, androgynous human, and it took me a second to realize I’d seen them on the boat, briefly.

They were the one who had a pair of spirits that looked like cutouts in reality.

Their spirits floated up behind them a moment later, each one of them grown to the size of a human.

To my mana senses, they clearly had some sort of strange, multi-part spatial focused mana that also wove together both creation, desolation, telluric, life, and death.

But they were only third gate. They had to be throwing themself into the jaws of fate if they really thought that they could actually make a difference.

Then a familiar crystal appeared in the air over them, and my eyes widened.

No…

I looked at Dusk, who shook her head, whistling that it wasn’t her – she’d buried it deep.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, this realm had been left undisturbed for a very long time. It was only natural that there would be more than one ascending-death crystal.

The figure in the sky touched the crystal, and and power flooded through them. I felt their mana strike fourth gate, then fifth. A second later, it was sixth, then seventh.

“Showtime, I suppose,” a voice next to me said.

I whipped my eyes down to see Travis removing a few items through his spatial ring. He popped a pill into his mouth, and I focused.

His body was still wracked with mana-toxin, but he didn’t even seem to care. More power rushed through him as his mana doubled, and a moment later, I understood why he’d blown all his destiny mana on burning away the mists of his third gate.

He wasn’t focused on growing, not the way I was.

As his mana overflowed, he shattered the barrier to fourth gate, even as with my lifesense I could feel the strain it put on him, his liver starting to scar with cirrhosis.

Then a key floated out of his spatial ring, and my eyes widened.

I admit, I looked down on people who used advancement treasures. They all came with a price. Ascending death crystals killed you. Keys blocked off all future advancement.

But Travis didn’t care. The key slotted into his spirit, and a moment later, his mana compacted as he broke through the fifth gate.

It was a false ascension, reminding me of the person who’d run the home for runaway teens more than Azalea or Kene’s grandmother.

But right at this moment? It barely mattered.

Travis’ aura grew dense, and then Liz smacked him gently.

“You idiot! I knew this was your plan, but–”

Before she could keep talking, he raised two fingers and a lance of aura shot through her leg. I heard a loud crunch of bone, and Liz let out a scream of pain.

The other tired climbers who’d been around the tower were screaming too, but they’d been doing that since the battle in the sky had started. I didn’t think most of them even noticed.

“Sorry,” he said. “I can’t have you try and stop me. This is the best for everyone. For what it’s worth, I do actually like you and your family, Liz.”

“What exactly are you doing?” I demanded, keeping a handful of spells on a hair-trigger for if he so much as moved.

“Saving unjustly jailed prisoners,” Travis said. “And the world too, if I can get away with it.”

His fingers twitched, and a massive beam of aura roared through the air. It smashed into me and tore me apart, dissolving my body nothingness.

Or at least, my physical body.

With my newly mastered Material Echo, I’d teleported around the bend of the tower and left a physical echo in my place. Travis had seen my illusory echoes, but those were clear illusions, shaky, indistinct. He’d had enough time to sense me to know I couldn’t have advanced, and he’d never seen my Material Echo.

Meaning he had every reason to believe that I was currently dead.

A moment after the red light faded, Travis shot upwards into the air with a force that only an arcanist could achieve. He was joined by no less than six others, and as I felt them, I was confident that at least two of them were true ascensions too.

Lacking in spells and power, yes, but there nevertheless.

As I stared into the sky, I numbly realized that this must have been what had happened with the fifth gate hudau heritage stones.

All of the arcanists released their power as one, flowing in with the person who’d taken the crystal. They reached their hand out, and a powerful item appeared in it, a smooth crystalline sphere that was half amethyst, half onyx.

I had no doubt in my mind it was a magic item made by and for occultists, and it stank of Elio’s magic, but also something else.

The power rushed through it, and with a strain, it just barely activated.

Idyll vanished, and space shattered.