There was really only one thing standing in the way of Oliver Grace and his returning home to his probably-still-pregnant wife and his probably-still-unborn child, it was named Archmage Alloman, and it was as close to an immovable object as those who are numbered among the living can aspire.

Oliver had considered a number of different plans and ideas, and finally had been forced to conclude that his plan with the nuclear spell wouldn't work at all.

Its success hinged entirely on him being able to find the hole that the archmage's dimension was joined to reality by, a hole which could be quite small, was probably concealed, and would certainly be warded in nearly as many ways as there were wards, and also being able to find a failproof method of threading his own mana through that hole.

The failure mode for his setting off the nuclear device without being able to find the place to stick it was death. The failure mode for not being able to find the portal, and therefore not getting to set it off at all, was also death, if only delayed a little later.

He'd tried a hundred different plans, and come up with ways that each one of them would fail, more ways than he was comfortable with.

In the end, Oliver was forced to conclude that there simply wasn't a way to reduce the uncertainty to a point where the risk was worth taking, there just wasn't.

It was time for a new strategy, the only option he had left at this point, and though it terrified him more than he would ever admit to himself, it was also the only chance he had left at finding a certain solution.

He would have to modify his System again, see if he could mold it into a form that would grant him some other advantage. He couldn't imagine what that advantage might be, couldn't see much beyond risk, but knew as he had known the last time that he'd modified his system that there was little other choice. But this time, he was forewarned, and therefore forewarned. He wouldn't be going in blind, this time.

After a little trial and error, Oliver developed a formula that would roughly calculate the amount of mental effort, determined by time elapsed, that it took him to realize a modification in the System. It scored each change by the amount of time — the magnitude of each change factored into the amount of effort it took to change it — and the time it took to effect the change. It was an imprecise thing, but he felt a little better having taken what few precautions he could instead of blindly rushing into the very thing that had nearly killed him multiple times already.

With nothing left to do and no ideas left to pursue, Oliver began to modify his System, slowly and methodically. His initial aim was to dismantle his current view so that he might replace it with something else entirely. It wasn't how it had worked before, where he'd simply ripped it out wholesale and let the magic determine what would replace it; instead, he hoped for a more controlled approach.

He started by dismissing the spreadsheet entirely, leaving only the music column and the mass of data floating in an amorphous form in the darkness. Then he dismissed that data too, and kept going, throwing away, dismantling, each piece of the System that had kept him alive thus far.

Soon he was left with very little except the music buttons. Eventually, hesitating, he dismissed that too, readying his mind for the existential horror of the total void once more.

A moment later, once the kaleidoscope of lights had dwindled away, he was left in the darkness, unable to see, feel, hear, or touch anything at all. He'd dismissed his System entirely.

Then he waited, steeling his nerve for the transition he'd known he would have to make, had known from the very beginning he would have to do, yet hadn't admitted to himself or really allowed himself to think about: he would have to dismiss this level of the System entirely, get back to — what had Madame Carrix called it? The Underpinnings. The layer between the everyday interface and that pure stream of data that had consumed him the first time.

Procrastinating, Oliver checked the tracker formula, noting that even as he'd done it just now, it had gotten progressively easier to shuck off pieces of his interface, indicating that it had become progressively less stable as the certainty that bound his concept of the interface to reality fell.

Oliver gave himself a moment's time to think about his wife and child, to dwell on the joy of their existence despite whatever might happen to him, in what might potentially be the last moment of his life. And then, with a mental flex and a wince, he dismissed the interface entirely, willing that sub-layer he'd seen only once before to come to the surface.

It happened suddenly, easily, and he was then surrounded by a deeper void. He had been drawn entirely into the interface, as before, as that one time inside the harpy's nest. He could no longer even blink, and all consciousness of his body — including, mercifully, the sensation of needing to go to the bathroom — had vanished.

He was within the Underpinnings again, except this time he had time, as much time as he needed to study it, and experience, the knowledge of what it was. Where before the System had simply been incomprehensible to him, the great starfield of nodes that he was hovering as a bare consciousness within now became clear.

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Each of the points of light was a record of a spell, made up of the myriad experiences that had gone into forming it, as interpreted by the great spell that was the System itself.

He was within the most incredible and powerful spell ever crafted, a spell that was informed by his experiences and others, and drew upon them all to bind him, a simple human, to a colossal library of meaning and intent that formed a purposeful means of interacting with that great being that was magic.

It was only here, in this place beyond a place beyond time, with his body sustained by another spell, the Second Wind spell modified and twisted from its original purpose beyond all recognition, that he could solve the problem of the Archmage.

With time, he found that he was able to make sense of the vast web, each node glittering in that space representing as it did a spell. He dipped from spell to spell, noting that each one was bound to previous iterations of the spell, and found something familiar in the visions that each spell conjured, found that they were the same visions he experienced whenever he learned a new spell.

Each vision, then, represented a particular iteration of a particular spell, its… heritage. Ancestry.

And that meant that each spell was bound to a previous spell, and that spell references were what were being exchanged between people.

It had been a spell reference that Tiro had passed to him, and he had unwittingly navigated that spell reference to trace its lineage. The Spark spell that had found its origin in a human mage contemplating the mana forms that made up the breath of the dragon, and had subsequently been molded, modified by other mages until the spell had reached its present diminutive form, a lighter.

And then, pondering this, he realized that he knew what he was looking for, exactly what would destroy the archmage no matter how powerful he was.

His search began.

For a timeless moment that could have been a day or could have been a year after that he into spell after spell, learning, watching the development of magic, the history of this world captured in outside of time like a fly in amber.

The visions formed him, changed him, and as he partook of one after another he found his knowledge of magic and mana increasing beyond bounds.

Oliver no longer suffocated from a dearth of sensory stimulation, he was drowning in it. But each time he found himself unable to absorb more information, he withdrew from the Underpinning into the soothing silence of the void. Soon he came to find the act nearly effortless, until he could switch back and forth with barely more than the conscious desire of it, until his mortal body became nothing more than an afterthought. He had a hundred bodies now, a thousand, a thousand thousand.

It was the kind of experience that a mortal mind was not meant to hold, and it would have destroyed him save that the supercharged and drastically modified Second Wind spell was healing the damage done even as he was inflicting it, empowered to repair the cell structures and the neurons according to the expectations formed by, and knowledge Oliver had learned through, mortal science. a neural net, an artificial intelligence that had been fed thousands of years of information on how the human mind was supposed to work in its healthy state, that had had time to nest and gestate within Oliver's mind and learn how he thought, and use its superhuman intelligence to make him not only more of a being, but more of himself, more Oliver, and even that would have failed but for that he was consciously directing it, choosing based on his own tiny fraction of lived experiences that nonetheless had the hold over his identity granted only by agency.

It was like his first experience with the Underpinnings had been, where he had become one with the pure stream of consciousness, only this time it was under control, it was under his control, and it was all by choice, and it was all directed towards one conscious end: destroying the System.

—

Some tens of thousands of visions later, he at last found it, the thing he had been looking for, the thing he knew had to exist: The Empire's latest incarnation of the System spell, the one that had been imprinted upon him.

The spell that he now gazed upon was final expression of it all, the tail end of a thread that led all the way back to the first spell, Myrddin's System, the sword of Damocles that had been long-suspended above the head of all mankind in both this world and his own, and however many others might exist out there in the great unknown.

In witnessing the visions of its development he was privileged to watch as it imprinted itself upon him, as the unique spellform that carried within its whirling fractal patterns all other spells and even the previous incarnations of itself, imprinted itself upon his mind. He watched while his mind was rewritten by magic, even felt himself come to consciousness, dazed, in a beautiful glade in a forest, dressed in lawncare clothes and with a weed whacker incongruously grasped in one white-knuckled hand. And then he was snapped out of the vision and back into the Underpinnings, for it had come to an end, the spell having settled.

The experience of dwelling within a previous version of his own body, re-experiencing the odd phenomena that had accompanied his arrival in this world, was a truly strange one that was more like to déjà vu than déjà vu itself was.

This iteration of the spell, this node hung within the great three-dimensional graph that his mind and magic had co-conjured up around him, it connected to another node, and that node connected to another, and so on, forming a long chain of connected nodes. As his mind raced along the chain towards what could only by the one inevitable destination, he found himself thrilling; even without a body to experience it, the human mind was still capable of emotion, and though his mind was much enlarged and changed by the experience, a human mind it still certainly was.

By now he had learned much of magic, had force-fed himself perhaps more knowledge and experience than any mortal man had ever had the dubious privilege of ingesting.

Alloman's magics had long since become clear to him; advanced they were indeed, the youngest and greatest manifestations of an elegant system of magic that fed on itself and unlike Jörmungandr grew only greater in so doing, a system of magic impelled by the force of human intent and agency.

Oliver saw that this world had long since had its Singularity, only instead of bringing about self-conscious artificial intelligence it had granted a greater power and will to man's own imagination, a power and will it had used to inflict on itself only greater and greater horrors, that it could only be by the barest chance this world existed at all, that its very existence hung on a thread.

But he was torn from his ruminations by arriving with a suddenness at the end of his quest, the spell that had been the beginning of it all: the very first iteration of the System.