First, there was a familiar sight. MIRE.

The old one. Still in one piece.

A very old by this point, and a very familiar scene. Shattering crystal. Our “deaths”. This one was not different in the slightest from what I remembered myself, although the timeline was a bit different. Of course, I mean we didn’t vanish exactly at the same moment.

The next one… was unsurprising, but interesting.

The “bowl”. And ruined MIRE. And not like I remembered it.

Yeah, it was destroyed. But not covered in greenery completely yet. Hell, even outside wasn’t the same.

It was a sight of pure desolation.

I saw him wake up and shake himself off from the stun of the appearance. He saw the destroyed building and looked outside.

Instead of the lush forest I knew there was in there now, I saw just a large crater.

Nothing inside, just a raw earth blown up in the shape of a humongous bowl that stretched between the mountains, hidden from sight.

Ah. So that’s how it appeared.

MIRE’s appearance literally blew a hole in a mountain range.

I mean, I had my own suspicions, but to have them confirmed just like that was something else entirely.

Okay. What’s next?

The vision skipped.

It had to be a good while after the previous one, because not only the sky was darker, but we… or rather he was at the edge of the crater, inspecting the raw rock that was almost vertically cut.

Another cut.

A river.

Or rather a beginning of one.

A stream of water, surging from the mountain, opening to a cave.

Mike taking a drink and promptly moving deeper, towards the source and inside the opened mountain.

An end of a cave.

A brief confusion followed by a couple of spells and sudden feeling of determination.

Followed by a lot of rock melding.

So he was the one who made the corridors, too.

Next one was just him traveling through the forest.

But there was one flash…

Him accidentally destroying a tree.

I finally noticed his arms.

I knew he had to have an Origin Crystal with him, but up till now the memory was hazy enough for me to not be able to tell where. And not like I knew exactly.

I could see that he had shrapnel embedded in his arm.

And not only there.

The more his memory focused, the more I was able to see.

Another arm. Leg. Chest… Especially there.

He was almost completely covered with wounds from the exploding crystal and the pieces of it were stuck everywhere.

Damn.

It was a miracle that up till then he didn’t drain anything accidentally.

But then, there wasn’t much to drain in the crater, nor was there anything in the tunnels.

Only thanks to the forest he was able to tell.

Next piece.

Mike again, this time he was in even more torn clothes. He made wraps from some scraps so he could touch things. It still wasn’t completely hiding his pieces from sight, although was good enough so he wasn’t in immediate danger to destroy something accidentally.

Next: meeting with Melle.

I was kind of surprised that this one was so brief.

I didn’t see much of it, instead it was just him seeing the familiar cottage in the middle of the woods.

Maybe he also got trapped with the vines and got the same treatment as me and didn’t want to show me?

Probably.

I did get a glimpse of her, though.

She was a lot younger back then. I mean, obviously, but seeing her face made me realize how actually similar to Il she was.

The only difference being her hair…

For some reason, she was bald.

A bit strange, but didn't really matter overall. The next part already had her being a grandma.

I never realized he left her so late…

Or maybe it was just because she was older than I thought?

Probably the second one.

After that there were some flashes of him traveling through every single possible climate I could think of. Some definitely not even remotely similar to the greenery I was used to. It was mostly desert flatlands and some of the mountains.

Few islands.

I even think I saw him right in the middle of the ocean, casting some spells to raise an island from the sea.

Wait, wasn’t that how the Red Edge was supposed to be made?

Was that memory that old?

The timeline didn’t add up, though…

And yet, after that I saw some images of a very rocky and very crystal island.

The visions came and faded, showing me more and more of his travels through the lands. I slowly stopped trying to remember everything, because it was just like a jumble of random scenes without much in common, besides of course, his own self.

What I noticed though was the fact that while time was definitely passing, he was not changing.

Unsurprising. He was part crystal after all.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Or at least it felt like that.

After a bit more images, I realized that most of the shrapnel was no longer visible on his body any more.

Did he find a way to get rid of it?

No.

Quite the opposite.

After a scene that involved some lake I managed to finally notice.

The crystals weren’t gone, they were just inside him.

Unlike me, whose crystal replaced a whole body, or at first a part of it, the crystal that got attached to him instead got pulled inside of him.

There were no missing limbs or anything to replace, so I guess it got pulled together somewhere else? He wasn’t wounded much, but…

No.

He had to take damage during the explosion of the MIRE.

It just had to be a different kind of damage.

Since the crystals coalesced inside of him…

Was it possible that it was just the insides that got damaged?

Internal damage.

I mean, of course it had to be.

Having shrapnel in your stomach could definitely mess with your guts if you were unlucky, and that was most likely the case.

It would also explain how he managed to keep the appearances so far.

It was his organs that got replaced and enhanced, and with those and the power of Origin Crystal he would be able to keep up the appearances. Seems like almost indefinitely.

Before the crystal got to his outer layer, he managed to realize what was going on and control it a bit more.

Unlike me when the change started from the outside and then promptly went towards my head, he managed to contain it in just what appeared to be his chest, or maybe just the heart.

Was he that unlucky that he also got stabbed through the heart?

Who knows.

That wasn’t the point of me being shown those memories, though, that was clear to me.

Because the next memory was a lot more vivid and snapped me out of the trance I’ve fallen into while watching the random bits of his mind.

A face.

I recognized her instantly, or at least I thought so.

Ilma.

Actual one. The real and original.

I think.

Child of Il, and…

Or was it Melle’s?

She did tell me that she was adopted…

It probably was the one from here, else why would she be in those memories?

But that didn’t make sense… The memory was not of the house near the bowl, nor in the capital. It was… a desert?

Yeah, somewhat similar to the one I’ve not so long ago been through, but it looked a lot less sandy and more like a wasteland.

Was that the place Rob mentioned?

Maybe? The one in his memory was different, though.

Main question though: what were either of them doing there?

The answer came almost instantly.

And it came in the form of a spell flying right at him.

What the hell? Why would a supposed daughter attack his father?

Was he training her?

I mean, it wouldn’t be surprising, it was Mike we were talking about, or rather Axelrod at this point already.

But it didn’t seem like it. And if it was, it was the weirdest training session I’ve seen in a while.

He was just acting as a training dummy for her.

Different elements, different shapes, she lobbed every single spell she could think of at him, not even making any scratch at his form.

Wow. I knew he was enhanced by the crystal, but I didn’t expect it to be so effective.

Sure, mine was, but I was already made out of that stuff. If my theory was correct and he was only “replaced” internally, she should be doing at least some damage.

But nope. Nothing was harming him.

Origin Crystal is scary.

After a couple minutes, she finally stopped. It didn’t seem like she gave up, she just ran out of mana.

I could see him trying to talk to her, but instead she just pulled out a small piece of metal from her pocket and vanished on the spot.

Portal magic?

Nah. There was no portal visible.

Suicide? Maybe? I don’t know…

Apparently not though, because the next memory was almost the same as the previous one, only the location was different.

Also, her gear changed.

I say gear but it was just mostly clothes.

While before, she was just wearing some plain looking clothes that would easily pass as a regular peasant, this time she was wearing more sophisticated clothes, like actual nobility.

But she was still the same person, there was no mistaking it.

No matter the change, the effect was the same: she disappeared without a trace.

When the third memory started the same, I tried paying more attention to her spells and the final act of disappearance.

I might not be so good at trying to distinguish different manas, but I can understand spells and how they work, or so I thought.

The truth was, I was still unable to understand completely how she was able to disappear like that.

One thing was for sure though: that was not portal magic.

Sure, it was similar, but different somehow…

Was it possible?

Was she actually teleporting, not just using portals?

What’s the difference though, right? From a regular person’s perspective it’s just the same, just skipping a few steps, isn’t it?

Wrong.

With portal magic you just connect two locations together and that’s about it. I might be glancing through the actual process of creating the spell in the first place, but that’s the main part: connecting two spots.

With teleporting though…

You don’t connect a thing.

You have to destroy and recreate.

In one place, you literally have to destroy your own self and then recreate a copy somewhere else.

At least that’s how I see it and how my theory about that works.

How then you can tell that the same person emerges on the other side?

The answer is soul.

Or rather your own mana that creates this “soul”.

I didn’t really think it was possible to exist, to be honest. Or at least not until we finally managed to transplant the soul…

Not like we even knew we succeeded. If causing a calamity can be classified as succeeding…

But, if that was true, it would also make actual teleportation possible, not just warping space into portals.

Well, whatever that was, she was definitely good at it.

Pretty much nonexistent cast time, amazing way to escape…

What I am talking about! Of course it wasn’t! To be able to cast something like this… I wonder how complicated the incantation had to be?

No matter, that was not the point. She was amazing at magic, that one was obvious.

Was it because she was Il? I mean, if he was the one who raised her, why not?

On top of that, it was really her, the original one, that also meant she had inherited some of her mother’s mind.

I felt proud for a second, but I quickly shook off the feeling.

It’s not like I helped much in that regard, I was more preoccupied with my other duties… And if she was the one, it was also my fault that she was in here like us. Stuck, maybe not in the worst world, but still not where we belonged…

Wait.

Stuck?

Was I so sure about that?

She was able to use advanced magic to teleport, who knows if she didn’t figure something else out… or at least was a lot better set up than me or Mike… Well, maybe not him. He was a king after all.

But since she apparently had access to this kind of magic, wouldn’t Mike be after her?

It definitely did not look that way, though.

To be honest, his attempts at counterattacking or even trying to prevent her from escaping were almost not worth mentioning. Just a stray lightning, a fireball just as she was able to vanish, stuff like that.

He had access to magic-disrupting artifacts, if he was interested in her, he’d definitely use some of those.

Or maybe he didn’t have those yet?

It was a possibility. Who knows when exactly he managed to get his hands on something like I’ve found… And if he had it, he’d for sure want to at least talk to her.

So far I’ve not seen even an attempt at dialogue from either side.

Distance much?

I’ve been a witness to a lot more of those “battles”, if you even want to call them so, being so one-sided. Every time she just escaped.

One thing was sure though: the passage of time.

In every single one I could see that the area around them was getting more and more densely overgrown, to the point where later ones had taken place right in the middle of forest, environment almost the same as I was used to.

That is, until the last memory.