The rush of power was nearly maddening. I was wholly aware that affinity tiers didn’t scale linearly, but... I couldn’t expect such power from just a zero-point-one percent affinity difference.

I commanded my soul-tendrils to attack the High Arcanist. They were far more than before, faster and meaner, but the twelve-star mage reacted fast. En’yen laid an eleven-star barrier, blocking the attacks coming from all directions. No matter my newfound affinity, I was still unable to penetrate his defenses with my tendrils.

I didn’t care.

I was only getting used to my affinity, and the tendrils were part of my soul, they didn’t cost any mana.

The sheer clarity of my mind was awe-spiring. I felt that soul magic was so much simpler now. As if everything I had done was wrong and flawed. So many things to optimize and upgrade. My unclouded mind allowed me to manipulate the tendrils with unconscious ease, thrashing around hundreds of them in an afterthought.

They were useless against someone as powerful as the High Arcanist, but they could totally knock a lower-starred mage like a nine-star one in a single hit.

Nine-star, a low star?

I laughed again.

My tendrils continue to hack and slash Yagul’s defenses, but the leyline walker had unlimited mana. It was obvious that I couldn’t defeat him with just my innate skills.

I need to use true magic.

Even though I couldn’t even muster how to cast a spell as simple as an Arcane Bolt now, a myriad of high starred spells came to my mind with an ease I could only be taken aback.

I started casting again.

Resurrection was already finished, it had been close already before my elemental change, but my true affinity accelerated the casting greatly. It was nice to have a safety net to fall into.

But now, my brain was fully focused on a single spell.

Requiem was already incredibly simple; it took me only three seconds to cast. But that was before. Now, in those three seconds, I could do ten.

So, I did.

Coming from all directions, pillars of a single soul assaulted En’yen Yagul with a power I couldn’t even believe it was mine for starters. The drain in my mana pool was considerable, but negligible compared to how much a single Requiem had consumed before. Ten spells of the tenth star had only consumed a fifth of my soul mana pool. That was five times the efficiency.

Simply absurd.

The tenfold Requiem strike violated through the High Arcanist’s defenses, or so I would have liked to say.

Something had changed in En’yen. After the first Requiem I casted he had spellcasted that spell, Arcane Providence, and there was a different aura around him. Mana behaved strangely. Ambient mana I meant, because I had now absolute and total control over my own with my true affinity. Perhaps even all soul mana.

As tendrils gathered around me, so did the leyline mana around Yagul.

The massive blast of the Requiems dissipated, allowing me to see him. He was in worse shape than before, the attack had certainly affected him, but far less than I would have hoped. It was obvious as there was no gut-wrenching scream this time.

En’yen looked at me bothered and pissed; his eyes overflowed with arcane mana.

“True affinity...” He noticed. “I take back everything I said about you. You are not just an uninteresting healer, Edrie Nightfallen.” A barrier cracked around him and dispelled. Even his eleven-star spell had fallen under the myriad of ten-star spells. “But I fear that play time’s over. It’s now time for the adults to show their might.”

Mana shifted around the Audience Hall.

The movements weren’t swift and delicate like those of my tendrils, but raw and overwhelming. A maelstrom of arcane mana gathered around the High Arcanist, a mobile leyline on its own.

He raised his hand, and the moment he pushed it forward, the weight of the world fell on top of me.

The artificial leyline at the center of the Audience Hall bifurcated once more, but instead of the thousands of branches of a tree’s canopy, it was now a single continuous stream. The whole leyline shot at me.

It was fast.

Extremely fast.

Even with my consciousness set on the spiritual plane, I could barely react to the sudden movement. All I could do was raised my arms in reflex, a useless endeavor as the leyline hit me with all its arcane might.

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I flew.

The impact couldn’t compare to anything I had suffered before. Not Fynn’s eleven-star Fulmination spell nor the leyline back at Lan’el. That had only been an arm, but now my whole body was drowned by the very essence of the world.

With every passing instant, I could feel my flesh disintegrate. If I weren’t numb to pain at this point, I would have screamed. Resurrection activated itself sensing I had died. That wasn’t good. I started casting another one. I didn’t have much mana remaining.

The beam of raw arcane energy pushed against the glass walls of the Audience Hall, keeping me in the air by sheer pressure like a leaf stuck flat in a wall by the wind. I tried to move, but the stream had too much force, pushing my arms back onto the glass.

I heard a crack behind me.

Oh.

The enchanted glasswork broke, unable to handle the power of leyline. My body, still getting pushed around by the arcane energies, continued flying straight outside of the Arcane Sanctum.

It took gravity a few moments to understand that I shouldn’t be able to move in a straight line in the air without support at my feet, so unfortunately, I began falling down.

There I was, rapidly descending from the tallest building in the world into certain death.

...

Just kidding.

The overwhelming mana of the leyline had dispelled my two Slow Fall spells, but I could reapply them at any time. And even then, a simple fall wouldn’t be the end of me. I wouldn’t even need Resurrection to survive, depending on how I landed, just some critical Regenerations.

I took this moment of respite, taking advantage of the fact that the High Arcanist wasn’t attacking me, to think.

I couldn’t win. Not like this, at least.

My mana was rapidly draining, and En’yen had unlimited mana. I couldn’t kill him, his defenses were too strong, and he seemed to develop resistance to soul damage incredibly fast. My only way to defeat him was to let the corruption of the leyline take him. No matter how much of a leyline walker he was, one person couldn’t just wield the power of a planet without consequences. I experienced that firsthand.

It was a battle of attrition.

I could revive, but I had limited mana. Yagul had only one life but possessed unlimited mana at his disposal. Unless I could take him far from the leyline... But no, that was more unrealistic than killing him. Ferilyn was covered with leylines, unless I took him to the skies, it was impossible for me to get him far enough to not use the leylines against me.

There had to be another way...

I thought of all the tools at my disposal and, indeed, I had many.

The question was: how to use them?

I looked at my burnt left hand as it slightly glowed white. It should be even more damaged than before, yet it now appeared in a better condition than since the battle started. It felt vaguely... spiritual. I observed my surroundings, the walls of the Arcane Sanctum slowly moving before me, my time perception greatly slowed as I had most of my consciousness on the spiritual plane. My affinity nudged me a bit.

Elementals became of the element itself they had an affinity with as they grew older, true elementals were the incarnation of that same very element. Maybe it happened the same with ellari?

This time I didn’t look with my eyes, but my Soul Sight. My soul had grown considerably in just a few minutes, or what felt like minutes. It was incredibly expansive, with hundreds of tendrils expanding almost ten meters in length. My affinity whispered something.

But instead of expanding my soul around like Alatea had told me to do... what if I compressed it?

It was easy to make the tendrils retreat back to me, I had been forcefully pushing them outwards, they wanted to take my original form, not this mess.

Time seemed to slow more and more as my soul became took once more the shape of my body.

It was as if I comprehended perfectly how soul magic worked.

And I knew how to make a new weapon.

Until now, I had been inferior to the other mystics I had known in all capabilities even when taking into account my astonishing affinity. That was going to end now.

If Alatea told me anything, it was that you can definitely carve your own path in magic. She ascended to the eleventh star with her own original spell. Creating a new magic, especially of that tier was rare. But possible.

I Recalled the most powerful soul spells I knew. Mystic’s Dominion, Phylactery Bonding, the Nethergate ritual, Requiem, and lastly, Alatea’s Resurrection.

Two spells of the tenth star, a ritual spell that rivaled ten-star magic, and two of the eleventh star spell.

I could see the similarities between the frameworks of the spells. The Nethergate had come first. Then someone had modified the Spirit Field spell to make Mystic’s Dominion with the things they had learned with the Nethergate. I had never casted Spirit Field, the original version of Mystic’s Dominion, but I had inspected the spell in the hidden library.

Mystic’s Dominion was quite literally Spirit Field but with coats of paint called Nethergate. I had once mistakenly assumed that these sections of the framework were connectors to make the spell work, and whilst that was partially true, in reality, they were a spell I hadn’t known yet.

Phylactery Bonding had more in common with the ritual than the ten-star field-type spell, as it dealt with the afterlife like Nethergate did.

Alatea herself, whilst she had never decided to use Mystic’s Dominion nor Phylactery Bonding, had certainly been inspired by the powerful spells’ framework. In a way, Resurrection was a mobile phylactery.

Requiem was infinitely simpler than the rest of the spells. It was rather an evolved Necrotic Bolt than an elaborated spell meant to transcend death. Still, I noticed the vague similarities with Mystic’s Dominion, a spell that already had Necrotic Bolt on its framework.

What made all of this interesting was the shared framework, it was as if they were parts of a puzzle no one had bothered to match together.

Until now.

Even in my very accelerated thoughts, I sensed my body was getting eerily close to the ground. I had forgone the casting of Resurrection for something better, and I needed to complete it soon.

It was botched, like basically everything I did.

It was the same as with Phylactery Bonding. Irresponsible, unlikely to work, yet somehow, it came to fruition.

The pieces of the multiple spells’ framework snapped together. My true Soul affinity gave me an insight into how they should connect to make a coherent, unified spell.

It felt like an eternity.

How could one’s concentration defy time and chance this much?

Time flowed again normally as I jerked back to the corporeal plane, there was a colossal backlash from the dissonance between soul and body. It had been just a few seconds in the real world, but how many had passed in my spirit?

It didn’t matter.

I opened my mouth and weaved my mana and soul with Xenoglossia. I dispelled Mystic’s Dominion because I no longer needed it. Words flowed into my mouth, I didn’t know what they were saying, just that they were appropriate.

I casted a superior spell.

“Mystic’s Apotheosis!” Reality cracked upon hearing me.

The world turned white with my words, barely a few centimeters from the ground. And for the first time ever, my ascension into a higher star hadn’t been anticlimactic.