Cartography is exceptionally difficult when one cannot even go within sight of running water. Were it not for lunar observation facilities studying the planet’s surface, we’d never know how many neighbors each continent may have. Whether a channel or an ocean, the separation is absolute.

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With his plans for immediate departure foiled, Jair spent the morning meditating in the oasis to refill his inner mana cloud. It couldn't be called a 'body' yet, not even close.

After some consideration, Jair concluded that Maelstrom’s Darkflame failed to teleport Raina with him due to a few simple complicating factors.

Maelstrom innately refused to cause her harm, therefore Jair’s own resources would be used to fuel the transportation and rebirth. Thanks to his brush with the seascourge, Jair’s manabody had been fully destroyed. Therefore, he no longer had the capability of powering spells, constructs, or abilities that drew on mana.

Though Maelstrom acted with soulspell-level perfect efficiency, there had to be at least some power for something as dramatic as destroying and recreating a person. With Raina’s own mana being off limits and Jair’s nonexistent, they’d need to either involve a third person as a battery or wait until Jair could reconstruct his manabody.

As much as he’d prefer to sit down and meditate for a week straight until his manabody could be returned to normal, the process of rebuilding took more than a constant power draw. There was a huge difference between empowering an existing manabody and rebuilding one from nothing. It needed time to coalesce before any drastic training methods would be effective.

Once the boundaries were solid, he could stuff it with as much mana as he wanted and as long as he had the focus and willpower to hold it firmly in place his manabody would gradually integrate all of it. Without the edges firmed up, though, the ambient mana pressure would equalize and drain the power back out as quickly as he pulled it in.

All of which meant that he had some free time between his morning and evening hours-long sessions of sitting and being painfully attentive to ongoing simple action that repeated with a tedium that threatened his sanity more than any number of chaotic upheavals.

Today, he chose to use that time walking Vaes City.

The capital of Veor was beautiful, he could grudgingly admit. Varied buildings in a similar but distinct style from the rest of the continent's cities lined overly-broad grand roadways capable of supporting a full eelship. If eelships had needed roads.

The city's philosophy on architecture was to hire the best of the best, set them in competition against each other with only the most minimum of restrictions, and see what happened.

As it turned out, what happened was a beautiful city with each block trying to outdo the last. It was a marvel of modern creativity pushed beyond reasonable extremes. Did the Baker's Guild really need a twenty-story compound with sharp diagonal slopes and whole sections of mirrors down the angled sides? Perhaps not, but it did make for a dramatic statement. In any other city it'd be a stand-out spectacle. Here, it was just one more demonstration of peak Veori overspending.

Astralla City liked to think it was something like Vaes City, but it was really no more than a cheap imitation. They couldn't afford anything like the same scale of creativity, leading to their blocks feeling disjointed rather than seamlessly varied.

There were a handful of places in Silvas and Parein, the twin trade cities, that came close to Vaes City's level of architectural achievement, but not as many as one would expect. Those cities preferred efficiency over aesthetics, leading to large districts of blocky housing, extensive warehouses, and manufacturing facilities. Anything that could be done safely outside of the oases was shipped out, and everything that required the oasis was used to maximum efficiency.

But Jair wasn't here today to admire the architecture.

He’d begun to notice some aberrant consumer behavior and wanted to investigate, purely for curiosity’s sake. He was used to having the economy play out in fairly similar ways, reacting predictably to his interference by injecting money into certain enterprises. To see people preferring different goods than he was used to was a pleasant surprise.

He did so love it when unexpected events offset the predictable tedium of the day to day existence he’d watched happen so many times.

In today’s instance of unpredicted chaos, a specialty diner Jair particularly enjoyed had experienced a sudden influx of customers. Normally, it was all but abandoned. Without his interference, it would go out of business within another two months. If he sponsored it directly, it could limp on another year before the owner’s self esteem overtook his desire to keep going and he stopped accepting Jair’s money.

In fact, it seemed the food industry as a whole had been turned askew. Many of the businesses that had been in the process of failing had revived practically overnight. The competition between them for marketing power was obvious, as nearly all of them had hired one form of attraction or another to draw people in.

It lent the place a rather carnival atmosphere he appreciated. Though the addition of waiting in line for his lunch wasn’t his favourite, it did give him the chance to ask what was going on of the others nearby.

“Something about the king loosening restrictions and reinstating previous import standards,” seemed to be the gist of it.

So, stabbing Farshen had done more than just make him willing to consider a proper reconciliation with his estranged prince, it’d also let him objectively reassess the bizarre laws he’d been setting in place. Good for him.

Unfortunately, while Jair was attending to his purchasing, someone recognized him and within a few seconds he’d gone from one more anonymous nobody to inundated with recognition as the Phoenix Healer.

Where had that title even come from? It’d spread far too quickly to be anything but intentional. Larenok’s doing, probably.

And wasn't that ironic? The biggest thing Jair ever did, getting rid of a dragon matriarch, almost no one even knew. One unintended side effect of his sword's ridiculous power, and everyone was all over him.

It made him intensely miss the peace and calm of the Oriad, where you only had to worry about giant monsters eating your body and vampires overwriting your soul. Whispers followed him, but he'd started to get used to that. People tugged at his sleeve or tried to catch his eye, hoping to be noticed by the Phoenix Healer.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Fame was so tedious to deal with at times. He sighed and shrugged off the attention. He’d waited this long, he’d stick around long enough to collect his sandwiches before disappearing.

Maybe that’s what he should be doing with his afternoons. Rather than trying to squeeze some new revelation out of Veor, was there anything stopping him from just… popping over to the Oriad for a few hours?

Jair may not know where to find Eythron, but Qahrvirna's tower was a place he was intimately familiar with. There was no reason he couldn't stop by, introduce himself...

Or, wait, at this point in the timeline, she'd still be hiding out from Cyrindenth, wouldn't she? Even better, he could help her get past her personal dragon gatekeepers and maybe commission a dragoncube for later pickup. Or buy hers...

Hmm. What sort of things did he have access to that Qahrvirna would want? Aside from his body and soul, of course.

He collected his meal and began walking as he ate. The seasoning in this particular fish sandwich was one he’d never found replicated elsewhere, and it invoked a sort of pleasant nostalgia that Veor rarely managed.

Between the meal and his pondering, he successfully ignored the looks he was getting from everyone and anyone in sight.

Any reason to delay? He’d wanted to introduce Raina to his mentors, but there was no rule that he had to wait until she was able to travel before stopping in to say hello.

He stopped by a butcher shop to pick up some extra large steaks, as a peace offering, then Maelstrom appeared in his hand.

Even as he went to activate it himself, people crowded around, reaching out for it.

“Stay back, this isn’t safe,” he tried, but they didn’t listen. If anything they only pressed closer, grabbing for the sword.

Very poor timing on their part.

Jair and three other people disappeared in a burst of green fire.

Instead of instantly reappearing in the crevice outside Mount Cyrindenth, Jair registered a sudden impact, then something was choking him. Not his sandwich, unfortunately. That would have been far preferable.

He was in deep water.

Panicked, he reached for Maelstrom. Any time you found yourself in water unexpectedly was very bad. Something gripped his arms, something else wrapped around his throat. He couldn't move. He felt its breath on his back, like acid melting through his clothes and into the skin.

Come on! Qahrvirna's tower, then. Not the random cave. Maelstrom twisted in his grip, the hilt reshaping into something thin and covered with thorns. Jair may not be able to move his hand, but in the brief opening created by Maelstrom's reforming, he squeezed down.

Fire, darkness.

Impact. Sinking through heavy water.

Not again!

Something was latched onto his leg, dragging him down. Not far away, the eldritch glow of something with a lot more teeth than the previous one came languidly drifting toward him, somehow closing the distance far faster than its movement would seem to indicate.

Qahrvirna's tower. Come on.

Maelstrom's thorns were still driven through his hand. Just as he'd done with Larenok, he held Darkflame active as he reappeared and disappeared faster than thought.

Water. So much water. Even staying in each location only moments he kept accumulating injuries. If not for Darkflame returning him to full health each time, he'd have been torn to pieces.

What is happening?

The feeling was the same as when he’d tried using a normal transit line across water, being grabbed out of nowhere midway and dragged down.

Something tore Maelstrom from his grip and hurled it away. Jair choked on a mouthful of seawater at the unexpected jolt out of his strange surreal voyage, and it took him a moment to realize it hadn't been just Maelstrom but his entire hand. He reconjured it to his other hand, but barely made it a few moments away before he was slammed back into the water again. He knew he'd traveled less far this time because he could recognize the thing that had torn off his hand, heading straight for him with hungry red pulses of light down its flexible blade appendages.

Forget Qahrvirna, just get us somewhere safe! Anywhere!

Darkness beyond darkness, no stars, no moons, no glimmer of torchlight. Pressure slammed into him, threatening to crush him. He was still choking, the darkflame rebirth doing nothing to remove the water from his lungs. Something had definitely gone wrong with his ears, but that was the least of his concerns.

Nothing was waiting for him, but that only meant he had a few seconds to claw his way toward the surface in hopes of catching his breath before any other seascourge noticed him. He didn’t make it anywhere close. Something rippling and glowing cut through the water toward him.

He still had Maelstrom’s thorns gripped in his hand. Darkflame flared up, and he was in more darkness. The pressure was the same, right at the edge of survivable, wreaking havoc on his body but nothing close to what the seascourge would have done to him.

Again. Again.

He had no idea where they were. They didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

He felt a deep desperation and the sensation of running helplessly in circles, disconnected but deeply central to himself. Maelstrom desperately wanted to help, to get them out of this, but it had no idea where they were or where to go. It was moving them from random patch of ocean to random patch of ocean, anywhere out of reach of the enemy, but that wasn’t a destination.

Oddly, its panic was what snapped Jair out of it, as though transferring his own intensity away.

It's okay. You can stop.

He had moments before one seascourge or another noticed them and came running, as they always did, but at least this time he'd appeared in a spot of Maelstrom's choosing rather than being dragged in by something.

There was nothing but water in every direction. More water than he'd ever imagined. He'd heard about oceans being deep, but the deepest lakes he'd swum in didn't come close to this. He'd never survived long enough to even try swimming down, any of the previous times he'd landed in the ocean for whatever reason.

And the creatures who lived here wanted nothing more than to tear apart the continents at their base and drown the entire world.

He gripped down on Maelstrom's thorny hilt and focused on the Vaes City square where he'd come from. If he couldn't bypass the ocean to get to a different engaldria, maybe he could backtrack.

It needed guidance. That had been the problem with Darkflame for the longest time, Jair not realizing what he was supposed to be providing to the equation.

Go back.

Maelstrom lit up with golden light. The pattern of his soul burst through him like an intricate laser grid the size of his entire being.

Jair stumbled into one of the people next to him as he stood waiting in line. His body felt strangely light, the sound was briefly overwhelming after the dead silence of the deeps, and Maelstrom was nowhere to be seen.

The moment he thought that, it appeared in his hand, thorns and all. He gripped it reflexively tight, though blood seeped between his fingers and ran down the pommel.

People reached out to touch the blade, but Darkflame wasn't active at the moment so they only cut themselves for their trouble. Jair had the distant impression Maelstrom helped itself to a sliver of their souls anyway, but right now he was in no condition to care.

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