You’d think an existential threat from the unknowable depths would be the subject of fewer love ballads.

----------------------------------------

Lilin didn't do much but sleep the first day. The second day, she holed up in Raina's family library and Jair hardly saw her apart from at meals. Even then, she only came to some of them.

She wasn't exactly avoiding him, and he wasn't exactly avoiding her. He had things to get done in the few days they had before Terlunia arrived, and she didn't seem interested in company.

Raina talked to her several times, and Jair left them to it. He knew the effects that his presence tended to have on his family members, and it was not generally a calming one. He could get things done, but to do so without alienating people in the process required time and caution.

The remainder of their stay was largely uneventful.

Larenok showed up with a new list of customers for Jair's Darkflame experiments, though at this point he was pretty sure he knew as much about what the power did as anyone ever could. It didn't function identically for everyone, and it did so in a way that was well outside normal parameters for measurement.

Larenok and Jair had tried controlling for age, sex, soulspell color – though that one was very sensitive in Veor – and none of them yielded any reliable trend one way or another. Some customers who started out happy ended up even happier, while others shrugged and saw no difference. Some unhappy people ended up even unhappier, while others found themselves free and emboldened like Larenok.

Jair suspected that they would never find a correlation perfectly. Much like how soulspells operated outside of any normal conventions, anything that focused so deeply on the individual was going to be chaotic at best. Even among soulspell classifications, there were outliers. Jair’s own soulspell was the wrong color for time-related powers, but with a name like Temporal Reversion, there was no denying what it was.

He strongly considered using Darkflame on Lilin, but she was in no fit condition to give consent, and that was the sort of thing that could be a negative influence over their entire relationship from this point on. If they were going to be traveling together, she needed to be able to trust him. Forcing his powers on her without warning or a chance to say no wasn't the impression he wanted.

Zaen was worth trying, just in case it could have done a Larenok and mellowed him out a bit, but seeing how thoroughly unrepentant his father had been, Jair decided against using Darkflame on potential allies without permission or a very good reason. Enemies, though, were fair game. When they went to deal with the Tsael vampires for instance, Jair anticipated a lot of them ending up as piles of fiery ash.

He hadn’t actually had the chance to try Darkflame on a vampire yet. Would it resurrect them, or not? He was curious to find out. Too bad Qahrvirna wasn't here. Though… Yeah, probably a good thing. She would be way too into it, regardless of whether she ended up dead for real.

Jair shook his head. He was getting sidetracked. He was meditating here to finish the last few pieces of his manabody, not to reminisce on the potential for the future.

It was astonishing to him how thoroughly his body and soul could flinch away from something that he had done a hundred times before. The pain shouldn't matter, the tedium shouldn't matter. Yet the necessity of doing it still triggered his desire to find anything at all else to do. Gathering power was one thing, slicing it into pieces and gluing it together from the soul out was not a fun process.

He sighed, tightened his fists, closed his eyes, and focused inward.

The power he'd been accumulating all week waited for him in a diffuse cloud, centered around the pseudo-core in his forehead and spreading out from there throughout his body. It didn't fully match the outline of his body, being more oval-shaped, but that's what he was here to fix today. He had enough raw materials he could get the process started.

Jair stilled his breathing and willed his heart into stillness. He needed his body perfectly unmoving for this, the slightest motion could throw the entire thing off. The body would start to cannibalize the manabody and then eventually the soul if he kept it in this suspension for too long, but he was an expert at working on his own bodies. He knew what he needed to do. It shouldn't take more than an hour, which would be just about enough to eat up the excess edges of manabody that he'd been collecting power for anyway.

Using his unmoving physical body as a template, and his soul as a blade, he sliced into his fledgling manabody. He cut away the edges and folded them back in on themselves, reinforcing the outline of his physical body as the boundaries of the mana, one tiny piece at a time.

It was not fun. Manabody construction, at least the fast-tracked version he practiced, was one of the most uncomfortable things he had done in a long time. And he’d recently been stabbed in the head by seascourge, so that was saying something.

He simply needed to endure. This process was not one he could shortcut away; this was the shortcut.

Performing complex manabody surgery on yourself was generally considered a terrible idea and extremely unsafe. More so than trying to do a physical equivalent. You could sooner replace your own liver. But for someone like Jair who’d been in every extreme situation conceivable and then some, the drastic disciplines of merging, splicing, and operating on and with multiple phases of his own existence at once were second nature to him now.

Though he’d delayed beginning, once he was underway there was no hesitation. He cut and sealed and cut and sealed, forcing the diffuse cloud into a clearer and clearer imitation of his physical body.

The biggest potential drawback of this method was the likelihood of failing to perfectly line up the manabody with the lifebody which ended up causing rather severe issues in future. If the angle of your spell imprints were even a few degrees off, they may malfunction or simply not work at all. If your manabody wasn’t in contact with your skin, you’d need implant constructs instead of the standard touch-based ones, making everything exponentially more complicated, expensive, and unpleasant.

To risk mutilating your future internal synergy just to save a few weeks of gathering power was never considered worth it. So many cautionary tales, the method itself buried from sheer disuse.

It’d taken him almost as long to discover its method as to perfect its application. But as with so much other ancient, hidden, forgotten, or lost information, he had unearthed it in the end and now considered it an integral part of his capabilities.

The mental and physical strain on him as he forced himself beyond mortal limits again and again barely registered. It was present, but his focus was so intent there was no attention to spare for the danger signals from his concerned bodies and mind.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Today he would return to his status as an initiate mage, tomorrow they would go have adventures on Terluna, and a month after that he would repeat the process on Nuprima to brute-force his way into archmage status.

And for once, he wouldn’t be alone. That alone made it feel wondrous and new, even if he’d be going through the same rote actions that he’d played out a hundred times before.

Jair had never been happier.

----------------------------------------

“Jai’s out meditating again, isn’t he?”

“He’ll be back eventually. You’re welcome to hang out with me until then.” Raina patted the bed beside her.

Lilin came in slowly, then sat down as though she were expecting the bed to collapse out from under her. "I'm sorry."

“That’s what you came here to say?” Raina glanced at Lilin sideways, one eyebrow raising. "Why? What do you possibly have to apologize for?"

"I'm taking up space in your house, eating your food, and infringing on your special trip with Jair."

"So? That just means now it's a special trip with Jair and Lilin."

"I don't think that's how it works."

Raina turned to face Lilin properly and took one of her hands. "I want you to come with us. Honestly, it'll help to have someone else along. I know Jair is still Jair but with everything that happened and everything that he's been through... I sometimes feel like he's not living in the same reality we are. I need to process, to catch up on so much, and he's become so..."

"Aggressive?"

"Assertive. Which I love to see, but I'm not used to it. So if I have to get used to it, and so do you, we may as well get used to it together."

"And you don't think having his little sister along will ruin the mood?"

Raina scoffed. "Aren't you the older one?"

"After what he's been through? No. No I am not." Lilin sighed. "I was so happy for him, going away. Meeting someone nice. So proud of him. But now I almost wish he hadn't."

Raina's voice came out flat, doing her best to suppress any emotion. "If he hadn't been here, I'd be dead. I'll never forget that feeling of absolute helplessness." Her voice trembled despite her best efforts, and then it was Lilin's turn to squeeze her hand.

"Can't you ask him to undo it all? He said he could undo the argument back home. Offered to send me back in time to before it happened."

"He offered. Asked if I was sure I wanted to live with these memories. Said he could go back to before any of it happened, destroy Ryenzo before she even set out to attack me. Fix everything before I was ever aware of it. Ensure I never had to face that in the first place." Tears gathered in her eyes and she tried to steady her breathing.

"But you're still here," Lilin noted.

"I'm already so far behind. I've lost so many years of adventures, of training, of improvement. So many battles he's had to fight alone." Raina shook her head firmly. "I don't want to start over. I don't want him to have to start over. What would he even do? Lie to me? Come out with this absurd story without any proof? Try to replicate any of what we've talked about, replay our conversations? Neither of us wants that."

"You really love him, don't you?"

"I'm not sure I'd say 'love'..." Raina felt herself blushing despite her best efforts to the contrary. No one else could get such a reaction out of her, but when it came to Jair—especially since the whole Ryenzo thing—it was like her body had a mind of its own.

"Why are you two trying to deny what's so blatantly obvious to anyone with eyes?"

"It would not be appropriate for someone of my station to take advantage—" Raina started.

"That is such a load of fishcrap. You can date anyone you want and you know it."

Raina bit at her lip, trying to think of the right words. "It really isn't like that. He's always been brilliant, inquisitive, vulnerable. At first, that last one was the reason I followed him around. He was so determined, so hopeful, and to see everyone else doing their best to crush the enthusiasm out of him... I couldn't just stand by."

"Yeah,” Lilin agreed. “He never told you how bad it really got. He thought it would just be burdening you needlessly, and he had to learn to take care of himself on his own."

Raina shook her head, laughing despite herself. "Yeah. He always had that stubborn independent streak, just not always as uninhibited as it is now."

"I can't even imagine what he's been through."

"Me either." The parts she could imagine were awful enough, and she was absolutely confident that he was still hiding the worst of it from her.

Just like he always had.

She snorted and shook her head again. "Trying to protect each other. Guess we'll always have that in common."

"And you're sure you're not interested in...?"

"I…” Raina huffed out a breath. “Honestly, I don't know. I've long ago resigned myself to marrying for a strategic alliance, so I've been entirely focused on obtaining more strength and knowledge for myself, to become a better future head of House Serin." She didn't mention the small part of her that thought she might have ended up betrothed to Prince Orren, before he went missing.

House Serin wasn't the highest nobility, and they were nominally in decline, but they still had a substantial amount of influence, significant assets, and an eligible daughter of the appropriate age. She'd always secretly suspected that was why she'd been allowed to play in the palace as a child, to get her and Orren used to one another, test the waters.

Until recently, she’d only seen Jair as a friend, and not one of a station to even think about in that way. To see him suddenly as a valid peer that no one would think of objecting to—even to the point where they might object to him spending time with a middling noble like herself—felt… very different. She didn’t know what to think, how to feel. It would take time to sort through everything that had happened, and she was in no position to go making romantic decisions in her current state.

"And you don't think the God of Time Travel would be a strategic enough alliance?"

"He's not a god. He has limits." Even if Raina hadn't observed them, she was sure they existed.

"Not from what I've seen. And he certainly doesn't act like a man with limitations."

"Unlimited redos makes mundane obstacles a non-issue, I'm sure."

"I wish I could just ignore mundane obstacles." Lilin flopped backwards onto the bed. "He's so unaffected by everything. It's not fair." She sounded a little choked, but Raina chose not to mention it.

"I don't want to know what he had to go through to reach that point," she said softly. "And I think it does affect him a lot more than he lets on. He still needs us.”

Lilin lay unmoving, arm across her eyes. "Still trying to protect him?" She peeked under her arm just in time to catch Raina blushing again.

"You can't say you aren't," Raina demanded, a little defensive. "There was plenty of time to turn back if you really wanted out. You're as concerned about him as I am."

Lilin shrugged, the hint of a smile twitching her lips. "Don't presume that my motives are the same as yours."

"Oh yeah? Miss 'technically not older' sister? You feel responsible for him. Don't deny it."

Lilin closed her eyes. "So what if I do?"

"Then can you do something for me?"

"What's that?"

"Play along."

Lilin rolled on her side, squinting suspiciously at Raina. "What are you up to?"

"Nothing nefarious. Just... I think we all need a vacation, and if you can at least pretend to have fun, maybe we can all relax a bit."

"You say that like you believe I'm incapable of having fun."

"I think that right now you're trying to process so much sudden upheaval in your life that you can barely breathe, let alone focus on enjoying life," Raina said dryly. "It'll get easier, but it'll get easier faster if you're not wallowing in it all day every day."

"Alright... what did you have in mind?"

----------------------------------------