I’d done the circuit of the tower at least three more times. On each occasion, I hope to have spotted a hitherto unnoticed way up or down.

No dice.

I was trapped within a perfect circle dotted with hundreds of closed cell doors. The only markers I had to stop the whole thing from turning into some kind of evil infinity loop were the open doors of my cell and the one the OG Morgan had been trapped in.

Idly, I knocked on a few of the other cells as I went by. It would be fair to say the quality of the results was not high. Most of the doors elicited no response at all. The occupiers, presumably dead or trapped in their own private hell, and thus not having the wit to respond.

All things being equal, though, I think I preferred the silent ones.

On the rare occasion my knock received a response, it was of a type I had long since categorised as ‘junkie in the underpass keen to drink your blood to soothe their thirst.’ I’d come across that particular band of psychotic malingering far too often in my life, and well, let’s say I was grateful for the doors separating us.

I eventually gave up trying. In the back of my mind, I fantasised about, maybe, uncovering a crack team of cultivators, sentenced to crimes they didn’t commit, that I could buddy up with, break free due to the combined might of our oddly specific skill sets, and then survive as soldiers of fortune. Maybe you should hire us if you could find us and no one else could help . . .

I’m drifting again, aren’t I?

You know how the real Morgan cultivated her arse out of here in about a minute? It would be really fucking great if you could do that.

I ignored it.

I always admired how cultivators could just pop in and out of existence. Like, sure, you are mostly bloodthirsty megalomaniacs seeking power at all costs. But the fast-travelling thing was a fucking riot at parties.

I ignored it.

We'd probably be home right now if you paid more attention to Merlin's lessons.

I threw the sword as far as I could down to the far end of the corridor and set off in the other direction.

Time to count my blessings.

It took me a while to come up with some.

I guess the fact that I was no stronger stuck in a time- loop counted as a big one. Although, I was struggling to see where I was now as all upside. This might not be a temporal loop, but it was a pretty fucking physical one.

And that seems to be it. My sole blessing right now is that I am not trapped in a dimensional time prison.

My life has really gone through some wild changes recently.

Having no other ideas, I plopped down in the middle of the corridor and pulled my knees to my chest. It seemed that I had traded one prison for a slightly larger one. Sure, I can get a bit more exercise out here, but at best, it was a marginal improvement, if not an active demerit.

In the distance, I could hear Drynwyn shouting for me, but it could wait. I didn’t think my mood could take many more snide remarks along the lines of 'why you are such a shitty cultivator?’

I dropped into my Artist’s Studio and spent some time enjoying the feeling of pushing my paint around my channels. There was something soothing about the ebb and flow of Qi, which took the edge off my anxiety. There were quite a few dealers in and around my local area who would have been much poorer had I known Qi cycling was an option a couple of years back.

I took stock of my techniques.

On the plus side, whoever had ripped them out had left me with . Sure, there was nothing else, but at least I still had that. OG Morgan seemed to think that was not the worst thing in the world, and I knew Merlin had lamented the frivolous way in which I’d gone about building up my skills.

Maybe this forced reset wasn’t the absolute worst thing that could have happened to me. Perhaps this was the chance to build up those foundations Merlin kept going about?

I hated saying it, but I missed Merlin.

Sure, he had a wholly different repertoire of you're ‘terrible at cultivating,’ but at least at the end of it, he usually had some advice to offer.

Having spent at least a millennium listening to Drynwyn’s anecdotes of Rhyddrech Hael, I was all for a bit of patient, constructive – none hypersexualised - advice.

Having nothing else to do, I flicked over the page of my Artist's Studio and took a gander at my inventory.

While back in Tintagel, Merlin had insisted on loading me up with several million scrolls and ancient tomes about the art of cultivation. I’d flicked through some of them, but considering the last time I tried to follow an instruction manual, I’d nearly blown myself up trying to absorb mana stones, I was a bit wary of following them.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

However, even someone as bullheaded as me recognised that I would be wandering these halls for a long time unless I found a way to change things up.

Besides, what else was there to do?

*

I'm going to level with you, the difference between being stuck in an endless time loop and blitzing your way through the wisdom of hundreds of learned cultivators is not as different as you may think.

I’m not saying this stuff is dull . . .

No, I am.

It’s fucking dull. Deadly dull. Watching-paint-dry-in-front-of-a-boiling-kettle-while-waiting-for-the-cows-to-come-home dull.

No matter which of the scrolls I tried, I just didn’t have enough of a foundation in theory to make heads or tails of the instructions. Even the ones I managed to follow in broad terms referenced techniques and steps of which I had no conception.

Not for the first time, I reflected that I really should have paid more attention to Merlin when I had him.

I dropped one called ‘Fire Dynamics in Stone Welding’ (honestly, I had no idea whatsoever. I’d hoped this might explain how to rip the floor open so I could drop through to the level below, but no. At least not without decades of careful and considerate study.) and picked up the next one in the row. ‘Apprentice Alchemy.’

My hopes were not precisely soaring as I turned to its first page. And they hardly improved when the entirely patronising author outlined the various bits of kit required before even starting “on the hallowed and mystical journey towards the most blessed of crafts.”

Not possessing anything that could be considered a mixing bowl, I was about to put it back in my inventory and move on to “Ellian’s Third Law of Ice Flow” when a little itch nudged the back of my head.

OG Morgan hadn’t just given me a pat on the arse and wished me well when she escaped. She gave me a cauldron.

I pulled it out of my inventory and sat on the corridor floor.

To be clear, if you are visualising a massive black iron pot when I say “cauldron," you need to rationalise your expectations. What Morgan had given me was, at best, a small bowl that I could comfortably fit both of my hands around.

Neither was it metal, but rather some form of heavy stone material. I’ve never had that particular middle-class joy at having a kitchen with actual, you know, surfaces, but I screwed enough guys that did to recognise the material this cauldron was made out of. Granite.

It came with the lid and either a pestle or a mortar; I wasn’t sure which. What it was, though, was a heavy granite stick with a phallic bulge at the end.

I watched the cauldron for a few minutes, wondering if it might be sentient. Hey, don’t just judge. I didn’t know that swords could talk until recently. Hating myself ever so slightly, I tapped it with my finger and said, “Hello? Can you talk?”

Nothing.

So, either it couldn’t talk, or it was a dick. I was willing to accept it could be both.

After giving it a few minutes to chat, I returned to the scroll. So, I have a cauldron. What’s next?

I perused the following three pages of info, which I could comfortably summarise as follows: “Gather some heart moss and grind it.” There were a lot of flowery phrases about doing the latter under the light of a Hunter’s Moon. Also the importance of doing so whilst clear of mind and spirit.

But fuck it.

I looked around the corridor and saw a dark green material glowing between the stones. I didn’t know if this was heart moss, but as soon as I saw it, I suddenly did.

Merlin would have been able to explain what had happened.

Drynwyn would be able to tell me an epic fucking story about Rhyddrech Hael knowing the properties of any herb he touched, which would make him precisely the sort of guy I needed around me in my previous life in Birmingham.

However, would that help me in my current predicament? It would not.

Anyway, I apparently had become some sort of herb-whisperer. I grabbed a handful of the moss and dropped it into the cauldron and, using the pestle/mortar – still no fucking idea – ground it into a thick green paste.

Next, I needed to create a ‘suspension.’

Having had more than my fair share of ‘enforced, fixed-term absences from school, ' I recognised the word but sensed it probably meant something else in this context.

So, I would have to ask Drynwyn, wasn’t I?

I’m not talking to you.

“Oh, come on. Don't you remember when we met? I threw you away then within minutes. You can’t take this shit personally.”

You threw me away that time to take out the commander of a fucking army. I can get on board with that. This time, you just lobbed me away. As if I was just a common-or-garden sword. Takes the piss.

Oh my God. I’d hurt the sword's feelings. “Look, I was getting frustrated. You’ve got to remember I’ve just escaped from a time loop. I was not quite myself. I didn’t mean anything by it."

So, are you saying you are sorry? You're not just cosying up to me because you need my help?

“Look, obviously, I need your help, but I’m sorry about throwing you away, too.”

I think you're just saying that.

Fuck me, I appeared to be in a dysfunctional relationship with my own weapon. I’d had this conversation with every boyfriend I’d ever had in various guises: “Why don’t we celebrate drawing a nice thick line under all of this nastiness by, I don't know, singing a good suspension?”

What the fuck are you talking about?

“A Suspension. That’s like a song or something, isn’t it?”

A suspension isn't a song. It's, like, water. A liquid, you know? Honestly, I sometimes think that you are the most stupid creature in the whole of fucking creation.

I chucked Drynwyn down the length of the corridor again. I was getting a nice, tight spiral on it now.

I dropped into my inventory, chose one bottle of spring water, and poured it into the cauldron on top of my heart moss paste.

Nothing happened.

I picked up the scroll again. This was starting to feel like it was too much like cooking. Another essential life skill I had singularly failed to develop.

I scanned through the instructions to see what I was trying to make and ignored all sides of unnecessary self–satisfied prose.

I was able to assert that this was an ‘Elixir of Wellness. Apparently, it was the single most basic concoction a cultivator could produce and would generally improve my overwhelming well-being.

Given a choice, there are any number of other things I’d rather be able to be brewing up, but I guessed beggars can’t be chosen.

It looked like I'd need this Elixir as a base for anything else that appeared later on in the scroll.

Flicking to the back, I liked the look of ‘Water of Life,’ seemingly the equivalent of Adam waving his sword about and yelling about the powers of Grey Skull.

So why was I seeingbupkiss?

“Add a handful of heart moss to boiling water. Cover and reduce.”

That was it.

Fuck, I was going to need Drynwyn’s help again, wasn’t I?