Chapter 371: The Story After (3) [Side Story, Part 3]

“How have you been all this time?” the Tower Master asked Ketal.

“I have been having a wonderful time,” Ketal replied, grinning so wide it seemed his face could not hold the smile. “I visited the fairy holy ground and even explored that phantom realm on the far side of the continent. I do not think my days could have been fuller than they were.”

“I see,” the Tower Master said.

Ketal, as he stood now, looked completely content. The question was how long that contentment would last.

The Tower Master pressed down the faint unease that rose within him and changed the subject.

“Then we should begin work,” he said.

“Understood,” Ketal answered. He lifted his gaze and whistled softly as he took in the land before them. “This is a mess.”

The terrain here had collapsed beyond recognition. From one end of his vision to the other, the ground was shattered and torn, so warped and broken that it was difficult even to place a foot without risk of injury.

It had not always been like this. Once, this had been a vast plain linking the East and South, a broad, gentle stretch of earth over which goods and travelers flowed without cease. War had turned that lifeline into a scar. The force of the conflict had crushed and twisted it until almost nothing remained of its former shape.

Their task now was to return this land to what it had been. That was the work assigned to the Champion and the Tower Master.

“Let us start with whatever lies in front of us,” Ketal said.

“Let us begin,” the Tower Master agreed as he snapped his fingers.

The broken earth heaved as if something beneath it had turned in its sleep. Fractured ground buckled upward and stretched, trying to re-form. Ketal slammed his heel into the soil. The ruined mass shattered again, but this time the break was different. Instead of collapsing into chaos, the land sloughed off its warped layers and settled closer to its original plane, as if the stomp had knocked it back into place.

Ketal was strong. Calling him the strongest living being in the Mortal Realm would not have been an exaggeration. The Tower Master was hardly weak himself. His light seemed dim beside Ketal’s radiance, but he remained one of the world’s highest-ranked powers.

Even so, when the two of them joined forces, repairing the broken land took far longer than either might have wished. They worked through an entire day, hammering, lifting, coaxing and shaping, and when they finally stopped to look, they had restored only a fraction. The stretch of ground remaining was still tens of times larger than what they had managed to heal.

“This will take quite a while,” Ketal murmured.

“Repair is always far harder than destruction,” the Tower Master said with calm certainty. “The foundation itself has been ruined. We can only restore it slowly.”

Ketal stroked his chin. He fell silent for a time, eyes narrowed in thought, then slowly smiled.

“Tower Master, I have a suggestion,” he said.

“I already dislike how that sounds,” the Tower Master replied.

“It is not a strange proposal,” Ketal said. “Will you hear it?”

The Tower Master nodded, though unease coiled in the space his stomach would have filled.

Several hours later, after walking the full extent of the devastated plain, the Tower Master returned.

“I did as you suggested,” he said. “For now, I have wrapped the entire damaged region in a single binding, foundation, and all.”

“Oh? My thanks,” Ketal said.

“I still do not know what you intend to do,” the Tower Master added. “I would appreciate an explanation.”

Ketal’s request had been simple enough. He had asked whether the Tower Master could enclose the area of broken land, along with its shattered foundations, in a magical barrier and tie it together like a single cloth.

From the Tower Master’s perspective, the task had not been difficult. He had agreed without much resistance, but the purpose behind it still eluded him.

“It is nothing grand,” Ketal said. “In fact, it is a very simple method.”

“Simple?” the Tower Master repeated.

Ketal did not answer. Instead, he walked to the center of the ruined plain. He stopped there and drew a slow breath.

“Good,” he murmured.

He gathered his strength. Raw muscle and refined Aura flowed together and pooled in his feet. Power surged up his legs, reinforcing his body and amplifying everything it could bear.

“Tower Master,” he said. “Hold the barrier firmly. I will try to moderate the force, but I would rather not make promises I cannot keep.”

“Very well,” the Tower Master said.

Only then did his intent become clear to the Tower Master. He hastily strengthened the magical shroud that wrapped the land, layering protections until they rang like steel.

Ketal drove his charged foot down, and the strike hammered the plain. The earth responded with a deep roar, rolling in waves like a storm-tossed sea. Shattered and twisted ground heaved together, pushed and crushed outward as though a great tide had seized it and dragged it back. He lifted his leg once more and brought it down, and the plain shuddered beneath the force.

If the Tower Master had not held the barrier in place, the shock would have spread far beyond the broken region, wrecking ground many times its size. That was how much force pressed down on the world in that instant.

Cracks boomed like distant thunder. Under that weight, the land itself began to sink, slowly but unmistakably.

“This is...,” the Tower Master murmured. If he had possessed flesh and features, his face would have been frozen in pure astonishment. “This is impossible.”

The vast plain that had once joined the East and South had been utterly destroyed by the war. It was not only the surface that had been damaged. The foundation beneath had crumbled as well, leaving the underlying strata loose and unstable. They could not simply smooth the top and call it done; the ground itself had to be beaten back into solidity.

There were two ways to solve such a problem. One was for a being like the Tower Master—a Hero mage of monumental power—to steadily harden the foundation, layer by layer, with magic and Myst.

The other was to leave it to the planet. The force of the star itself moved the crust over vast spans of time. Plates ground together, melted, rose and fell. Eventually, the broken foundation would be renewed as the world’s slow churn erased the fractures and replaced them with new stone.

However, that process demanded ages—hundreds of years at the very least, and far more likely thousands or even tens of thousands. No one could afford to wait for such spans of time, so the Tower Master and others like him took the burden upon themselves and carried it forward little by little. What Ketal was doing now went far beyond that.

“He is pressing down the whole region,” the Tower Master realized.

He was forcing the collapsed foundation back into stability with nothing but weight and pressure, stamping the earth until it compressed into a single solid mass.

An individual, a mere inhabitant of the world, was performing in moments something that, by rights, only the slow, grinding power of a star should have been able to achieve over millennia. Not even the Tower Master, creator of the Mage Tower, could fully grasp the scale of the force at work.

If that strength were ever directed toward pure destruction, the thought alone made the Tower Master’s borrowed, fleshless spine prickle.

The quaking gradually subsided. The ground, which had rocked and pitched like a ship in a storm, calmed and lay still. The foundation, crushed under relentless pressure, had been forcibly stabilized. After a short while, Ketal lifted his head, his expression bright.

“There. That should do it. Spreading the strength evenly gave me more trouble than I expected,” Ketal said. He let out a satisfied breath and flashed a grin. “Then I will leave the cleanup to you, Tower Master. I plan to look around a bit more.”

“Very well...,” the Tower Master said. He forced the answer out, his mind still racing.

***

The ground rumbled. With the foundation settled, the Tower Master turned his attention to the remaining debris. The barrier still held the region together, and Ketal had already gone to inspect the surrounding areas. While he cleared the shattered rock and smoothed the surface, his thoughts wound in tight circles.

“I knew it in theory,” he admitted to himself, “but seeing it with my own eyes is something else entirely.”

If that power were ever turned toward ruin instead of repair, the outcome required no real contemplation. Half the continent could crumble in less than a single day, and even that would not mark the true extent of the devastation.

Unwelcome images kept rising in his mind. He began to consider, in earnest, whether he should prepare something to ensure Ketal did not grow bored.

The earth gave one last low growl, then fell quiet. His work with the debris finished, the Tower Master moved to find Ketal. He eventually located him a short distance away, standing at the edge of a small forest. Ketal’s posture was intent, his attention fixed on something between the trees.

“What are you—” the Tower Master began.

“Quiet,” Ketal said. He lifted a finger to his lips.

The Tower Master fell silent at once. Only then did he sense that Ketal had completely suppressed his own presence. The Tower Master did the same and followed Ketal’s gaze.

He saw a wild boar. She was heavy with young, flanks heaving as she knelt in the grass. The strain in her breathing made it clear that birth was close. Ketal held his breath and watched, eyes bright.

The boar gave a great cry. With that raw sound, the first of the piglets slid free, then another, then another, slick and small and blind. The mother turned, licking the blood from their bodies, her tongue careful as it cleaned. She gathered the damp newborns against her belly, wrapping them in warmth.

It was not a miraculous sight. Life bringing forth life was as natural as breathing. It could move the heart, it could make one marvel at the pattern of the world, but it was no legendary spectacle. Even so, Ketal exhaled a low sound full of awe.

“Oh. Oh...” he whispered.

“Is that so astonishing?” the Tower Master asked him.

“Of course it is,” Ketal said softly. “This is the birth of life.”

It was not merely any life, either. He watched the arrival of new beings in a world shaped by Myst, spirits, and gods, witnessing with his own eyes the moment such lives first opened their eyes. For him, no joy could stand above that sight. The Tower Master, seeing his expression, finally understood.

“You love this world itself,” he murmured.

It was not the great Mysts, the sweeping spectacles, or the glittering relics that held his gaze. It was the smallest things—the opening of a flower, the turning of the seasons, the quiet birth of a creature deep within a forest. Ketal rejoiced in those moments with the same sincerity he felt when a Demon King fell or a Primarch was defeated. Only then did the Tower Master realize how needless his fears had been.

On their way back from the day’s work, he spoke of the worries that had been weighing on him. Ketal listened and then burst into a hearty laugh.

“You really did let your worries run away with you,” Ketal said.

“Apparently so,” the Tower Master replied. “They were pointless fears.”

“I understand how you felt,” Ketal added. “From where you stand, such thoughts are natural. But I love this world.”

He cherished not only the great and obvious wonders but also the small and intricate ones. He loved every part of it.

“At the very least,” Ketal said with an easy smile, “until the day your name is forgotten, I will not grow tired of this world.”

“That will be a very distant future indeed,” the Tower Master said.

Perhaps because the tension had finally left him, he let out a low laugh. He extended a hand formed from bare bone.

“Then I will rely on you from now on as well,” he said. “Outsider who has become a native.”

“And I will rely on you,” Ketal replied, taking the skeletal hand in his own. “Native of Myst.”

He shook the Tower Master’s hand with a bright, open grin.

***

Half a year passed. One by one, the world’s various crises were resolved. As the worst of the wounds healed, space for leisure began to appear. The Tower Master and Ketal used that newfound room to begin a series of experiments.

“Let’s start,” Ketal said.

“Understood,” the Tower Master replied, his tone tight with anticipation.

In front of them stood a strange apparatus. An iron wire coil was wound around a rotating ring. Magnets were fixed on either side, and at the end of the setup sat a small bulb shaped like a glass bead.

With a short breath, Ketal set the ring spinning. The coil began to whirl rapidly between the magnets, sparks crackling in soft bursts. The bulb fluttered, dim at first, then steadied into a warm, steady glow.

The Tower Master let out an unrestrained shout. “It worked!”

“So it does...,” Ketal said.

In contrast to the Tower Master’s delight, Ketal’s expression carried a hint of unease. The reason was simple. In that moment, he had drawn upon his authority to strip away the fantasy-born concepts of this world and overlay the principles of the world he had once lived in. The experiment depended entirely on that borrowed foundation.

“Is your authority truly active now?” the Tower Master asked him, eyes alight with curiosity.

“It is,” Ketal said. “I am focusing it as tightly as I can, so that it affects only the bulb and the apparatus. Controlling it this way takes more effort than I expected. Part of me wants to simply release it.”

“I would prefer that you did not,” the Tower Master said.

According to Ketal, his original world did not contain beings like liches. If Ketal’s authority spread unchecked, it might overwrite reality so thoroughly that the Tower Master’s very existence would be erased. The thought made him recoil, and he firmly vetoed the idea.

“Still,” the Tower Master said, “I think I understand well enough now.”

They continued their investigations, using the authority that overlaid one world’s rules atop another’s. They experimented with generating electricity, with the way objects fell, with hidden forces that acted without being seen. Little by little, a clearer outline emerged. The Tower Master nodded to himself.

“Good,” he said. There was only one reason to run these experiments. “Let’s organize the differences between your world and this one.