Chapter 388: Mana Singularity

"What is your plan?"

The old man watched with keen interest as Sieg drew one item after another from his spatial ring, tools and devices that would likely be of use later.

Until now, Sieg and Noelle had been conserving every spark of energy to extend their time here. To employ alchemical machines in such a place would have been unthinkable.

"I do not believe this abyssal creature possesses the power to fashion two wholly separate dimensions," Sieg said slowly. "That lies beyond the reach of its kind. Had it truly attained such strength, it would never have allowed you any chance of resistance.

"You yourself said these twin dimensions exist solely to bind you—to sunder your body from your spirit, and thus to prevent you from carrying out the plan you once spoke of.

"What I mean to do is to force the two dimensions to join up again. I shall render us whole and give Wang Yu the chance to lay his hands on the abyssal beast."

Though he spoke with some uncertainty, his calm tone carried such conviction that the old dream god hesitated. It was the certainty of a scholar whose judgment drew upon decades of knowledge and study. There were many gaps to overcome, and the outcome was yet uncertain, but Sieg had already resolved to act.

"Merge the two dimensions...?" The old man blinked, startled. "I could never hope to achieve such a thing. But you are not me. And for all my doubts, I find myself willing to trust you. But what will you do after that?"

He spoke with the ruefulness of a broken deity, one bound to the abyss and rendered incomplete. He had lost all his hope during his time here.

"I will place my hopes in what Wang Yu can achieve once he lays his hand upon the creature," Sieg replied. "I refuse to remain locked here for all eternity. We cannot remain here. The false god of the dragons may be an abyssal being in disguise. That deception must be brought to light."

With Noelle's help, Sieg erected a makeshift laboratory. It was crude compared to the facilities in Skyborne City, and meager in terms of instrumentation—the Seed of Eden remained with Avia.

The old man's expression darkened. "I know little of dragons. But if your experience is to be believed, then this so-called Dragon God must be intertwined with the Abyss.

"I cannot permit what befell us to be repeated. If you truly mean to join these sundered dimensions, tell me how you will attempt to do so."

Abyssal beings were the bane of this old dream god. They had destroyed his civilization; he refused to allow the same fate to befall another. He would support Sieg at any cost.

"You said that this abyssal creature, trapped in its cage of dreams, split space by instinct, shunting all energy to one dimension and leaving the other barren. That was how the rift was born.

"What I will do is forcibly generate energy within this desolate husk of a world—not just bring it in from outside, but generate it from within—so that both dimensions may share the same foundation, and in time, overlap again."

Beneath Sieg's calm tone lay an audacious plan. How exactly did he propose to revive a dead world?

"I see no way to do it," the elder admitted. "Since my people's fall, I have been but one man. As a god I was bound and hardly clever.

"I am freer now, with fewer chains, but I have still failed to find a solution all these years. How do you propose to achieve such a feat?"

His candor lacked the gravity one expected of the divine. In this, he resembled the Lady of the Night, who was enigmatic and unbound by mortal reason. Sieg could not truly comprehend what it meant to be a god nor whence such power arose. But for now, he set the thought aside.

"Mana," Sieg said, "energy that has accompanied us since time immemorial. We know not whence it arises, nor where it goes once spent in spellcraft. The mystery of its birth has been among the greatest pursuit of scholars.

"You recall what I told you of hypermagic, a breakthrough in our understanding of mana. Building upon it, we sought to answer the question of how mana is born. We came up with hypotheses and even made preliminary progress—but ultimately, none of it could be proved."

He began to calibrate his crude apparatuses, his eyes closed as he sensed what lay in the barren environment around him.

Energy seeped constantly from his frame. The void's hunger drew it out; this was the very force that made survival here so difficult. Yet Sieg smiled, wry and exultant.

"Who would have thought that the environment we sought, one we thought impossible to find in reality, would actually exist here..."

The mana that drained from him was not his own. He was insensitive to it by nature and largely incapable of storing it within his body. What the void consumed actually belonged to his living armor, which clung to his flesh.

To discover the origin of magic, one had to witness its genesis. Yet such an observation was utterly impossible in the material plane—there was simply too much interference. Mana was omnipresent. The entire world was saturated with it; perhaps even the dissociation layers possessed mana, too.

What magicians considered mana-scarce or mana-forbidden domains were merely regions in which it was too faint to be readily drawn upon. Mana never vanished. It was always in the background, even if sometimes limited or abundant in quality.

Even so-called anti-magic objects like nullstones, silence arrays, or even wizardry did not annihilate mana. At best, they barred its conversion into spells capable of influencing the material world. Mana itself remained untouched.

The most striking example known to Sieg was the Silent Forest curio, perhaps the closest any artifact had come to embodying the true concept of nullification.

Yet even it merely erased the effects of magic, rather than magic itself. Indeed, the destruction of the Meteor of Annihilation had been achieved precisely by exploiting that property.

Within Skyborne City, Sieg and his fellow scholars of the Council of the Arcane had wrestled with a single intractable problem in their studies of the origin of magic: the omnipresence of mana.

They could never distinguish whether their experiments had birthed mana, or merely enriched it, or even transmutated it. A realm devoid of mana was required for this experiment—and no such place existed.

Now, however, Sieg had confirmed through his alchemical instruments and his own perception that this wasteland contained no magic at all. If traces existed, they were so infinitesimal as to be of no importance whatsoever.

He soothed the living armor that clung to his flesh as he tore it away. Even with its cooperation, the separation left deep wounds: the armor was bound to his very body.

Yet any interference had to be stripped away. Here, at last, he might be able to observe the birth of mana once and for all.

In this barren void, with no magic within or without, Sieg stood at the threshold of a new discovery. Though he was pressed for time, his instruments were crude, and there were no assistants about, this was the finest opportunity he would ever have to seek—and perhaps to create—a mana singularity.

Within the plane of the dead, Aurelian, now in human form, received an answer from the towering figure before her, the Lady of the Night.

"Wang Yu still lives. Sieg should be with him."

Aurelian had been unable to set aside her fears for Sieg and Noelle before setting out for the infernal plane. After all, the purpose of striking at the Isle of Dragons, of slaying the Dragon God and demolishing the Church of Dragonkind, had always been for their sake.

She no longer rejected the idea of faith in gods; she had seen that the true danger lay not in worship itself. Yet the marks she had left upon Sieg and Noelle led her nowhere. After some thought, she had turned to the Church of Nightfall.

At her prayer, the Lady of the Night, who had long been watching her, appeared.

Aurelian first revealed the existence of the abyssal creature, then asked about Sieg and Wang Yu. The goddess produced the Crimson Mark and showed her where it pointed.

The mark pointed unerringly toward the Endless Sea, the very place where they had gone missing. Yet it held one flaw: it didn't distinguish between the living and the dead. Even if they had perished, the mark would still point to them.

Even so, the Lady of the Night declared with certainty that Wang Yu yet lived, though even She could not reach him.

Aurelian's heart sank. If even a god's sight could not find Sieg and Noelle, what danger could they possibly be facing?

"I will find them," She vowed.

The Lady's gaze turned toward the horizon. Since the day the merfolk fleet and their archbishop had vanished upon the Endless Sea, the Church of Nightfall had begun to stir. She Herself was preparing to descend in Her full power.

As soon as Aurelian had spoken of the abyssal threat, She had transmitted her message through the church's ranks to every devotee.

And though the Church of Nightfall was no unified body—it was hardly an organized church at all, but rather a vast, scattered conglomerate—it had many, many adherents. Most dismissed the report, as Aurelian had expected.

𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

Yet there were also others who knew more of such beings, and who had a deep connection with Wang Yu himself. The message had reached Skyborne City, and from there, the machine spirit Astartes.

The tide was rising. Countless powers had begun to move.