Magnus Thorne 05

05 – Neverexia

[TLC 1-1-1 Reached.]

[Refinement 1 Reached.]

The accomplishment should have made me feel elated, but I barely had the strength to keep my eyes from shutting as I lay slumped against the wall.

I am very familiar with the concept of portals. In fact, the stronger I grew the more I used them for travel. When you can simply summon a portal through whichever shenanigans you find to be fit in the moment, to go wherever you want, portal travel quickly becomes the preferred means of travel. Compared to teleportation, it’s much cheaper and allows for many creative improvements that make it look flashier on one hand, and reduce mana cost considerably on the other.

Magic is weird like that. A simple portal? In the power-precision-uncanniness ruler it was easily a TLC 3-10-10 spell.

A portal framed by a superconductive ring of metal, dialed with chevrons, and only leading to one location? TLC 2-3-2. Much easier, but expensive.

The dwarf did not lie though. The portal was there. And it responded to me, as opposed to not working for the dwarves. The problem was that it needed a decent amount of mana to operate, and it only led to one location.

I waited for my mana to regenerate, hoping that my current condition would even allow me to gather enough mana for the portal to work. I pricked my skin, stumbled around, and did everything I could not to fall asleep. The poison had spread too much, and I knew that if I fell asleep then I would not wake up again.

***

Impossibly tall walls hid what was surely a great city from view. They were imposing, made of polished grey stone bricks, thick and solid. Atop them I managed to spot the silhouette of guards, and I was quite relieved to see that they were human.

“Say!” I yell, slightly out of breath and swaying, hoping they can hear me. “Have you ever heard of a certain Magnus Lazarus Thorne?”

“Who?” Echoed a yell from the walls. The guard’s voice was unsure.

Huh. It appeared that they have forgotten about me. A very strange thing indeed, considering how… let’s say famous I was.

At the edge of my consciousness came the thought that it wasn’t the first time I met someone who did not know me. In fact, my barely awake brain, full of poison thought, it happened very recently that I met someone who did not know me. Who? I could not recall. Why? No idea.

Regardless of why, this was good for me. If they don’t know me, then they don’t know about my reputation, meaning I get a mostly clean slate to begin anew.

Mostly, because right as I was about to speak again, my wounds finally caught up with me. My vision blurred and I was dimly aware of the fact that I was fainting. The last thought that crossed my mind was that, as far as blank slates went, it could have gone worse. But better too, since they now must come all the way down and grab me and bring me to some first aid structure. Hopefully they won’t be too mad about it when I wake up.

***

J4-49F
Hycean World
Distance: 183 LY
Mass: 9.7x Terrenia
Temperature: -9°C

There are places in the cosmos that really hammer home just how small we are, as people. Eerie places. Hycean planets are one such places.

Hycean planets are planets composed exclusively of water. They might have a solid core somewhere below, sure, but it is surrounded by thousands of kilometers of water. Nothing else but water. They just make you feel strange, different. Thalassophobia, some people call it. I find the name diminutive. It’s not a phobia when you are drawn to it, is it? Some might even call it the call of the deep, of the void below.

I found myself attracted to the sight of the endless expanse, my eyes wandering to the depths unseen below the ship.

My good friend and invaluable guide in this treacherous place Josh Ruspine emerged from below deck, his head barely visible through the shower of salt water and mist and foam of the storm. Not even senses like mine could pierce through the waters of an ocean like that of J4-49F.

The light barely reached one meter away from our ship before being swallowed by the darkness. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. Hulking shapes. Not monsters, but waves taller than mountains. We were on one such wave, I knew, sensing that the ship was tilting forward.

Once we reached the summit, we would begin to plummet down and we would feel weightless for a moment or two. Then, the ludicrous gravity of this planet would once again try to rip us to shred, and we would thank our Refinement status for allowing us to survive.

“Can’t you do anything about this shit weather?” He asked me, no, yelled at me through the raging storm.

With a sigh, and a playful face, I looked at how many charges I had left.

[Power is available. 12’993’228 charges left.]

“Maybe.” I said mischievously. I had to admit it would be cool not to have to suffer through yet another wave.

The man simply stomped up to me and grabbed me by shoulder.

“If my ship sinks because of your shitty shenanigans, I swear to the sunken mother of—”

“Nooooo need to get heated.” I told him. “I’ll do it. Here. The weather is shit, | we cannotsail without hassle.”

[10’242’558 charges left.]

The ship suddenly sailed through the storm as if the sea was a perfectly flat pane of glass. “There there, much better eh?”

Josh had never seen magic used in such ways perhaps, and he must have been joking when he asked me to help or perhaps he simply did not believe I could do it. He was not used to such versatility in magic, and in all the years we have known each other, he had never gotten around to it. He died still thinking me an abomination of nature, in a good way.

As such, he simply stared out into the darkness, speechless.

In all fairness, using a TLC-standard spell would have cost an abominable amount of mana not even I could spend with such carelessness. Not at that time.