Three days crawled by. Three days of a silent, one-sided staring contest. Archmage Valerius sat at his ridiculous little table, a permanent fixture in the swirling mists, his quill scratching endlessly in his notebook. He tracked the non-existent sun's path across the non-existent sky. He took notes on the way the mist coiled around the Inn's foundation. He documented the utter, complete, and maddening lack of anything happening at all.
Inside the Inn, the atmosphere had grown heavy with a unique kind of dread. A direct attack was terrifying, but at least it was an event with a beginning and an end. This… this was a psychological siege. It felt like being watched by a patient predator, one that was not waiting for them to make a mistake, but was trying to understand the very nature of their cage so it could dismantle it screw by screw.
Leo found his nerves fraying. He would pace the length of the lobby, the [Renovations] menu a distant, pointless fantasy. What good was planning an alchemy station when a mad genius was trying to rewrite the laws of physics on his front lawn? Lyra maintained her stoic silence, but her hand rarely left her sword, her knuckles white. Even Silas had lost his usual playful demeanor. His corner was quiet, the whispers from his network offering no insight into the Archmage's plan.
The breaking point came, as Leo suspected it would, not from the patient mage, but from the petulant Duke.
On the fourth day, Duke Carrington, having exhausted his capacity for quiet observation, stormed over to Valerius's table. His face was a blotchy, purple mask of fury.
"Theron, this is madness!" the Duke's voice was a furious hiss, loud enough to be faintly heard even through the Inn's walls. "I am paying you a fortune that could fund a small war, and you are sitting here… sketching! Like a maiden in a park! I commanded you to destroy that thing, not to admire it!"
Archmage Valerius did not look up from his notes. "I am not admiring it, you fool," he said, his voice dripping with condescension. "I am dissecting it. This structure does not obey any of the five major schools of magic or the seventeen minor disciplines. It is an ontological impossibility. To attack it with conventional magic is like trying to drown a fish."
"Then be unconventional!" the Duke shrieked, his voice cracking. "Do something! Use the spell you spoke of! The one that leveled the Obsidian Citadel during the Heretic Wars! Level this whole cursed patch of land!"
Valerius finally looked up, his expression one of deep weariness. "That spell, my dear cousin, is a catastrophic application of force. A sledgehammer for a problem that requires a scalpel. It will, in all likelihood, fail just as spectacularly as everything else."
"I don't care!" the Duke insisted. "I want to see fire! I want to see ruin! I want that… that manager to know fear! Do it, Theron, or our arrangement is terminated, family or not!"
The Archmage let out a long, theatrical sigh. He placed his quill down with painstaking slowness. "Very well. You wish for a grand, pointless gesture. You shall have it. But know that I do this only to satisfy your boorish need for spectacle, and to gather data on how this domain responds to a threat of overwhelming magnitude."
He stood, his scholarly demeanor replaced by a chilling aura of immense power. The three crystals orbiting his head began to spin faster, glowing with a fierce, white light. He began to walk the perimeter of his camp, his hands tracing complex, glowing runes in the very air, which hung there like solidifying light.
Inside, the trio watched with dawning horror.
"He's actually doing it," Lyra breathed, her face pale. "The 'Sun's Anvil.' It's a forbidden spell. It doesn't just destroy a target; it annihilates the very space it occupies."
Leo's blood ran cold. This wasn't a Mana Lance or a ground tremor. This was a deletion key. His eyes were glued to the Archmage, who was now chanting in a low, rumbling monotone. A vast, complex magical circle began to form on the ground around him, its light so bright it made the swirling mists recoil. The power being gathered was immense, biblical. It made the air itself feel thin and fragile.
He was going to try and wipe his entire property off the map. His property…
A thought struck Leo, so sudden and out of place that it almost made him laugh. It was a thought from his old life. When a new development was being built, the first thing you established was the property line. It was sacrosanct. But his property line was just an invisible fifty-foot boundary. What if he could… reinforce it? Not with a wall, but with a rule?
But what kind of rule could stop a spell like that? His 'No Violence' rule worked inside, but this was happening outside. A new rule felt like putting up a 'No Trespassing' sign in the path of a tsunami.
Then, another thought, another memory from his past life, surfaced. A particularly nasty legal battle with a construction company whose crane had collapsed and damaged a neighboring property. The issue hadn't been stopping the crane; the issue had been liability. Damages. Compensation.
His eyes lit up. He turned away from the window, his heart hammering with a new kind of energy—not fear, but the thrill of a brilliant, high-stakes idea.
"Guide," he said, his voice sharp and focused. "I have a question. A legal question, you could say."
The orb of light appeared instantly beside him. Ask, Master.
"My authority is limited to my property. But what, exactly, is my property?" Leo asked. "Is it just the building? Or is it the land the building sits on? Does it include the fifty feet of… whatever this is, outside?"
The Domain is a conceptual reality, Master, the Guide explained. Its boundaries are defined by the Master's will and sustained by the Inn's available Value. Currently, it is defined as the building and the surrounding fifty feet of Threshold space.
"So I define the boundaries," Leo confirmed, a predatory smile spreading across his face. "And my rules apply to the entire property, not just inside the building?"
That is correct.
That was all he needed to know. He turned back to the window. Outside, the Archmage had finished his preparations. A massive sphere of white-hot energy, looking like a miniature sun, now floated above his head, pulsing with terrifying power. The Duke had scrambled back to his carriage, watching with a mixture of terror and glee.
Valerius raised his hands, ready to unleash the apocalypse.
Leo took a deep breath. He didn't shout this time. He spoke with the calm, unshakable authority of a man dictating the terms of a binding contract.
"New rule," he declared, his voice resonating with a power that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with ownership. "Any and all damages incurred by this property, its assets, or its sovereign domain, caused by a hostile external entity, will be compensated by the aggressor at a rate of threefold the assessed Value."
The system screen flashed in his vision, the text glowing with a powerful, golden light.
[New Rule Registered: Hostile Damage & Liability Clause]
[Domain Authority conceptually reinforced.]
Outside, Archmage Valerius thrust his hands forward, sending the miniature sun screaming toward the Threshold Inn.