High in the sky floated the ocher castles of Nabica. Down on the ground rose titanic slabs that formed hills and peaks. They were the true shape of the undying city, instructing the sands and winds to keep the floating structures in place.
Once nothing but a flat and broken paving bowing to the mana drought, the entire plain was now basking in their shades. Slabs big enough to have entire complexes dug in them where monsters abounded.
We were walking on the lower ones among that jagged landscape.
Compared to that massive craft covered in glyphs, the Parao looked mundane. But the human noticed it immediately.
"Look, sir!" He pointed it to me. "There is something, it looks like a ship!"
Its crossed masts were dwarved by the andesite masses around but the painted wood, even with its sails folded, still cut sharply in the shades. Both hulls held on the smooth ground even without moorings.
I gestured for the man to follow me.
Down at the starboard keel stood Rascal. The orc had already crushed three beasts and picked his axe at our approach. Magic had washed over him too, allowing for his tusks to grow back as well as two pairs of horns.
Above all, he wore a new pattern of scars with pride.
He hit the ship's hull with his fist and the ramp, held by ropes, rolled down to welcome us. Then he moved to block our way, ready to fight.
Gravity. The power that forced him to his knees was so great that he eructed black blood. I passed him without even a look.
The man behind me stopped, taken aback.
"Leave him be." I advised. "He is a follower of Korion. He obeys me because I am stronger."
That made the orc snicker. "Wrong." His boarish voice broke through the weight on his body. "I stand you because you fight."
Same difference.
I had already reached the deck. A move of my finger broke the spell and let the beast breathe.
"Move, the both of you. We are leaving."
"Excuse me, sir?" The human was climbing the ramp, hesitant. "Could we not stay a bit longer?"
Ah. Finally. That human was done following like a puppy. He faced me and I faced him for a second of silence.
"Just for a bit!" He assured, his hand on his neck. "I have barely had time to to visit the marvels here, so, with your permission, wouldn't it be beneficial to look around some more?"
The spark in his wasn't greed, not exactly. I would call it ambition. He had a human system and I knew that thing had already rewarded him. He had probably been given more... quests... and relished the opportunity.
But that man was hiding that. Behind his smiles and blue eyes, he was plotting.
Or he would have shown me the bracelet he now kept under whatever cloth that was that he wore.
"Two days!" He pleaded. "No, one day! Surely we can manage that much?"
"Fine." I cut his theater. "Two days." And to the orc: "Rascal! Go with him." Then back to the human. "You are his master now. Use him and make sure he gets to fight."
"A master, uh." The orc got up and smirked. "We will see about that."
I watched them depart, waited for them to be far enough that they would not see me act and then, earthworks! As if I would let the human out of my sight.
Glad to the human's mana, I could sense vibrations for kilometers away. But that was hardly enough. So two circles of magic surrounded the Parao to enhance that and focus it on the two of them. I would use Nabica itself to track their every move.
The deck's hatch opened to let the magnal slip out. That monster had waited obediently in the lower deck and now felt safe to show up.
"The ship is clean." He growled. "The seals are ready. What should I do for two days?"
Of course he had heard everything. Nasse wasn't angry, no matter his growl; on the contrary, he was extatic at the influx of mana that had brought fire back to his veins.
"Fix my armor." I answered. "Then you are free. The human found records on anti-magic, I will be working on that."
"You are toying with death."
He was telling that to a clay golem.
Still, the lizard sucked the iron plates out of me, on the deck and then started carrying them down for smelting. As soon as I was free of that weight, I left for the back of the ship, through the lounge and past the bathroom to what had become my study.
There, in the small cabin I could let out my worst habit.
A human came when I needed it. No call, little warning, just his voice from a portal not built for it. He sounded like he was fleeing. Just what is Earth? If not the circles, what lets them come? What prevents more from coming?
At the very least I was writing those thoughts on clay, instead of engraving them on the wall. Most of the time. And once I was done I could throw the clay out through the porthole.
Yes, that was one more piece in the puzzle. But I didn't want that specific puzzle solved.
Because a human was there now, and the mana drain was already at work. I needed anti-magic to give him a future.
Out there, that human was exploring. He had learned the orc's name and the orc his. The two of them looked more relaxed than he had ever been with me.
They even cracked jokes when one struggled.
And of course, there were monsters, but that was meaningless. The human was brimming with potency and Rascal had by now months of experience in warfare. Those beasts, by contrast, had just been born.
My attention, every time I glanced at them, was for any ripple in anti-magic. Any trace of Calisle coming back. The wyvern skeleton had attacked a human at full strength: there was no telling when it would try again.
And I was really curious to see what the system was pushing him to do.
For my part, human knowledge described the problem of anti-matter containment in the form of pressure.
Take the cosmic ceiling. Naturally, outside the realm, there was nothing: the void. Inside the realm was magic. Inbetween stood the cosmic ceiling which humans judged made of anti-magic. Every conclusion came from that observation.
When the night fell I was still nowhere near even a barrier and the human was still far in the tunnels, setting up for the night. He refused to eat monster meat, the fool, and drank what he assumed was water.
I watched him improvise an altar and get the orc to help. They sacrificed the meat to something, then went to sleep.
The next day had them cross to another slab and start climbing back up, to reach a vast broken chamber where magic crystals once stood. A ghost frog had made it its lair after triumphing on its peers.
It proved an ordeal for the two of them to prevail against that weakling.
Once they did, there was no lack of celebration. Rascal especially reveled in the wounds he had sustained.
The human realized: "We need to find a way to treat your wounds!"
"Pah!" His companion mocked him. "Let them be!"
"But, they must hurt like hell! What are you, a masochist?"
"I am alive!" Boasted the orc. "The pain is proof of that! You too, Varun, the mana drain will catch up with you. Then you will understand."
No. No he would not. He was a human, not a monster.
With this victory they accessed the chamber's glyphs and the human began a ritual. I immediately recognized it and would have felt it anyway, even without my scheme to observe them.
He was waking up golems.
And the golems answered. Nabica relied not on shards nor scrolls but, per the city's nature, on stone tablets. All the sand tablets laying broken and wiped woke up again.
Inscriptions reappeared on their surface.
Then the body reformed, bulgy quadrupeds that immediately went to work. Fights broke out for several dozens slabs of distance.
On the surface as well, the winds blew over old tablets that revived after all this time. Dozens of servants rose in silence and started to roam the stone. I could see them even from the porthole.
"Kaele!" The magnal rushed to my study. "We have a problem!"
I got out and calmed him with one hand.
Then I walked outside, down the ramp, to meet one of those lumbering giants. They served humans as I did, so it let me approach, put my arm in its body and snatch the tablet. The whole mass of sand went crashing down in the instant.
One look at the tablet: a single-layer of recursive, non-adaptative instructions.
What else did I expect? For even the tablets to have withheld the mana drain, they had to be that simple. It meant that as soon as the human's instruction was complete, they would all stop.
So, while the two of them were making their way back up, I brought the tablet back onboard, added a layer on it and started to write.
Few golems were instructed how to create more golems. I should not have had that knowledge. But after seeing so many records, that craft was not ouf or reach anymore. If it was even remotely possible for me to touch my own tablet, I could have rewritten myself.
It was not.
Anyway, anti-magic. While I worked on the tablet, I also pondered the barrier. And there were two factors to the cosmic ceiling.
One, anti-magic was less... active. Hence why it was so good at, well, anti-magic. So it didn't get swallowed by the void because it simply didn't move that much.
Two, even though the realm held a tremendous amount of magic, humans proposed that it was too minuscule and therefore, crushed by the void. So, pressure. The realm would not burst.
Of course, there was no way to test since the cosmic ceiling was impassable.
But what if? What if you could recreate that scheme inside the realm? Just a twist on the common craft of a microverse that made it infinitely more expensive to conceive and infinitely more sustaining, if not totally cut from everything.
By the next morning, the tablet was ready. I put on the armor, walked out again, among the slabs to put it back and let the sands come to give it a body.
That was my gift to Nabica. For the time mana would last, a golem to lead the others.
Good luck to it.
The orc appeared first, followed by the human who was struggling to follow his pace. They saw me among the golems and came to meet me. I looked like a shining knight in the mud.
"Two days have passed." I greeted them.
"That master is not too bad!" The orc replied. "Teach him to be ruthless and he will be king of kings!"
His eyes had seized on the ship behind me and the circles around.
"Or you doubt him?"
"Now, now," the human intervened, "we are all on the same team, aren't we? There is no need for any animosity."
Again he groveled to me. That attitude of his made even less sense considering the new relic he was hiding along with the bracelet. When reviving the golems, the system had gifted him a ring that he had tried to hide even from the orc.
Rascal had almost certainly seen it. I had caught it too. Three liars altogether.
Still, of all the things I felt like saying to manipulate that man, there was how monsters worked. Because he had spent so much time laughing with an orc that I didn't want him to keep misunderstanding the realm.
"That animosity," I explained to the human, "is a monster's respect. Be ruthless, savior, and earn his ire as well."