I didn't walk back to House Argent. I vibrated.
The adrenaline from the dojo was warring with the exhaustion in my bones, creating a jagged, buzzing energy that made my skin feel too tight. My brain was a blur of sword angles and footwork charts, but underneath the noise, the itch was starting.
The coder's itch. The compulsion to fix the syntax error that had killed me in my dream.
I slipped into the dorm, nodding to the few students awake at this ungodly hour, and headed straight for the service door behind the main hearth. I descended the stone stairs into the basement.
The air here was cooler, smelling of iron filings, grease, and the faint, soapy tang of the communal laundry vats. This was Grace's domain. The old armoury of House Argent—forgotten by the faculty and used as storage for broken furniture for decades—had been gutted, scrubbed, and repurposed into something that would have given Professor Vex a stroke.
Grace was waiting by the heavy iron door at the far end. She had a rag in her hand and a smudge of oil on her cheek. She took one look at me—at the dried blood under my nose and the manic glint in my eyes—and shook her head.
"You look like a necromancer's leftovers," she said.
"I feel fantastic," I lied, my voice sounding a little too loud in the confined space. "I feel optimised. Show me."
She didn't argue. She knew that look. It was the same look she had when she was trying to force a golem to understand poetry.
She pushed the door open.
"Welcome to the playground," she said.
I stepped inside, and my breath hitched.
The room was stark. Stone walls, stone floor, no windows. In the centre, illuminated by the harsh white glow of four hanging mana lamps, stood the machine.
It wasn't a rune table. It wasn't an enchanting altar. It was a cage.
It was a perfect cube, six feet on each side, constructed from plates of dull, grey metal that seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it. The seams were welded with a precision that looked almost surgical. On the front face, a thick, circular window of dark, smoky glass peered into the interior like a black eye.
"Star-Steel plating," Grace narrated, walking around the perimeter and trailing her hand affectionately along the cold metal. "Reinforced with an internal lattice of dwarven iron. I anchored it to the bedrock with twelve-inch bolts."
She tapped the dark glass window.
"Dragonglass viewing port," she added. "Three inches thick. It's supposed to be able to contain a Class-Three Mana Breach without cracking."
I walked up to it. I ran my hand over the rivets. It felt solid. It felt heavy. It felt expensive.
"It's beautiful," I whispered.
'It is a coffin,' Ronan corrected in my head, his voice wary. 'Why do we need a prison cell in the basement?'
"It's not a prison, Ronan," I murmured, pressing my face to the glass to look into the dark, empty interior. "It's a compiler."
I turned to Grace. "The ventilation?"
"Runic scrubbers installed in the ceiling," she pointed up. "If you generate toxic gas, plasma, or—god forbid—void rot, the vents will flush it out into the main drainage system."
She crossed her arms, leaning against the heavy doorframe.
"I built it to your specs, Murphy. It's rated to survive a thermal detonation from the inside out." She paused, studying my face with a look that was less concerned about safety and more concerned about logic. "But I have to ask... are you planning on standing inside that thing?"
"I'm going to debug in it," I said, dodging the specific geography of the answer.
I walked over to the desk I had set up in the safety zone—ten feet away from the box. I grabbed a stack of parchment and a fresh charcoal stick.
"The spells I'm writing..." I said, staring at the heavy steel door of the chamber. "They don't have safety rails. They don't have the 'Mercy of the Emperor' to keep them stable. If I get the syntax wrong, they don't fizzle. They explode."
I looked at her.
"This box is the only thing standing between my bad math and a crater in the middle of the dorms."
Grace didn't move to open the door. She just stared at me, tapping her fingers against her bicep.
"You're a lot of things, Murphy," she said slowly. "You're paranoid, you're greedy, and you're slippery. But you aren't suicidal."
She tilted her head, the glint of the mana lamps reflecting in her goggles.
"A guy like you doesn't lock himself in a blast furnace unless he knows he's fireproof." She let out a short, sharp breath. "I don't know what trick you have up your sleeve—an artefact, a shield, or maybe just dumb luck—but I'm assuming you plan on walking out of there?"
I grinned. It probably looked terrifying.
"I plan on walking away from it," I corrected carefully.
Grace held my gaze for a second longer, searching for the lie, then shrugged. It was the shrug of a mechanic who accepted that some engines just ran on black magic.
"Right," she said, grabbing a heavy lever on the wall. "Initiating lockdown. Just don't scratch the paint, boss. I just finished the primer."
Clang.
She threw the lever. The heavy bolts on the Kill Box retracted with a sound like a gunshot. The door swung open, revealing the dark, waiting mouth of the machine.
"Grace," I said, my hand hovering over the charcoal. "Before we start... I need to show you something."
Grace looked at me, her hand still resting on the lockdown lever. "Oh yeah?"
"The Black Box deal, it won't work down here. If you're going to be my partner in this, you need to know what—or who—I'm putting in that chamber. I can't be running in and out of there trying to keep this a secret."
I took a deep breath. This was it—the moment I handed someone the gun that could execute me.
I reached for the Core. I pulled the mana.
Pop.
The air shimmered next to me. A Clone materialised.
He looked exactly like me. He was wearing the same tunic, had the same messy hair, and sported the same tired expression. He looked at me, looked at Grace, and gave a little two-finger salute.
"Sup," the clone said.
Grace didn't scream. She didn't run.
She froze. Her eyes went wide behind her goggles, darting back and forth between me and the copy. She looked at the scar under my eye, then the scar under his.
"It's... solid," she whispered, her voice trembling slightly. She reached out a hand, then pulled it back. "Is it... a twin? A shapeshifter?"
"It's my art," I said, keeping my voice steady. "An Echo. It's made of water and mana, held together by my will. It thinks it's me, it talks like me, but it's not alive, Grace. It's a construct."
Grace stared at the Clone. "Grace, meet Clone Four." Clone Four scratched his nose.
"Why clone Four?" Grace asked.
"I dono, he just looks like a four to me", I shrugged.
"So... you built a bio-golem," she breathed, the fear in her eyes replaced by a sudden, intense mechanical fascination. "Without a soul-cage? Without a rune-matrix?"
"It's my own soul," I explained. "Stretched thin. That's why the Jesters work. That's why I can be in two places at once. That's the secret, Grace. It's what the Inquisition is looking for, for reasons I can't get into right now..."
"Right, they'll unbind you," she finished grimly.
"Correct."
She walked around the clone, inspecting him like he was a new piece of hardware. She poked his arm. The clone flinched.
"Ow," he complained. "Watch the merchandise, lady."
Grace looked back at me. A slow, terrifying grin spread across her face. It wasn't the grin of a friend; it was the grin of an engineer who had just been handed a new power tool.
"You have disposable test subjects," she realised. "Infinite, renewable test subjects."
"That's the idea," I nodded. "But they explode."
Grace walked back to the control panel. She tightened her grip on the lever. She didn't look horrified anymore. She looked ready to work.
"Well then," she said, pulling her goggles down over her eyes. "Let's see what they're made of."
The days didn't pass. They dissolved. I had taken leave from my classes, dispatching clones to study in my stead so I could lose myself entirely in rune inscription.
My life became a blurred loop of charcoal, steel, and sudden, violent decompression. I wasn't living in Lastlight anymore; I was living in the box. And the box was a harsh mistress.
"It's a simple combustion script," I explained to Grace on the first day, my voice hoarse. "Standard Ignis. But I removed the 'Prayer of the Hearth' that throttles the output."
"And replaced it with what?" Grace asked, watching Clone Four step into the chamber. She didn't flinch at the sight of him anymore. To her, he was just Four or Five or whatever we called the next clone on the chopping block.
"A direct call," I said. "A hard pipe. I want the fire to draw directly from the source."
Clang. The heavy door locked.
"Execute," I whispered.
Clone Four touched the paper. He pushed a single drop of mana into the ink to prime the pump.
But I hadn't installed a valve. I hadn't defined the Max_Intake.
The moment the connection opened, the rune didn't just take the drop. It acted like a siphon in a vacuum. It latched onto Clone Four's internal reservoir and pulled. Hard.
It drained the Clone's entire mana capacity—fifteen per cent of my total soul—in a single microsecond.
FLASH.
The Kill Box turned into a miniature sun. The Dragonglass port went completely white.
Clone Four didn't scream. He didn't have time. He was simply erased as his own energy was weaponised against him.
HISSSSSSS.
"Cut it!" Grace yelled, slamming the emergency flush.
The light faded. Inside the box, there was nothing left. No ash. No paper. Just a room that was glowing cherry-red.
"Buffer overflow," I muttered, shaking. "The pointer didn't close. It ate the whole stack."
'Murphy,' Ronan's voice rumbled in my head, questioning and sharp. 'We are risking structural damage to the facility. Why not use the Inventory? You could have simply phased the explosion into the void. You have swallowed mud, water, and acid. You could swallow the fire.'
I scribbled a note on my parchment, not looking up.
'Because Grace is watching,' I projected back.
'She knows about the Clones,' Ronan argued. 'She is an accomplice.'
'She knows I can duplicate. It is weird, but it is magic,' I explained, my mental voice cold. 'The Inventory? That isn't a spell, Ronan. That is a god-tier artefact embedded in my soul. If I start sucking fireballs into my skin, I lose my last secret.'
I looked up at Grace, who was busy checking the heat sensors on the box.
'I trust her enough to run the lever,' I admitted. 'But I don't trust anyone enough to give them the whole map. The Clones are the distraction. The Inventory is the insurance policy. If she turns on me, or if the Inquisition breaks her... I need something they don't see coming.'
Ronan went silent. He didn't like the paranoia, but he respected the tactic.
"I incinerated a variable," I corrected aloud, chugging a Mana Potion. "Next."
By the third day, the smell of ozone had been replaced by the smell of copper.
"Gravity," I announced. "The 'Aegis of the Earth' rune. Defined as a raw vector. Force = Mass * Acceleration."
Grace watched Clone Seven sit in the centre of the box. "Did you cap the input this time?"
"I tried," I said. "I added a while loop."
"Activate."
Clone Seven tapped the rune.
The loop failed. The spell kept pulling. It dumped the Clone's entire mana bar into a kinetic shove.
THWUMP.
Clone Seven vanished. A wet, red smear appeared instantly on the ceiling of the chamber. He had fallen upwards at terminal velocity.
Grace stared at the stain. "That is going to take hours to scrub."
"Nah, the blood turns into water when they dispel," I noted, wincing as the phantom pain hit my real body. "And the loop was infinite."
Two days later, I was a wreck.
"Sound," I croaked. "Sonic resonance."
I sent Clone Nine in with a wine glass.
"Just ping the glass," I muttered.
Clone Nine tapped the rune.
I had capped the volume. But I hadn't capped the duration. The rune drank the Clone dry and poured it into a single note.
CRACK.
The air inside the box compressed and detonated. The wine glass disintegrated. The wave hit the walls.
CRAAAACK.
A spiderweb fracture appeared in the centre of the Dragonglass window.
I fell off my chair, clutching my bleeding ears. "Memory leak," I whispered into the ringing silence. "I forgot to delete the pointer again."
I rolled onto my back, laughing weakly.
I had spent five days blowing myself up. But in the ashes of the failures, I saw the pattern.
I sat up, the room spinning.
"I know what I'm doing wrong," I realised. "I'm writing logic gates. But Aether isn't binary. It flows."
I grabbed the charcoal.
"I'm trying to be a coder," I muttered. "But I need to be a plumber."
It was three in the morning. The basement smelled of stale sweat, ozone, and the bitter, chemical tang of the cheap Mana Potions I had been chain-smoking for six hours.
I sat on the floor, surrounded by a graveyard of crumpled parchment. My hands were stained black with charcoal. My head felt like it was stuffed with wet wool.
"I'm overthinking it," I whispered to the empty air.
Grace was asleep in her chair, her head lolling back, soft snoring cutting through the hum of the ventilation scrubbers.
I looked at the failures. The scorch marks. The red stain on the ceiling. The cracked glass.
Every single failure came down to the same problem: The spell didn't know when to stop eating. It was a hungry dog that ate until it burst.
"I keep trying to write a Stop command," I muttered, spinning the charcoal stick. "I keep trying to tell the Aether to Delete or Halt. But you can't tell a river to just... stop. If you block a river without giving the water somewhere to go, the dam breaks."
I looked at the water pipe running along the ceiling of the armoury. It was old, rusted iron. It had a pressure valve near the joint.
When the pressure got too high, the valve opened. It vented the excess. It didn't stop the flow; it managed it.
"I'm not a coder," I realised, the fog in my brain clearing. "Magic isn't binary. It's fluid."
I grabbed a fresh sheet of parchment.
"I need to stop writing logic gates," I said, my hand moving with a sudden, fluid confidence. "And start writing valves."
I drew the Lumen rune. But this time, I didn't try to cap the input with a hard bracket. Instead, I drew a secondary loop—a shunt. The code equivalent of:
If (Brightness == Max) { Return(Source); }
I wasn't blocking the extra energy. I was recycling it. I was telling the Aether that once the cup was full, the overflow should pour back into the stream, not onto the floor.
"Clone Twelve," I croaked.
Pop.
Clone Twelve materialised. He looked awful. He had my bloodshot eyes, my slump, and my general air of a man holding onto sanity by his fingernails.
"One more time," I told him. "Into the breach."
Clone Twelve sighed, took the paper, and walked into the Kill Box.
Clang.
I didn't wake Grace. If this failed, the explosion would wake her up anyway. If it worked... well, I wanted to see it first.
"Execute," I whispered.
Clone Twelve held up the paper. He pushed a single, microscopic drop of mana into the ink.
I flinched. I couldn't help it. I raised my arm to cover my face, my muscles tensing for the flash, the boom, or the crunch of imploding bone.
One second passed.
Two.
Three.
There was no sound. No heat. No shockwave rattling my teeth.
I slowly lowered my arm.
Inside the dark chamber, Clone Twelve was standing perfectly still. Floating above the parchment in his hand was a sphere of light.
It wasn't the harsh, blinding flare of the first experiment. It was a soft, perfect azure orb. It didn't flicker. It didn't pulse. It hung there with the absolute stability of a star.
I stood up, walking toward the glass.
The spell wasn't draining him. It took the initial spark, reached its capacity, and then... it just sat there. It was pulling the ambient Aether from the air to sustain itself, venting the excess back into the atmosphere in a perfect, zero-loss loop.
"Zero drain," I whispered, pressing my hand against the cold Dragonglass. "It's a perpetual motion machine."
I watched the light hum, feeling the triumph swell in my chest. I had broken the economy of magic. I had created a free light source.
Then, I smelled smoke.
Inside the box, the edge of the parchment in Clone Twelve's hand began to curl.
"Wait," I muttered.
The blue light remained stable, but the paper holding the rune was turning brown. It wasn't burning from heat; it was decomposing. The fibres were unravelling, turning into grey dust that drifted to the floor.
Fizzle.
The paper disintegrated completely. The rune broke. The light vanished instantly.
Behind me, the creak of a chair announced Grace's return to the land of the living.
"Murphy?" she mumbled, her voice thick with sleep.
I stared at the pile of dust in the clone's hand.
'You ran a river through a straw,' Ronan's voice noted, sounding both impressed and critical. 'You figured out the runes, but the material isn't strong enough to handle that kind of power.'
"There's always a catch! We can't just get a fucking win, can we?!" I shouted the euphoria crashing into the hard wall of despair.
"The energy loop is infinite, but the mana flow degrades the material."
I leaned my forehead against the cool glass.
I hadn't solved magic. I had just traded one cost for another. I didn't need Mana anymore. I needed better hardware.
"Ronan," I whispered, tapping my temple. "How is your blacksmithing?"