Landing on a flat surface, Micky scanned his surroundings, ready to protect his host against any potential threats. Not that he expected to find any beasts inside the sealed tomb, but one could never be too careful.

  The room was mostly dark, though a few scant rays of sunlight slipped through the tunnel that he and Marnok had just crawled from, barely illuminating the place. The cube’s faces were in relatively decent condition – smooth and engraved with numerous runes, written in a language that Marnok was only tangentially familiar with. The floor, walls and ceiling were made of some copper-based alloy like bronze or brass, though the enchantments had clearly elevated its structural integrity greatly.

  Micky spotted a few cracks here and there, as well as some mold marring the corners of the chamber, though the place was clean for the most part – especially if he considered that it had supposedly remained unattended for thousands of years.

  Alas, Micky and his host had much bigger concerns than the condition of the tomb.

  “‘Tis empty!” the sailor exclaimed, disappointment twisting his features.

  The only “object” that they could see was a single skeleton sitting cross-legged in the centre of the room. It was quite aged, its drooped skull missing multiple chips, small mounds of pale dust gathered next to its feet. It wore a set of golden robes far fancier than anything Marnok’s crewmates had owned, though the fabric had long lost its lustre. It was full of holes and tears, the once-intricate patterns now too faded to make out.

  “Is this it?!” Marnok continued, his voice cracking as he questioned everything about his mission. “This is what all me friends lost their lives for? Just an ol’ bag o’ rotten bones?! What about the Fools’ Amber?!”

  Micky had no idea how to console his host. Truth be told, he was also shaken by this development, having hyped himself up for the treasure that they’d been supposed to find. He wasn’t sure what exactly he had expected – he didn’t have any use for the beast mana, nor had he intended to snatch the precious resource from Marnok. Still, this was a demigod’s tomb – for fuck’s sake!

  ‘How is this possible?’ he couldn’t help but ask himself.

  The sailors’ information clearly hadn’t been entirely wrong, since the Saint’s resting place was exactly where they’d expected it to be. Had somebody beaten them to the chamber and claimed the coins?

  ‘No, that can’t be right either,’ Micky thought, mentally shaking his head.

  Scanning the room more carefully, he quickly concluded that there was no other entry or exit point, besides the hole in the ceiling that they’d just drilled through. That could only mean that there had never been any Fools’ Amber to start with!

  Was it just wishful thinking then? Had Marnok’s people muddied the truthful information about the tomb’s location, embellishing it with fake rumours of treasure?

  Either way, this was bad. Finding something useful here had essentially been Marnok’s only hope of surviving the deadly island. Micky was going to be hard-pressed to find another way to help his host.

  Controlling the distraught sailor’s body, he walked up to the sitting skeleton, kneeling by the late Saint’s chest. Leaning closer, he tried to make out the faded inscriptions on his robes – to see whether they had missed something important – his fingers brushing over the fabric.

  Shockingly, even the slightest touch was enough to cause the demigod’s bones to crumble, raising a cloud of dust. Startled, Marnok stumbled backwards, falling clumsily on his butt as Micky shielded their mouth and nose from the airborne particles. Amidst their coughing fit, they felt a faint tremor permeate the chamber, some kind of mechanism clicking beneath the floor.

  ‘Now what?!’ Micky asked, leaping back to his host’s feet, examining the Saint’s remains in apprehension.

  Uncaring about his concerns, grating sounds continued to emanate from behind the cube’s surfaces, like giant gears grinding against one another. At first, they appeared to spin rather slowly, impeded by rust or dust – or whatever else the endless march of time had lodged in the gaps between them. They accelerated with every revolution, slowly shedding their obstructions as a deep rumble filled the tomb.

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  The runes along the cube’s surfaces began flickering one after the other, sparks and motes of various colours spilling out of the symbols after every short-lived flash.

  Marnok’s mouth dried with greed, his soul flaring with renewed anticipation as he realized that the situation might not be so hopeless after all. On the other hand, Micky was a little more worried than his host.

  ‘Shit, I hope we didn’t damage anything important,’ he thought, staring at the hole in the ceiling.

  For better or for worse, the gears kept picking up speed, the enchantments glowing for longer – a few of them never turning off after activating. Eventually, the entire room lit up with colour, the mechanical sounds in the background blending into a constant, muted hum that was thankfully rather easy to filter out.

  That was when something even weirder happened.

  Some of the runes shone brighter, forming a straight line that split the cube in half. It started where the Saint had been seated, travelling to his left across the floor, climbing up the wall, through the ceiling and down the opposite wall, before finally completing the loop from the demigod’s right.

  With no warning, the glow shifted along the cube, spinning counterclockwise, the deceased Saint’s remains serving as its invisible axis. Micky keenly noted that the enchantments ignored the gap in the ceiling entirely, exhaling in relief upon confirming that they hadn’t been affected by the missing patch at all.

  Oblivious to his thoughts, the pile of dust and tattered clothes rose from the floor, reforming the demigod’s skeleton as it had been before he touched it!

  As if that wasn’t shocking enough, Micky watched the broken pieces of alloy fly back to the ceiling to plug the hole that he and his host had entered from, restoring the room to its previous condition. The flashing runes showed no sign of stopping, the mold in the corners of the cube slowly receding, the cracks along the walls mending, as did the tears in the Saint’s robes. The fabric grew smoother, the previously faded patterns more distinct.

  They depicted a tangled web of fine threads that permeated various settings – from lush jungles to tall mountains, bustling cities, towering castles and crowded markets. Those places weren’t empty, however. There were several creatures going about their daily lives, though both the people and the beasts remained oblivious to the existence of the strange threads, despite being surrounded by them. Micky had no idea what this meant – or even if it meant anything at all.

  Moving on to more important matters, he focused on the writing across the demigod’s clothes, trying to make out anything and everything that his host was capable of reading. It wasn’t much, but he managed to gather some more information about the owner of this place.

  ‘Saint Ludwick, Clear grade, Karma affinity’

  Marnok creased his brow, Micky echoing the sentiment. They’d already known the demigod’s name and grade, but it was nice to finally know his mana type too. Glancing back at the imagery on the Saint’s clothes, Micky realized that he might have an answer as to what those threads represented.

  Was it how karma users perceived the world around them? Some special sense analogous to his own Soul Vision perhaps?

  ‘This must be what Jason was using to track us down,’ he guessed, recalling how the Green mage had gathered mana to his eyes whenever he had attempted to manipulate one of the objects in their surroundings, sending them flying towards or away from something else.

  ‘Micky? ‘ave ya ‘ny idea what’s happenin’?’ Marnok suddenly asked, clearly shaken to his core.

  ‘I’m not sure. I’m not an expert on karma magic, but I don’t think it’s capable of this. Could it be time magic?’ Micky responded with a question of his own.

  That didn’t sound right either. From what he knew, time magic was only capable of accelerating or decelerating the flow of time – and only locally. Reversing or travelling through time, on the other hand, was generally considered to be either completely impossible, or extremely difficult. Even if the strongest gods in the universe could do it, they shouldn’t be able to return more than a few seconds in the past, otherwise they would have probably dominated the universe already.

  ‘If it’s not time magic and it’s not karma magic, then it has to be some kind of illusion,’ Micky concluded after eliminating all the alternatives.

  Confident as he was in his guess, he still didn’t know how the dead demigod could have possibly set all of this up by himself. Unless of course, he’d had others helping him…

  The changes in the room kept mounting at a scary rate, countless years flowing in reverse for seemingly everything but Marnok. The cube was gradually restored to pristine condition, even the demigod’s skeleton markedly improving. The holes in his skull got patched up, the rest of the powder by his legs gone.

  Eventually, the spinning enchantment began to slow down, apparently approaching some special moment in the past. Just as Micky was scratching his host’s head, trying to figure out what the tomb was trying to tell them, one final change occurred – the most drastic one, in fact.

  Flesh spilled out of the skull’s holes, a layer of skin rippling over the corpse in an instant. The figure swelled slightly, Marnok barely getting a chance to blink once before he and Micky found themselves staring at an old man, his chest heaving up and down, looking as alive as one could be.

  “Well, would you look at that…?” Saint Ludwick – presumably – said with a tired sigh. His voice was soft like a whisper, but it permeated the whole cube like a gentle tune. “To think that this day would finally come…”

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