As time passed, normalcy somehow returned to the refuge with Joel.

  With him deciding not to leave the forest anytime soon, the children eagerly welcomed the return of classes at the small school. The other adults had done a good job maintaining instruction with the materials they had on hand, but no one could match the powerful wizard when it came to explaining, motivating, and sparking the children's curiosity.

  For the children, Joel was much more than a teacher: he was the ultimate authority figure in their lives, the beacon that had pulled them from despair and shown them a new world of wonder, science, and infinite possibilities.

  Nana's potions, meanwhile, became the most important resource within the refuge. From many perspectives, they were a kind of divine elixir. What Joel had initially considered to be simple, advanced versions of blood potions ended up revealing itself as an extraordinarily complex manifestation of a unique, innate ability.

  Upon closer examination and from a scientific perspective, Joel discovered that each potion was completely customized to its recipient, precisely tailored to their biological characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. Even Nana herself initially failed to grasp the magnitude of what she was doing; only as her scientific knowledge began to develop and her reasoning matured was she able to understand the depth of her talent.

  She was like a mother who, without much thought, produces in her milk exactly what her child needs to grow. Nana did the same, but with the magical development of others.

  While what she could achieve with people possessing magical affinity—impressively accelerating their progress—was already astonishing, what truly left Joel speechless was discovering what happened when she applied her ability to children with no affinity whatsoever.

  First, four new children began to show signs of a magical awakening. But barely two months after Joel's return, that number had increased to nine. Nine children with the real potential to manifest power even before reaching adulthood.

  Joel couldn't hide his smile whenever he thought about it. The mere thought that the twenty-six children in his care could become magicians filled him with an almost uncontainable excitement.

  The possibility of cultivating magicians from scratch, with such ease, ignited dangerously ambitious ideas in his mind.

  For the first time in history, the birth of a new kind of society seemed possible: one where magic could be replicated and perfected from childhood, without depending on chance or inherited talent.

  But Nana, true to her rational nature, quickly set limits on that vision. She explained to Joel that, in theory, each child would require years of constant attention from her, since the potions weren't simply replicable formulas, but living extensions of her essence. Reproducing the process on a larger scale would be unfeasible, not only because of the effort involved, but also because it would consume all her time and energy, diverting it from other equally or even more important research.

  Joel understood the reason. However, a small part of him couldn't help but think about what he could achieve if he found a way to replicate that ability... a scientific way to reproduce Nana's miracle.

  Just as she had predicted, within a couple of months, Nana had finally fully assimilated Connor's dimensional affinity, becoming a potential dimensional walker. This was something Joel eagerly anticipated, as it represented the only truly safe escape route from the region they were in… or, if everything went according to plan, a way to leave the world of Myrrial altogether.

  True to his promise, Connor began Nana's training with methodical patience and high expectations of teaching such a peculiar being as the statue. The first few days focused on perception exercises, teaching her to sense the structure of space, to recognize the invisible ripples that an ordinary mage wouldn't even notice. Then came controlled attempts at distortion: tiny fissures that lasted barely a blink, just enough to allow a leaf to fall in and emerge from another part of the room.

  Unfortunately, the former agent couldn't share the more advanced knowledge he possessed, due to the seals on his memory. Therefore, he had to resort to more basic and primitive knowledge, which is handled at a general level and which is usually used by civilian mages or members of organizations outside of empires, such as some cursed cults.

  During the long conversations that followed those training sessions with Connor, Joel absorbed a great deal of knowledge about the world of dimensional walkers. He discovered that it was a specialty feared more for its potential than for its offensive use. The walkers' fame didn't stem from their power in combat, but from the inherent danger of their magic: the power to draw the boundaries between worlds closer.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The ability to open a portal didn't make anyone invincible. Most walkers possessed other affinities that they had to master in order to defend themselves. Connor himself, by his own admission, possessed an affinity for water magic, which he mastered to such a degree that it was one of the reasons he survived the C4 booby trap.

  However, the true terror lay in the inexperience of a dimensional mage. A novice walker, or worse, a desperate one, could unleash a catastrophe greater than many armies, for opening a portal was to interfere with the very fabric of reality. There were records of cities wiped off the map, dissolved in the blink of an eye because a wizard miscalculated during the creation of an experimental portal. And then there were the darker tales: rogue walkers who, cornered by their pursuers, chose to self-destruct, dragging everything around them down with them. No containment spell could stop a dimensional collapse. That, according to Connor, was the main reason why dimensional affinity was one of the most tightly controlled by empires and one of the most feared by those who served in their ranks.

  There are many methods for opening a portal, though two are the most common. The first is the location-marking method, the safest and most widely used. The traveler memorizes a point in space they have personally visited and seals it in their mind as a magical mark. Each seal acts as a key that can be opened at any time, provided the mage has sufficient mana and the astral conditions permit. However, the number of seals a mage can maintain is limited and depends on their level; too many marks and the mage risks suffering a mental breakdown, losing their memory in the worst-case scenario.

  The second method, much more dangerous and difficult to master, is astral positioning. This allows the opening of portals to places the mage has not necessarily visited, but it requires extensive knowledge of mathematics and magical astrology, making it the most imprecise and with a real probability of opening a portal to a dangerous place. In the worst-case scenario, one could end up thousands of meters in the sky, at the bottom of an ocean, or in the void of space itself.

  Connor explained it in a somber tone: “The difference between a living walker and a star corpse… is a poorly solved equation.”

  Joel listened intently, but what truly disturbed him wasn't the complexity of the subject, but the strange gleam that was beginning to appear in Nana's eyes. A cold, calculating curiosity… as if the notion of “reality” were becoming too fragile for her.

  However, there was something Connor hadn't considered when he estimated that Nana would take the same amount of time as an average mage to learn dimensional magic. The statue was already a specialist in spatial magic, one of the most complex and enigmatic affinities of all, and that prior mastery gave her an overwhelming advantage when it came to understanding the fundamentals of dimensional magic.

  Additionally, Nana possessed a mathematical knowledge far superior to Connor's. Not because the former agent was incompetent, but because Joel, in his obsessive search for knowledge, had shared with her knowledge brought directly from Earth: calculus books, theoretical physics, geometry, and concepts that didn't even have a name in the Myrrial language.

  To Connor, they were chaotic, meaningless scribbles; to Nana and Joel, they were gateways to a new way of interpreting reality.

  Joel, who had witnessed several of the training sessions, quickly became involved. At first, he kept to himself, murmuring corrections or alternative perspectives, but soon arguments became inevitable. What was meant to be a simple practical lesson transformed into an intellectual battleground.

  Connor tried to explain the classical foundations of dimensional magic, while Joel, with an almost feverish gleam in his eyes, began to redefine each equation from its foundations, questioning the very basis upon which the entire theory had been built.

  "Your formulas assume that space is static," Joel said once, tracing symbols on a makeshift whiteboard. "But if space itself stretches and contracts, then the anchor points should be relative, not absolute."

  Connor looked at him silently, unsure what to think. The statue, meanwhile, copied the information with unnatural speed, her fingers engraving formulas onto her countless calculation notebooks.

  To Connor's surprise—and horror—, Joel and Nana's incredible and bizarre mathematical methods seemed to work. The variables stabilized, the margins of error shrank almost to zero, and what had once been a process riddled with uncertainty became an extremely precise operation. Connor watched in disbelief as, day after day, their calculations became more refined, until the initial design flaws simply vanished.

  Nana no longer missed a single attempt. The test portals, which at first could barely connect two points separated by less than a meter, soon reached distances of hundreds of meters. In a single night, she managed to move an object over a kilometer, without distortion, without collapse, without a trace of residual energy. It was a feat that would have taken any Oculus wizard decades to perfect.

  When the time came to move toward extraplanar portals, Connor realized he was witnessing something far beyond his comprehension. The room transformed into an impossible laboratory: thick books filled every corner, alongside luminous devices that emitted soft hums and displayed shifting symbols on flat screens. There were buttons, cables, and metallic structures calculating coordinates in real time, all functioning without a single detectable particle of magic.

  Joel watched in silence, his heart pounding. Seeing human technology coexisting with Myrrial magic was like watching two universes merging into one. Connor, for his part, could barely process it. The magical logic he had known since childhood crumbled before his eyes.

  From Joel's perspective, everything was beginning to fall into place like a puzzle. For him, it was almost trivial to take the primitive mathematical system used by Connor—a rudimentary numerical method, very similar to the Roman numeral system on Earth—and transform it into the decimal system, the foundation of modern science. Soon, magical theories began to intertwine with algebra, calculus, dynamics, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics, transforming something that must have been incomprehensible to an ordinary magician into a window of almost infinite possibilities for Joel and Nana.

  The memories of several scientists and professors played a crucial role in dismantling and reconstructing, in a more logical and efficient way, the method for opening portals. All of this, of course, was supported by the experimentation and practical data that Nana gathered from her experiments.

  In a matter of months, the statue advanced what had taken other dimensional walkers decades of study, refining every equation, every symbol, every layer of reality that separated one world from another.

  It was common knowledge that not only walkers were capable of creating portals. Large magical organizations, those with the resources and power to do so, could also achieve this feat. Each permanent portal that connected the capitals and cities of empires was a colossal work, erected and maintained for millennia, with or without the help of walkers. They were monuments to ingenuity and persistence, relics of the power accumulated by enormous magical civilizations.

  Joel never imagined the day would come when he himself would be so close to understanding—and reproducing—such a miracle. What he had once considered impossible now unfolded before his eyes with a logic so clear and elegant that it was almost terrifying.