What mana does is create an independent source of strength. That is why body-strengthening potions seem to have less effect the higher one’s realm. The potions have strengthened the body, by a fixed, unchangeable amount, but the strength granted by mana keeps growing, outclassing the body with each realm we attain. That’s why pure physical enhancement diminishes in importance the higher your realm.

  — Excerpt from Notes For Newstar

  Day 469, 2:30 AM

  I jerked from being impaled, startling myself awake from meditation. I glanced around, nothing much to see, before my mind caught up with what day it was, and I groaned.

  The day before the party. I’ll have to go through that all over again.

  I groaned. Suddenly, I felt Honor was a bigger bastard than I did after the party. Even though my death almost certainly wasn’t his fault. Or, in a sense, it was. Had I been in the library or meditation chamber, I wouldn’t have noticed the oddity on the voidnight.

  A deep breath in, then exhale through the nose.

  I considered the social event again. The wine and food were decent, the music pleasant. The party wasn’t that bad, and since I already knew all the questions before the clingers would ask them, I could mostly ignore them, and think of other matters.

  The party was fine; I was being a dick. And of course I want to know what’s happening. All information is valuable. Now, stop whining, and get on with the program.

  I closed my eyes and returned to my realm. The metal seal I was working on was already decaying, and I picked up the slack, passing the time without thinking about the failed loop.

  Strangely, but not really surprisingly, I enjoyed the second run at the party much more than the first. I had clear expectations, and the probing for information had become a background drone, while the food and wine factored much more into my evening. Since I knew I wouldn’t enjoy dancing as much, I just took three spins. Then I moved the rest of the interrogations over to the food and wine tasting, where I did my best to deal as serious a blow as I could to Honor’s stock of quality vintages.

  I left at the same time with similar words and experienced the same soundless keening. However, I pretended I hadn’t noticed anything and just kept walking. It turned out good for my health, because when Redo came off cooldown, I was alive and well.

  With my safety ensured, and all tasks completed to at least a satisfactory level, it was time to set aside a bit of time for making logical deductions regarding what had happened. In the adventurers’ guild, inside my private room, I took some paper and started writing everything I knew, and making connections, a few of which thanks to Initial Reference Checker, which led to some wild conclusions.

  After learning of its existence, it had taken me all of several minutes to give the natural phenomenon a name - voidnight. The concept was as inviting and mystical as an eclipse or solstice, and those certainly had names. The only reason it would be kept unnamed and relatively secret was because it held some real significance.

  Having a skill that inferred something like that just because I had neat notes and one of them said mana was involved was potentially some crazy system oversight. Then again, it was possible it only worked like that in conjunction with my high mental stats.

  Anyway, about an hour later, I had a working theory. The imperial family knew of an actual way to harness the voidnight’s peculiarity and kept it secret from the general populace. It involved killing people, and the weirdness, or more likely the special process surrounding the executions, produced the ripple I had sensed. That bit I guessed because death certainly happened all the time, but there was little soundless, soul-shaking wailing involved.

  As for the exact goals of the imperial family, they remained unknown, but certainly tied with power, because everything boiled back down to power. Whether they did the deed only in Glory City or in all imperial cities was a good question, but my deduction skill told me it was more widespread. After all, Glory City’s prince was seventeenth in the imperial hierarchy. It stood to reason that whatever boon he was entitled too, those above him were too.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The next question, one I didn’t have an answer to, was - what do you get from killing people and how? How do you convert them to power, other than burning the mana inside their bodies on a task, such as establishing a secret realm?

  That wasn’t a bad question. Was it possible the prince was using convicts to create a new secret realm? Again, deduction came to my aid. While possible, it seemed unlikely. Anyone performing such a hypothetical deed would have chosen a time when mana was at its zenith, not nadir, for obvious reasons.

  No, they are doing something that requires a low mana concentration. I thought, shuffling the papers. What if they are trying to make a dead zone?

  Again, I tapped the desk with my finger several times, then dismissed the thought. That would be like activating a thermonuclear device under your own ass because you were bored. While I hadn’t visited one yet, dead magic zones seemed like a great way to suicide. You use a touch of mana, and then the world drains the rest to equalize you with the environment, shattering your core if you are lucky, and doing much nastier things if you aren’t.

  Maybe the outer gods drain mana from those areas? Another silly thought. The outer gods swam and lived in pure mana. If there was any sort of flow, the mana came into the world from the fissure in reality—.

  Wait. If there’s a flow, mana would sometimes, no matter how unlikely, spill back into the void at least a bit. I dismissed the thought, imagining a pressurized hose filling a swimming pool. Water could really, in theory, flow back into the hose if the pressure in the pool was greater than inside the hose.

  Any world having a greater mana concentration than the void was impossible, since, to the best of my understanding, the void was mana and the source of mana for the worlds.

  Still, I wrote outer gods on a piece of paper and added it to the jumble, and Initial Reference Checker went mad. Whatever it was, it involved the outer gods.

  I tried to scribble potential lines of relation, but unfortunately, Initial Reference Checker remained silent. While the skill seemed broken, it operated on some level I didn’t understand, and wouldn’t make some connections. Or perhaps there was no connection.

  For instance, I drew four papers from the mess - Imperial Family, Outer Gods, Friend, Enemy. Initial Reference Checker couldn’t make any connection, despite there obviously having to be one of those two relationships. Probably the latter, since the imperials were hunting down the cultists of the outer gods.

  While I personally enjoyed good, multilayered plots in stories and other works of fiction, seeing one in real life felt like a whole lot of problems. Everrain was bad, but at least there I was free of politics and had a clear enemy to fight.

  Wondering who is going to assassinate me, and for what reason, was poor for building trust with the locals, as well as for my freedom of action. Just my latest assassination, I didn’t know whether it was the imperials or one of the nine families I asked the information about.

  While I could test it out loop after loop and hammer out who my allies were, I didn’t even need allies. Not in the strictest sense of the word, and besides, my current arrangements worked.

  So, having made some guesses about the imperial family’s dark secrets, I incinerated all evidence of my reasoning and went about my life as usual.

  Days passed, my number of noble clients dwindled as I helped them overcome their challenges, but some less noble awakened at fourth and fifth realm asked to see me. The pay wasn’t quite the same, but certainly above what a third realm mageknight would earn doing anything else. It was certainly enough to support my lavish lifestyle.

  One thing I did to break up my routine was to walk around on voidnights. Just as expected, every voidnight the silent screams of the damned washed over the streets of the city, confirming my theory.

  I could have, in theory, tried to locate the source by looping countless times, but I decided against it, and not just because of the obvious reason of what it would do to my mental health. No, what I feared more was finding something while Redo was red, and being found in turn.

  Losing my life and everything I had built up over a mildly interesting eerie mystery was unacceptable.

  And other than the said mystery gnawing at my thoughts much more than it should have, I spent the rest of my time as I should. My realm was coming along nicely. While I was still a long way from completing it, I thought I was close to making something no human had ever made before, hopefully something beyond my kind’s ability.

  That’s what I believed until one day, four moons after the ball, Gem stopped me as I was leaving the meditation chamber and handed me a sealed envelope.

  “Master Dandelion, a group of students from the Explorer’s Gate stopped by, saying they wanted to see you.”

  Newstar, I thought and grinned.

  While I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, I missed someone to make a mess of my life and bring me more good fortune.