As strange it may sound, everyone decides their realm’s elements on their own when they are shaping their realm. Namely, once your first layer is completed, you will start sculpting it. Once you reach the point of fully sculpting the available area, your elements are set.

  — Excerpt from Notes For Newstar

  Day 620, 3:45 PM

  Newstar arranged everything I would need during my stay at Explorer’s Gate in less than an hour. The room was humble, spartan even, a bed, a table, and two chairs, its only furniture. More importantly, it was private and clean.

  The first thing I did was make a privacy bubble, which promptly burst.

  I had no idea where the eavesdropper was, but I turned towards the door and offered a polite half-bow.

  “Greetings, Senior,” I said. “Let me once more assure you I have no hostile intentions towards your order or Newstar. We have made a pact—”

  Aaand the barrier sprang back up. Higher mana density locations have their own set of problems.

  I stepped outside the seal, bursting the bubble. “We have made a pact, and I am to help him. Trust me, I have his best interests at heart, and all I want is to maximize his benefit from our arrangement. Could you please let me do it?”

  I waited, but there was no answer. After a minute, I bowed towards the door once more for good measure, then went back to work. Work itself a rather questionable word for what I planned to do.

  I sat and entered my realm. Inside, I willed a patch of ground into fine white sand and started writing, preparing for the endeavor. The best plan was obviously to create the entire realm blueprint in the first two weeks, during a hopefully finite number of loops. Then write it all down in my realm, naturally simplified, before I could focus on how to commit it to paper.

  I would need a code or cipher, something Newstar could intuit, since I couldn’t spend the time to teach him the cipher, but it had to be something only he could understand.

  I’ll think about it whenever I need a change of pace.

  My basic schedule was easy enough to plot out - it took less than ten minutes, mostly thinking about pitfalls and how to avoid them. Putting the plan into practice, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter.

  While I didn’t need to make the seals the same size to test them, I did need to make the basic variants of each constellation to see the energy flow and effects. The process was much like with my own realm, but I first needed to construct an area of earth and fire mana exclusively, then work inside that zone, since that was the environment of Newstar’s realm.

  I finished that seal in three hours and decided it wasn’t worth drawing a new one in each loop, loops would start with it already in place.

  The next problem was that each seal constellation produced its own mana phenomenon, a disturbance to the ambient, if you will. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t matter. I would work on the puzzle for a year or five, and have it ready. But since I needed to redo, and would rarely have more than two seals formations done at the same time, I needed another approach.

  The first solution I came up with was that after completing each independent portion and checking its signature, I needed to incorporate it into the base environment. So,I created another environmental seal right next to its identical twin I had already made. That way, I could compare their auras easily and easily make tweaks.

  “That should be the basics,” I said aloud, then started with the first section, a mass of fire seals intertwined with earth. The work was complex, definitely beyond the master scribe grade issued by the guild. Each individual piece not so much, but fitting them in to achieve the hypothetical result I was after was a form of art.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  A loop passed, and I barely managed to complete it.

  “I really need to stop overestimating myself.” I chuckled as I stared at the defensive constellation, whose parts combined into a large seal with the attribute of heat dispersal. Newstar had defense against heat, but I hypothesized his shield could endure at least twenty percent more load, along with the reduced mana consumption, depending on how much heat he is facing.

  I didn’t congratulate myself, though. The work I had done was about one-two-hundred-and-fiftieth of my total toil. Possibly less if the incorporation of the underground portion caused more trouble.

  Instead of celebrating, I carefully memorized the layout of the component seals, drawing them again and again for a day before a new loop was scheduled to start.

  I awoke with a gasp from my meditation, then went back to my realm, the only evidence of my work being the two environmental seals, the development and control. I took the better part of two days just to draw the heat dispersal constellation, then another three to mimic its signature in the control seal.

  Days passed, followed by the flickering loops. Sometimes I made progress. Sometimes I failed. In failure loops, I spent my time consolidating my gains, and considering what I needed to change and why I was failing.

  That line is too thin. I fixed it. Too thick! I leveled the entire section of the seal and started over. With the passage of years, I felt the weight of my failures more and more. I needed some form of entertainment, but I was a stranger, an intruder, and a possible spy in the eyes of my hosts.

  While I was spending all my time inside my realm, I was fairly certain the order’s senior staff was bursting my bubble on a regular basis.

  Are the outer gods pissed because of what I’m doing, or are they also making plans and testing things out? The latter definitely, the former, probably.

  My thoughts were going too much astray, I needed something to do. I got up from meditation and left my room, finding myself inside the worker’s building for the first time in years, yet for the people around me, merely ten days had passed.

  “I would like to go for a swim,” I said aloud, talking to myself like a madman.

  Nobody responded, nobody stopped me either. I just went to the black-sanded beach. Despite it being spring, the sands were scalding hot. Normal humans wouldn’t dare walk them barefoot, but I found the warmth pleasant as my toes dug into the sand.

  The place was really nice. I looked left and right. If I were an insane scientist trying to revive the dinosaurs, I’d do it in a place like the Explorer’s Island. Not that saurians needed reviving, only a slight rebranding, and they were fit for a movie screen.

  God, it’s been ages since I’ve seen a flick.

  I breathed in the sea air, took my shirt off, and let myself fall on my back, my arms spread wide. The searing sand felt like prickles against my skin, and I used no defense to ward off the heat. It was pleasantly unpleasant, feeling alive, baked by the real sun, feeling the real wind.

  While I had tried hard, my realm was far from a real world, not just because everything obeyed my whims, but it was clearly artificial. Somehow, the tactile feeling of touching sand was different.

  Why is that? I asked myself an irrelevant philosophical question and started thinking about it. Well, for starters, I’m touching it with my thoughts, or perhaps my soul. Since the contact is metaphysical, it can’t be physical.

  And why is that? I started down the famous loop of questions curious children everywhere asked of just about anyone they wished insane. Why? I had once mocked Edna for not asking herself that question more, and yet, there I was, accepting things as they were served, not thinking for myself. A head not used might as well be empty, but what about a head constantly entertaining wrong questions?

  Was it really a coincidence the world I appeared in was suffering a malicious outer god influence? Did I actually have a mission? Why was the thickness of lines important for seals? Someone in some book mentioned seals were just star charts, a mimicking of the greater universe in limited space.

  Then it hit me. Am I trying to make a copy of the universe inside my soul? Is Newstar?

  Was that the secret behind his success? If it was, and if we were, then we were more heretical than the four cults combined and more arrogant than the imperials and all their nobles put together.

  Wait, does that mean that for us to properly sculpt our realms we need to have all unique seals with no repetitions?

  I groaned, hugged myself, and rolled on the prickly sand. I don’t want to. There aren’t that many different seals, there aren’t that many different stars, there aren’t that many different shapes.

  Then I stopped wallowing. I was right - there weren’t that many different patterns nor stars. That was why the thickness of the lines mattered. For really great scribes, the thickness depended on the location and environment.

  I laughed like a madman. Human brains were amazing; they led you on a wild-goose chase until you answered your own questions.

  All right, smartass, how do I find Manny?

  Unfortunately, my mind wandered back to the outer gods.