At first, Luke had been confused. Angry, even.

  As a scholar of the faith, not merely any scholar but a high-ranking one whose devotion and promise marked him for greater things, he had expected his work to be celebrated. When he first presented his research to the highest members of the faith, their reaction to what was undeniably a world-changing discovery was not support or encouragement, but the complete opposite. They moved to suppress it. They forbade him from continuing altogether.

  At the time, it made no sense.

  It only began to make sense later, when he was at the lowest point of his life, disgraced and broken, approached by none other than Queen Arianna. She was infamous, yes, but she at least had the decency to explain why.

  The truth was a secret not merely hidden from the world but actively erased from the collective memory of the Land of Men. It had been buried by both the highest echelons of the faith and the ruling powers of the continent.

  Before the rise of Cleon, the so-called One and Only Emperor, there had been another Emperor. In truth, another empire. One whose rule made Cleon’s tyranny seem almost merciful by comparison.

  It had not been the dominion of a single monarch, but of three. A human sovereign. An elven king. A beastkin warlord. Together, they styled themselves the Strength Emperor, the Eternal Emperor, and the Immortality Emperor. United, they ruled with an iron will over an empire built upon the enslavement of humankind.

  Their oppression revolved around one singular pursuit: the extraction of Manacyte from the dungeons scattered across the continent.

  Day and night, countless humans were driven into those depths to dig, excavate, and haul. They fed an insatiable hunger for the crystalline resource. The reason was simple. Manacyte was the lifeblood of their obsession: an arcane discipline they named Technomagia.

  Technomagia was another branch of magic. It was the result of centuries of experimentation and refinement by the trio who would become the head of the Triumvirate. It allowed magical phenomena to manifest without the usual mediators. No innate skills. No cultivated abilities. No reliance on MP or SP. No dependence on artifacts infused or imprinted with magical elements.

  It operated outside the known framework.

  Its potential appeared limitless.

  Naturally, they became consumed by it. That obsession ushered in one of the darkest eras the Land of Men had ever endured.

  There was, however, a cost.

  While Technomagia bypassed conventional magical restrictions and did not draw upon MP or SP, it still required power. That power came from Manacyte. The mineral was already prized as a battery for wands, staves, and enchanted blades, but the scale required for Technomagia dwarfed all prior usage.

  Dungeons provided abundance. What they did not provide was labor.

  The depths were feared for the creatures they spawned, making them easy to claim, but harvesting their riches required hands. Many hands. With few options and fewer scruples, the trio chose the path of atrocity.

  At first, they conscripted captured bandits and criminals. When that supply proved insufficient, they widened their net to include entire villages suspected of harboring outlaws. Women. The elderly. Children old enough to lift a pickaxe.

  Then even that proved not enough for their goal.

  In the span a hundred years, systematic enslavement transformed into total domination. They absorbed their captives into their banners, dismantled local leadership, and unified the territories they subjugated. What began as resource exploitation became imperial consolidation.

  They were no longer merely slavers.

  They became emperors.

  Their rise to sovereignty, according to some surviving accounts, had been almost incidental. Dominion was never the original goal. It was a consequence. An outcome of their relentless pursuit of Technomagia.

  But pursue it they did.

  With it, they conquered. With it, they fortified their rule. With it, they expanded. At the height of their power, the triumvirate controlled the entire eastern half of the Land of Men and had already begun pressing into the western territories when their advance was finally halted.

  By whom?

  The Angelic Deities.

  Finding no other solution to the problem, the deities themselves descended. What followed was not a mere war but a divine intervention. They clashed with the three Emperors, beings who had grown so formidable that even among them stood figures equivalent to monarchs of overwhelming might.

  The battle reshaped landscapes and shattered cities.

  Yet even in defeat, the trio was not annihilated. They survived.

  They withdrew into obscurity. Their forced laborers were freed. Their Manacyte excavation sites were dismantled. Their collaborators were hunted down and purged. Then the faith undertook a final, drastic measure. It erased them. Every name. Every record. Every monument. The memory of their empire was carved out of history itself.

  The Land of Men, they believed, could only heal if the wound was forgotten.

  But the Emperors endured.

  When Luke heard this from Queen Arianna, understanding dawned upon him with cruel clarity. His research had brushed against the same forbidden current. His findings threatened to exhume a past the faith had buried at immeasurable cost.

  Had he made his discovery during Cleon’s reign, he would not have survived long enough to question it. Cleon, the One and Only Emperor, had lived through the triumvirate’s tyranny. His hatred of them surpassed even that of the faith. He would have hunted Luke down personally for daring to meddle with their legacy.

  Luke finally understood the danger. He truly did.

  And yet unease clung to him.

  The triumvirate still lived. Not merely survived, but prospered. In the Dwarven lands they subjugated, they now thrived. According to what fragments remained in the faith’s sealed archives, they were stronger than ever. And Technomagia, the art they had forged, had withstood the might of not one but three Angelic Monarchs.

  Was it really wise to ignore such power?

  It felt like folly.

  Luke knew these thoughts bordered on heresy. To voice them within the faith would invite more than reprimand. The Executare Vicaris, the order tasked with eliminating problematic elements, would not hesitate. He may already have been under watch.

  Fortunately, the one who now heard these forbidden considerations was not a priest.

  She was a Queen.

  A Queen who had recently overthrown the very man who would have opposed Luke’s research with blood and fire. A Queen who shared his apprehension toward the Seraphim’s passiveness.

  Queen Arianna.

  ***

  In the Citadel of Magecraft, upon the twelfth floor of the ivory tower, the chamber pulsed with verdant radiance.

  Beneath the domed ceiling, the air shimmered like rising heat. A soft emerald aura enveloped the floating scholars who orbited the great Scriptforging Table at the center of the room. Its carved glyphs glowed in steady rhythm, rising and dimming like the breath of some slumbering beast.

  Rheon drifted in a slow circle, body suspended several meters above the stone floor. His limbs hung loose, yet his posture remained controlled.

  “First observation on attempt two hundred twenty one,” he said, voice measured as his fingers scribbled notes into a thick ledger. “Gravitational pull is nullified only with respect to human mass within a twenty meter radius. My body floats without weight, yet inertia remains intact.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He flexed an arm, then rotated in place.

  “No change in internal pressure. No abnormality in respiration. Blood flow remains stable. We have not altered biological constants. We have rewritten gravity itself.”

  The others hovered nearby, listening intently.

  Rheon attempted a walking motion midair. His leg extended, searching for ground that did not exist. He drifted instead.

  “Locomotion is severely hindered,” he continued. “There is no friction. No anchor. Motion becomes drift. Push yields glide. Twist yields rotation. This tragically lacks counterforce.”

  He steadied himself and faced the training dummy stationed at the far end of the chamber. It wore chain padding and weighted plating to approximate an armored opponent.

  “I will attempt a strike.”

  He aligned himself carefully and threw a punch.

  The dummy snapped backward from the impact.

  Rheon spun the opposite direction, limbs flailing in slow helpless arcs.

  After a moment of awkward rotation, he regained control.

  “There it is,” he muttered. “Force symmetry. Without traction, impact becomes self defeating. Even if a blow lands, sustained combat becomes impossible. If combat is our objective, we require—”

  “An anchor,” Attendant Eric interjected quietly.

  “Yes. An artificial one.”

  Eric drifted closer, thoughtful. “If we introduce a parameter that affixes spatial position midair, even momentarily, we could stabilize motion. A temporary foothold.”

  Rheon’s eyes brightened. “A dynamic anchor. Precisely. That resolves everything.”

  From several meters away, near one of the silent veiled Ascetics who observed without comment, a calm voice cut through the discussion.

  Magister Luke.

  He hovered with hands folded behind his back.

  “Something to write.”

  A golden slate was placed in his palm within seconds.

  Without ceremony, he began to inscribe. Lines of light traced beneath his fingertip, forming nodes, vectors, intersecting sigils. The construction unfolded with surgical precision. Less than a minute later, he turned the slate toward them.

  A complex lattice shimmered upon its surface, a web of geometric intention.

  The scholars leaned closer.

  Attendant Lynn inhaled softly. “This would function.”

  Rheon studied it with growing excitement. “It binds a floating subject with null gravity coefficient to a fixed magical coordinate. That’s it. That’s what we need.”

  Eric narrowed his eyes.

  “There is no available sequence slot for this configuration on the Table though.”

  Luke inclined his head once. “Then we add another layer.”

  A collective exhale swept through the chamber.

  “With an additional layer,” Rheon said, “this becomes a complete flight apparatus. A replacement for traditional levitation disciplines.”

  Energy sparked in the room. Ideas converged. Anticipation thickened the air.

  Then Luke raised a brow and gestured toward the immense Scriptforging Table floating behind them.

  “Operational,” he said evenly, “is a generous assessment. Look at the scale of this thing.”

  The structure spanned nearly six meters across, a monumental disc of carved stone and luminous script.

  Silence followed.

  “You cannot carry that into battle,” Luke added.

  Eric rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Then the solution is obvious.”

  All eyes shifted toward him.

  “We must miniaturize it.”

  “If so,” Lynn added, “we’d have to change the design—make it portable.”

  She shaped a cube with her fingers. “What if we shrank it and housed it in a container like this?”

  “A cube’s too rigid,” Eric countered. “How about a sphere instead?”

  “A sphere,” Lynn repeated, narrowing her eyes thoughtfully. “Something that fits well in the palm.”

  Magister Luke tilted his head in silent agreement.

  “That… makes sense. Good idea, Eric.”

  Emboldened, Eric spoke again. “Also, if we want this device to replace actual flight skills, we need it to be practical. That means an interface. A way to activate and deactivate it. Buttons.”

  “Buttons?” Rheon echoed.

  “Yes,” Eric said, eyes bright. “One to turn the field on and off—and another to toggle the anchor. Simple. Efficient.”

  All of them grew silent, and in that silence, they saw it:

  A sphere, fitting in the palm, smooth and metallic. Two small inset buttons. One for lift, one for gravitational lock.

  They nodded.

  “That’s actually a genius idea.”

  “A floating anchor device. Flight on command. Locked movement. Precision hover.”

  Magister Luke, who had been nodding quietly in agreement with his attendant’s suggestion, finally spoke again, his voice as smooth and cool as an obsidian edge.

  “Far be it from me to curb your enthusiasm,” he said, “but we have to consider a far more urgent problem than designing a container.”

  The attendants turned, alert. “An urgent problem?” they echoed.

  Luke’s eyes narrowed. “Yes,” he said. “How are you going to shrink a device that has a component immune to shrinking?”

  “Oh.”

  They all immediately understood which component he was referring to. He could only be talking about the manacyte used to power the Scriptforging Table.

  Found typically in the walls of dungeons and said to be the source of the energy used by dungeon spawns, manacyte is a material that, after undergoing a process that transmutes it from a raw state to a refined one, is used to create or improve artifacts. The reason is simple: it can store MP and, more often than not, SP. But that is not all. It has many other properties, among them the fact that manacyte, whether raw or refined, tends to be self-regenerative in terms of energy.

  Depending on the dungeon from which it has been extracted and where within that dungeon it was found, the energy contained within the material can regenerate after depletion. When built into an artifact, it does so by drawing resources from the wielder. When left unbound, it can absorb energy from other sources.

  There is another unique aspect of manacyte. It is highly resistant to effects that qualify as magical, whether spells or elemental attacks. The material is immune to all of that, and if it is not outright immune, it has a way of undoing the effect. This trait can be assumed to be related to its energy-absorbing particularities. As such, there would be no shrinking that encased giant refined manacyte crystal, even if they found someone with the right skill to shrink down the Scriptforging Table.

  And without manacyte to power this art they called Scriptforging, which in truth was merely their attempt to revisit and mostly pierce the secrets of the art known as Technomagia, there was no Scriptforging.

  “Crap, I completely forgot about that.”

  “Me too. I was very optimistic about seeing this manifested into an actual S.F. artifact.”

  “Got any suggestions, Eric?” Rheon asked.

  “Me? Why?”

  “You came out with a lot of good suggestions today.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. I noticed that too.”

  “Finally coming back into your prime after that little vacation.”

  “It wasn’t a vacation. I was on a mission.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Say that to all of us who never left the Citadel in years.”

  Luke had no problem with his attendants teasing each other. In fact, he liked that side of them. But he felt that this was getting a little one-sided for poor Eric. “Now, now. That’s enough teasing my apprentice. Now Eric, do you have a suggestion as to how we can address this?”

  He mused for a moment before ultimately shaking his head.

  “I see…”

  “We could use a better grade of manacyte,” a voice suggested. “That would mean a smaller core. That would be a beginning, right?”

  Manacyte quality can vary from dungeon to dungeon. The older the dungeon, which tends to be synonymous with greater danger, the higher the quality of the manacyte in its raw form.

  “We’re already using a high-grade manacyte. And don’t say we should use a better refiner to get higher-quality manacyte. We already have the best alteration expert on the continent.”

  “I fear I have to agree with Rheon about that,” Luke confirmed. “We’re harvesting our manacyte from Mirrorshade Bastion. It’s the sixth oldest and second most dangerous dungeon on the continent. You cannot get a better-quality manacyte than that.”

  “Damn.”

  “How perfect it would have been if we could harvest manacyte from the Voidborne Catacomb.”

  “That’s the most dangerous and oldest dungeon of the continent and quite possibly the world. Stepping into its domain is synonymous to instant death. Even for SSS-ranking adventurers.”

  “That is true,” Luke confirmed. “So no extraction of manacyte is possible,” he made clear.

  The truth was that it was actually possible. The main reason he said it was not was because those who entered the Voidborne Catacomb simply never got out, making it a dungeon one should not even consider crawling into. Yet there was someone, other than Queen Arianna, who had taken that chance and had become known for surviving the one-hundred-percent-fatality dungeon and had challenged it more than once. That person could harvest manacyte from that place, manacyte that Luke was certain would be the highest grade he would ever have the chance to lay his eyes upon.

  Thinking about that person reminded Luke of the news that he was back on the continent. He briefly considered commissioning him to get it manacyte from that place, do for him what Samson and his workforce already do for him, but he quickly realized why that would be unsustainable: the price, the distance, and, more importantly, the timescale involved in such a harvest.

  “Shame,” sighed Eric. The others did as well.

  “It’s alright,” Luke reassured them. “I’ll try recruiting more alteration experts.”

  Just as one of his attendants had said, they already had the most talented alteration expert on the continent. But Luke knew there were better out there. To be exact, there were better out there, in the hands of his fellow Magisters.

  “I’ll talk to Elder Nala.”

  As he said those words, he looked at the veiled girl in the corner and exchanged a nod with her. The Devotee would report what had happened here to Elder Nala, in a sense arranging the field for his request, which would then be made merely for the sake of appearances to those they were doing this for. He did not know why, but he would nonetheless respect this hierarchical formality.

  “Now then, people, I think we’ve all done enough for today,” he announced. “Go get some rest. A long day awaits us tomorrow. After all, we’re going to add a second layer to the table.”

  “Yes, Magister,” they echoed, half elated to be done for the day and already dreading tomorrow.

  In less than a minute, after bidding him farewell, they left, leaving inside the room only two of them: himself and Eric, his attendant, and the Devotee, whose presence he once again almost forgot.

  “Not leaving yet?” Luke asked.

  “Erm, just rearranging my notes before taking my leave.”

  “Alright.”

  He nodded and walked up to the Scriptforging Table, deactivating its gravity-altering effect. Thinking about what he had planned to do the next day, he looked at the note he had made and began searching for the nodes he had mentioned. It was during that process that someone burst into the room at a frantic pace.

  “Magister!” several voices called, as they rushed inside.

  It was his attendants, the same ones who had just taken their leave.

  “Something happened?”

  “What?”

  They stumbled over their words trying to explain, ultimately managing only, “You must come and see. You’ll understand when you see it.”

  Luke exchanged a worried look with the Devotee. He could read none of her expressions because of the thick black veil that concealed her face. There was no visible reaction from her.

  After glancing at Eric, he followed the others to what they had to show him. Soon enough, as they reached a section of the tower with an opening overlooking the horizon, he saw it.

  There, in the distance, a giant pillar of blue light shot high into the clouds.

  “What is th—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, two more pillars erupted, forming a triangular formation. For a half a dozen seconds they stood like that, then a veil manifested between them, connecting each beam. It formed what could only be one of two things: a barrier or a prison.

  Going by gut feeling, a process he was not particularly fond of relying on, it was going to be the latter.