Magus Reborn

It took Elder Caelith a while to confirm that the seeds Kai had brought back were truly Elder Tree seeds.

Kai himself had been certain the moment he saw them, but he didn’t mind waiting while the elf elder examined them properly. If anyone among them was best suited to make that judgment, it was Caelith. Kai would much rather be certain now than realize later that they had risked everything in the earth plane only to return with the wrong thing in hand.

Fortunately, the wait did not end badly.

Before long, Elder Caelith looked up and confirmed that the three seeds were indeed Elder Tree seeds.

The moment Kai heard that, he let out a slow breath he had not realized he was still holding. His first instinct was to leave for Sylvastra immediately and place the seeds in Elder V’aleirith’s hands. If the Elder Tree could be healed, then every moment mattered, and Kai had no doubt V’aleirith would already be waiting for him.

But after that first impulse passed, he forced himself to slow down.

There were other things that needed to be settled first, and he doubted a single day or two would change the fate of the Elder Tree one way or the other.

For one thing, Kai had no idea where they had actually arrived.

The ritual had only been meant to return them to their own world. It had never been designed to land them in any exact place, or else they would have awakened in Veralt itself. Instead, all he could see around them were long stretches of grassland with no clear sign of where in the world they had been dropped.

There was also the matter of time.

Kai had no idea how much of it had passed while they were in the Earth Plane. Time did not flow the same between realms, and with no real day or night cycle there, he could not even judge how long they had spent inside that place. It had felt like several days at the very least. If that was true, then weeks might have gone by here.

Kai needed to know whether things in his absence had remained stable, whether Veralt still stood without trouble, and whether something had gone wrong while he was away. Because of that, all of them agreed that they would head to Veralt first. Once they reached the city and had a better sense of the situation, Kai could leave for Sylvastra together with Elder Caelith.

They also needed to get Claire somewhere safe, so no one argued with that decision.

The only issue was that Kai had spent most of his mana escaping the spirit king. Because of that, it was Elder Caelith and Elias who went out to get a sense of where they had ended up while Kai stayed behind with the others and focused on recovering what mana he could.

A part of him very much hoped they had not landed in some other kingdom.

If that had happened, getting back to Veralt would become far more troublesome than he wanted to think about. It would be much simpler if they were still somewhere within Lancephil and he only needed enough strength to fly back when the time came. The problem was that Lancephil was large, and even after everything Kai had seen during the civil war, there were still plenty of places he had never stepped foot in. The grasslands around them meant nothing to him. They were unfamiliar, but that alone did not prove they were elsewhere.

So he waited.

After roughly half an hour, Elias and Elder Caelith returned.

They had spotted a small town, they said, no more than two hours away from where they were. That was enough. The moment they heard it, the whole group started moving. Elias still had enough mana left to form an earth platform, and all of them climbed onto it while he pushed it forward across the open grassland and then through the stretches of trees beyond it.

In the end, it didn’t even take them two hours.

They reached the town in about half that, thanks to the speed of Elias’s platform and the good fortune of not running into any beasts along the way. Even so, their arrival caused a fair bit of trouble. The guards at the town walls spotted a huge slab of earth gliding toward them and, for a moment, clearly thought some strange beast was bearing down on the place.

It took a bit of shouting and a little patience to calm them.

Still, once the guards understood that the group meant no harm and saw that all of them were Mages rather than bandits or monsters, they became far easier to deal with. And what they told Kai after that made something in his chest finally loosen.

They were still in Lancephil.

They were only in a smaller region under the control of Baron Radomir, a name Kai had heard before.

The guards even had an old map of the area, and although it was worn and clearly not new, it was enough. Kai spread it out, studied it for a while, and soon found a workable route back to Veralt. Better still, by his estimate, it would take less than a day to get there even if he had to carry most of his party himself.

Veridia did not need the help.

The others did.

Even Elias, who could still move around on his earth platform, was not fast enough for what Kai wanted. So after letting everyone rest for a few hours in the small town, Kai recovered enough mana to act and built another spell for the journey back.

It was called [Gale Vessel].

The spell was made purely for transport. Kai shaped wind mana into the outline of a ship, hardened the surface until it could hold their weight, and then drove the whole thing up into the air. The scale of it drew open surprise from everyone who saw it.

Kai ignored it.

He also ignored the questions that were already beginning to gather behind Elias’s and Veridia’s eyes. Both of them clearly wanted answers—about the sixth circle, about the spells he had used, about too many things to count—but Kai had no desire to explain himself right then.

He was tired, and not just physically.

He wanted his reserves full. He wanted his circles stable again. More than anything, he wanted rest. Because for all the things he had accomplished, for all the power he now carried, he was still not a god. He was a mortal, and mortals broke if they were pushed too far for too long.

That was something many Mages never thought about enough.

They understood drained reserves and broken bodies. But too few of them gave proper weight to what the mind carried after certain battles, certain choices, certain moments where death had stood close enough to breathe on your face.

Kai was mentally stronger than most.

That still did not mean he could shrug off fighting a spirit king and almost dying several times in the same day.

That was too much for anyone.

Kai was not foolish enough to believe he had survived that encounter through talent and power alone.

Part of it had certainly been that Spirit King Vaelthoros wanted answers from him. It had wanted to know how the fire giant was summoned, and it had wanted back whatever Kai had stolen from its castle. Because of that, the spirit king had not truly fought as if its only goal was to kill him from the very first second.

Kai knew that, and knowing it sat badly in him.

He would need time to really accept that truth, and more than that, time to prepare himself in case he ever found himself in a similar situation again. He had no intention of relying on an enemy’s curiosity a second time.

There was also the matter of what his own body had just gone through.

In the span of only a few days, he had forced two advancements. His body had not fully settled from one before he had already driven it toward the next, and now everything in him needed rest—his mana organs, his flesh, even his soul. To wound the spirit king the way he had, Kai had burned part of his own life force, and that meant giving up a few years of his life.

In the grander picture, that was not devastating.

Even at the sixth circle, Kai was likely to live for centuries if he survived long enough to enjoy them, and he had every intention of taking advantage of the better mana quality in the world around him. Still, he could feel the cost.

Even while the wind ship carried them back through the sky, he could not help noticing the difference between the mana here and the mana of the Earth Plane. The gap between them was enormous. Returning from that realm to this one felt like stepping from an ocean back into a pool.

Not that Kai was complaining.

Living in the Earth Plane for any longer than necessary was not something he wanted.

So during most of the journey back to Veralt, he sat off to one side of the ship, thought through everything that had happened, and slowly worked on stabilizing his organs and soul. He took the process carefully, feeling through each part of himself and trying to make sure nothing had been left unstable enough to become a problem later.

From time to time, he also checked on Claire.

Her condition was improving, but only gradually. She still needed far more rest before she would wake properly. As far as Kai could tell, her body had simply been pushed too far by everything that had happened and finally given out once it no longer needed to keep going.

The high concentration of mana in the Earth Plane had affected Claire, even with the Storm Sovereign protecting her from the worst of it, but Kai could already tell she would recover. She only needed time, and for now that was enough for him.

The journey back passed in much the same way.

Every few hours, Kai brought the wind ship down near a forest so he could hunt a beast or two and recover some mana. Keeping the spell active over a long distance was a steady drain, and there was no point pretending otherwise.

The stops helped in more than one way. None of them had eaten properly in days. Even in the small town, all they had found was soup and pie, and while that had done enough to keep them upright, it was not the sort of food that put strength back into the body. Fresh meat helped.

Elder Caelith, however, refused nearly everything.

He would not touch the meat, nor even simple herbs when they offered them to him. All he wanted was sleep. Kai understood why. The old elf had probably not rested properly for days, not with the Elder Tree’s imminent death, the weight of the journey before them, and the possibility that all of it might end in failure. Now, for the first time in a long while, he had a reason to let himself rest.

Because of those stops, it took them more than a day before Veralt finally appeared in the distance.

Even so, Kai preferred it that way. Approaching a large, populated city in the dead of night on a ship made of wind was far better than arriving in broad daylight and alarming every guard on the walls. So when the silhouette of Veralt finally came into view, dark against the horizon, something in him loosened.

It felt like seeing home after years away.

At some point, without him noticing exactly when, Veralt had become that for him.

Home.

And with that thought came a wave of people he wanted to see—Francis, Amara, Balen, and the others. In the small town, Kai had also learned the date, and from that he had finally been able to understand just how much time had passed. They had spent only six days in the Earth Plane.

It had become two months here.

It was the longest he had been away from Veralt apart from the civil war itself, and as the city drew closer, Kai could not help wondering how much might have changed in his absence.

He wanted to fly the ship straight over the walls of Veralt.

But he didn’t.

Doing that would only have caused more panic than it was worth, especially after being gone for so long. So instead, Kai brought the wind ship down some distance away from the city, stepped off it, and finally dismissed the spell he had been maintaining for far too long. The moment it vanished, he felt a quiet sense of relief at no longer having to keep that constant drain running in the back of his mind.

After that, he created hands of wind again, using them to carry the others over the walls and into the city, all except Veridia, who needed no help at all and simply flew under her own power.

As they crossed into Veralt, Kai kept his eyes moving.

He watched the streets, the buildings, the movement of people, the guards, the lights. Nothing looked drastically different. The construction projects he remembered were still going on. The commoners moving through the streets did not look panicked or distressed. Even outside the gates, from what he had seen while approaching, the usual number of carriages and travelers had still been moving in and out.

That was a good sign.

It likely meant things beyond Veralt were also holding steady.

Kai knew he was being cautious, maybe even overly so, but caution had its reason. Two months was not a small amount of time, and sometimes things did not need long to go wrong. A single day could be enough to turn an entire kingdom unstable if the wrong spark landed in the wrong place.

Still carrying those thoughts, he guided the group all the way to the castle and landed on the same rooftop where they had first performed the ritual to reach the Earth Plane. Even now, the stone there still bore the scorched marks from it.

Elias looked down at the blackened stone and let out a breath. “I don’t think I’ll be reading books on rituals again for a very long time.”

Veridia gave a scoffing sound from nearby. “With your reputation, I doubt you were reading them in the first place.”

Kai didn’t bother joining their banter.

He dismissed the wind hands so the others could get down, and then immediately started toward the stairs with the rest of them following behind.

A few guards and servants moving around the estate noticed them almost immediately and bowed, but Kai did not stop for any of it. He only asked where Francis was, and while doing so he handed Claire’s unconscious body over to one of the guards, telling him to get her to her room at once and summon a healer to keep watch over her condition.

After that, the rest of them headed straight for Francis’s office.

When Kai pushed open the door, he found Francis there just as expected, but the sight inside was not the usual one. The old man was not seated at his desk with papers spread before him and a quill in hand. Instead, he stood beside a large table with all of his apprentices gathered around it. Even Ansel was there.

Kai only needed one more step into the room to see what had taken their attention.

A map lay open on the table.

Several locations had already been marked on it.

The moment Kai entered, everyone in the room turned toward him. Francis was the first to react. Relief crossed the old man’s face so quickly that it made him look years younger for a second.

“Lord Arzan. You’re finally back.” He let out a breath and added, “You have no idea how worried I’ve been.”

Then his eyes moved over the group properly, taking in their condition, the exhaustion on every face, the drained look in their eyes. Then, his expression tightened at once.

“Where is Claire?”

Before Francis could let his mind run too far, Killian spoke up. “She’s alive. Don’t worry.” freeweɓnovel.cѳm

Kai gave a small nod to support that, but his own attention had already gone to the map.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. “What’s the map for?”

At once, the atmosphere in the room changed.

The relief that had surfaced at his return seemed to sink straight back down again. Francis looked from Kai to the map and back as though he did not quite know how to start.

In the end, it was Ansel who stepped forward. His face was already hardened, and when he spoke, it was in a grave tone.

“There’s been a problem, Lord Arzan,” he said. Then, after a brief pause added, “A major one.”

Kai’s eyes sharpened. “What happened?” he said. “Tell me clearly.”

Ansel drew in a breath.

“Parts of Lancephil are under dead mana,” he said. “The plague that destroyed Vanderfall has reached our kingdom.”

***

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