17th of Season of Earth, 216th year of the 32nd cycle

  Newt left the mine in a staggeringly good mood. After successfully summoning Magmin. The attempt drained his mana mercilessly. Then again, he had summoned Magmin at around half his strength. Magmin as he was at the initial stages of the eighth realm, meaning, a peak seventh realm combatant.

  He had never heard of a technique to summon a creature, not even the legends had such fantastical ideas, and yet there Newt was, defying common sense and making history. What’s more, he knew how to further refine his mana, as his baptisms purified his body and mana alike.

  And if I can divert some of that energy into Magmin…

  It was quite possible the dragon could make a permanent appearance, assuming enough years passed and Newt poured enough energy into him.

  “Lord Salamandra,” the airship pilot greeted Newt when he had arrived. “We have stayed longer than expected. When do you think we can leave?”

  Newt could sense the unspoken disapproval behind the man’s neutral question, but he couldn’t really blame him. They were supposed to stay for three days.

  “We shall depart this time tomorrow, I had taken much longer than expected to comprehend something.” With that, Newt left the man alone and headed to check out the seventh realm tomes of his family’s fire arts. The words written were almost certainly useless for him, since he had an exalt to personally guide and instruct him on supreme techniques, but still…

  Those tomes contained his legacy and the arts practiced by his ancestors.

  Newt started with the seventh realm version of Confuse Senses and found himself pleasantly surprised. The seventh realm variant, besides the same effect of blinding and deafening anyone unguarded in a large area, also had the effect of scrambling mana sense. A very useful addition and something Newt didn’t find in any techniques he had the privilege to browse through.

  The others were more disappointing. Salamandra’s Skin, Breath, Touch, and Flight were on par or slightly inferior to techniques Newt had learned from Gatemaster Greenthorn.

  Salamandra’s Regeneration was the thickest tome. Based on its size, Newt had expected some marvel of fiery self-healing - body diagrams, flow charts, and explanations on how to circulate mana to heal different sorts of injuries.

  Newt found none of it. The self-healing technique was quite subpar, and Newt’s earthen healing power outstripped its power by an order of magnitude. Disappointed, Newt flipped a third of the way through the tome, which was where the technique’s manual ended, but the text continued.

  My dear descendant,

  I have failed in my intention, ultimately too weak, too poor, too poorly connected to act on what I had learned. Considering your realm, you must have noticed the bits and pieces of oddity surrounding our family and our estate.

  You must have wondered why I have established a stronghold in this forgotten part of the world, more often a part of the Summersweald than of our glorious empire. Heh, how ironic it feels to write these treacherous words.

  Following this introduction I will leave an account of my life, of the moments I believed glorious and horrible, of things I couldn’t tell anyone, not even my own children, since knowledge without power is a heavy burden, a burden that eventually broke me.

  No, I was not insane, nor have I grown senile in my old age. Yes, I have bought a mountain in the hinterlands, not because I was searching for a legendary dragon’s core, which was never there in the first place, but because it was far from the capital, because it had a unique geomantic potential for setting up defensive spell seals, and because it had a convenient story, I could leverage while also venturing into the Summersweald to gather resources. That my peers in the capital laughed at me, considering me a desperate fool grasping for straws, was merely a bonus, one that helped me drop beneath their notice.

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  In short, no, there’s no legendary dragon’s core in the bowels of the mountain, only manarium, which I have used as foundational nodes for the castle’s defense. Don’t waste time chasing legends, you have very real threats to your safety. To our family’s safety. To our whole world’s safety.

  Newt stopped reading and focused on bringing Magmin into his body.

  “You know how I told you my ancestor came to this region because he was searching for your core?”

  “Yes?”

  “Turns out he didn’t. It was an excuse to run away from the capital. He warns me not to search for your core.”

  Magmin snickered. “That sounds interesting.”

  “There’s more. You can read with me.”

  Newt and Magmin continued reading the tome. Newt’s ancestor painted himself like a hero from a story, a youth from a common family, who had by lucky coincidence survived an onslaught that had eradicated his entire village. He was fifteen when he dug his way out of his family’s ruined home.

  There he had found two saurians that had slaughtered each other, one gutted, with its core still fresh and visible. Blaze touched it and awakened.

  It was the start of the change I needed, but the real blessing was a pair of adventurers who had come to my rescue. They were too late to save the village, but they took me in. A young, natural first realm mageknight was a rarity, and we made a pact. They would help me grow, and once I grew strong enough, I would help them.

  The pact worked, both sides following through with the deal. Blaze had reached the third realm by twenty-five, decent, but not the speed of a genius. He laid out in detail what his adoptive parents had spent on him, and what he had bought for them, insisting that he had fulfilled his filial duty.

  Based on how he had written it, Newt could only assume his adoptive parents hadn’t agreed, but if Blaze wasn’t fabricating things, he had paid them back ten times over, which was more than fair for a business deal.

  Newt stopped his reading, wondering whether he had paid back his parents for what they had invested in him. In all honesty, just the airship trip from Explorer’s Island to Dragon’s Rest cost more than what a mortal man would spend in a lifetime, so Newt had probably settled that score, but he couldn’t guess what his parents would have to say to that.

  I’ll ask them later. Mom. Dad might want to bum some money from me.

  Newt continued his reading. His ancestor had been a guild man through and through, spending a bit of his time on spell seals, but he was mostly a dabbler, capable of setting up traps which made hunting easier, as well as basic comfort seals to make his life less miserable.

  He was on the road for centuries, pushing slowly until he had reached the sixth realm.

  That’s when offers and ultimatums started arriving. Hardrock, an acquaintance of mine, had reached the sixth realm thirty years before me. Much like myself, he had been receiving offers and counteroffers from various forces.

  He laughed and bragged about them, but he had a heart after my own image. He was a wanderer through and through, and he rejected them all. Then he vanished.

  Just like that. I spent two years looking for him, but the earth had swallowed him. He hadn’t taken a mission, he may have left the royal capital, but nobody’s seen him leave.

  I gathered clues, and it wasn’t that hard to figure out what had happened to him. Someone had eliminated him, made the man disappear. The sixth realm was acceptable to roam freely, but someone at the seventh, well, they just might start a new order, add a new contender in the game, and the powers that be couldn’t allow that. No rocking the boat, no threatening their interests.

  I’ve heard stories of alchemists and scribes going missing after making a particularly grand discovery. But I never guessed it could happen to us, the guys whose job was to hit things. I was naive, very naive.

  Newt read as the story of freedom and adventure suddenly became one of who would offer the best conditions, the loosest leash, the greatest reward or bonus. Newt could see that the choice pained his ancestor for some reason, and Newt couldn’t even imagine why.

  He had spent the majority of his life as a member of a large order. He could see them sending countless people to their deaths, but it was with the hope that at least some of them would survive and grow and advance the order.

  Eventually, Newstar’s ancestor had decided on a backer - the imperial family. He enlisted with the royal bodyguards. It seemed like a vanity position, watching those stronger than yourself, but Blaze soon discovered there were countless princes, princelings, and their children’s children, people who weren’t powerful at all.

  But, it did give him access to the third prince’s imperial palace.

  And it was there that I had learned the truth. I had just finished my shift, and I was heading towards my quarters, when I caught something. An imperial tutor had forgotten to activate the privacy seal while giving the princess her lesson.