With Conflict’s trial complete, I returned to my body, my hand still upon the door. I barely caught the distinguished tones of Calbern starting to speak when the aftereffects of my trial kicked in.

The burbling mess I was reduced to wasn’t much of a surprise.

That I got to watch Calbern in super slow motion as he took a single step towards me was. With the agony burning up and down my spine you’d think I wouldn’t have the presence of mind to notice when he started to frown. Yet despite the pain, everything around me was crystal clear. Conflict’s looming presence behind us. The doors above. For what felt like hours, waves of agony radiated outward from my spine, eventually reaching the tips of every part of my body. Yet by the time it was done, Calbern had barely shifted his weight forward, time resuming its normal pace.

“-you okay, master Percival?” Calbern asked, kneeling down next to me.

“Yeah. Little more intense than last time,” I grumbled while letting him help me to my feet.

“Ah, that was the opposite of my experience. Though it seems this time I was the faster of us, as I completed my encounter over a minute ago,” Calbern said, his gaze flicking towards Conflict for a second before returning to me. “It has indicated that I now have two minor favors to spend.”

“That’s… good,” I said, nodding while getting used to everything moving at normal speed again.

“Well forged, little one. Well forged indeed,” Conflict rumbled out, making me wince on reflex. Yet… either its voice was better modulated than I was used to or I wasn’t as affected. “You have progressed much further down your path than I foresaw.”

“More good news,” I said looking up. “Right?”

“Yes. You have pushed yourself past a mere ingot, forging your mind to be… more. And your path will require me to spend time considering the next true trial. If you wish to refine your efforts, you may repeat the existing trial once a week,” Conflict stated, turning its head to the side as it tapped its heavy finger against its chin.

The thunderous noise confirmed that Conflict had simply been talking more softly, and I quickly threw up the noise shields for both of us before using a Restore Form to restore my hearing.

“Can we trade in our favors?” I called out, drawing the being’s attention back to us. “I wanted to get your help with designing a Granitas engine.”

It nodded, so I pulled out the plans. The orange flame inside Conflict’s eyes grew brighter as I handed it the designs Inertia and I’d roughed out. Ones I’d spent some of my time refining during the trial, though most of it had just been ideas I’d come up with while working on my final projects.

“Hmm,” Conflict said, lifting up the page and… incinerating it. The crackling flame that shot out of the beings eyes left a floating afterimage, creating a copy of the design in the air. “For one of your favors, I can do this.”

“Allow me to use one of my favors, master Percival,” Calbern yelled as he stepped forward, his voice barely audible over the shields.

With Conflict no longer tapping its chin, I allowed the shields to drop just in time for it to respond. “Your favors are not suitable, reforged one. Yours are favors of violence, not creation.”

Calbern’s mouth twitched downward in the barest hint of a frown.

“So, it’s gotta be one of mine? Should I start bringing more people with us?” I asked, gesturing to the other doors. “You seemed pretty out of it after we finished last time.”

“The Trials have been stoked once more,” Conflict said, its voice practically a purr. “They can handle four attempts per day, though you cannot.” It paused for a second, before shifting forward, the chains behind it suddenly spinning to life as it leaned down to look me directly in the eyes. It got close enough, I could smell ash and brimstone wafting out of its nose, despite it not needing to breathe. “As for your favor… your request… is not enough. You must ask for more.”

“Well, I won’t complain about that,” I muttered, glancing at where the flames of the design still hung in the air. “Don’t suppose we could add in the actual building of an airship using the design?”

“That would shift the scales too far in the other direction,” Conflict replied, leaning away. “However, I could build the engine for you, providing you supplied the materials.”

That… would save us a lot of time. Me and Inertia specifically, since we’d be the ones pouring all our efforts into working with a material that was, quite frankly, beyond us with our current tools.

“Does repeating the trials still get us favors?” I asked, glancing towards the door. Already, the image on it was shifting to resemble the peaks I’d crossed. Calbern’s door instead showed him standing with his sword ready as he charged directly towards a collection of giant monsters. Not one of them a metal devil.

“Minor favors, yes,” Conflict confirmed.

“Is there no other purpose I could put my favors to?” Calbern asked, attempting to keep the scowl off his face, but still showing the faintest twinge.

While Conflict provided Calbern a list of what it considered an appropriate exchange, I reflected on its offer. Was probably going to take it. Especially if we could come back here weekly. I was still somewhat hesitant about opening the place up to others. A single favor could do a lot. And that could easily be used against us. That said… I’d forgotten but Conflict was supposedly similar to Keeper, in that it didn’t accept everyone.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

How many people would it even accept?

There were people I trusted, such as Xoth and Tamrie, yet neither of them were combatants. If Conflict made them fight the rollerbugs… well, Xoth could probably handle them easily enough, but Tamrie…

Not until I’d figured out some way to make her stronger.

While I’d been thinking, Conflict and Calbern had clarified what he could trade his favors for. Which included battle upgrades to Fang.

Not too surprised when Calbern chose to use both his favors on upgrading the bike. Wouldn’t be surprised if Inertia wanted to take it apart once he took the improved version back, either.

Could Forgeborn take the trials? Despite her interest in the recovered rollerbugs, she’d never made her way out, not that I knew of.

Since Fang was kind of our ride back, I got Calbern to delay the upgrades long enough to drop me off back at Verdant Point’s Waygate. With a wave, he turned around immediately. Conflict had required a full day to complete the Granitas engine, and since he wasn’t willing to hand it off to Calbern, I’d be going back the next day.

With that done, I was finally able to shift my attention to my research: how to give a mortal a mana-body.

First I made my way to Keeper, where I pried as many of the relevant secrets as I could from the being, all in exchange for two shards worth of knowledge.

Then I went down to the enchanting workshop where I got Neta to watch over me. Slipping into Memory Palace, I started going through everything I knew, drawing on the resources from both Keeper and Balthum to figure out how to imbue people with mana-bodies.

The answer I was getting was… it was complicated. Very, very complicated.

Like… build dozens of special city-sized research facilities that all existed solely to carry out research on every aspect of mana interacting with sapient beings. And then, after that, creating an even more specialized facility that completed the process. Those levels of complicated.

I brought up the map of my domain, looking at all the spots on my map that had unique names, matching them to the listed research facilities.

The Infinite Furnace, the Final Rest, the Orphan’s Bloom. All researching different aspects of mana-bodies.

After an hour spent inside Memory Palace, I went to find Bevel to bounce ideas off of. Which was when I discovered I hadn’t been inside as long as I’d thought.

“You’re still working on those? Thought you said you’d be done in half an hour?” I teased, kneeling down to inspect the enchanting designs I’d left her with when I’d gotten back from my visit to the Trials. Hadn’t given her a deadline, but she’d insisted it was so easy she’d be done both sets before I came back to check on her.

“I am done!” Bevel said, jotting down the last line and flipping it around. “And it did only take me half an hour.” She tapped the glowing bar of the mana-clock beside her, which had a small sliver left in it.

Even as I was squinting at it, from across the room Keria chimed in from within her fortress of study materials, “My sister’s right, you weren’t gone long. Half an hour at most.”

“Huh… that’s…”

“Told you,” Bevel said, thrusting the pages at me to check.

“Sorry. There’s something weird with one of my spells, I think,” I said as I checked over her work. There were a couple minor corrections, but they were both from her dragging the pencil she’d been using. Still, that sort of mistake would be expensive when using a scribing pen.

“Which spell?” Bevel asked, frowning at the two minor mistakes in her otherwise perfect work.

“Memory Palace,” I replied, even as I pulled out my grimoire and flipped it open to the relevant section.

Bevel peered at the notes intensely. I didn’t actually look at the spell in my grimoire that often, since I usually kept the spell slotted.

“That’s… not like most other spells,” Bevel said, pulling out a fresh sheet of paper and copying down parts of it.

“It’s really not,” I agreed as I looked it over for a hint as to what’d caused the change. I suspected it had something to do with the ‘reforging’ from Conflict’s trials, but I wanted to isolate how that’d interacted with the actual spell.

However, Memory Palace had several unique sections that I’d never seen in other spells, and whose purpose wasn’t clearly laid out in the description. A lot of spells were like that, but most of them had their components described, at least in part, somewhere.

Bevel and I spent an hour testing Memory Palace while trying to figure out which part of the spell was reacting to my ‘reforging’. While we didn’t figure out the spell mechanic, we were able to confirm that I experienced time at a little over twice the real world’s time while I was inside.

Which would be useful, without a doubt.

But it was incredibly vexing to not know why it was like that. When I went to ask Keeper, it recommended several time based spells that it thought might help, but couldn’t confirm any of them would be what I was looking for. They were all surprisingly weak spells too. Time didn’t seem to be an effective affinity. Either that or it was just too rare for Keeper to have collected any good spells.

The fact that Keeper wanted ten shards for even the cheapest of the spells was enough for me to hold off on going down that route, for the moment.

Instead, I returned my attention to the original reason I’d come to Bevel, and we started talking about mana-bodies.

“Pretty sure Banya’s been investigating all the runes we use. She might have some ideas too,” Keria said just after Bevel and I started.

Which led to us hunting down Banya, who was working on some enchanting homework Xoth had given her out on the tavern’s patio, despite the raging storm overhead. It seemed Esbee had gotten someone to put in transparent stone awnings for the patio. Made for quite the place to work, if you were willing to put up with an occasional gust of wind.

As we went through everything, we confirmed that the facilities were only part of what I’d need to figure out mana-bodies.

Balthum's notes indicated he'd succeeded with Bevel and she confirmed that it’d been in one of his weird labs hidden near the ocean. Not in the ocean, like the Golden Halls though.

While he’d succeeded, as a side effect, he'd effectively stunted her growth. That wasn't what I wanted. What I needed, if I wanted to keep my promise to Tamrie without crippling her, was access to the Golden Halls of Ascension. The more we read and the more we talked, the more it seemed like the Halls were the original source of mana-bodies.

At least in the old Ventinial Commonwealth.

Which seemed to be the name for the government during the time people were still creating mana-bodies the old fashioned way. And by old fashioned, I obviously meant using incredibly sophisticated arcanotech devices to build one within a person's soul.

From what I'd read in Balthum's notes, I doubted he understood that's what it was for. I was also pretty sure that his 'curse' had been some sort of damage to his own mana-body.

My eyes shifted to the map once more. Specifically to one specific glowing symbol.

The Golden Halls of Ascension.

Time for us to decipher the Spellcode Balthum so kindly left behind.