It was hard, sometimes, for Hyeong Daesung not to feel like an imposter. Ever since Goryeo joined the Jiaguo empire, he’d been granted the title of Grand Magus, and no matter how much he was assured it wasn’t the case, he felt that it was only because he was a friend of the Empress.

  Yoshika could be an inspiring leader, and had a talent for bringing out the best in those around her, but despite her best attempts to create a more balanced and incorruptible civic system, she was rather prone to nepotism. Not that he could blame her—Dae himself had little interest in civics and likely would have just instituted a monarchy or some other form of autocracy that allowed the ruler to choose their successor. Despite the absolute power her seat held, Yoshika was far from authoritarian in her rule. That didn’t stop her from favoring her friends.

  Her appointments weren’t arbitrary, by any means. Yoshika placed people where their talents would thrive, but while the position may be the one which best fit the person, that didn’t necessarily mean that the person was the best fit for the position. Dae felt that his was the most clear-cut example. Ja Yun had risen to her role as the head of the treasury quite well once she’d been cajoled into actually using the authority of her position, and even Lee Jung’s ‘ornamental’ position as the Minister of Foreign Affairs had her serving as a cultural advisor smoothing over interactions between the largely multi-national councilors representing the various interests of the city.

  Dae hadn’t complained about being put in charge of the academy, nor about leading the nation’s research and development. Those were challenging posts, but he felt prepared to rise to those challenges. Jiaguo had been a developing city state, and even after annexing Yamato, his position still made sense—they didn’t have much in the way of scholarly tradition, aside from their reclusive monks.

  But Grand Magus of Goryeo? Dae could name at least three people better suited to the position in the same room.

  Jiaguo’s gathering of minds had been working around the clock to complete the task their empress had set before them. Roughly, their goals were threefold—find a way to reverse the flow of the Sovereign’s Tear, complete Do Hye’s mana amplifier, and modify the grand formation to function as a siphon for the divine ocean.

  In truth, the first was largely a matter for Yoshika herself, though she had made herself available to test any theories the gathered mages—well, they weren’t all mages—could come up with. As usual, she was scattered, with each of her bodies attending to their affairs wherever she felt they were most needed. Seong Eunae was in Goryeo, keeping the high nobles from taking advantage of the crown’s absence to cement their power against her. Hayakawa Kaede was in Qin, preparing for the summit. Lee Jia was off doing...something—she hadn’t specified. Even Li Meili was helping in her own way—mostly by staying out of things and keeping herself apprised of mortal sentiment.

  That left only An Eui, but she was—distant. She sat in quiet meditation and spoke only when addressed, which few people were brave enough to try. Yoshika was busy, and whatever she was busy with was taking up the attention of multiple aspects.

  Technically, there was another of Yoshika’s bodies present—one could argue her only real body, with the rest being extensions of her will, like Melati’s drones being controlled by the central personality of her queen body. Yoshika would probably resent the comparison, without disrespecting Melati’s hive. Her aspects were distinct, but she had confided that the distinction was at least partially performative.

  In any case, her true body was not physically present, but it was...there. If Dae used his Soul Sight technique, he could see her sitting in the center of the formation, ready to act at a moment’s notice if she was needed. Only Dae and Heian could actually see her without using a static formation—even Seong Misun, despite her comprehensive experiments on higher dimensions, hadn’t mastered it as a mental technique.

  “Just another reason you’re the man for the job, I say. You’re too hard on yourself, Dae.”

  Hwang Sung had been nothing but supportive of Dae from the moment he’d moved to Jiaguo—perhaps as a way to apologize for how harsh he’d been about Dae’s part in founding the empire.

  “It’s hardly a unique trait, High Magus. Heian and Yoshika are both just as capable, and anyone can do it if they learn the formation.”

  “A formation which you invented.”

  “With Yoshika’s help, yes.”

  The old mage ran a hand through his gray hair, smoothing some of the owl feathers that mixed with his human hair—a weak expression of his spiritual ancestry.

  “You needn’t always compare yourself with the top, young man. The empress is an outlier among outliers—I doubt the world has ever before or will ever again see her like. It’s no wonder I sensed such a strong aura from Lee Jia when we first met.”

  “Yet she claims her younger sisters are more talented than she—both of them.”

  “They might be! But they are cultivating that talent slowly—I believe that Empress Yoshika is being careful with them, perhaps even coddling them a bit. Yoshika is more than just talent. Fate has a hand in it—luck and circumstance, the challenges she was forced to rise to were like a crucible for the talents of those young women, forging them together into something truly great.”

  “And here I am still floundering at houtian! I don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath.”

  Hwang Sung scoffed.

  “You’re not listening to me. Grand Magus was never a title about power. Frankly, it was created to serve the fragile ego of a treacherous little wretch of a man whose only accomplishment worth mentioning is raising the young man before me.”

  He shot a withering glare at Do Hye who chuckled and shook his head.

  “Whose spell are we researching here, Hwang Sung?”

  Do Hye created the title, and if anything he seemed rather tickled to see Dae inherit it. The wizened old professor ignored his former rival to focus back on Dae.

  “But even for him, it wasn’t a boast of strength. You are a magus, Dae, and what we prize above all else is not power, but knowledge. Admittedly, granting the title to Seong Min after Do Hye’s departure was largely political, but if I didn’t believe you deserved the title, I’d challenge you for it myself.”

  “I’ve done nothing to deserve it.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “No? Princess Misun’s research into higher dimensions was built on the back of your Soul Sight, your Reflecting Pool and Teleportation Circles are going to reshape the entire world, and you are leading this research initiative because we all believe that you are our best chance to succeed.”

  “But I’m not even xiantian!”

  Seong Misun had been pretending not to hear the conversation as she busied herself writing spell formulae on a blackboard, but Dae’s protest made her laugh. She turned away from her work to give him an arch look and shook her head.

  “So? You could have been—faster than me or even Yoshika—if you’d only been more stupid. You could have rushed your advancements and crippled yourself like the rest of us, but you saw that there was a better path and despite how far you’d already traveled you did the smart thing and started over. That’s not a condemnation, it’s a credit. Now stop whining and help us prepare for the next experiment.”

  Do Hye chuckled. Dae had been avoiding his former master and...father figure, but it was hard to hate the man he’d spent his entire life looking up to, even after all the manipulation and betrayal.

  “I wouldn’t trust anybody else to complete my great work.”

  He turned to indicate a very complex formula that he and Misun had been working on. Even in shorthand and notation, the design of the spell circle was mind-bogglingly complex, but Dae knew what he was looking at, and he could see how they’d adjusted the formula to solve one of the biggest issues.

  “Reversing the flow is a solved problem—whether it’s gathering or amplifying mana, the principle remains the same. Trivial.”

  “Assuming there’s somewhere for the essence to go, which is a real problem for the gathering mode.”

  Do Hye waved off Misun’s interjection.

  “Yes, yes, but that’s a fair assumption for what we’re trying to accomplish here. The more difficult matter is the size of the channel, as our Grand Magus identified the moment he saw the formation.”

  Dae had to suppress the traitorous swell of pride he felt from Do Hye’s praise.

  “As you’ve correctly identified, the sub-formation here fails miserably at the task of expanding that channel, and I believe it may be a placeholder installed by my previous incarnation. A stand-in which serves to indicate its intention without actually accomplishing the goal. By discarding it entirely, we open up new avenues.”

  Misun stepped forward to highlight the modified portion of the circle in the blackboard’s notation.

  “We’ve designed a new sub-formation with a completely different approach. As it was her idea, I’ll allow Honorary Magus Iseul to explain.”

  The mud elemental strode forward—actually walked, with legs, which was rather rare even after how much she’d improved at controlling her form. Dae thought she was probably showing off. Like him, she was self-conscious about her relatively weak cultivation.

  “As you all know, the difference between a talisman and a formation is a practical one. In theory, they are one and the same, and it comes down to permanency and application. Formations are often used to aid in the production of complex talismans, and spell scribe talismans have been employed as an extremely resource-intensive way to miniaturize powerful formations and allow them to be deployed dynamically in the field.”

  Iseul produced a simple-looking talisman, but Dae’s eyes sharpened immediately at the sight of it. It wasn’t immediately obvious at a glance, but Iseul had used very intricate extradimensional scribing, and the physical part of the tablet was little more than an anchor for a much more complicated spiritual formation.

  “I posit that talismans can create talismans, and formations can create formations. It should be obvious, since they are actually the same thing. I’ve worked with my mother, Magus Ja Yun, and...Heian to create this as a demonstration.”

  She barely muttered Heian’s name, and the cat spirit rolled her eyes at Iseul’s petty reluctance to credit her self-imposed rival. The elemental held up a blank sheet of talisman paper and cast her spell. The talisman evaporated, and with a surge of magic, burned a copy of itself onto the blank.

  Dae watched curiously. Rather than using ink, the spell had fused a microscopically thin layer of crystalized mana to the blank paper—similar to the way that Iseul created her own body and empowered the physical core floating in her transparent torso. Also of note was the fact that she’d done something very clever with the spell that he suspected nobody else noticed.

  Indeed, Magus Hwang Sung adjusted his spectacles and frowned slightly.

  “Miss Iseul, with your access to Goryeo’s libraries, surely you know that spell recursion has been tried before. The problem is—”

  Iseul wordlessly produced a second blank and repeated the trick, to the stunned silence of every graduate of the Goryeon mage colleges in the room, except Dae.

  Seong Misun whistled appreciatively.

  “I knew that was coming—even helped with the theory—and it’s still impressive to watch. I’d give it full marks as a graduation thesis, eh Sung?”

  The owlish professor scratched his head, but rather than denial or objection he was just curious.

  “But that’s—how did you overcome the degradation effect?”

  Indeed, mages had tried to create self-replicating spells and formations before, but there was a problem. Intent and understanding were already a huge problem with spell scribe techniques. To create one, you had to imbue the spell with both the understanding of the spell itself and also the understanding of the understanding. For each layer of recursion, you needed to imbue the spell with another layer of understanding, and it grew exponentially more difficult, even for the most advanced mages.

  How did Iseul overcome this limitation? She cheated. There was only one spell, and it had only one purpose—to recreate the anchor that bound it to a physical medium. Completely useless and impractical, but as a proof of concept? Dae’s eyes sparkled as he imagined the possibilities.

  Rather than explain that, Iseul pointed at the newly redesigned sub-formation.

  “Humans tend to think about things physically, but space is only a very tiny part of the reality that surrounds us. Elementals understand that. And spirits, I guess. You think of the spell in terms of a channel of essence, and try to expand or widen that channel. My suggestion is this—make more channels. Infinitely more. You already know you can draw part of a spell in higher dimensions—why not the whole thing?”

  Then the mages saw it. The sub-formation would split itself between replication and channeling, while the main formation served as an anchor and focus for the essence. As long as there was more essence available, the sub-formations would keep replicating at an exponential rate, and so would the essence they channeled into the main formation.

  It was a far cry from the impossible ‘perpetual mana machine’ that Do Hye had toyed around with. In fact, it was horrifically wasteful, with half or more of the mana going into the spell’s self-replication rather than the actual channeling, but if the source was unlimited?

  Do Hye rubbed his hands together eagerly.

  “We’ll start with some small scale tests—Miss Iseul or Heian can control the formation to limit output and halt the replication. If it works, and Empress Yoshika can coax the Sovereign’s Tear into absorbing essence, then all that would remain is reversing the flow of the main formation.”

  The collaboration of magical researchers murmured excitedly—a breakthrough at last! But Dae blinked, then narrowed his eyes at his former master.

  “Do Hye, reversing the flow is already solved. You said it was trivial not ten minutes ago.”

  The Snake’s smile turned slightly waxy, but he didn’t miss a beat.

  “Of course! I was just emphasizing how close we are, my boy. Practically done already!”

  Anyone else might have missed it. It was just Do Hye—the consummate liar and manipulator. He’d died, and the simulacrum his shade inhabited was just a pale shadow of his former self, so a few quirks were to be expected. But Dae knew him. He knew the man who’d raised him better than anybody else in the world, no matter how much of that had been built on a lie. The look on Do Hye’s face was almost more obvious to Dae because he’d never seen it before, even when all the man’s plans came crashing down. When Dae had betrayed his father and laid the trap that led to his capture and eventual death, Do Hye had just looked proud. Now?

  He was scared.

  !

  Selkie Myth for their incredible shoutouts.

  RMullins

  Etly

  Emilin

  Victor

  Mine

  Odunski

  Naimah

  DvorakQ

  Thomas

  Robin

  Cog

  Alexis Lionel

  Attherisk

  Kit

  Vail

  Arusalan

  Saganatsu

  Stephane

  Celdur Ey'lin

  Alexandra

  IrateRapScallion

  Fraxx

  The Test Subject

  Yandron

  Berj

  Sorcoro

  Max C.

  Solo

  Mark

  Ava

  Auribia

  VietDom

  MeliMeliDH

  Andrew C.

  Seasparks

  Joseph H.

  ShadeByTheSea

  Beryn

  Ranzbart

  Connor B.

  Taylor W.

  Lu

  Rayaface

  Zeodeicasia

  Jess

  j0ntsa

  Jan

  LarryParrish

  6J0ker9

  GiantOrange

  K G

  eagle0108

  thkiw

  FISHLAD

  Tatsu D

  The Human

  Tarantism

  Elisah

  RuRo

  bisque

  Salmuna

  Jake T.

  Emanym

  TAF

  mrblue

  Rhaid

  Damian Z.

  itbeme12321

  Joseph C.