In the end, what Itzelan and I created for our final project was something…lesser than what I’d intended. For months, I’d built up the idea in my head of solving the mystery of the strange ward copying stone that protected my home. Only, it turned out to be something that the government of the Dominion would very much dislike me having my hands on. Like she’d said, I couldn’t exactly go public with a project that might bring down assassins on my head.

  I’d had enough of that during the war.

  What we created was still useful in its own right, if not in an almost offensive rather than defensive manner. We took the basic idea of rejecting entrance to something to its most basic extremes, in a certain tight radius around a simple fist-sized stone.

  That being air itself.

  This idea, I think, finally broke…Meia out of the funk she’d fallen into when she discovered what I had at the top of my lighthouse. The idea of voids of air or vacuums was not something I believe the various peoples of Vereden and Indiqua were familiar with. They were unaware of just what implosive effects were capable of, in contrast to explosives. The ultimate result that we created together was something disposable. A regular old stone was layered with a delayed activation enchantment, where, when activated, it would rapidly create a vacuum field around the rock.

  Then, it was thrown.

  The surface of the vacuum field was fragile enough to violently destabilized upon impact with another. The result was violent, but not overtly dangerous. The sudden rushing of air into the space created by the field created a loud cracking noise, a visible, almost reverse-shockwave in the air as it rushed inward, powerful enough to stagger both of us from several feet away, and a cloud of debris floating in the breeze.

  Of course, I was…curious to see just what would happen if that struck a person.

  I regretted it pretty quickly. Upon impact, the air was stolen straight from my lungs, followed by a splitting pressure headache. That wasn’t even counting the actual force of the implosion at the point of impact. The rest of the night and into the morning that we worked, I had a massive bruise across my entire chest and a throbbing in my skull that wouldn’t go away.

  Still, this had potential. I fully intended to see if I could go further with this idea, and I think Meia had the same plans, judging by her considering look. But we had no problem in creating another of our ‘vacuum grenades’ as I took to calling them, and the two of us turned it into Professor Stendahl the next day.

  Needless to say, we passed. I actually got a pat on the back from the old man when I demonstrated it against a practice dummy for him.

  However, even after class, the thoughts of what I’d learned about the anomalous Ward Stone never left my mind. The principles of how to safely destabilize a Ward scheme without causing the Breakage Effect were very interesting to me. I kept them in mind as I descended into the labs. Today, it was just going to be me in Grey’s personal experimentation space. My mentor was busy leading a large monster culling expedition with the Order of the Eclipsed Dawn. The hordes that the Breaks had caused during the war tended to ebb and flow, and a particularly massive group had been spotted a few days' ride away from the capital.

  It had been a bit concerning when it was discovered they were so far south, and so a coalition of local Martial Orders had gathered to take them out. My own Polaris Reach was still new and relatively small in comparison to some of the other Orders, but we’d still contributed. A team of our best Classers, led by Alex and Liora, was put together and had ridden out with everyone else a few days ago. I had dearly wished to go with them, of course, considering just how close I was to level two hundred. I probably would have ticked over into that important milestone within the first few hours of hunting. But alas, Renauld had kept a suspicious eye on me during the staff meeting where that group was assembled.

  Another time, maybe…

  So, now I had some free time to experiment, while Bait took over my duties at the Bastion. And as for Aveline…last night I think I’d had a breakthrough. Not just regarding actually telling her how I felt. But I’d realized that that…well.

  I’d been acting a bit stifling with her, these past months in Blutstein. I didn’t need to constantly have a clone hovering in safe distance around her. I didn’t need to be ready to jump in and save her from whatever enemies I’d invented in my mind. Blutstein was honestly pretty safe to live in, and I had no particular foes dire enough that I had to worry about her in the city. I’d been acting like a hovering mother hen. She could attend school or hang out at home just fine without me. Either the teachers or Rachel could easily reach me if there were any problems. Aveline had been surprisingly mature about it all, and I was thankful for that. Frankly, I think she’d been a bit clingy as well, considering she had quite literally just lost her entire family and the world they lived in. But now we’d reached a position of mutual understanding and care deep enough that we were comfortable with a little daytime distance.

  Thus, I was standing hunched over the work desk in Grey’s lab, doing something that had become pretty commonplace.

  Pouring over the Netherim archive.

  After all, Grey hadn’t been joking when he told me that he’d figured out how to solve our power problems. The solution, it turned out, lay with the cast-offs of the ‘gods’.

  As it almost always seemed to. You couldn’t escape their influence, really.

  Months and months ago, when Grey had first welcomed me here in Blutstein, he had shown me a curiosity. A small, abnormal Monster Core that he and his old adventuring party had dug out of some equally abnormal monster corpses. Closer inspection of the beasts and their nest had proven that they had been cast-offs from the experiments in monster creation that the gods had done. He and his companions had found the strange black Monster Cores they’d recovered interesting, but had never found a use for them. As a result, one of those cores had sat on his shelf for decades as nothing more than a curiosity.

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  Until I had returned from the Gorenzan bunker with the repository.

  We had agonized for months and months over what exactly the Netherim had been using as a power source for their technology. A hint had been obvious from what I had seen of the core in that facility, the ‘Atheric Fusion Collider’. It had been creating something through an apparent reaction of Mana and Ki, in that bound star. But neither Grey nor I had made the connection to that small, strange, murky Core…

  The idea came to Grey initially. What if the odd, almost anti-Aether that it produced was what we were seeking? After all, both the core and the repository were technically byproducts of the Netherim.

  I think both Grey and I had thought nothing would actually come of it when he had brought that core with him to the lab. Perhaps incautiously, Grey had placed it not far from the GLEAM lying innocently in its metallic cradle, thinking nothing about mere proximity.

  Both of us nearly had heart attacks when the GLEAM lit up with pale green light, for the first time since Travers had delivered his last message to me. Not only that, but the light had been steadily increasing in intensity, the longer the core was next to it. Fearing that the GLEAM was about to overload, I had bodily picked up the core and chucked it across the lab to clatter into a corner. Thankfully, that solved the problem. The light coursing through the GLEAM immediately died out, returning to its dormant state.

  Careful examination of the GLEAM afterward told us that it hadn’t retained any of the charge that the core had given it. Nor did it seem damaged any further, which was a huge relief. When the adrenaline wore off about what had nearly happened, though…

  I had no shame in saying that both Grey and I had cheered out loud, in the socially safe confines of his lab.

  We’d done it. The mystery of what the Netherim had been using to power their technology had been…partially solved. Neither Grey nor I had known what exactly the energy within those strange cores actually was, but we finally had a power source we could use to charge the GLEAM. An excited Grey had told me that it didn’t matter if we consumed the entirety of that single core in our experiments.

  He had an entire trunk of the damn things, hidden away in his basement, moldering for literal decades.

  Still…that wasn’t a perfect solution. What we actually needed to do was figure out just what was going on with those cores, and then figure out how to produce that strange black energy.

  For now, though…

  We were getting by on charging the repository with the use of those ‘Flux Cores’, as we’d taken to calling them.

  Upon initially booting the GLEAM up and diving into its libraries, Grey and I had been thrilled to discover that Travers hadn’t been lying to me. There really was what seemed to be an entire civilization's worth of knowledge in here. Entire libraries in a kind of hardlight, half digital, half physical format, where you could turn luminous pages with a single finger. Scholarly articles by the thousands, each of them written in the oftentimes obtuse voice of the academic, and each of them referencing dozens of other papers. Actual recorded lectures of long-deceased Netherim in projected hardlight as they described wild Aetherial concepts that caused Grey to gawk in either awe or frustrated realization. Hundreds upon thousands of meticulously detailed design documents for devices and structures that boggled the mind. I had seen so, so many things within the repository that I couldn’t believe. Bunkers like the ones I had visited, megalithic structures that would tower over mountains, everyday household items, weapons by the dozens, things neither of us had a clue about, and even…

  God, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but…

  I think one time, I had seen something that resembled a space ship. Not a large one, judging by the given scale.

  But something that would be capable of sailing among the very stars themselves…

  I’d had to step back from the desk to keep myself from hyperventilating when I first saw that. When I shakily explained what it was to a concerned Grey, my mentor nearly vibrated himself into a higher plane of existence.

  There...was a problem, however.

  The repository had no sorting system. I had doubts that this was normal, for a civilization as advanced as the Netherim had seemed to be. Nobody would be able to convince me that an apparently space-faring people couldn’t invent something like the Dewey Decimal system.

  Every single item in the repository was randomly sorted. There were…a few possible reasons for this, Grey and I had concluded. The first was that it was by design, and we simply weren’t understanding the records. The next was that it was either a result of the damage from Lucretia’s curse or from the haste that Travers had apparently been in when he copied over the data. And the last…

  Well, maybe Travers had played one final trick on me as a ‘pretender’.

  Frankly, I wouldn’t put it past the bitter old cantankerous Lich.

  None of that mattered, though. What did was that there was only one way to navigate the records. Each and every file was given what seemed to be a randomly assigned string of letters and numbers as a designation. This was the only way to tell each file apart. None of them had a description of what they were or what they contained. Grey and I had, out of necessity, started an index of our own, in a brand spanking new leather-bound book.

  More of a tome in size, really.

  Within it, whenever we were delving into the files, we meticulously copied down the string for whatever we opened in the repository. Then, we would glance through it at our own pace and then jot down an explanation of what we thought it contained.

  God, I was thankful that Grey could even read the damned thing. I’d almost expected it to be in English, but thankfully, it seemed that the System was translating the language contained within.

  Come to think of it…

  Hadn’t the others with me in the Bunker been able to understand Travers, but not the self-destruction announcements? Those had been in English…

  Hmm.

  A thought for another time.

  My point was, you never knew just what you were going to find in the repository. Thankfully, it was easy to return to a specific file once you had the string for it. The barest bit of utility that it offered was a search bar and a projectable hardlight keyboard to type the string in with.

  Explaining how to use that to a baffled Grey had been nostalgic to me. Once upon a time, my Father had been a bit tech-shy and had often needed my help navigating the burgeoning digital age.

  I smiled to myself as I studied, at the memory of Dad baffled by password systems. Frustrating, at the time.

  But something to look back on and laugh at now.

  It was hard for Grey and me to tear ourselves away from the repository a lot of the time. There was just so, so much in it to discover. Like what I was currently absorbing. I’d gotten lucky a few days ago and found something I had been particularly eager for.

  A certain kind of weapon blueprint. Something that was almost a match for an item I had picked up in the Bunker. What I was looking at seemed like an earlier revision, of course. Less advanced, if that was possible. Less powerful.

  But it was still recognizably a complete diagram of the spent laser pistol I had found in Harlow’s room. The very same weapon that was currently sitting directly to my right, carefully disassembled down to its smallest components.

  After all, I wasn’t scared of destroying this thing anymore, now that we had access to the repository.

  I dived deep into the knowledge of the Netherim, and the hours just…melted away.