Magus Reborn 387. Where’s the seed?

As soon as Elias asked the question, Kai went still.

The words echoed in his mind several tis over, and the answer should have been simple. The sensible choice was obvious. They needed to leave. They were already close to the edge of how long they had estimated the spirit king would stay occupied, and if he was being honest, they had been luckier than they had any right to expect. He had no real idea how much longer that luck would last.

The logical thing to do was to get out.

Get out of the chamber, the castle and out of the Earth Plane before Spirit King Vaelthoros turned his attention fully back to them.

That was what reason demanded. But it had one problem.

They had co too close.

Kai did not want to return empty-handed. Not after this. Not after everything. And yet the Elder Tree seed was not here. The chamber held only the trees themselves. So where had the seeds gone? The earth sovereign had been certain. It had said Vaelthoros had taken at least a hundred of them. But there were only dozens of trees in the chamber around him.

Which ant the rest had to be sowhere else in the castle.

The question was where.

This place had been the most obvious answer. If the spirit king grew the trees here, then this should have been where the seeds were kept. But if not here, then where would a being like Vaelthoros store sothing so valuable?

Kai forced himself to think back through everything the earth sovereign had told him about the castle’s layout. And the longer he thought, the narrower the answer beca.

There was only one other place that truly made sense.

The problem was that reaching it might cost him far more ti than he could afford.

Still, the more he turned it over, the more certain he beca that it had to be the last place worth checking. If the seeds were not here, then they had to be—

“Arzan, what are you thinking?” Veridia cut in sharply. “We don’t have much ti left.”

Her voice snapped him out of the spiral at once. He looked at her.

There was real fear on Veridia’s face now, the kind he had barely seen from her before, and he understood it. He felt so of it himself, buried deep beneath the urgency still burning through him from the ascent and the situation pressing in on all sides.

Kai drew in a breath and spoke quickly.

“The three of you need to leave now. Before it’s too late.” He did not wait for them to argue. “I’ll build a spell that will send you back to the ritual circle in under a minute.”

Killian’s expression tightened at once. “And what about you, Lord Arzan? What are you going to do?”

Kai answered imdiately. “I’m going to the main chamber of Spirit King Vaelthoros. If there’s a seed anywhere in this castle, then it should be there.”

“Then let co with you,” Killian said at once.

“It may be too dangerous for you to go alone,” Elias added.

Kai shook his head.

His eyes moved briefly toward the path they had entered from, already asuring the distance in his mind, before he said, “It’ll be more dangerous if I have to keep all of you alive as well.”

Then he looked back at them.

“Our original plan needed every one of you. That was before. Now I’ve reached the sixth circle, and hence, it’s better if I move alone.”

He let his gaze rest on each of them in turn.

“Please understand. This is the best option.”

No one said anything. So Kai went on.

“If I find the Elder Tree seed, there’s a good chance I’ll still have to deal with the spirit king directly. At the very least, I’ll have to run from him.” His voice stayed calm, but there was no softness in it. “And in a situation like that, I won’t be able to protect all of you properly. Your spells won’t be enough.”

As he finished his words, he could clearly see what they were thinking.

Veridia, especially, looked as though part of her wanted to agree with him imdiately. But more than that, all of them were probably thinking about the sa things at once—about whether Kai would survive alone, about whether they would end up stranded since he's the one who needed to trigger the ritual properly, about everything that could still go wrong.

But there was no other choice here. So before any of them could argue further, Kai moved.

He raised both hands and began building the spell.

It was large enough that he needed both hands working at once, the structure unfolding layer by layer in front of him as he drew on a mixture of mana from his soul and the other five circles. Even for him, it was not sothing he could put together casually. The shape of it demanded precision, and by the ti it was nearly complete, almost thirty seconds had passed.

During all that ti, Elias and Veridia simply stared.

Shock sat plainly on both of their faces. Even Killian took a step back as more and more mana gathered into the spell. None of them were used to seeing that much power poured into one spell, and if Kai was being honest, this was his first ti casting a true sixth-circle spell himself.

But unlike them, he had seen such magic before.

He had watched Sixth-Circle Mages work. He had studied their spells and the principles behind them in enough detail that, even without personal experience, he knew what he was trying to make.

So when the structure was ready, he triggered it imdiately.

At once, the spell burst outward and wrapped around Elias, Veridia, and Killian in streams of wind mana. Veridia let out a cry in surprise, her hands already moving as if she thought Kai had turned on them, but the tension left her face almost imdiately when she realized what the spell was actually doing.

The wind gathered behind her back and took shape as wings.

The sa happened to Elias and Killian.

All three of them simply stood there for a second, stunned, feeling the spell settle around them.

Kai gave them no ti to linger in that shock.

“They’re [Wind Wings],” he said. “They’ll get you out of here and back to the ritual circle quickly. The spell should last three minutes at least. That’s more than enough.” Then he looked at them one last ti. “Still, don’t waste ti.”

With that, Kai turned at once and moved back into the hallway they had entered from.

He heard shouting behind him but he kept his pace, there was no point in arguing anymore. They had already spent too much ti standing still.

He moved through the hallways as fast as he could, trying to hold the layout clearly in his mind.

If he rembered the earth sovereign’s directions correctly, then the spirit king’s main chamber should have been to the left of the Elder Trees chamber. That was what he followed now, cutting through corridor after corridor until, after crossing several of them in quick succession, he ran into a mass of spirits blocking the way.

There were all kinds among them.

So were lean and wolfish, with root-like growths winding over their limbs. Others were broader and almost humanoid, their bodies made from bark, stone, or so mix of both. A few hovered rather than stood, while others crowded the floor in thick numbers, ard with claws, tusks, jagged wooden limbs, or mouths full of teeth. Judging by the way they froze when they saw him, they had probably been on their way toward the Elder Tree chamber to deal with the intrusion there.

Instead, they found Kai, and he gave himself no more than five seconds.

He did not bother with another sixth-circle spell. That would have been wasteful here. Instead, he unleashed a storm of fifth-circle spells in rapid succession, but this ti, every one of them was mixed with mana drawn from his soul. The difference was imdiate.

In those five seconds, he cast ten spells.

A crescent of compressed wind sliced through the front ranks and split three spirits apart at the waist. A twisting lance of white fire punched through two more and then burst outward, setting a cluster behind them ablaze.

A rain of burning ice shards followed, hissing through the corridor like a storm of glass and fire. Then ca a web of razor-thin wind threads that whipped between bodies, cutting one spirit open before carving into the next.

A wave of dense pressure struck after that, slamming a knot of smaller spirits into the wall hard enough to burst them open. Then, he drove up spears of jagged ice from the floor, skewering several at once.

A storm of ice-edged wind tore across the middle of the crowd and left bodies falling in pieces.

A ring of fla burst outward from Kai’s hands, catching those that had slipped too close and turning the air itself into pain.

Then ca a narrow beam of soul-touched fire, white at its core, that punched clean through a bark-armored spirit and kept going through the ones behind it.

And lastly, he shaped a blunt hamr of compressed wind and drove it down the corridor, flattening the last cluster before they could even regroup.

One spirit still managed to get close.

It lunged through the chaos, fast enough to nearly reach him, but before Kai even turned properly, a ball of magma exploded in the air beside it. Lava rained outward in all directions, and the spirit vanished beneath it with a scream.

The corridor beca a ss of blood, burning flesh, shattered bodies, and pained cries that died just as quickly as they had begun.

Kai kept moving.

A part of him did feel the weight of it, the bloodshed, the speed with which he had cut them all down. But that was for later. Morality could wait. Right now, there was only one thing that mattered.

The Elder Tree seed.

So he crossed the ruined hallway, took the next turn, and finally stepped into a dimly lit chamber.

One glance was enough to tell him that he was in the right place. After all, there was a bed in the room.

And the earth sovereign had complained enough about Spirit King Vaelthoros’s obsession with taking on humanoid habits during their talk for Kai to recognize exactly what that ant.

Kai imdiately spread his senses through it, brushing every corner, every wall, every faint shift in mana he could reach. At first, he found nothing. Just the chamber itself, the bed, the heavy air.

Then he felt it; a small, hidden chamber tucked behind the room so tightly that his senses only barely caught the edge of it, but there was no doubt sothing was concealed there.

Kai moved for the wall at once.

There was probably so proper chanism to open it, so trigger or hidden way built into the room, but he had no ti to start searching for that. So he did the only thing that made sense. He built a spell.

Golden soul-flas spread over both of his hands, bright enough to cast sharp light across the room, and then he struck the wall. The first blow did not break it. Neither did the second. But under repeated hits, the stone began to crack. Then pieces started falling away. More and more of the hidden space behind it revealed itself until the opening beca wide enough for Kai to force his way through.

What he saw inside made him stop for a mont.

The chamber was much smaller than the Elder Tree garden, but it was packed with treasures.

Herbs had been piled there in thick heaps, thousands of them layered over one another, dried, preserved, or still carrying enough life in them that the air felt saturated by it. Mana essences glowed throughout the cramped space, most of them earth-aspected, but not all. So were pale and clear. Others held deeper colours, denser light, or stranger signatures that made them stand out from the rest. Artifacts lay mixed among them as well—small things, old things, so wrapped in roots, others half-buried under the herbs and stones. His senses touched all of it at once, taking in the sheer wealth of the chamber.

But Kai ignored almost everything.

Because one thing in the middle of it all gave off more mana than anything else there.

He moved straight toward it, pushing through the crowded little chamber until he stood at its center, looking down at a box woven from thick vines.

Kai reached for it imdiately.

The soul-flas in his hands burned through the vines at once, and when they fell away, three golden seeds lay inside.

For a mont, ti seed to stop as Kai looked down at the seeds.

He had spent so long chasing an Elder Tree seed that, in so strange way, seeing them there almost felt unreal. It was like finally finding sothing he had been reaching for across half his life. So many tis he had co close. So many tis it had seed within reach, only for it to slip away at the last second.

But now, they were right in front of him. Not one, but three.

Kai was not leaving a single one behind.

He grabbed all three at once and tucked them into his robes. The mont that was done, his mind moved to the only thing that mattered now.

Getting out.

If things had gone well, then Veridia, Elias, and Killian would already be on their way back to the ritual circle, and with his new strength, he could catch up to them.

With that thought, Kai turned imdiately.

Even as he moved, a spell structure ford in his palm. He poured half of the soul-mana he now held into a spell called [Driftstep], and the mont he activated it, his body rose from the ground. Strands of wind mana twisted together around his legs, shaping themselves into sothing like shoes, and in the next second he was gone.

He tore across the spirit king’s chamber and through the hallway beyond it in no more than three seconds, passing the bodies of the dead spirits that were little more than blurs.

The spell was, in essence, an improved version of the ordinary [Flight] spell—sothing Kai had learned long ago when he had still been preparing for the sixth circle in his past life. Back then, he had never managed to use it properly because he never found a place rich enough in mana to support the advancent. The best sites the Sorcerer’s Tower once used had already fallen by then, swallowed by the dead mana fiends.

So feeling it work now, after all that ti, was almost unreal. But Kai did not let himself dwell on it.

He kept his mind fixed on only one thing as he raced through the castle.

He had to get out of Spirit King Vaelthoros’s ho as fast as possible.

He did not try to follow the sa route they had used to enter.

Too much of the castle had already been broken apart when the fire giant crashed into it, and Kai had no reason to waste ti weaving through hallways when the structure itself was starting to fail. After several turns, he found what he needed—a narrow crack ahead, thin but open enough that light and drifting ash were filtering through it.

He raised a hand at once.

Spikes of fla ford in the air before him and shot forward into the crack. They struck a second later and exploded, blowing apart the weakened section of wall. Stone split outward, and in the next breath Kai was through it and out of the castle.

The mont he erged, he stopped for the briefest instant.

More than half of that section of the Earth Plane seed to be on fire.

Flas had spread across the forest in wide, hungry stretches, climbing tree after tree while smoke and ash rolled through the air thick enough to dim the light itself. The ground below was scarred everywhere. Great furrows had been torn through it, sections of forest had been flattened completely, and broken roots and burning trunks lay scattered across the land like the remains of so ruined battlefield. Even now, Kai could hear distant screams from spirits still trying to flee through the destruction.

Before the guilt could fully rise in him, sothing else seized his attention.

The spirit king.

Vaelthoros stood over the fallen fire giant.

The sight held a terrible weight to it. The giant’s body lay motionless now, sprawled across the ruined earth, while a massive tree—one that must have been uprooted and driven down during the battle—was pinned through its chest. Around them, the damage of their clash stretched in every direction. Whole sections of the environnt had simply ceased to exist as they once had. What had been forest was now fire, splintered wood, churned soil, and drifting cinders.

It was the kind of sight that demanded to be stared at.

Kai did not let himself do that.

No matter how striking it was, he looked only long enough to understand that the battle was over. Then he gathered more wind into his legs and shot forward, cutting through the cover of the trees toward the ritual circle. If he was lucky, Vaelthoros would stay focused on the giant’s body and never—

Kai’s thoughts stopped as the spirit king turned.

At first, Kai thought it was only looking back toward the castle. But then the movent settled, and he realized the gaze had fixed through the forest itself, straight toward him, cutting through the cover of branches and leaves as though none of it existed.

For one desperate second, he hoped it ant nothing. Then the spirit king’s voice reached him.

“Human,” Vaelthoros said, “stop where you are right now, or I will make sure even your soul never escapes my grasp.”

***

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