The OP Lich is a Returnee, Chapter 71 (Patreon)

Chapter 71 – Considerations

It had been two weeks since my ‘field trip’ to the government research laboratory, and I was still processing the true import of everything I had learned there. Oh, the discovery of a being from another world wasn’t that unsettling. Their being a dragon did change things a bit, but we had entered into an alliance, so that was fine, for the time being.

Actually, it was rather refreshing to have someone else in the world that might actually pose a threat to me. In the other world, I knew that there were dragons, and some other immortals who might match me for power. Ever since I returned, I was so laughably above everyone else in power that it was not even funny. There had been no threat to me, or even anyone coming close to being a threat.

That kind of environment was just as dangerous, in different ways, from one where you were constantly under threat. When there is no one who can possibly challenge you, that breeds complacency. Worse, it can whisper in your head, telling you that you should do whatever you want, just because you can, and no one can stop you. And that kind of attitude will eventually make someone desperate enough that they’ll do something stupid, and risk everything just to take you down.

Oh, I had certainly gone about, doing mostly as I pleased, ever since I returned from the other world. But mostly I was just crafting, or teaching. The only times I acted out were when someone attacked me, or mine. They provoked me, and I responded.

That was different from going out and just slaughtering people on a whim, or turning a city into a graveyard just because I could. And there was a very real chance that I could have found myself sliding into that kind of mindset. Even in the other world, where those who could threaten me (at least in groups) were more prevalent, I basically set that entire continent up for devastation, and left them without any way to summon trump cards from the other world. Add in slaves suddenly going free, and chaos would reign.

So, it was good that I had someone who could at least stand on my level, in terms of power. I wasn’t entirely sure how my power ranked against Onedeirth’s, but I did not think myself weaker than he was. However, without testing our might against each other, it was impossible to say for sure who was stronger, and our powers did not lend themselves to play fighting, especially when we started getting serious. If we were to fight, even as a heavy sparring match, the local maps would need to be redrawn, as new canyons and craters formed.

At any rate, having someone who I could roughly call an equal in knowledge and power was a good thing. It kept me from walking the path of a Demon Lord, and deciding that everything would be so much better if I just ruled the world. After all, I had the perspective of immortality, and the power to back up my promises, didn’t I? So why not take the decision away from the mortals? It was a trap that was far too easy to fall into.

Of course, all that just mattered to me, personally. There were other things that our brief conversation had brought up, such as my promise to help the dragon find his way home, if such a thing were possible. Altering the Ritual of Returning might work, but I had not examined his soul closely enough to see if there was a connection to his home world remaining, after all this time. Assuming that he didn’t have any kids in this world, I could try and do a calling to his blood, but that also counted on the fact that his kin remained alive in his world.

Either way, I couldn’t exactly just whip out that kind of ritual on a whim. Sending a full-grown dragon across the planes was far from an easy task. Sending them to one world in particular? Even tougher. And, with magic as it currently was, there was no way that I’d be able to pull that off, not without sacrificing a town or two. Or more, if they weren’t willing sacrifices. I somehow doubted that was going to be in the cards, so I needed a way to get more mana.

The technology to convert electricity to mana or mana to electricity was there, but still in its infancy. The research lab had been fortunate to have an entire nuclear reactor dedicated to powering its experiments, but governments were understandably loath to just let those things out in public, and such a creation would be far more permanent than necessary. What she needed, really, was some kind of battery or capacitor that could be charged with mana and stored until it was needed. This was far more than just creating a wand with the power to launch a spell a certain number of times before it burnt through its power supply. I’d need something that could legitimately power a city, if one tapped into it properly.

Either that, or I needed to find a deeper source of mana. That, of course, brought up some of the other questions that Onedeirth’s story raised. How was magic sealed away in this world? Who did it? And why? Would undoing the seals unleash some greater trouble? And, perhaps more importantly, would unleashing the seal give enough power that I could try and return Onedeirth to his home?

To answer those questions, however, I needed to know more about the seal. The fact that my summoning had weakened it suggested that the seal was in some way connected to the location my former school was on. I knew that, today, it was considered a power site, where magical rituals could be enhanced. That suggested that there was what the other world called a Mana Current running through the area. In this world, the best approximation would be ‘ley lines’.

Thankfully, I did not have to go back to the United States so soon after my ‘discussion’ with the CIA director. There had been enough legend and lore around the idea of power sites and ley lines before the Awakening that, once magic had proven to be real, people had gone out looking for them. Within a decade, the ley lines of Earth had been thoroughly and completely mapped. Well, at least the major ley lines and their primary tributaries. They were still finding minor streams, some of which dried up during certain phases of the moon, and swelled at others, suggesting that the seal was merely damaged, not removed.

Fortunately for me, a search of the public records proved my assumption was correct. There was a ley line running under the school, a tributary of one of the major lines. That probably also accounted for why the summoning happened at our school, rather than elsewhere. The magical channels, for lack of a better term, were already dug there, even if they had been unused for who knew how long. Add in some magic from an outside source, and boom.

With magic at such an ebb, the sudden surge would have flown up and down the ley lines. Like a lightning bolt hitting a house with wiring that hadn’t been updated or changed since the first electric light was hung. But there was only one device nearby on that path to ground that was actually on, and that was the seal, so it got ALL the juice.

The fact that the seal was damaged, not destroyed, meant that it was built to last. It also meant that it was designed more for keeping mana contained, than defending against it. Which meant it shouldn’t be impossible to destroy the seals, if she found them. Whether they could be destroyed safely or not was another question entirely. Suddenly unplugging a river that had been dammed up for over a century tended to be a bit dangerous for those immediately downstream, after all.

And the seal would have to have been around for far longer than just a century or so. Given that there were legends of magic in human cultures around the world, it could be said that the seal had to be put in place sometime after the dawn of human civilization, but before the modern world. Actually, it was probably before the Common Era, or sometime around there.

That was just a guess, on my part, but it seemed like a logical one. At the latest, it would have to be around the time of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, as the Church began to rise, and contemporary accounts of magic all but faded away, or were the result of delusional individuals looking to persecute the ’nonbelievers’. But it was more likely that was after the seal had been put in place, as magic was draining from the world.

At any rate, I needed to find the seals before I could go and look for a way to unseal them. But how to find them? Even if I had been graced with a map, it has been so long since magic was around that it would be only marginally better than searching for them blind.

So, I needed to do a search. The seals were obviously connected to the ley lines. I was working under the assumption that there were multiple seals because that just made more sense, given what I knew of magic from the other world. For only one seal to work, the world would have to have only a single wellspring of mana, and that was highly unlikely.

Both Onearth and Ouros, Onedeirth’s world, had nine wellsprings. One was the Prime Wellspring, with untyped mana. The other eight were wellsprings of the eight elemental types. Even if you sealed the Prime Wellspring, that would just remove the untyped mana from the world, forcing all creatures to more clearly express their own elements, making it incredibly taxing to use spells of different elements.

The flow of mana was strong enough that sealing off the wellsprings one at a time would have been a monumental undertaking, requiring the placing of magical barriers to ward off the other wellsprings, so that their flow did not damage the seal before all nine could be fully activated. Such a task would have been nigh impossible in the ancient world. And yet, it is still more likely than any one nation being able to get the resources, all around the world, to seal the wellsprings. After all, transoceanic travel was not common for a long time after the seals were set. Magic could have compensated, but still, that was not likely.

That, of course, left a more unsettling question to be answered. After all, if it wasn’t one single nation or organization sealing off the wellsprings all around the world, then what drove peoples in all corners of the world to seal off their local wellspring, all in about the same time, in ways that wouldn’t upset the other seals? And why was there no record of something like that happening?

The only way to find the answer to that question, of course, was to find the seals. The seals, no matter how they were constructed, would, by necessity, give clues to not only their makers, but the source of their knowledge. You could not make something powerful and complex enough to seal off a wellspring, much less all nine, without leaving indications that one trained in the arcane could identify. It was no different from an art scholar being able to identify a piece as a Rembrandt, even if it was unsigned, compared to a piece done by one of his students, or so on. There was a signature in the work itself that one could pick out, if you knew what you were doing.

But that meant I needed to find the seals. And there was only one way to do that, as far as I knew, beyond searching every nook and cranny of the world and the spaces between in person. I would have to ‘ping’ the ley lines, and see where they fell silent.

Which meant I needed access to a ley line nexus, a major one. Fortunately, as I said, the mortals had mapped the major lines already. And it just so happened that there was a nexus in Yokohama.

The only problem was that ‘pinging’ the ley lines was essentially the same as creating the lightning strike that weakened the seals. The power would spread through the ley lines, like back then. And there was no way of knowing what would happen then.