He paced slowly in front of John, staff ticking soundlessly against the nothing beneath their feet, the endless white stretching in all directions.
“Your magic circles,” he continued, “are lagging behind your classes’ tiers. Sovereign of Paradox at Tier III, Apex Paradox Warden now at Tier IV—yet your internal engines are still only just past the beginnings of what they should be.”
He stopped and turned, pinning John with a steady gaze.
“Let us concentrate on that first.”
John swallowed, his mind still catching up—not just with the sudden shift from drowned cavern to white void, but with how casually the old man laid out the intimate structure of his soul like reading from a page.
One stable circle—he could feel it when he focused, the cool, deep rotation of Water threaded with the crystalline resonance of the blue cave. And beneath it, half-formed and stubborn, that other wheel: shadowed and green, the echo of hours spent beneath roots and stone, breathing in black mana and sap-scent, trying to tease power from a crystal the world wanted him to ignore.
He had stopped trying to understand how this old man knew.
The Trial. His stats. His forms. Now even the hidden meditation at the black crystal under the World Tree’s roots—an act he’d never confessed to anyone, not Elyndra, not Shira, not Archangela—laid bare in a single sentence. Only that old elf might have known.
Did the old man in front of him also know about that? The question flickered through John’s mind, bitter and wary.
Of course he did.
The old man watched him for a heartbeat, as if he’d heard the thought—and perhaps he had. Then he lifted his staff, the blue orb brightening.
“Sit,” he said. “We will rebuild your foundations. Then, perhaps, you will be ready to do what your heart is already trying to break the world for.”
Part of John wanted to explode.
To shout that they were wasting time, that he needed to move, to act, to tear the world backward until Shira stood breathing again and the encampment still sang with laughter. The words burned on his tongue.
But here, in the white void of the Trial Subworld, no seconds ticked by outside. No bodies cooled. No black tiger regrouped. The world beyond this place was a frozen tableau—waiting for him to return, changed or not.
If he had to swallow his panic to make that change real, then so be it.
He sat.
The old man nodded once, satisfied, and lowered himself to sit opposite, staff laid across his knees. The white void dimmed slightly around them, as if the space itself leaned in to listen.
“Close your eyes,” he said. “Look inward. We start with what you already have.”
John exhaled and sank into himself.
The first magic circle greeted him immediately: a vast, rotating ring etched into the fabric of his soul, lines of liquid blue mana flowing along its channels. It moved with the deep, measured cadence of tides, infused with the crystalline purity of the ocean cavern’s divine crystal—structured, stable, strong. Water, threaded with Arcane and a faint echo of Light.
“Good,” the old man’s voice murmured, not in his ears but in the space of his perception. “Now, lower. Past the ocean.”
John focused deeper.
Beneath the Water circle, something rougher turned—smaller, incomplete. The second magic circle was a darker construct: its lines irregular, segments flickering, some sections bright with verdant green, others pooled with inky black. It stuttered, its rotation uneven, sometimes hitching as if snagged on its own half-formed glyphs.
Nature and Darkness—the residue of hours spent under the World Tree’s roots, meditating before the black crystal, breathing in sap-scent and shadow until his soul took their shape.
“Your second circle is like an overgrown thicket,” the old man said. “Powerful, but tangled. We must prune and shape.”
“How?” John asked inwardly.
“First, align the spin.”
The old man guided him through it step by step.
- John matched the second circle’s rotation to the first—same direction, same rhythm—forcing the jagged wheel to synchronize with the smooth, tidal cadence of Water.
- Whenever the second circle jerked or stuttered, he smoothed it with intention, like running a hand along a warped wheel until it found a continuous groove.
- Where lines overlapped chaotically, he pared them back in his mind’s eye—clearing extraneous offshoots, reinforcing the main channels of Nature’s growth and Darkness’s depth.
It was like forging, but inside himself: heating, hammering, quenching, again and again. His Scholar’s discipline and Potion-maker’s precision found new use here, turning half-wild power into something structured.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Slowly, the second circle’s rotation steadied.
The deep green segments—roots, leaves, the pulse of living things—wove cleanly with the shadowed lines of Darkness, becoming not a mess but a unified pattern: the deep forest at night, fertile earth drinking in starlight. The circle locked into a stable spin beneath the first, both moving in harmony.
“Better,” the old man said. “Two wheels, now properly set. Time for the third.”
A faint pressure built in John’s chest. He had just completed his second circle. Wasn’t it too soon to try for a third one?
“Reach inward,” the old man instructed, “not down. Toward your blood.”
John obeyed.
He let his awareness sink into his veins, feeling the rush of life, the thrum of stats and skills, the strange, other rhythm that had never quite matched his human side. There—in the depths of his being—something shone: a thin thread of luminous ichor, alien and pure. The legacy of Serenielle, goddess of light, whose essence had mingled with his in ways that had never fully made sense.
“Follow it,” the old man urged. “Let it be the seed.”
The third circle did not rise from the ground of his soul like the others.
It blossomed in his chest, lines of radiant white and pale gold sketching themselves in mid-air—as if drawn by a steady, invisible hand. The more he focused on the divine thread in his blood, the brighter the lines became, forming a ring inscribed with sigils that felt both new and uncannily familiar.
Light mana flooded into it.
Not the gentle luminescence of a simple illumination spell, but something higher—clarity, revelation, the burning away of deceit and shadow. The circle spun faster than the others, a halo whose rotation hummed in counterpoint to Water and Shadow-Nature, sending faint rays of brightness down into both, clarifying their flows.
It reacted to Serenielle’s ichor like iron to a magnet.
Each time John acknowledged the divine origin of that power—not as something foreign, but as part of him—the circle’s structure solidified: runes locking into place, channels widening to accept more Light, the spin stabilizing from frantic to authoritative.
“Good,” the old man murmured. “Light accepts you, as you have accepted it. Now you have three circles. One more.”
A fourth presence waited at the edge of perception—vague, abstract, like the memory of a shape he hadn’t fully seen.
“The last,” the old man said, “will be the most difficult. You already touch Space and Time. Your class, your paradox, your loop—all of it has carved a path. We must make that path deliberate.”
“How?” John asked. “They’re… slippery.”
“Anchor them between what you know,” the old man replied. “Space between Water’s depths and Nature’s roots. Time between Light’s certainty and Darkness’s memory. Let the fourth circle be the bridge.”
He guided John gently.
- John pictured the first circle: the endless sea, depth and flow.
- The second: the night forest, soil and shadow.
- The third: the halo of Light, burning steady above.
Between them, in the gaps, he imagined lines—faint at first, then stronger—connecting the three. Not as random threads, but as arcs, trajectories, distances. Space. Thinking about his Shelter and his Trial Subworld as well as the Parallel World and the Ascension Trials helped to imagine escaping space and time. He tried to concentrate on the lines he had witnessed during transitions to these subspaces and reimagined them in his head.
Those lines twisted subtly when he remembered the loop in the cave, the stopped water, the failed rewinds. Time—not as a straight line, but as something that could coil, branch, and knot.
The fourth circle began as a faint outline between the others, inscribed not on a single layer of his soul but across them—threads weaving through Water, Root-Shadow, and Light in careful, precise arcs. Its glyphs were more geometric, more abstract, combining angles and curves in ways that hurt to look at directly.
“Do not force raw Time into it,” the old man warned. “You are not building a lever to break the world. You are crafting a mechanism—Space to give Time room to move, Time to give Space meaning.”
John breathed—slow, steady, guiding mana into the nascent pattern.
Space mana trickled in first: the subtle sensation of distance, of here and there, of between. Then Time: the weight of before and after, the pressure of cause on effect. Each tried to slip free, to exist alone, but he bound them with intent, crossing their channels so that neither could function without the other.
The circle began to spin.
It was different from the others—slower, but deeper. Each rotation seemed to take longer, but with every pass, the entire structure of his inner world subtly tightened, as if this new wheel was calibrating the rest, aligning them to an unseen axis.
He felt connections spark:
- Time circling through Water, giving rhythm to its tides.
- Space threading through Nature, giving shape to roots and branches.
- Both refracted through Light and tempered by Darkness.
At last, the fourth circle found its own steady motion—sitting not above or below the others, but interwoven, a quiet, dense engine behind them all.
The old man’s voice came again, warm with rare approval.
“Four circles. Water. Nature-Shadow. Light. Space-Time. Now your soul’s architecture matches the hint of the tiers you carry.”
John opened his eyes.
The white void was unchanged, but he was not. Power no longer felt like scattered rivers he had to chase; it felt like a system—a constellation of wheels turning together, ready to be harnessed.
The old man watched him closely. “Now,” he said, “we can talk about turning the river backward… without drowning in it.”
John’s eyes were open, but his focus was still turned inward.
The four circles spun within him—Water deep and steady, Nature-Shadow rich and dark, Light brilliant and clear, Space-Time slow and dense. Yet one of them did not sit right. The fourth circle tugged at the edges of his awareness, like a wheel mounted on a slightly crooked axle. Each rotation carried a faint hitch, a whisper of strain.
He frowned.
“It’s not… right,” he said quietly. “The last one. It feels incomplete. Unstable.”
The old man’s gaze sharpened, and for a heartbeat his expression shifted—approval, clean and unmasked. “Good,” he said. “You felt it. Most would be too dazzled by the idea of a Time circle to notice it limping.”
He leaned on his staff, stepping a little closer in the white void.
“Your discomfort is correct. Your fourth circle is formed, but its scale is wrong—too narrow to carry what it is meant to hold. You are trying to turn a universe with a child’s toy wheel.”
John bristled slightly. “So I make it bigger?”
The old man shook his head. “Not bigger. Broader in understanding.”
He lifted his staff; with a soft chime, the void around them shifted. Points of light winked into existence overhead—first a few, then thousands, then millions, until a vast starfield stretched in every direction.