Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 27

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It took a bit more scrying to pinpoint exactly where the cart hauling my Father’s comatose body was at. One of the drawbacks with low-level scrying magic was that it wasn’t good at pulling back from the target to hunt for landmarks, and even if it could, it wasn’t like this part of the world had plenty of unique and diverse landscapes going for it. It was a lot of rolling hills covered in patchy scrub grass with mountains to the north and side curving around to meet each other far to the west.

Presumably, there would be some trails down into the lowlands, but since I planned on catching up to Father long before the cart got to that point, I didn’t concern myself with locating them. Eventually, the easier solution became to use sensory enhancing invocations to sharpen my eyesight so that I could look through the night and the distance while I drifted up in the air.

It was around two in the morning when I spotted the cart. Once I got close enough, it wasn’t that hard since it was the only thing moving. I hadn’t seen a single one of the supposed monsters that roamed the wastes, but maybe they were just all asleep. Somehow, I doubted it.

The next part was going to be delicate. I had no idea what orders Nermet had rattling around in his poor, abused brain, and I didn’t want to have to kill the man in self-defense if Noctra had given him a command like, “Attack anything that gets close to you.”

At the same time, trying to do a cerebral deep dive while maintaining three other channeled spells that were only being powered thanks to my ability to pull a constant stream of mana from my crystal didn’t appeal to me. The best way to approach the cart would be either by opening with a spell to incapacitate Nermet or by using something to effectively hide myself from his notice.

I was leaning towards a stealthier approach simply because subjugated individuals were notoriously hard to incapacitate if their masters had set things up properly. I wouldn’t be able to tell whether Noctra had managed that until I got in there and started rooting around, and that would be much easier to do if Nermet wasn’t actively trying to murder me at the time.

The stealthy approach had its own drawbacks, mainly because I was using a curtain as a sail to glide through the air. It wasn’t the noisiest way to travel, but it was eye-catching, even at night. It was incredibly rare to get a night without a single moon, and tonight was no exception. Nalicin the blue moon would probably set before the sun came up, but that didn’t mean another moon wouldn’t rise to take its place, and since I was nowhere near an astronomer’s conservatory with access to their books and notes, I had no idea where we were at in the lunar cycle. Honestly, things looked so different up there that I wasn’t even sure what part of the world I’d been reborn in.

The cart wasn’t moving fast enough that I couldn’t land a thousand or so feet behind it and spend some mana to catch up. A combination of shadow cloak and aura of silence would keep me unnoticed if I stayed on the ground, though it would admittedly cost me two or three full core’s worth of mana to keep it running for a few minutes.

I shook my head. There was no reason to chase the cart down when I could just land far enough ahead that Nermet wouldn’t notice me and wait for it to catch up. That would also give me time to regenerate some mana in my core. Ideally, all of my spells would be fueled by my own mana so I didn’t lose a fifth of it to transference loss with my mana crystal. That was more of a goal than a current reality, at least until I grew my core to stage three.

I was conflicted about stage three right now. I didn’t need to make a decision yet, but I needed a fully grown body to do stage three properly and I wasn’t interested in waiting twenty years for that. When I’d made my original plans, I hadn’t factored having a family that I cared about into them. Artificially advancing my body would affect my relationships with them. Reversing that age later was possible, but came with some significant drawbacks that made it dicey. I doubted I could do it without damaging my mana core.

I sat on a rock fifty feet off the trail Nermet was leading the donkey down and considered how far I’d deviated from my pre-reincarnation plans already. Being born into a mana desert had wreaked havoc on my schedule. I should have already possessed a stage two core and aged myself up to at least prepubescence. The lack of ambient mana combined with the bad luck of the village being used as a mana farm really had been just about the worst possible outcome I could have gotten short of being killed as an infant. Even that might actually have been better if it happened soon enough for the reincarnation magic to cycle again.

But if I hadn’t been born as Gravin, I wouldn’t have my family now. And I loved my family. Of course, if I’d reawakened my past memories as soon as I’d been born, that might have played out differently as well. The Gravin part of my personality would never have had a chance to grow.

The ethics of the whole situation were murky, to put it mildly. That was bound to happen when pushing the limits of reality, however. As far as I was aware, I was in uncharted philosophical territory. The closest I could think of was body-snatching as a form of immortality, but the ethics of that weren’t that hard to tease out. When the body I was inhabiting was my own reincarnation, things got a bit hazier.

Or maybe it was just as clear cut. Maybe I was a monster. If I considered my former identity to be separate from my new incarnation, that I’d stolen Gravin’s life from him at the tender age of two years and a few odd months. If someone else had done it and I’d found out, would I condemn them?

My musing was interrupted by the creaking of cart wheels and the steady clop of the donkey’s hoofs as it pulled my father along. I hopped down from the stone I’d been perched on and cast shadow cloak over me to blend into the shadows before creeping toward the sound.

If possible, I wanted to save some mana and not use aura of silence to cover my approach, but that would depend on exactly how observant Nermet ended up being. I could only make out his towering silhouette without an invocation to sharpen my eyes, but that was enough to keep track of him.

A sleep spell would be easiest, if it worked. I was hesitant to try any enchantments that affected Nermet’s brain until I got a chance to look at exactly what kind of subjugation magic had been worked on him. A physical restraint would probably be better for his health, though it wouldn’t be anywhere near as efficient.

I approached the road, timing my steps with the clopping beat of the donkey’s, and I was already within five feet of the cart before Nermet jerked in surprise and peered at me. “Something there?” he asked, his voice dull and slurred.

Surprising, but too late. Magic danced between my fingers as I approached him. Nermet was so focused on whatever sliver of movement he’d seen through the shadows hiding me that he didn’t even see me approach. In a fight against a trained warrior, I might have suspected he was baiting me in, but despite his position as a member of the village Garrison, Nermet was the farthest thing from being trained.

I reached out to touch the back of his hand and discharged the paralyzing grasp spell I’d cast into him. His body stiffened mid step and he fell over with a meaty thump. I winced at the sound, hoping I hadn’t hurt him too bad, and hopped over him to grab the donkey and slow it to a stop. It obeyed placidly and showed no interest at all in what was happening around it.

The practical side of me demanded I immediately get to work on Nermet. He was a threat and I’d only temporarily neutralized him. The paralysis would last at most ten minutes, possibly less. Considering how big he was, I wouldn’t be surprised if he shrugged it off sooner. The spell worked directly on the target’s muscles, and the more mass there was, the harder it was to affect all of them.

The sentimental side wanted to go check on Father and break the sleeping enchantment he was under. That probably wouldn’t take more than a minute, but it was a minute I didn’t know if I had to spare. I spent a few seconds pulling the tarp off of him to confirm he was alright, then left him sleeping while I got to work.

Nermet’s mind was horrifying to behold. Noctra had taken the magical equivalent of a hammer to it and beaten the parts he didn’t want until they broke. There was a knot of instructions tying all the broken pieces together, telling Nermet how to react to various stimuli, when to fight, when to run, who to listen to and who to ignore.

The whole thing was so clumsily done that if Nermet hadn’t already had brain damage from whatever accident had happened as a child, there was no way someone wouldn’t have noticed. He’d probably had a gradual change in personality when Noctra started working on him, become slower and quieter, and the people who knew him just chalked it up to the accident having far-reaching consequences.

Fixing this would be the work of days normally, but with my mana reserves so sharply limited, it would be more like weeks or even months. I could just go in there and smash the spells, but the backlash could very well kill Nermet. If it didn’t, it would definitely leave him as nothing more than an ambulatory blob of muscles and organs wrapped in a skin sack.

Nobody deserved something like this to happen to them. Somewhere, buried under all the compulsions, was a person who knew his life had been suborned, that he’d lost control of his own mind, that he’d been turned into a tool for someone else’s convenience.

I wondered if the real Nermet had even a single shred of hope that someone would come along and save him or if he’d resigned himself to his fate. Did he even have enough awareness left to contemplate his own future? Would it be better for him if he did?

I also wondered if his accident had truly been an accident or if Noctra had orchestrated it to give himself a slave that no one would ever notice had been subjugated. The man obviously didn’t have a tenth of the skill needed to perform such subtle magics, and he’d known that he’d be ruining the mind of whoever he chose as his victim.

Maybe I was attributing too much malice to Noctra’s actions. Nermet looked to be in his mid-twenties, so it was possible his accident had happened before Noctra had come to the village. It was also possible that Noctra had just seen an opportunity and had taken advantage of it.

I found that I didn’t much care about the circumstances behind this situation. However it had come about, Nermet was beyond my ability to save right now. The only options I had left were to kill him myself or let him continue on. Maybe he’d live if I let him go. Maybe the people waiting for his cargo would kill him when he turned up with an empty cart.

I wasted precious minutes considering my options, trying to find some other alternative. The only thing I could think of was to usurp Noctra’s control and claim Nermet as my own subjugated slave. It would remove him as a threat and keep him alive, but it would be a drain on my own mana that I couldn’t afford.

I glanced over at my father, still unconscious in the cart. Maybe there was a way after all. And when I was done with all of this, I was going to return to the village, find Noctra, and kill him as messily and painfully as possible.

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