Chapter 240

Chapter 240

While Matt and Liz were mostly kept near the hospital as anchors for Justinian, they weren't able to stay there forever, and they all knew it. Matt could see in Justinians eyes how he wanted to beg them to stay, but he never did. Matt wasnt sure if he just knew it was impossible, or if he feared that asking would shatter the illusion, but they started spending some more time away each day.

The next week was hectic.

While they spent most of their time with Justinian, they were brought up to the floating island to talk to Frederic, who kept up his polite face in front of them even though they knew he was beyond angry at the general circumstances.

He explained what was needed of them, which didnt go over very well.

We will need you three to each individually give a testimony in the coming days. Thats all that will be required from you, per your request to not attend the actual trial, but note that this will be exhaustive, with both sides attorneys being given a chance to question you.Ñøv€l-B1n was the first platform to present this chapter.

Justinian took that news exactly as Matt expected.

In seconds, he started to drift into his own mind, where the horrors still had a hold of him.

No. No. Nononono.

As he started to go catatonic, Frederic gestured, and Justinian vanished, returning to the hospital and its attendants.

Rubbing the bridge of his nose, Frederic sighed. I really hate that. We need the entire story, and it simply forces the victims to relive those horrors once more, but if we wait until they are in a better mental place, it can complicate all attendant investigations and allow accomplices to cover their tracks better.

Matt looked at Liz, and she shook her head slightly. Taking her lead, he waited until Frederic spoke on his own.

On to other things. You both are going to be commended for your work here once everything is settled. That means official military rewards and the like. The Emperor was watching this fiasco, and while we havent talked, word from the court is that he is quite happy with the conclusion of this mission.

Hearing that, Matt had to ask, Cant he just circumvent this entire trial by winding back the clock and seeing whos guilty and who isn't? Seeing Frederic open his mouth, Matt continued, I know the imperial bylaws, but Justinian cant handle something like this so soon.

Frederic waved off into the distance. Beyond the fact not even the Emperors word alone is sufficient to convict someone, let alone a noble, his time is valuable, Quill. To make a trip all the way out here and spend the effort to look back five hundred years is more than even I can ask of him, not with war looming on the horizon. What few post-cognition abilities I have access to will be leveraged, but they are far from infallible. Mr. Millers testimony is crucial for a speedy trial. He stated when he was lucid that he wanted to get this over as quickly as possible, and while we will make all possible allowances for him, we will proceed with his initial request.

Matt just nodded. He didnt like it, but he couldn't force Justinian to change his mind.

Liz asked, How do you think this is going to play out?

I know exactly how this will play out, sadly. I want this over and done with as well, but we must go through the motions. Linda is seemingly going to fall on her sword and plead guilty, while stating that she was one of the only ones who knew the full truth. That will mostly keep her son out of the crossfire. He's still being charged with smuggling, but the death penalty isn't on the table for that, which is all she really cares about. The entire family will lose the title and land, but that's small reparations to pay. The real issue is Ilkor. Linda is insisting that he personally knew everything and was taking a cut to not intervene. Hes stating that he was simply taking bribes to not look too closely at her.

Frederic sighed, and Matt saw how weary he looked. Which, sadly, is in character for Ilkor. Hes always been willing to turn a blind eye as long as things arent pushing the line too far. If I can find evidence that he was involved, Im going to hang him out to dry and strip him of his titles and lands, but it seems unlikely.

They chatted for a little while longer, but in the end, none of them could change the upcoming events.

The questioning was, as stated, thorough and exhausting.

Quill was asked a million questions about the event. From why they didnt just ask to enter the estate, to why he punched down when attacking the trapped Tier 15s when drawing out Linda.

That one was at least an easy response. Combat proficiency had no bearing upon whether or not a given incident counted as punching down, legally speaking. Quill wasnt entirely certain how combat prowess could be measured outside of Tiers, and asked just that, but the lawyer just changed the topic instead of answering.

After a while, the lawyer did return to addressing his combat strength, but this time by insinuating that Quill either wasnt truly a Tier 15, or had the backing of someone high Tier enough to supply his talismans.

Quill had to keep himself from laughing in the mans face. He was a Pather with a manager, arguably the manager. The idea that he was capable of subverting the rules of the Path directly underneath Lunas nose went clear past absurd and into utterly laughable. He didnt even need to say it, as the opposing lawyer beat him to it.

Despite that, he was still questioned relentlessly.

Not all of the pointed questions were from Lindas lawyers. Some were from Ilkors, and others were from the prosecution. The latter were even more exhaustive in their questioning than everyone else, as they were trying to cover all of their bases before they let him go, but they were at least gentler in how they framed their questions.

Torchs own questioning went about the same way, but Justinians was much rougher from what Quill could tell as he watched the recordings they were provided.

Despite the lawyers on all sides being far kinder in their questioning, the absence of his therapist and accompanying calm he provided simply was too much. Justinian broke down on multiple occasions, and needed several recesses before they could continue. Sometimes, it was when they were asking him to recount the worst of the times, like when they took away all of the amenities he had earned and tortured him with the sight of his revoked privileges through the confines of a glass cage . He broke another time when he was being questioned about the first few years of his captivity, and yet again when he described a time when they wouldnt give him mashed potatoes without gravy. Despite behaving for years by that point, refraining from giving them any trouble and them treating him generally well in return, they kept failing on that simple request. Even just the memory enraged him and sent him spiraling.

One of the attorneys on the prosecution side had to be asked to leave after she accidentally let slip that Justinians parents had died several hundred years ago, which delayed everything by a full day, as he was immediately teleported to the therapist. Justinian had apparently been told by the Gerbles that his parents had died, but he was fully aware that they were willing to lie to him in order to punish him.

In general, his education seemed shoddy, not that Matt was too involved in exploring the particulars. Naturally, the Gerbles had never informed him that it was possible for any cultivator to commit suicide by detonating their cores, and that the immortality of a Tier 15 wasnt mandatory, but despite that, he seemed in no rush to figure out his Concept.

While all the lawyers kept up their flat expressions during the questioning, Matt and Liz hung around just outside to give Justinian some much-needed moral support during his breaks. None of the lawyers seemed pleased with the stories they were hearing, but they maintained a truly impressive level of professionalism throughout it all.

It took almost a week of questioning to get through the five hundred years of captivity, and Justinian was a wreck for another two weeks afterwards. He seemed to have held himself together as best as he could through sheer force of will, but when it was done, he collapsed in on himself. The emotional toll of recounting everything having hit him all at once.

Thankfully the Empire, or rather Frederic, had an expensive therapist available full-time for Justinian, and the fatherly, older-looking man seemed to be a beacon for him.

Matt and Liz stuck around for another week after that, but Justinian was in good hands, and had plans to travel throughout the Empire for a couple of years with his therapist. Justinian felt that he needed to get away, and exploration was all he had thought about in his captivity. The therapist agreed it could be good for him, and was willing to travel with him as a friendly ear and protector, as Matt suspected. There was no way the man wasn't at least a Tier 35, no matter how he presented himself as a run of the mill older gentleman.

Both of them gave Justinian a way to contact them, and made sure he understood that while they might not be in a position to respond right away, they would get back to him. That seemed to settle him a little, but Matt still worried for the man. He knew he couldn't babysit him forever, but he really hoped that Justinian would recover fully in due time. He had been through enough.

They, meanwhile, needed to physically recover, and Luna wouldn't let them just do anything while on a healing cooldown.

You did well in that mission, especially in how you didn't break the masks. Looking at Matt, she nodded. I half expected you to do so when Linda went all out. Your planning and preparation weren't perfect, but you two did well for running the operation essentially solo. Stuffing Liz in your chest was a smart play, but not needed if you had better analyzed the wards. There was a gap in the wards on the North-western side that Liz could have slipped through, using the tools you had at hand. Though in fairness, it might have taken an unduly long time to find it. Your use of unstructured blood magic was good, Liz, but you should have moved your position more often. You stayed stationary too long several times, and would have struggled to get hidden quickly enough if things had gone a little different. I would have done the mission by

Their debriefing lasted almost a full day as they flew in Matts chaotic spaceship to an otherwise undisclosed location.

Along the way, Liz began to molt. Shed assembled a nest made of coals for herself, transformed into her phoenix form, and spread herself over the glowing cinders. She looked rightly miserable, though she reassured Matt that she was fine, coughing up clouds of cinders as her flames slowly died down and her body began to turn gray.

Liz slept most of the rest of the way to the planet, but was mostly awake when they arrived. In her brief moments of wakefulness she was more like a wet and grumpy cat than a bird, which he thought was adorable, but he was smart enough to keep that observation to himself until she was feeling better. He had kept a close eye on her during their trip, fascinated by the molting process. He watched as various parts of her plumage, and then limbs, turned into ash and flaked away, revealing healthy flesh beneath.

When they arrived at the new planet, Matt had expected Luna to send them into low Tier rifts, but instead, they arrived in an uninhabited low Tier system, leaving both of them confused.

Once they orbited around the planet Luna gestured below them. This is your project for while you recover.

Matt looked down at the planet sized brown ball of dirt and shot Luna a raised eyebrow.

This world is fated to be a new training planet, and it is your duty to perform some of the base terraforming. Once you leave, more people will come in to finish it, but I want you to use this time to practice your large-scale magic. Mass-area manipulation flexes your skills in different ways, and this is one of the few activities outside of combat where you could feasibly utilize all of your mana on a single task. You are to create a single earth aura rift, hidden somewhere appropriate, and establish other rifts to match whatever you wish, but ideally in a naturalistic-seeming way. You have two years.

Liz raised a finger in question. Can we absorb the essence stones we won from the academies?

At Lunas agreement, they moved on to what terraforming actually entailed, and how best to tackle the project they were given, which wasnt as easy as it seemed. Thankfully, Matt wouldnt be working alone; Luna expected Liz to help and get her own practice with large-scale manipulations, even if she was more limited in mana reserves than Matt.

That forced them to take a crash course on terraforming. While most new worlds were low-Tier planets found drifting through chaotic space, some were made more or less from scratch, especially when there was a specific goal in mind. The general process, from what Matt understood, was:

Step 1: Get a ball of rock by finding a planet in the outer reaches of the system, condensing an asteroid belt, pulling a planet from a Tier 40 rift or higher, or simply making a planet using the relevant [Create] spells.

Step 2: Jump start the molten core.

Now that he was maximally using his resources, Matt turned back to his book. Even offloading making air onto his [AI], multitasking like this slowed down his reading. It was faster training overall, certainly, just more mentally taxing.

That was Luna, though. She could smell inefficient training from a million miles away.

***

Two months later, there a whisper-thin atmosphere was finally beginning to accumulate near Matts biosphere, though as it slowly dispersed across the planet it would become even more intangible. He was reaching the limits of what he could feasibly learn from just running [Create Air] at full tilt, and had come across an interesting enchanting project that was still within the scope of his current job, even if it was slightly unorthodox in this scenario.

There were a decent number of asteroids in the system, probably the remnants of some ancient moon, but very few were of any appreciable size. Liz had been working on some of the bigger ones, mostly in using [Earth Manipulation] to extract specific compounds from the rock for their uses in alchemy, but she had also purified some appreciable amounts of metals. The problem was, she didnt have a great method of moving masses of metal and rock the size of a small mountain. At least, not quickly.

Hed had his curiosity piqued by the enchanting involved in terraforming mover drones, long distance haulers that used gravity enchantments to move huge quantities of ice, stone, or other materials around a solar system. It was usually for when a moon had to be broken up into raw materials and added to a planet, but they would function perfectly well for him here, as well as give him a new angle to learn on this job. Also, there may have been a slight ulterior motive involved.

The next time Liz, finally back to human form, returned to the planet, he filled her in on his idea, and she agreed. It seems like youll need some additional supplies for this. There are some big rechargeable mana stones in the orbiting supply cache, but most of the rest isnt on hand. I could grab some from the Ryaga system, it looks like. Two weeks round trip, and I can even restock our food. Stupid cat, not telling us that we wouldnt be able to refill our eggs. Or milk. Is there anything else we need?

Chocolate. Matt resisted letting his smile slip out as he said it.

Hey, you said it, not me. But Ill add it to the list. I need to let the asteroids do their thing for a couple weeks anyway. Ill head out tomorrow, restock our pantry for the next year, and maybe grab you a pastry or two. Ryagas supposed to have some good bakeries..

Sounds like a plan. While youre gone Ill try to twiddle my thumbs slightly less than I usually do, and fruitlessly yearn for you to come back. He turned to look at Luna, lounging in a sunbeam in her cat form. Luna will miss you terribly, too. She just doesnt show it as well.

While he waited for his supplies, Matt changed up his work by mulching rocks with [Earth Manipulation], flying over swathes of land and turning massive, monotonous plains of rock into valleys and hills, into boulders, sand, and dust. Once the atmosphere was in better shape, the next crew would be seeding bacteria and lichen to get the soil-making process started, and having a bit of variety helped there.

He agreed with the Emperor, it was good, honest work. Best of all, it helped with his mana control.

Luna only moved to stay in her sunbeam and out of the dust clouds that floated around.

When Liz got back, Luna lifted her head to briefly glance at her. As Matt was hugging her, a small, gutted fish floated out of Lizs bag and towards Luna. A flash of movement was all they got, as their manager ate the fish in a single bite and returned to her nap.

Though inefficient, Matt set his AI to a combination of [Create Air] and [Air Manipulation] to direct a torrent of wind outside of his biosphere as he set up his enchanting bench. The mana loss of running it through his AI was, naturally far more than offset by the enchanting gains hed get from being able to work with his full attention on his project.

After that, he went to work.

Though his grasp of combat-related Tier 15 runes was slowly solidifying, gravity-manipulation runes were not in his limited library. Like all runes of his Tier, calling any enchantment a single rune was a severe oversimplification. It was more a complete language dedicated to a single effect, with its own unique interactions and syntax, interactions, and points of interference. It took him a solid week before he even had a trivial enchantment created, after burning through a lot of his raw materials, and that was by all metrics fast. His mana budget, or lack thereof, helped there, but he was still hoping he could have gotten something useful faster.

With a basic understanding of gravity runes achieved, Matt diverted about a thousand mana per second to his AI to translate the schematics and formations he had access to into something workable at his current skill level. It took a few iterations, but after about a month hed gotten a design that he could make, would serve his objectives, and could be made with his remaining materials.

What he settled on ended up looking something like a beetle, with a glossy black main body the size of a taxi, and with six appendages for detail work and directing the gravity fields for thrust. Not his finest work, and he had messed up his first two attempts so badly that they werent salvageable. But after a months worth of prototypes, he had a squadron of six drones ready to do his bidding.

He had to complete the assembly in orbit, though. Ironically for a device made to manipulate gravity, making them outside of freefall would cause several of the runes to malfunction and generally make the physical construction of the devices much finickier. It did make installing the power cores a lot easier, at least, as the ten-million mana stones he was utilizing for a battery were stored in the orbital terraforming cache.

As the last of the hauler beetles hummed into action, Matt almost felt a bit melancholic. Gravity magic was fun, and while intensely irritating at first, the interplay between each rune in the entire formation had grown on him over time. He almost wished he could justify another project utilizing them at the moment, but he simply didnt have any other experiments to tinker with now.

The hauler drones took off to the outer solar system, with most of them heading to the ice giants lagrange points, and Matt watched them go until they faded from sight. His drones would be moving asteroids into orbit around the planet for the next few months, and for the first hour, he was obsessively checking in on them to make sure everything was working as intended. Most of that was thanks to the logic cores he had just copied from the available sources, or hed have spent decades working out bugs.

Just as he was turning to head back down to the planet, he saw Luna floating alongside him. Not quite what I expected, though its good, worthwhile work. Still a little rough around the edges, but you were improving your technique with each iteration. Im glad to see you branching out a little into areas where throwing mana at the problem doesnt give you as large of an edge.

I already have a few ideas for how to improve them. I could squeeze another seven percent efficiency out of the propulsion alone. Matt sighed, checking the readout his [AI] had given him.

Thats the bane of craftsmen everywhere, Matt. If you get to the end of a big project and find that youre totally happy with the final product, then you didnt learn anything along the way and it's time to move on.

Turning back to the planet, he pinged his wife and saw that she was carving out paths for rivers. It seemed fun enough, and he needed something to do while asteroids were herded around the solar system. And if he could work on the range of his Concept, all the better.

They took their time with it and had fun carving little valleys and nooks where streams could flow and animals could retreat into. They created caves that would be hidden if the giant lake beds they created worked as intended to form hidden waterfalls. They even created an entire tunnel system under a pre-existing mountain range for the fun of it. It would remain to be seen how much would survive the rest of their terraforming, but it was good practice and good fun if nothing else.

Four months later, Matt was hovering in a gorge he had made, letting a veritable river of water and air stream from his hands.

It was meditation week, and he hadnt moved a muscle in four days.

Luna had probably known from the start, but there was a resonance between his Concept and the task of letting his endless mana flow into the creation of what would eventually become a life-bearing world. Focusing on that feeling helped with Concept development, and he needed all the development he could get in preparation for his Intent, letting himself sink into daydreams and rabbit holes as his mind meandered.

In the area where he was spewing out air, the air pressure was high enough that the water actually remained liquid until it hit the ground, giving him a nice low rumble to help him focus.

It was infinitely better than pure silence, which always seemed to turn oppressive.

A ping from the satellites interrupted him, but it was worth it. Slowly unwinding from his meditation position, he brought out his flying sword and started heading to where Liz and their house were.

He found her sitting with her eyes closed, concentrating over a cauldron of blood which she would occasionally bring out a dash of some ingredient or other to throw in. Matt decided it wasnt a big priority to get going right now, so he went to make a pot of tea, then sat in a chair to the side of her crafting room to watch Liz work.

Matts knowledge of potions was decent, for someone who didnt specialize in the field, but Liz was actually good at it by all accounts, and it was slightly mesmerizing to watch her work. The blood in the cauldron would boil for a second after she threw in a pinch of aluminum powder, and go briefly clear when she pulled out some leaf from her garden orb and tossed it in. Then she would use [Pressurize] to let some sort of reaction happen under high pressure, all the while she was casting her analysis spells to measure whatever changes she was making. Once the blood had settled down and turned an off shade of red, she levitated it out of the cauldron and fed it into the bracelet Matt had made to give her easy access to her veins without cutting her skin.

Potions were a core part of Lizs melee fighting, and it took serious work to not only continue to advance while under Path time constraints, but to do so while utilizing a branch of potioncraft that wasnt well established with millions of years of information backing it.

After letting her spend a few minutes to check whether her latest experiment had worked, Liz pulled out a notebook, wrote something down, and opened her eyes. The moment she did so, Matt thrust a mug of hot tea into her hands, which she happily accepted, and he finally got to talk about the thing he had come here for.

Want to go throw rocks at the ground?

Soon after, they were in orbit, with Matt on his flying sword and Liz sitting side saddle on her flying spear. Hed been back up here a few times since his drones had set out, just to refill them on mana between trips, but now, he actually got to reap the fruits of his labor.

The goal: throw asteroids at the planet to sculpt the landscape, and do it without ruining any of their previous work.

Planets were big, and this one hadnt ever had oceans to sculpt its surface. The interior of the planet was heating back up, slowly, but as a mostly solid mass, it didnt even have continental plates. The intended maps for the planet included lots of changes to the landscape, and large areas needed to be carved out for oceans and seas.

Throwing asteroids at the planet could allow them to make huge divots on the surface of the world with very little effort, and would be quite a bit more fun compared to doing so manually.

For the next three days, Matt and Liz had a blast flying between the clusters of asteroids that Matts drones had deposited in orbit, then slowing them down enough that they would fall and create enormous craters on impact, but not crack the planet. They limited themselves to mile-wide asteroids at a time, as they didnt want to blast too much of the water and air they had made into space, but it was great fun to watch the huge rocks fall and create lakes of lava and huge clouds of debris.

Most of the time, they made a game of it by trying to aim the asteroids manually, with no AI assistance, and still hit their targets. Matt had an easier time eyeballing the trajectories and actually moving the asteroids, but Liz had better mana control, so in the end, he only barely edged her out on the scoring system they had come up with.

After they ran out of asteroids to use, they just sat there while the planet rotated beneath them, watching the glowing lakes of cooling lava spin past them. The work was far from done, they wouldnt even see most of it, but they had made their mark on the planet. Matt just imagined what the new inland sea would look like once the craters were filled with water and life.

Matt collected his drones, returned the rechargeable mana stones to the supply cache, then went down to meet Liz at the edge of the nearest lava lake to their house.

Together, they set up a little picnic spot where they could breathe and talk normally, and ate a light lunch that they roasted over the edge of the lava patch. Sausages, toasted bread, and a dessert of smores browned to perfection.

For the next week, they went around to the craters, smoothing out patches where they werent quite as precise on their impact placement as they had wished, and shaping the ground while it was still hot enough to move easily under their magic.

Once things were mostly settled, as much as they could do in the first ten months, they started working on what Matt had been waiting for.

Aperology.