I remembered before the Gods reincarnated me in this world as their "spawn", I was a salaryman who was surviving on my mere salary. On my trip home, I got struck by lightning and died instantly. The gods told me my body was beyond repairable so they chose to reincarnate me as a baby. I became Achilles, the son of a poor farmer.
Half a century ago, when I was a young mage fresh out of apprenticeship, I did what all young kids dreamed of, I became an adventurer. Many mages like myself wanted nothing more than to get away from the stuffy towers and their endless books, and do something more productive such as lobbing fireballs at monsters.
Unlike the other reincarnated heroes who were already strong and with unique skills, I don't have any except low-level magic. I started from scratch.
Aside from that, the Gods gave me a death system which made me kill monsters. Of course, I have to go alone. It was generally agreed that solo dungeon-delving at my level of experience was reckless at best, and suicidal most of the time but I did it anyway. It must have been the Gods way to strengthen their spawn.
When that so-called system was idle, I would join a team to have some friends which I didn't have back when I was a salaryman.
They were an interesting lot. Leon was a lesser noble who'd trained as a knight, and he kept going on about honor and glory. Raina, who always gave me the creeps, was a dual dagger specialist who I suspected earned a living on the side as an assassin. Kyrian had been just recently confirmed as a priest and was already trying to stay as far away from his temple as he could, and he could snap his fingers and your hangover was gone. Finally, there was Jenna, who despite her ogre blood giving her an impressive physique, preferred to rely on her bow and arrows.
All they had in common was that they were young and happened to apply for party status at the same Adventurers' Guild chapter but the required number of members for a party at our rank was five, so it had been my arrival that allowed the creation of the team.
I was most definitely the one who helped them out, of course. Of course I would have ended up stuck without a team if they didn't happen to already be waiting for a last member.
In any case, we had clicked, and we had had a good decade of adventuring until we went our separate ways.
Leon had retired to Blackrock at my suggestion when his body finally started failing him in his fifties and began tutoring kids in swordsmanship after he realized how much he hated sitting on his ass waiting to die.
It was for that reason that I dropped Sarjay off at his house, after asking him to put him through the most brutal training regimen he could come up with. The glint in his eye and his shit-eating grin as he accepted the charge only confirmed that my trust was well placed.
We'd make a proper knight out of him, yet.
That left me with at least a whole free week while my minion underwent tortu—- Training. I meant training.
This meant one thing. I was finally able to start learning Dimension magic. The thought left me both giddy and apprehensive. I still remembered all those botched attempts from my youth, and in truth, I had been pretty badly injured the first time I attempted it.
At the same time, I was an Archmage who specialized in Summoning and Necromancy, one of the most powerful alive, who had revolutionized an entire area of magic. Even the gods had deemed me powerful enough to be a threat — surely the Dark Lord could handle a measly little Dimension magic, right?
It turned out that no, I couldn't.
I had left Blackrock accompanied by a handful of weights and found a nice secluded spot several leagues away, in a forest. It would keep me away from prying eyes, and the trees wouldn't mind the collateral damage too much.
The first attempt blew up in my face, as did the second and the third. It was evident, then, that brute-forcing it would not work. I decided a more introspective approach was needed.
The Aspect of Soul was more my specialty. It governed over things like life, memory, and most importantly right now, magic itself, since the conduit was part of the soul.
After tasking my undead with keeping watch, I sat down cross-legged on the soft grass and peered inside my own soul.
It was a familiar sight, my soul. I'd studied it many times in the past, when I was working on separating it from my body and anchoring it to something less squishy. I was possibly one of the foremost experts on matters of the soul, and despite that, all that I knew was barely a drop in the ocean that was the core of all living beings.
To an untrained eye, the soul looked much like a crystalline orb, but that was akin to looking at the sun and calling it a circle. With enough proficiency, you could peer past the surface and see the naked soul in all its glory, an entire world in and of itself, an astral tapestry of strange constructs and ciphers. Even after having spent years researching the soul, the beauty of it still overwhelmed me.
With a mental nudge, I moved my focus to the conduit.
In magical academies, the conduit is generally described as a tunnel, with one end inside the soul and the other end anchored in Unreality. Strictly speaking, this is an accurate, if incomplete,
simplification. That description falls greatly short when you're faced with the real thing.
From inside my soul, I could only see the inner end, and looking at it was already starting to give me a headache. You could look at it from any direction and you'd see the same planar rift in the fabric of the universe. Its strange geometry was never meant to be seen by mortal eyes, I believed.
I peered inside the conduit itself, so that I could see the mana as it flowed from Unreality to my soul. I was hoping that, by analyzing the entire path of mana from the source to a completed spellwork, I could see what was going on differently when I used Dimension mana compared with any other Aspect.