Chapter 77 An Awe Inspiring Show.

  Isaac had barely let Lenna, Sir Solomon, and the prisoners leave before he decided to push how much mana he could give Shamesh. It wasn’t that his wife was distracting, but rather that the less of an audience that he had, the better his performance would be. “You’ll keep getting more and more dark mana until you can no longer handle the imbalance, at that point just say so and you will start getting less.” Isaac instructed his physical shadow. His wording had been very awkward but incredibly precise. He didn’t want his words to mess with whatever mental state Shamesh was in which was what resulted in such an awkward explanation.

  ‘Understood.’ Shamesh sent back. His focus was honed in as much as it could be as he felt the incoming dark mana steadily increase in volume. As more and more dark mana diluted the rest of his mana, Shamesh felt his control start to waver slightly. A moment afterwards he felt a pressure building inside of his ribcage. It felt like water trying to force its way through a dam’s sluiceway but the water level on the other side of the dam just kept rising. He wasn’t quite at the point where it would start forcing its way out the top but if things continued how they were, it wouldn’t be much longer. ‘Too much!’ Shamesh sent Isaac in a panic. It had only taken a breath’s length of time to go from ‘sketchy but doable’ to ‘I might actually explode’.

  Isaac dialed back the power that Shamesh was receiving almost completely until his physical shadow was able to rebalance his mana reservoir. Once Shamesh was ready, Isaac started ramping up how much mana was being transferred again. “Let me know before it gets to be too much.” Isaac instructed him. “About what percentage was the ratio of the dark mana to everything else when it got to be too much?”

  ‘Thirty-seventy.’ Shamesh replied.

  “That is better than I expected but not as good as I would’ve liked. It is a great point to start from though. Once you get used to twenty eight to seventy two, we can start incrementally increasing it as you get used to it. Who knows, maybe this will be useful sometime in the future.” Isaac instructed him.

  ‘Okay, I will try to do better.’ Shamesh sent him back.

  Isaac shook his head. “It’s alright to not be perfect every time.” He consoled the much younger mage. “Perfection is what we strive for, not where we start. This is just like when you learned to speak. You will get used to it soon enough.”

  Isaac felt the link between them grow warm and then firm as Shamesh’s emotions transferred up the connection entirely unbidden. ‘Yes.’ Shamesh replied. ‘Ever forwards.’

  Isaac chuckled. “I don’t know where you heard that, but yes, ‘ever forwards.’”

  Isaac and Shamesh had been at it for another half an hour, and moved the percentage of black mana to everything else back up to thirty percent. With black mana usually taking up around eleven percent of a wizard’s total mana, this only really managed to shorten the time it would take him to break the attunement to around three and a half hours in total with an hour of it already finished. It was at that time that Alexander took a deep breath and opened his eyes. “Where is everyone?” He asked and turned to see Isaac and Shamesh. Isaac was sitting in a chair behind Shamesh with his elbows on his knees and his eyes closed. He had a perfectly neutral expression on his face and it did not suit him at all. The image that Alexander had in his head of Isaac was anything but a still pond in a hurricane like his expression suggested. He involuntarily gulped at what appeared to be Isaac in a state of silence before a sudden and very violent storm.

  “They left. The prisoners are being locked up and the wounded are being taken to a healer.” Isaac informed Alexander calmly. Little did Alexander know, but Isaac was struggling with almost every fiber of his being to stay on task. Isaac could only sit still if he had something to entertain him while he did so. Usually, that would be a book but Isaac didn’t trust himself enough to be able to maintain perfect control over the outgoing mana flow while reading.

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  “I see.” Alexander replied while he tried to keep any and all worry from his voice. “Did something happen while I was deep in meditation?”

  “No.” Isaac said without even shaking his head. He took a deep breath and then pulsed death flames through his entire body in an attempt to remove the exhaustion of fighting his own wandering mind for so long. If he could have seen Alexander then he would have noticed all of the color drain from the young wizard’s face. “This is just more difficult to maintain than I expected.”

  Alexander took a moment to try and figure out what Isaac was doing. He closed his own eyes and felt for the mana around them. He felt an odd shift in the mana in three specific directions. One of the directions was obviously Isaac, as Isaac only took in dark mana and nothing else, the other two were nearby but he hadn’t noticed them. He opened his eyes again and searched where he had felt the odd disturbances. His eyes went wide as he noticed the animated shadows shifting around just a few feet from Isaac and himself.

  “Those shadows… are you actively controlling them?” Alexander wondered. If that was the case then he had a follow-up question. He really wanted to know how Isaac was controlling mana without a connection to himself. As he thought back, Alexander vaguely remembered feeling words of power echo off of his core as he was deep in meditation.

  “No. I did make them though.” Isaac informed him. “Don’t worry about what I’m doing.” He added right as Alexander was about to open his mouth to ask that very question. “Keep an eye on the sky for me, would you. If you notice the weather starting to change abruptly, let me know.”

  Alexander nodded absently as he looked up through the greenhouse’s glass roof to see nothing but starlight. “I can do that.” He agreed. “Did Lady L’Vore go with the others?”

  “No. She told us to contact her once Shamesh was done breaking the attunement on the crystal.” Isaac explained. “Now that you’re caught up to the immediate happenings, I have some other news for you.”

  “Oh?” Alexander wondered. He had no idea what kind of news Isaac would have specifically for him.

  “Tell Sera that she needs to talk to Arthur. I am sure you will be the one to facilitate that so you can learn about the drama that way.” Isaac began. “Next, we- shit-” Isaac cut himself off with a swear as the amount of mana he was feeding to Shamesh started to drift. Alexander was thankfully silent as Isaac’s brows furrowed in concentration for a long few moments as he and Shamesh found the sweet spot again. “We have some of those items that you were looking for. Let me focus.”

  Alexander was about to reply but immediately shut himself up as soon as Isaac had ordered him to keep quiet. He waited patiently as Isaac’s hand started to move off to the side. The maybe-a-demigod-eventually didn’t even bother hiding his Inventory as he pulled item after item out of mid air and dropped them on the ground. It was clear from the sudden bout of sweat on his brows that doing whatever he was doing, while pulling magical objects out of thin air, was taking its mental toll.

  Once Isaac was done dropping all of the items on the ground, his elbow returned to his knee and he took another deep and focusing breath. “Okay, there.” He said more to himself than to Alexander. “Now, we are investigating an organization that has been distributing them.”

  “Shamesh had informed me about the Magus Yarra, Marquess Flynn, and Marchioness Beatrix being taken into custody but this is the first I’ve heard about this organization.” Alexander replied and sat up a bit straighter.

  “From what I can tell, only whoever gets the items from the creator actually knows anything about them. We have no idea who that person may be, however, for all we know, they could already be dead.” Isaac continued. “The lord’s sister had an automatic teleportation bracelet that triggered from the phrase: ‘I’m going to die’ or something like that. Anyway, this whole city is a mess and in bed with the CSC, the organization I mentioned. Add on top of that, there is a moderately high chance that the CSC has some ties to a green dragon and well, yeah, we get here.”

  Alexander’s head was reeling as he tried to process everything that Isaac had said, the complications, and the implications. As he leaned back onto his hands to help him think, his eyes naturally drifted up towards the ceiling and the predawn sky above it. He watched as clouds started to blot out the stars one by one for a long moment before he remembered what Isaac had told him. “Um, Lord Darkness, clouds are forming in oddly regular patterns above us… wait, I recognize this effect. Someone is controlling the weather, but not just anyone, someone with an incredible amount of understanding of the unseen forces at work. It is happening far too fast for someone to be letting the spell do all of the work for them.”

  “Shamesh, let’s take a break. I want to see this.” Isaac told his physical shadow and let their connection return to its default state. Isaac stood up and stretched. “Begone.” He ordered the two shadows that were standing guard. He was tired of the lowered mana regeneration rate. “Let’s go outside and get a good look at the Thundering Blizzard at work. I am sure it is bound to be an awe inspiring show.”