Staring at the floating crystal of a quest reward with Ras and Mita, I couldn’t help but glance around at the first core’s throne room and notice all the octahedrons of Aux cores and the singular pille of an Aux lodestone scattered around the place alongside the lemon chiffon first core. Stuff really had been spiralling out of control in a really weird sort of way for the past year. And now I’m about to become two more types of pinnacles of mages and probably overload the io-amber, should have made spares... I mentally muttered to myself before Arch commented from the back of my head,

“Everything is ready, you all can use the crystal now.”

“Thanks, Arch,” commented Ras with a sigh of relief, obviously ready to get this over with but also a bit hesitant… which probably was a bit of emotional bleedthrough from me and Mita at this point. We had spent the past four days getting everything ready so that while Sous, Umi, and Terrin were on standby if anything bad happened, Draceld, Louella, Alexander-Harper, and Harper-Alexander would be overseeing the soft openings of our new resorts: the Goldleaf in Sweets Golden, the Bourbon Mint in Golden Local Imports, and the Amaretto Sour in Rainbow Rope District. It was still crazy to think that my Enigma was going to have ten resorts… blackzones were serious cheats when it comes to construction work and human resources… Not to mention defenses: Alexander-Harper and Harper-Alexander did finally manage to make their upper tower women, opera cake singers and colourful shortcake misses, and their four-head raid boss dragon, the Great Four-Coloured Dragon.

“So we’re seriously going to do this? Get a Grand Key just like that?” asked Mita as he fiddled with his layer-woven wampum belts, sentient things of mana that served as the herit crest’s summons rolling off of them.

“Yup, and if it’s like the last three I got, it’s going to hurt like hell when it gets inscribed,” I answered, awkwardly scratching the back of my head and feeling both Surcia-Robert and Driscoll getting ready to mitigate whatever was about to happen from my expanse of blackness.

“You think we’re going to pass out?”

“I don’t know, maybe? You and I are going to be getting two race advancements for sure and I have no clue if the protections we got are going to work.” And it’s not like we could get medicine or something for this cause getting a Grand Magus-grade mandala forcibly inscribed in pretty much one go was brutal and way too varied to concoct some treatment for, or at least that’s what Dr. Van Heime told me.

“Well, we probably shouldn’t just keep sit around cause we’re going to have to use it sooner or later,” pointed out Ras as I shifted in my seat, feeling my skin tight summoning of a replica over my real body pulse slightly: he was right, the floating crystal was literally calling out to us. If we kept waiting one of us was probably going to cave in and activate it. 

“Ras is right, it is best you do it now,” agreed Rom from behind me as she petted Sugar and Spice with Beath while Daisy and Tirel watched us from further back, the six of them fully exploiting the fact I was practicing my summoning to watch this. Sighing, I mentally agreed and went to touch the floating crystal once I felt everyone was sort of ready.

The feeling of lancing pain as over a dozen mandalas were suddenly inscribed followed by a nauseating and euphoric rush of mana as I felt my tier get raised and I ended up gaining even more uninscribed extra slot mandalas. Stumbling as my replica, Tirel, and both Sugar and Spice were suddenly dispelled, I felt my connection to Ras and Mita become stronger than my ones to Daphne and Lucilla as a new connection was forged to a god from the Flasaporium hub, Frisylt. Trying to ground myself, I focused on my connections to others and ended up noticing my connection to the divergent distortion side of my Enigma was stronger: my newfound spirit king nature already manifesting. And below all of that I could feel the original me, my actual primary sapiance that I was connected to and subconsciously regulating, writhing from the mass inscribing even with all mitigation going on.

“Okay… that was really disorienting… but atleast I’m not screaming in pain this time,” I muttered to no one in particular, blinking a bit to get some lights out of my eyes and staring out into my expanse of blackness and seeing that all my connections were… thicker? Holy shit, are they retaining mana? I wondered in a bit of shock as I felt their flow of mana: guess I had a new thing of innate magic from the looks of it.

“Yeah, they have their own mana reserves now. And our phylactery is completely shattered,” answered Surcia-Robert from his corner, his mass of sugar elementals body glowing as potently as the dark flames that covered Driscoll’s long oily black hair.

“Crap, you’re kidding me.”

“What did you inspect? All three of you just inscribed a mirroring Grand Key with it in its mandala formula. It broke keeping you all from going into comas.”

“Oh…”

“I’ll get to work on repairing it, you two should check up on Ras and Mita,” interrupted Driscoll, already getting to work on mending the phylactery with some complex spellcraft. Grumbling under his breath, Surcia-Robert quickly left my expanse of blackness while I went to use my Candied Eyes of the Divergent Distortion and Contracted Cake-Eye-Balls to see what was going on.

“Well that was interesting,” chimed Daisy as Beath and Rom went to prop up my real body. Focusing on the child-sized magecraft spirit with clockwork jewelry and andrygonous android of an asset through my summons and ethereal vision, I found myself woozy and strained from my chronophasia, PMF, and ABS all flared up at once: if I could actually move my real body, I probably would have been vomiting right now. Shit, too much at once.

“Let me help you with that,” commented Sal and they and Arch went to managing my spirits and summons while Sous went to helping control my ethereal vision a tiny bit, following up,

“You need to be more careful with managing your ingredients.”

“Have you seen my so-called ingredients lately? Especially all the cursed ones?” I shot back with a frustrated sigh, letting my trio of system assistants manage my spells while I tried to cope with how shitty I was feeling.

“You guys okay?” asked Ras as he shook his head a bit in confusion.

“Feeling like shit, but alive,” I replied over our telepathic connection, my cake-eye-balls flitting around in their own annoying bout of confusion: I was literally so mana-drunk in a bad way that it was affecting them.

“I mean you are… tier 5.1 now… you’re completely not acclimated to your tier. Not to mention you’re now enough types of pinnacles of mages to counteract your lowered effective tier.”

“You’re telling me.” My level of acclimation was probably two full tiers off at best and right now I was sitting next to two people where both about a full tier off themselves with a series of connections to them running on full blast: it was painfully embarrassing and getting a trickle feed of Ras’s knowledge about wasn’t helping. “So I’m tier 5.1 now, you’re tier 4.4, and Mita is tier 3.9.”

“Yeah, that feel’s about right. Also jesus christ Robert, you feel like a hangover,” piped up Mita, working his way through his own thing of mana-drunkenness. 

With the inscribing out of the way, the three of us decided that it would be best to call it a day and try to relax. Taking my time while my real body was set up on my penthouse’s bed, I went to idlily looking at my new Grand Key, Three Founders of Historia Pastoria Sweets. Looking over it’s mandala formula I saw that from me, the three of us were getting race advancements as Vox Reborns and Descended Architects plus potioneering based off that, Ras’s side made us spirit kings and gave us his Bow of Glyiria, Mita’s side improved Arch and gave us his new herald-busting herit crest, and collectively we had Rom, Surcia-Robert, my spirit contract, and phylactery along with the general mirroring stuff.

“We’re going to need to do a lot of preparation to be able to make use of this latest Grand Key,” commented Driscoll as I stared at his handiwork of repairing the curcumedioia-style phylactery. Why the hell did it have to break now of all times? We still had to deal with that insane quest and I have an entire multi-system slot dedicated to using it! 

“I know, I know, you don’t have to remind me how annoying this all is,” I sighed, circulating mana with some techniques that Daphne and Lucilla taught me to help with all my manalogical maladies.

“You’re, we’re, a tier 5 master of a super distortion with four Grand Keys and connections to five different gods on top of being eight different types of pinnacles of mages. People would kill for our status and portfolio of mandalas.”

“And we also have a bunch of cursed mandalas, a fucked up state of existence, and I’m not a proper mage past my potion making and what I can borrow from others.”

“In Eilean Falaichte Na Nog back when I was alive that was more than enough to be considered a proper mage,” pointed out Driscoll a frown before causing a small flood of fragmented memories of his home artificial cluster, mostly of learning the basics of magic and all the various types of spirits used. Shaking my head, I didn’t bother to respond to that because frustratingly I knew he was right. I am a proper mage in the most backwards roundabout way possible, all I really need at this point is a spelled bachelor’s or master’s… or twiced-spelled master’s I guess, I thought to myself pausing realizing there probably was no way in hell I could reasonably go back to college a time soon with all the stuff going on with my Enigma. Although honestly I’d rather just call myself a potioneer and leave it at that.

“Perhaps you should test out your new potion making skills to see how much of a proper mage you are?” suddenly interrupted Sal out of the blue, sensing my boredom as I continued to watch Driscoll work. “Another wave of plague clouds is hitting Sugar Hills and the apothecaries could use some support.” More plague clouds already? We just had some yesterday. Quickly shifting my ethereal vision to the top of Rainbow Rope’s Caketopia, I saw the disgustingly coloured clouds rolling over my Enigma and sensing the negatively-charged elemental luck and manalogical forces of karma inside them along with that I’m pretty damn sure was dimensional miasma. 

“Yeah, let’s do some potioneering to get my mind off things,” I replied to my system assistant as I drew on my three-in-one connection to my Enigma to conjure a replica of myself. Shifting my consciousness into the replica before a secondary consciousness could kick in, I paused and noted that my spirit form had two more masks on it: a blindfolded one with basic crown-like protrusions for Ras and one with simplistic pictures of an eagle, a fish, and a bear replacings its eyes and mouth for Mita. Just another thing for me to have to test out later… but first, potions and relaxation.