I’d waited patiently as long as I could, but he never came back. I grabbed a few worms and tried to remake that demon I’d killed, but had no luck with that. I had no idea where the exoskeleton and mouth had come from. All I could do was make them bigger by feeding them mana. I also acquired a moth, bat, and some ants. Then the wildlife learned to avoid my cave.

I devolved into listlessly expanding my Domain. I made looping corridors that led to huge jungles by acquiring the roots of trees and other plants. Then I tried unevenly distributing mana over several levels of my Domain as Senz had recommended, so I could train Awoken.

It was hard to see the point by then. I fell into a state of torpor and just sort of … stopped. I collapsed the entrances to the rest of my Domain and brought all the mana in around my soulstone. The ants I’d summoned were still fighting, but I couldn’t bring myself to acquire the winner and erase the rest. Instead, I just looped my mana around and around and around for a long, long time. Things were happening within my vision, but I cared so little that none of it stayed in my memory.

Then I saw a human. She’d come alone, and was completely unfamiliar, not that I expected otherwise. It had been too long now to expect anyone I’d known to have survived outside. Maybe that was what had happened to Chennai. Maybe he’d just died.

But wait, she was saying something.

“…let me learn magic, I’ll do anything you want.”

Well, that was the arrangement. Maybe I’d do it. I just felt so tired though. I wanted to lose myself in the streams of mana again. I felt a strange sense of … panic, as I considered the idea. It wouldn’t hurt to just set up some frogs or something like I’d originally planned. I couldn’t talk, but she’d probably get the clue.

“Well, I didn’t really think it would be that easy,” she muttered. She was circling away from the ants that were advancing toward her. The—

Ants?

I had forgotten to dissolve them when I’d first gone to sleep. They’d grown bigger. The smallest was the size of a cat, and they all had thick exoskeletons and sharp mandibles. They spread out in a formation to catch the girl who’d come in. She had a spear that channeled mana, but against the ant army, there was no way she’d survive.

Tendrils of mana stretched between each ant. I peeked at them and discovered crude thought enclosed in each one. The ants didn’t just communicate, they communicated with telepathy. There was a big black and purple one who most of the tendrils stretched to and from, and I gathered that one was the leader. It was the most intelligent. The ants had changed a lot. They were about on par with dumb people.

I was suddenly very averse to wiping them out of existence. Still, I had my purpose. I couldn’t just let them kill her. Instead of killing all the ants, I dissolved a bunch of walls and swept my Domain through the old tunnels and cave systems. I had to clear away cave-ins and trim some of the forest growth so that my mana could freely circulate, but I soon had an enormous amount of space under my control, probably more than even the palace. A little searching around the area of my soulstone and I discovered the hidden tunnels and the hive where my ants now lived and duplicated them into one of the deepest forested caves. There wasn’t any light down there since the only way I could create any was by flaring my mana, but they were ants. They’d live. Then I sort of shoved the ants into my mana until the flow carried them where I wanted. Then I put them down and tried to do the same thing with my soulstone to put it at the very bottom of my Domain.

My vision shattered into million identical versions of me, one inside the other in a stack that would be infinite if I didn’t abandon—

I yanked the external mana away from my soulstone.

That wasn’t going to work.

“Uh, thanks. So, what do I do to learn magic? Just sit near the stone?” the girl said.

I really needed to learn how to talk. Just in case she could read, I formed a piece of paper in front of her with ‘Name?’ on it. She frowned and shook her head.

“I can’t read this.”

That figured. I knew the basic idea of how to Awaken someone, but I’d never actually done it before. I’d have to create a bunch of trials and hope my fumbling about didn’t kill her. I had no idea when another person would find me. Well, the first requirement to Awaken was mana. But only a certain amount. I’d adjusted an area around Senz and she’d told me what felt right for each stage of Awakening, and I now had a good idea of how much was too much or too little. For someone who hadn’t Awakened at all, what was in the chamber was way too much. I couldn’t just lower the amount of mana here though, not without abandoning the lower parts of my Domain. There was a minimum amount of mana that needed to flow to my soulstone to maintain a certain area of my Domain. I now had a ton of mana because of my time spent dormant, so much it almost felt infinite.

So, first step. I needed to move my soulstone. Maybe instead of doing what I’d done with the ants, I could just slip my soulstone on top of the mana. The part where my mana sort of merged with the thing it was transporting wouldn’t happen, though the process would be a lot slower—like, speed of sound instead of sight.

No use dithering. I concentrated on what I wanted to happen, and then it was done. I was on a pedestal, but this one I’d built myself. It was pretty fancy, with basalt branching through the marble chamber and the red marble that made up the pedestal itself.

I hadn’t lost any pieces in the transfer. That was good. And—I could use that method to transport anything that I could just put mana around. I could make cells and stick any invading demons inside, and sort of teleport people around within my Domain. The best part of my new location was that it was far, far below the rest of my Domain, and there was no space for even a regular ant to squeeze through. I used extremely narrow and long gaps in the stone to push my mana through and quickly redistributed the amount of mana flowing through my Domain, with the least at the top and most where I was now.

But I couldn’t get distracted. The girl was now poking around the chamber with an expression that might have been confused or scared, or maybe both.

I created two knights out of stone, which took a whole lot of time. The girl seemed fascinated with the process though, so I finished it and had two knights in full armor gripping spears while flanking the entrance. Maybe I could actually animate them if I took the time to experiment a little. I shelved that thought for later. The girl had noticed the spears.

“Hey there. I’m Ember. What’s your name?”

Not being able to speak was really frustrating, especially when someone else had no idea that I couldn’t do so. After all, Ember had just seen me make rock knights out of midair. I probably seemed like some kind of superpowered Aelon to her. The emotion pulsed through my mana, causing a wind to blow throughout the entirety of my Domain.

That was unnerving, both for me and Ember. I hadn’t meant to summon wind. Hm. I created a frog, one that had a minor shielding ability. Then I made an actual shield out of wood and some iron deposits I’d found underground and let it clatter in front of Ember.

She gingerly picked it up. “Is it enchanted?”

I sent a surge of aggression to the frog, which hissed and leaped at her. Her eyes widened and she stumbled back, abandoning the shield and bringing the point of her enchanted shield up in front of the frog’s path. The frog was much bigger than a normal one, but she intercepted it with her spear. The spearhead glowed green, first brightly, then fading away as the blue sparks of the frog’s shield flew and the frog hissed again and bounced away, wary. I couldn’t tell how the spear worked, not with her own natural mana interfering with mine. If she’d just put it down for a few moments and walk a few feet away I could acquire it.

She didn’t. After she stabbed her spear repeatedly through the frog’s guts, she started talking again. It was mostly questions, and I couldn’t answer even the simplest of them. Then there was a pause in her monologue and she said she had to go, so I opened a path outside.

If she didn’t come back, I’d send the ants out to search for her. After I learned how to communicate with them.