I gathered all my mana to my soulstone. It whirled around me like an invisible hurricane, causing the humans to flinch and step back from me. Traveling would burn away all my mana if I let day or moonlight hit me. A large, inverted, stone boat took care of that. I could ‘see’ almost straight down with my mana because of the shadow I cast. I positioned myself and my upended boat above the humans. They stared at me.

Lead on, Corin.

“Uh … alright.”

Corin talked a lot. I encouraged it. I focused on Ember early on as well, but she was extremely cagey about what she knew. He navigated through the sun, moon, and stars for the most part, which was fair but also useless to me, since I couldn’t extend my mana far enough to actually see the stars. On further consideration, I could use the ants to navigate for me. They had normal sight, though looking through their eyes always made me feel like the world was flat and dead.

Then he touched on the major aspects of the Azure Empire. I already knew a fair amount, but much of what he said was new to me. The shimmering blue gemstone the Empire was named after actually contained trace amounts of mana inside. It was hoarded within the Empire’s borders because anyone could use draw from it and instantly gain the powers of someone who’d recently Awakened, like Ember. The Empire’s troops were therefore less powerful but much more numerous than those of the surrounding nations. They also banned Domains within their lands completely. Corin didn’t care, though, and I had idea of how I could circumvent the scanning spells. I asked, and he confirmed, that those spells worked by searching underground for high amounts of mana. They served the dual purpose of finding the azure mana gems, so their attention wasn’t likely to have lapsed any.

But what if I just stayed in the sky? Flying and keeping my stone boat in the air took a bit of attention, but it didn’t scale too much with volume and I never slept. I could copy items that were worth a lot of money, give them to Ember and Corin to sell, and then get them to go buy different ones.

Corin also talked about the court. Thousands of people from all the corners of the Empire got together every decade to decide what the next big project for the Empire should be. The Emperor selected a few he liked and they were put into place, with the groups who’d been in favor of this barricade or that dam getting together to personally work on it. The faction with the best result, as decided by the Emperor, became the court and took care of running the parts of the Empire he didn’t care to. They became very rich.

We traveled for some time. Humans were slow and carrying them in my mana was infeasible: they were slippery little things. Short-term levitation or teleportation within my Domain was possible, but eventually their bodies rejected my mana. Boredom was good for generating idea, though, and eventually I just created railings on the top of my inverted boat and let them climb on. Since I wasn’t touching them directly with my mana, I could hold them pretty much indefinitely. It was the kind of thing that seemed extremely obvious in hindsight.

With me flying at full speed, we made good time. I could move at a pretty much arbitrary speed as long as I spent the mana for it, so we arrived in the Azure Empire a day after they boarded me. I could tell the moment we entered.

The mana hit me first. It was twisted and strange, almost sentient. Sort of like my mana, except I couldn’t sense any guiding intelligence behind it. Just the result of one, as though a soulstone had crafted given its mana the desire to Awaken people and then just left it there. I guess that was how a soulstone automated things; we could just press sentience into a patch of mana. It also meant that their mana crystals didn’t cause the temporary low-level Awakening here—it was the location. Any mana crystal used in the Empire would allow anyone to use the powers of a fresh Awakened. That explained why they didn’t sell even a tiny amount of their azure crystals outside their borders.

I decided I quite liked this place. If floating in the sky protected me from being found, I could study the semi-intelligent mana around here and learn to make my own.

It would be a great place to grow, and I found I rather enjoyed the thought of being a giant floating castle. I asked Corin to point to a place of the Empire that was perpetually covered in mist. Luckily, there was such a place. The swamplands weren’t much of a fun place to live, but that’s where I decided to set up. I let them off there. Corin wanted to reclaim his position and money and buy a bunch of things, while Ember just wanted to see the land. I sent a few ants to scout around; when they returned I’d ask them for a few choice memories that summarized what they knew.

My humans would be back, and Corin had promised to quiz a few people to see if they could be trusted to run my trials. I’d strayed rather far from my original goal of helping people escape the prison camp, but making Awakened was good fun. I enjoyed designing the trials and watching them being completed. Quite a few Domains were like that, I heard.

For now, I settled in. I extended a few tendrils of mana downward, just for seconds at a time, so I could replicate anything on the ground. I doubt the Empire’s Aelons would detect sources of magic so close to the surface, but it was better to be cautious than dead.

My new floating castle was a pristine white tower from the outside. The quartz and marble construction gave me a sense of unreality when I drew my view back out and gazed at the entire thing as a whole. It was a good start, but my humans would be gone for a month at the least. I had the time and mana to do much better than start.