I figured out how to give a bit of intelligence to parts of my mana. I could set a little cloud of it around a staircase or roof and have it collapse at the presence of a soul, and then reset a little later. I could even set up a bunch of magical effects, like a wall of fire.

That was all great. I’d wanted to make more functions automatic. The drawback was that for every bit of mana I gave a goal, I had to slow down my personal time to communicate what I wanted. More complex tasks took longer to communicate, so long in fact that an entire day passed before I stopped my experimentation and actually got to work rebuilding my Domain.

At the moment all I had was a tower with a bunch of empty rooms. I didn’t feel like replicating my old trials. That would be boring. Maybe I could have small rooms on the lower floors, leading into each other in random arrangements (I could probably communicate randomized teleportation to my mana) and leading up to a large room at the end of the trial. Something unique could go there.

Table that. I went back to brainstorming what the random room of my first trial would hold. Firstly, I wanted different types of rooms. People had different skill sets, and those would diverge even further the more an Awakened progressed in power. I let my tower sink close to the ground. The lower floors would have the least amount of mana in them and the top floors the most. Sort of the reverse of my other Domain. I wondered what was going on over there. A demon that powerful should have been killed right as it emerged. Hopefully my humans were able to bring back news to me.

Back to the maze of rooms. I decided on three main categories. The first was brute force, and would suit those who were focused on just killing whatever got in their way. Most of those tests would revolve around my own personal monsters made out of mutated animals. After that would be a category for those who prepared for everything. I’d have a ton of situational challenges in those rooms, things like the darkness in my jungle or chasms that required rope to cross. Lastly, puzzles. Step in the wrong place and get fried, play a game of lichess against me (not that I was very good at it, but I could add another element of challenge—darts shoot out for every piece lost?), and other things that relied more on perception than power.

I was missing something, though. There was another unofficial category that I’d need to build into every other room. It included false walls leading to secret locations, turning elements of a room against each other, picking a lock instead of finding the key. Those who were always looking for an alternate solution would have one.

The next few days were spent testing several room designs inside an isolated room a few floors below my soulstone, which I kept in a section of the tower no one could ever reach. Can’t squeeze through gaps you can’t see.

Half the month passed while I put in my new fancy teleporting puzzle mazes down to replace my first trial. It took a lot longer, but I was much more satisfied by the result. I’d impressed upon the mana circulating there that each room should have no more than one person in it, and if all the rooms were full the entrance would lock itself. That entrance was still dangling a couple dozen feet off the ground, though. I hadn’t want anything climbing up while I was working on my trial. Now that I’d finished with that, I had an idea for the entrance. It took a few hours, but I got the mana at the entrance to recognize sapient souls with bodies that could fit inside my tower, and to then start generating a crystalline staircase that reached the ground. Any living thing that wasn’t within a certain radius of the soul got teleported back to the ground. I made that radius fairly large in case anyone brought in a familiar. After a while with no sapient souls around or inside my tower, the staircase would crumble to nothingness.

Almost immediately, the staircase began to assemble itself. I paused and checked the scanning area. It felt correct. That meant … someone was outside.

I couldn’t see anything the sun or moonlight touched directly, but my scanning function sort of went around that, pinging only souls before returning. I used a variant of that myself and felt it. A single soul waiting below my tower.

Should I retract my staircase? I didn’t expect whoever this was, and they could be coming to kill me. Then again, I’d never heard of a soulstone being destroyed by anything less than an army. Maybe he was an Aelon scouting for strange mana? If that was the case, it would be better to let him in than allow him to report back to the rest of the Empire.

The stair formed below the tower, away from direct sunlight, so I was able to see it. I quite liked its appearance. The crystal was so transparent that only the edges were visible. They glinted. It looked like it was made of solidified light.

The lurker stepped forward and climbed up my staircase, finally allowing me to get a good look at him. He was fairly young, maybe in his twenties, and wore a green robe. He had a necklace, bracers, and a thin circlet on his head, all studded with tiny mana crystals. I could almost see something inside them, little twisted pieces of mana. Spells. They were too close to his body for me to properly examine them.

My double doors slid sideways until they were flush with the wall. That effect had taken me quite a while to work out, but I was extremely happy with it. The Aelon paused for a second to tap at the walls and nodded. He stepped inside my entrance chamber and it closed behind him. Even being open for that long was allowing the light outside to shred the mana in there, and I didn’t have a lot in my redone first trial in the first place.

He didn’t pick one of the doors that would lead to different trials, just leaned against a wall and spoke.

“Every so often we get a soulstone that thinks it’s being so very clever. It flies in the Empire and sets up without competition or Hellmouths in sight, as if it’s the only one with a levitating Domain.”

I was getting a very bad feeling about this.