Chapter 94 ： Magic Crystals
"I yield, master." Boniface's pride was considerable, but the pain in his soul was not something he could endure indefinitely. He forced the words out.
The Oomani smiled. It knew exactly what Boniface was thinking — every thought, every flicker of resentment, every calculation. "Relax. As long as you're obedient, I won't mistreat you. Devils are intelligent beings. We don't kill without reason — that's what lesser demons do. We prefer to use our minds."
Boniface kept his thoughts locked down. He bowed his head and said yes.
"You have an enemy," the Oomani said, browsing through Boniface's memories with the unhurried interest of someone leafing through a book. "Nicholas. Interesting. Very interesting." It shook its head slowly. "Revenge isn't killing someone. Revenge is breaking them. Grinding them down until they have nothing left to hope for. You've been trying to kill him twice, and he's killed you both times. That's not revenge. That's just embarrassing."
Boniface said nothing. He thought nothing, or as close to nothing as he could manage. He had no intention of experiencing that soul-pain again.
The Oomani continued without waiting for a response. "Now that you're my servant, a few things need to change. That body of yours is too fragile for planar travel. And that trick of draining people's vital essence to pass for a living person — I understand the appeal, but the effect doesn't last and it draws attention. I'll give you better methods." It paused, as if reconsidering. "Actually, I'll give you better methods and better power. Go back and actually train. I don't want you embarrassing me. And once you return, start rebuilding my worship. I need a presence in the material plane."
Blue-green flame erupted around Boniface. He screamed.
"Stop that noise. Your hellfire technique is barely an apprentice method. I'm using infernal flame to temper your body — strengthen the physical structure so you can survive planar transfer. This is a gift."
"Thank you, master," Boniface managed, kneeling despite everything.
"Good." The Oomani straightened. "I'll send you back to your soul vessel's location. Hold on—" it glanced around at the barren landscape with mild irritation. "These hell fragments drift. I can never keep track of which one I'm standing on. No matter. Your soul vessel gives me the anchor."
It opened a spatial gate and kicked Boniface through it without ceremony. Then it faded, returning through its own projection back to the true infernal realm. The fragment of hell it had been standing on would drift again. Today had been unexpectedly productive.
Boniface hit the ground of the material plane, lurched upright, and immediately vomited. A lich, vomiting. The indignity of planar transfer, apparently, exceeded what even an undead body could absorb without complaint. He stayed on the ground for a while before the world stopped spinning.
When he finally looked up, he recognized the ruins around him. Nicholas Andrew's old castle in the Liya Demon Forest — or what remained of it. The Holy Inquisition had burned it not long after Evan left. The walls were broken shells, the towers collapsed, ash and rubble under years of weathering. Somewhere in this ruin, in a location that only Boniface knew and could not forget, was his soul vessel.
He sat in the wreckage and let the rage work through him. It couldn't be directed at the Oomani — that path led somewhere he wasn't going back to. So it went outward, a storm with no target, bending the air around him for a few minutes before it exhausted itself.
When it was over, he was calmer, and he started thinking about what the Oomani had actually asked him to do.
Getting back to Nabos from the Liya Demon Forest would take two or three months, at minimum.
......
Back on the hillside, Evan's group had regrouped. Roslyn and Thomson arrived shortly after, having rushed from the northwest pass when they heard the signal rocket.
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"You found the lich?" Thomson asked, breathing hard. "Where is it?"
"It's no longer in our plane."
Between Evan and Emma, they explained what had happened. Thomson and Roslyn listened, and Evan let himself feel, quietly, how close the outcome had been. He had used short-range teleportation three times in this unstable area without knowing the risk. Boniface had used it once and ended up in a hell fragment. The margin between those outcomes was thinner than he liked.
"That settles the case," Emma said. "We should head back. I'll need to write a report, and Shel and Carpenter should qualify for ten standard credits — I'll submit it to the academic board."
Roslyn raised a hand. "Wait. Before we go — we found something on the way. A cave. Thomson's Perception technique flagged it as unusual and we thought the lich might be hiding there. It wasn't the lich." She reached into her storage ring and produced a fragment of dark stone. "It was these."
"Magic crystals?" Evan asked.
Emma explained. Roughly thirty-five years ago, Ortlando had discovered the phenomenon by accident. Magic crystals were distinct from magic cores — cores were the condensed energy of magical beasts, extractable only through Core-Seal immediately after death. Crystals were different: a mineral formation, found in deposits, apparently the remnant of magical organisms from some earlier era that had fossilized under specific conditions. Ortlando had published a brief account in the school's monthly Magic journal. The deposit he'd found had been small and was exhausted fifteen years ago.
Roslyn held the sample out for the group. It was deep black, irregular in shape, semi-transparent, with an inner luster that caught the light differently than ordinary stone.
Evan took it. He felt the energy inside immediately — dense, volatile, not well-suited to direct absorption. Too raw for a practitioner to use in meditation. Similar to a magic core in some ways, but not the same. He thought about the black powder in the goblin mechanical warrior's chest panel, and the activation array that had required almost no spiritual force to trigger. He thought about what a widely available, high-density magical energy source would mean for a civilization that had built magical arrays but was limited by how few people could generate enough spiritual force to use them.
He gave the crystal back to Roslyn. "Where exactly was the cave?"
"Not far. Thomson found it while we were searching the mountain."
"We should look," Evan said. Emma was already nodding.
Roslyn led them to it. The entrance was narrow — one person at a time — and half-hidden behind old vines. Ten steps in, the passage opened. The walls caught their light and gave it back in fragments: crystals, scattered across the stone, some embedded deep, others loose on the ground. Evan picked one up and held it for a long moment.
He looked at Emma. She was already looking at him. She gave a small nod.
"This is a crystal deposit," Evan said, turning back to the group. "How large it is, we can't determine without survey work. But I want everyone to treat this as confidential until the school has been notified. What's sitting in these walls is significant — potentially enough to change how magical technology develops. I don't say that lightly."
The others absorbed this. Some skepticism, some excitement. All of them nodded.
"Emma — send a priority message to Ortlando. Highest level. Tell him we've found a crystal deposit."
Emma took a sheet of magical beast skin from her storage ring, wrote quickly using a quill against a flat stone, sealed the message, raised her staff, and spoke the sending incantation. A burst of fire appeared in the air. The letter passed through it and vanished.
They came out of the cave and waited. The light was going, and they ate travel rations and talked while the sky darkened. Then a spatial door opened in the middle of the clearing, and three people stepped through it.
Ortlando was one of them. Beside him was a woman Evan hadn't seen before — slightly heavy-set, with a pleasant expression and the bearing of someone who had been comfortable in her authority for a long time. The third was a middle-aged man Evan recognized as Professor Marshall, Shel and Carpenter's faculty adviser.
Everyone exchanged greetings. From the conversation, Evan gathered that the woman was Hessewave, a Legend-rank mage and the current master of the Water Tower in the half-plane.
She looked at Evan with open curiosity. "So you're the death mage Arcanist the school just hired?"
"Hessewave, hello. I'm Evan Wang — I've only been here a short while. I look forward to working with you." He gave the standard mage's bow. She didn't register anything unusual about him.
"And with you, Professor Wang. We're colleagues." Her tone became more businesslike. "Ortlando found the first crystal deposit thirty-five years ago, but the quantity was small — it was exhausted fifteen years back. Several things we built at the time can't function without fresh supply. We've been working from reserves that are nearly gone, and there's been talk of writing off that equipment entirely." She looked toward the mountain. "How large is this deposit?"
"We haven't surveyed it yet."
Marshall was already with Shel and Carpenter and Emma, getting the story from them. Ortlando walked over to Evan. "We combined our spatial techniques to open that gate on short notice. This had better be worth the effort." No real complaint in his voice. He was already moving toward the cave entrance.
"Follow me," Emma said, and led the way in.
The reaction from Ortlando and Hessewave, when they saw the walls, said everything.