The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

The paper had been submitted. Whether it would be accepted was up to the editors now, and there was nothing left for Evan to do but wait. The school's tournament rankings finally came out — and he had to admit, with some embarrassment, that he'd barely followed any of it. First place went to Zebishini again, second to Marsiba, third to Aspola, and Escuro brought up the rear — only second and third had swapped places from the year before. Life settled back into its usual rhythm.

He kept teaching, turning over the true nature of magic in his mind whenever he had a spare moment. A few days later, a letter arrived from the editorial office of Magic, informing him his paper had been accepted — though not without considerable controversy. His argument had cast doubt on the existence of pure elemental planes like the Water Plane and Fire Plane. He hadn't rejected them outright, but he'd made his skepticism plain, and the existence of pure elemental planes was a load-bearing pillar of elemental doctrine — the very foundation, in fact, of the magic towers themselves. Every tower kept a channel opened at its base, drawing on some deeper level that supplied the entire structure with water, drawn directly from the Water Plane itself.

The facts Evan had laid out, along with his experimental results, suggested that at least some fantasy-born creatures behaved exactly as he'd described. After considerable deliberation, and after reproducing his experiment themselves to confirm his findings, the editorial board concluded his paper had opened up an entirely new school of thought around summoning. After much discussion, they decided to publish it — appending their own commentary at the end.

Evan let out a long breath and shook his head. So this was really happening. The pure elemental planes had always existed as a purely theoretical construct — no mage, not even a legendary one, had ever actually laid eyes on one. They existed like ghosts, sensed everywhere by every school of mage, and yet no one could say precisely where they were meant to be.

Evan had his doubts that the pure elemental planes existed at all. Plenty of phenomena could be explained just as well without them, and a theory built entirely on assumption never quite sat right with him. He had no way of knowing that back on Earth, a fourteenth-century logician and Franciscan friar named William of Ockham had once proposed a similar principle — what people would come to call Occam's Razor: entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, or, more simply, the principle of least assumption.

Evan knew nothing of that principle, and yet he'd arrived at the same instinct on his own. To him, adding a pure elemental plane into the mix felt like an unnecessary complication. Still, the paper had passed review, and that was enough for now. The question of the pure elemental planes could wait. For the moment, it remained only a hypothesis, and there was a long road ahead of it yet.

Tucked inside the letter were three golden cards — genuinely yellow, though not made of gold at all, but of refined gold, a metal even more prized than the ordinary kind, etched with an intricate magical array. Reading the accompanying note, Evan realized this world actually had something resembling credit, though confined entirely to the magical community, and issued in very limited numbers. What the cards carried wasn't currency exactly, but points of a kind — Magic Points, used to purchase rare materials and hard-to-find magical items at designated shops scattered across the whole of Tyrenese.

He looked the cards over. All three were registered to specific names — one to himself, carrying sixty points total, and the other two to Xiaoshuang and Jessica, twenty points each. He called Xiaoshuang over first and handed her card to her. She looked puzzled at first, but the moment Evan explained, her eyes lit up and she snatched it away. Where she stashed something that large, he had no idea — one blink, and the card had simply vanished.

Evan smiled and went to find Jessica next, card in hand. She happened to be running an experiment with students in Alchemy Lab No. 23. Evan arrived at the door just as she was saying, "Potagora vine comes from deep in the jungles of the Barbarian Continent. When cultivating it, be careful — its roots look like an ugly lizard, and they can emit a high-frequency sound. You'll want a spell to dampen the noise before you handle it — Silence, for instance — and only then can you begin planting..."

Evan waited by the door until she'd finished. A moment later, she wrapped up her lecture. "Now follow my steps for the transplanting. Harry, you're the class monitor and you've got the technique down — help guide the others through it."

Once she'd settled her students, she opened the lab door — it had a small glass pane set into it, letting her see out — and she'd already spotted Evan waiting there, which was why she'd cut things short.

"Good day, Professor Wang. Something you needed?" Jessica said, pulling the lab door shut behind her.

"Good day, Professor Jessica. Nothing urgent — my paper's been accepted, in the next issue of Magic. This is your card," Evan said, holding it out. Jessica took it with visible disbelief, pressed it to her forehead, and let out a sharp gasp.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"By the Creator — a gold card! Twenty magic points on it! I can hardly believe it. A gold card — most accepted authors get a silver at best. Almost no one holds one of these. This isn't something an ordinary person just receives. Was our paper really worth that much?" Jessica said, unable to quite trust it.

"Is it really that rare? I hadn't thought so — Xiaoshuang got one too," Evan said.

"Of course it's rare. Sometimes a whole year goes by without a single one being issued, and this month alone we've had three. Going forward, if you submit again, whatever points you earn go straight onto your existing card. A gold-tier paper earns a hundred points, silver fifty, bronze twenty. When multiple authors share credit, the card tracks the paper, but the total points don't change," Jessica explained.

"Is there anything above gold?" Evan asked.

"There is. Platinum, above that — three hundred points for a paper, and one comes along maybe once a decade. Nothing's been awarded in the last twenty years, as far as I've heard. And above that, the highest tier of all — the Gemcrystal Card, a thousand points for a paper. Nothing's earned that in centuries. Just reaching gold already says the paper's worth is extraordinary. Thank you for this — I never would have dared submit anything myself before. Maybe I ought to write something one of these days," Jessica said.

Evan smiled. "You could write about potions, actually. Field research, especially — the magical plants we know of are only a small fraction of what's out there in the wild. You might make a real contribution in that area."

Jessica's eyes brightened. "That's a good idea. I'll think it over. Thank you."

What Evan didn't know was that his paper had split the Magic editorial board into two opposing camps, the argument eventually landing on Ortlando's desk. Magic had started as Hollingburton's own school publication, but it had become, in practice, the most important journal in the magical world — copies reached even the distant East within two months of publication. The mortal world's boundaries meant little to the upper echelons of the magical community, who kept up their own lines of communication across vast distances, even if ordinary mages remained largely unaware of it.

As headmaster, Ortlando also served as the journal's honorary editor-in-chief. Reading Evan's paper, he asked, "Have you verified these experiments yourselves?"

"We have. The results match the author's claims exactly. Our own trial was run under stricter conditions — full double-blind protocol — and it held up without issue. The dispute is over the interpretation. One faction agrees with his conclusions, the other opposes them. We'd like you to make the final call."

"This paper breaks new ground, whether or not every conclusion proves correct — its foundations are sound. Publish it, with commentary from both sides appended after it. No one's proposed a genuinely new theory since classical elemental doctrine was established. This might bring us something we never expected."

"What tier of reward should this receive, then?"

"Gold. If it turns out to be correct, it would deserve platinum at minimum. Three authors — split the reward three-one-one."

Evan had no idea just how significant his paper actually was. Its real weight went well beyond being merely a paper — it had shaken the foundations of classical magical theory itself, opening the first crack of real doubt. Ortlando had seen that clearly, and it was exactly why he'd smoothed the way for it.

When Evan brought his copy of Magic into the office, his colleagues crowded around at once. None of them grasped the paper's actual significance, but everyone knew getting published in Magic at all was no small feat, and they demanded he treat everyone to dinner. Evan laughed and agreed readily enough — not just his own office, but Jessica's colleagues too, along with Emma and the rest, until nearly twenty people had gathered for the occasion.

Setting Evan's celebration aside, Magic remained the single most important publication in the magical world, and as this issue went out, owl messengers carried it swiftly to every corner of the land. In Rotterberg, Newton was deep in thought over his theory of universal gravitation, having largely worked out its qualitative form and now wrestling with a proper mathematical expression for it. He remembered something Evan had once told him — that a theory was only complete once it had a mathematical formulation behind it.

Tired from the effort, he found the timing fortunate when an owl messenger dropped off the latest issue of Magic. Newton was an alchemist by trade, capable of managing zero- and first-tier spells well enough, but anything beyond that was past him. Still, he subscribed to Magic, drawn to the small magical techniques it often described, and used a zero-tier spell of his own to draw the copy toward him from across the room where it had fallen. Flipping it open, he scanned the table of contents and caught a familiar name — Evan Wang. Looking closer, he found a paper co-authored with two others: Some Thoughts on Fantasy-Born Creatures. He knew the term well enough — mages generally used it to describe summoned creatures, and applied it to a range of uncommon magical beasts besides.

He turned to the article and read through it. Being a proper paper, it included the experimental record, and by the time he finished, something clicked in his mind with the force of a physical jolt. If the article's claims held, then to some real degree, there was no such thing as a purely elemental plane at all — and didn't that align perfectly with his own theory of absolute space and time, where the same laws governed every corner of existence...

In Watersdale, at Leonardo's home, Leonardo was reading through the same issue of Magic. As he read on, something opened up in his mind all at once. He stood, murmured an incantation, and a three-legged, three-armed figure of metal appeared — an experimental assistant of his own invention. "So that's how it is," he murmured to himself.