The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

The applause thundered on, everyone in the room joining in. More than a few of the legendary mages present had lived past two hundred years — a long life, as Evan put it, and long lives came with their own benefits, if nothing else than having seen more of the world than most.

"Professor Wang's remarks were excellent," Ortlando said. "They put me in mind of how we founded this school in the first place — false starts, tearing everything down and starting over more than once. If we'd approached it the way Wang describes from the beginning, we'd have spared ourselves no end of trouble. Wielding power beyond what ordinary people can manage doesn't spare us the headache of doing things properly. Let's get to assigning roles."

Ortlando began dividing responsibilities. Evan's role turned out to be unusual — a liaison and coordinator moving between the various teams. He gave a wry smile at that. The project split into an engineering team, a technical team, and a review team, each division carrying a distinctly otherworldly flavor of its own. Evan sat outside any single team, a dedicated position under the overall project lead, free to move between whichever group needed him.

The teams themselves turned out to be loosely organized in practice — plenty of people held three roles at once, drifting between all three groups as needed. Perhaps that was simply how this world did things. Evan found his own careful framework had already warped into something else entirely — these otherworldly natives moved at a leisurely, unhurried pace right up until the moment they didn't, and then everything happened at lightning speed.

Evan hadn't quite grasped the defining feature of this world yet: beings with abilities far beyond ordinary human limits didn't build the way ordinary people did, brick by brick. A single incantation, one spell turning mud to stone, and a structure locked into place at once. Taking a building apart was just as simple. All of this applied only within their own way of life, and Evan hadn't yet accounted for it, which was why the speed of it all left him so astonished.

The engineering team had already set out, and Ortlando sent Evan along with them, hunting for materials suited to building a floating city. Evan discovered, for the first time, just how ingenious magic could be — countless applications he'd never imagined possible. A projection appeared, and a rough estimate of the stone required followed almost instantly. Evan watched them work, and a base took shape in the projection before him — four hundred cubits long, nearly three hundred fifty wide, close to a hundred high — magnificent in scale, a grid rapidly forming across its surface. The whole process looked like something out of virtual reality, the volume calculated out almost instantly. It put any computer to shame, Evan thought — countless minds working through the tally together, at a speed no human mind should have managed. This was cheating, plain and simple, he thought to himself.

In no time at all, the tally came out to nearly four million cubic cubits of stone. Evan had assumed this single calculation alone would keep them occupied for a good while — instead, they finished it almost instantly, drawing on some kind of parallel processing, each mind functioning like a living calculator. Building a proper model this way, using the most basic methods available, and having it solved in moments left Evan stunned. Fortunately, these living calculators weren't tireless — in that brief span, one legendary mage had burned through nearly all his own reserve of mana and retreated to the side to meditate and recover.

Evan had never imagined magic could be applied this way — no offensive purpose to it at all, no other practical effect beyond this, and yet it represented the sheer intellectual power of the human mind put to work. He tried it himself, standing off to the side, watching how the others did it. His mental power drained away almost instantly. His face changed — for that one instant, he'd felt himself in a state of absolute stillness, countless models flashing past too fast to track, before his vision went dark and he nearly blacked out. He stopped himself just in time.

Heathermere laughed. "You haven't reached legendary rank yet — you can't handle splitting your mind into that many threads, even if each one is running the same calculation. Don't try it again. Do you think being a legendary mage is only about raw power? It isn't. A legendary mage's thinking works far more efficiently than an ordinary person's — the brain itself develops far beyond normal limits. Given enough time, what an ordinary person calls an impossible problem is nothing more to them than something that takes a little longer to solve."

Evan pushed through his exhaustion. "Honored Heathermere, does that mean legendary mages are far more creative than ordinary people as well?"

"Not quite," Roland cut in from nearby. "A legendary mage's raw computational power far outstrips an ordinary person's, but creativity stays roughly the same either way. No one's quite sure why."

"All right, go meditate," Heathermere said. "You're worn out. Your mental reserves took too much of a hit. Sleep first, though meditation would serve you better."

Evan felt bone-tired, and something clicked into place in his mind — so liches still needed sleep after all. An ordinary lich's mental strength ran deeper than any regular mage's, and their recovery came fast enough that the need for sleep simply never registered — not that they didn't need it, only that they never felt it. Evan returned to his tent and, rather than meditate, simply collapsed and slept. Pitifully enough, he couldn't recall the last time he'd had a proper night's rest.

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They'd pushed deep into the Atlas Mountains by now — no one was going to source stone anywhere near Hollingburton itself. The engineering team had traveled nearly a hundred miles into the mountains and settled on a particular peak to quarry from. Plenty of earth-aligned students had come along with the team as well, functioning essentially as labor — quarrying stone was hardly work fit for a legendary mage's own hands.

When Evan woke, he felt sharp and refreshed. He stepped out of his tent to find dusk settling in, the western sky burning red with evening light. The camp had already been fully set up while he slept — stone walls now ringed the perimeter, raised through the same mud-to-stone spell. Evan couldn't help but marvel at it: in the span of a few hours, an entire small settlement had risen out of the wild mountainside, complete with stone buildings scattered throughout, the tents that had stood there before all gone now except for his own.

He packed his tent away into his ring. Seeing him up, Heathermere said, "Wang, eat first. Today was only for setting up camp. Quarrying starts tomorrow."

"Thank you, Lady Heathermere. How's Burk Town holding up?" Evan asked — the first time he'd thought to ask since Heathermere had returned, not knowing who'd been left in charge there.

"Professor Uplan is holding things down. Nothing much happening these days. It's mostly just us and the Order Keepers there now — the vampires and the Druids only keep a token presence," Heathermere said.

"Any progress on the devil cult?" Evan asked.

"The Druids found a few leads, but whoever was there had already cleared out. They're keeping quiet for now. Our main effort's tied up in the floating city, and we're not looking to stir anything else up at the moment," Heathermere said.

Evan sank into thought, Boniface surfacing in his mind — that other lich, the one he had no real way to deal with, whose phylactery remained wherever it remained, unknown. After a moment, a question rose unbidden. "Lady Heathermere — if a lich existed, how would someone go about killing him for good?"

"That's about as close to unsolvable as a question gets. The only real method is finding the lich's phylactery, but those aren't easy to locate," Heathermere said, her brow furrowing. She didn't suspect Evan for a moment — nothing about him carried the faintest hint of a lich.

"Once someone finds the phylactery, is there a reliable way to do it?" Evan pressed.

"No good method exists. Astrology has its uses, but it's a discipline too deep and uncertain to trust for something like this — most astrologers only manage seventy or eighty percent accuracy even under good conditions, and they can never pin down something as small as a phylactery, especially one disguised as something else entirely. Do you have a lich enemy of some kind?" Heathermere asked.

"I do have an enemy who's a lich, though since coming to Hollingburton, there's little he can do to reach me. I only wondered — given how powerful a legendary mage's raw calculation is, could that be turned toward locating a lich's phylactery?"

"Every lich in recorded history has met a bad end eventually, but always by chance. No one's ever deliberately set out to hunt down a phylactery and succeeded at it."

Evan gave a rueful laugh and set the matter of Boniface aside. The man had clearly made real progress lately — whatever he'd gained from that unknown dimension he'd fallen into, it had paid off handsomely. Was he supposed to be the protagonist here, or was Evan? Every other story about someone crossing over came stocked with secret manuals and miraculous encounters. He supposedly counted as one of those crossed-over protagonists too — so why did his own path feel this hard? No miraculous encounters, nothing handed to him — everything he had beyond what he'd inherited from Nicholas the lich, he'd built through his own effort. And on top of it all, he'd managed to draw the Creationist Church's attention as an enemy. That much, at least, he could accept — Nicholas had brought that trouble on himself, and Evan had simply inherited the whole of it, taking the blame in his stead, fair enough. But then along came Boniface out of nowhere — some jumped-up necromancer, of all things, who'd somehow managed to become a lich himself.

Nicholas had turned himself into a lich and paid for it with his life, and Evan had slipped into the gap left behind. Boniface, meanwhile, had somehow pulled off the transformation successfully, and now kept coming back to make trouble for Evan again and again, hiding behind his own undying nature while Evan had no clean way to touch him in return.

The next morning, after breakfast, the students set to work under the legendary mages' direction, and enormous columns of mud shot up out of the ground, reaching toward the sky — over six hundred of them in all, arranged in tiered ellipses, growing shorter toward the center until the whole shape formed half of a great ellipsoid.

Evan watched in genuine awe. The outermost ring alone stood a hundred and twenty cubits tall. The mud columns hardened into stone under the same mud-to-stone spell, functioning much like scaffolding — though nothing about this construction resembled ordinary craftsmanship. It took shape all at once, in a single working.

Next, the students, wands in hand, cut great blocks of stone straight from the mountainside, then floated them down with Levitation. Evan watched neatly cut blocks of granite emerge and drift down to settle at the base of the stone columns. When he asked why they hadn't simply used the mud-to-stone technique to save the trouble, Heathermere and Roland both looked at him as though he'd said something faintly ridiculous, explaining that natural stone held up far better than anything conjured artificially — especially granite, which was exactly why they'd chosen it in the first place.

Once the granite blocks reached the base of the columns, another incantation lifted them into the air, and block after block fused seamlessly together, leaving no trace at all that the whole mass had once been separate pieces of stone. By the end of the first day, a thick layer had already formed — though naturally, hollow chambers ran through it as well. At Evan's suggestion, they added a good number of additional chambers wherever it wouldn't compromise the structure, and the practice became standard going forward.

At regular intervals, channels connected one chamber to the next. Evan understood these were meant to be filled later with materials like refined mithril, carrying force from the array out to every part of the structure. The construction grew day by day, and in under twenty days, the base stood complete, resting atop its six hundred stone columns.