The hill closed behind him with a soft thump.
No dramatic quake. No lightshow. Just a clean seal, like the ruin had never existed. Marth stood for a moment, boots scuffing dry gravel, and watched the hillside return to silence.
"Of course," he muttered. "Four hours inside, and now it decides to vanish again."
He turned away.
The sky had dimmed while he was down there. A dull strip of orange still clung to the horizon, but the light was fading fast. The Foldlands weren't exactly welcoming in the dark, but he didn't feel like camping on top of a pocket reality that had just coughed up a spell-laced monster heart.
He started walking.
By the time he reached a ridge a few kilometers out, full night had fallen. He stopped at a flat patch of rock, dropped his travel bag, and pulled up the field chair he kept folded in his storage array. It creaked a little under his weight.
The wind was cold up here. Dry, too. Thin air with just enough mana to keep his body running efficiently, but not enough to matter.
He opened the storage again.
The containment field shimmered faintly as the heart emerged. Still pulsing. Still ugly.
It looked like someone had fused a dragon's chestplate to a tumor, then wrapped the whole thing in mana cables and told it to keep beating.
He stared at it for a while, arms crossed.
"Not the worst thing I've seen," he muttered.
The fragment of the spell was still resting somewhere in the back of his mind. Quiet. Dormant. It didn't press. Didn't whisper. But he could feel it like a pressure behind his thoughts. Not active—just waiting.
He leaned back in the chair and looked up at the stars. Foldstars. Not real ones—reflections of light scattered by the way space bent around this place. They shimmered like water.
And somewhere in that shimmer, his thoughts drifted.
He had come here in his previous life, hadn't he?
Yes. He remembered now.
Back then, he had been sure the ruin existed. Records, artifact drift, Fold-pattern behavior—all of it pointed here. He even mapped out a twenty-seven point spatial resonance to track it. Took weeks.
And when he finally arrived?
Nothing.
No mana field. No ambient shift. Just flatland and a few mana-dead rocks. He'd camped nearby for a week, trying ritual after ritual, but got nothing.
It was like the whole thing had been folded out of existence. Not destroyed. Not hidden. Just… removed.
And now, in this life, it reappeared.
No sign. No trigger. Just a weak pulse in the local space fabric that only someone obsessive enough to track minor Fold twitches would've noticed.
Lucky him.
He turned back to the heart.
It was still pulsing. Slower now.
He crouched down next to it, ran his fingers along the edge of the containment field. Still stable. No signs of decay. The binding glyphs he'd used were overkill, but better that than having the thing burst open in his bag halfway through a jump gate.
Now that the adrenaline of the ruin was gone, he could finally tally what he'd actually gained.
One: The spell fragment. Origin-tier. Broken, but still valuable. A true transformation spell. Not a disguise. Not illusion. A rewrite. Biological, structural, magical—complete. If the conditions were met.
That last part was the issue.
He hadn't seen what those conditions were. The memory fragment hadn't included them.
Still. A full rebuild might be possible. He'd need time, testing, maybe another life.
Two: The heart itself. A biological container still holding stabilized fragments of magic. Not just a passive object. There was intent in it. Muscle memory of the spell, maybe. Or leftovers from a soul structure that refused to die.
Could be studied. Could be reverse-engineered.
Three: The ruin's folding mechanism. The entire place had been hidden in plain reality—not buried, not cloaked—folded out. He hadn't seen that technique used anywhere else in this cycle. If he could decode it, replicate it…
Well, it beat paying for vault wards.
He leaned back again, watching the heart throb under the field.
That was everything.
No artifacts. No relics. Just one memory crystal, one impossible spell, and one very angry-looking organ. Some mages would call the expedition a failure.
Marth didn't care.
He had something real now. And no one else knew about it.
Eventually, the heart dimmed again. The pulse slowed to near-stillness. It didn't go dormant, but it stopped reacting to his presence.
He sealed it away.
Folded the chair.
Packed his things.
Then he stood at the edge of the ridge and stared out across the Foldlands.
There was no trail to follow yet. No plan.
Just a broken spell and the thought that maybe, with enough time, he could fix it.