The pop of displaced air echoed faintly between the trees, then vanished into the quiet dark.
Marth stood alone beneath the forest canopy, moonlight filtering through gaps in the branches. The warmth of the setting sun had long faded, and with it, the strange sense of closure the ruin had offered. Night had fully settled. Crickets chirped. Mana stirred softly in the roots and leaves.
He didn't linger.
One practiced motion—a flick of the fingers and a pulse of spatial will. Space folded in on itself. A line twisted open in the air. Then another pop.
Marth reappeared in his room.
The air here was still. Familiar. Quiet.
His feet hit the wooden floor without a sound. The curtains fluttered slightly, stirred by the backlash of the spell. A few stray papers on the desk rustled, then settled.
He let out a breath and sat down.
He still had over a week before the Academy term started.
That was more than enough time to set his priorities.
This was a new life. A new body. A new path forward. He had no intention of repeating past mistakes.
In his past life—his second one—his research focus had eventually narrowed down to two fields: soul magic and spacetime manipulation. He hadn't reached their limits—not even close—but he'd carved deep enough into both to lay the foundations for things most mages couldn't even dream of.
Now? Things were different. His body was younger. Mana pathways were fresher. But more importantly, his awakened Esper ability—Dimensional Apperation—was already stronger than it had ever been in his past life. It wasn't just teleportation. It was refined spatial control. Controlled folds, layered skips, temporary shifts.
That changed everything.
It gave him room to build bigger things.
His core plan stayed the same: keep digging into soul magic and spacetime until the theories bent to his will. But with this new compatibility, he had breathing room—enough to pick up secondary disciplines and push them further than he ever could before.
Two disciplines stood out immediately: summoning and transformation.
He wasn't starting from zero. In his past life, he'd studied nearly everything during his obsessive hoarding phase. Summoning and transformation included. But while he had a solid theoretical foundation, he never truly specialized in them.
That would change.
Summoning had always fascinated him, but now he had an edge. His Esper ability meshed perfectly with the spatial framework of summon circles. He could feel it—the stabilization came naturally. Less resistance. Less noise in the weave.
Transformation was even more critical.
He had a partial Origin Spell now—one built around complete transformation into another being. That kind of magic wasn't common. Understanding how it worked, let alone improving it, would require deep transfiguration theory. Fleshcraft, soul-binding, essence modeling—the whole tree of concepts.
If he ignored that, he'd be wasting a golden opportunity.
And then there was the long-term plan.
Becoming a lich wasn't negotiable.
Not the old kind, though. No brittle phylactery buried in a vault. He was aiming higher this time. A phylactery sealed inside its own spacetime continuum, isolated from reality itself. Hidden not just in place, but in causality. Untouchable.
It wasn't just a theory. He'd done it before—sort of.
The spell that sent him back in time had worked because of a core artifact: a mysterious stone that radiated spacetime energy. He'd found it in his past life and used it as the anchor for the ritual that threw him here.
That stone still existed. Somewhere. He just had to find it in this timeline.
And when he did, it wouldn't be part of a desperate time-travel spell. It would sit at the center of a perfected ritual—a lichhood model that no divine, mage, or beast could ever undo.
Maybe it'd do more than that. Maybe it would unlock something else entirely.
He leaned back in his chair.
His hand drifted to the pocket dimension where the beating heart from the ruin now rested. The partial spell fragment sat quietly in his mind, inert but present.
He had time.
The Academy wouldn't open its doors for another nine days. Until then, he had nothing but quiet, mana, and the start of a future no one could predict.
He cracked his neck, stood up, and crossed the room.
Tomorrow, he'd start planning spells. Testing runes. Measuring thresholds.
Tonight, he'd let himself be still.
For now, it was enough just to exist in this new life.
And to prepare.