Four years had passed since I was sent to the Prison World.
The Rune of the Interstice had changed everything.
Before it, each cycle forced me to choose what to rebuild. After it, I could accumulate.
My first permanent laboratory had been nothing more than a reinforced room. Now, the former Parker site housed an entire network of workshops, chambers, and storage areas. The main house served as the command center. The basement was dedicated to dangerous experiments. The other houses functioned as specialized sectors.
I had transformed a temporary prison into a research facility.
And, for the first time, my projects were beginning to look less like makeshift solutions and more like technology.
Before the Rune of the Interstice, I had lost entire rune matrices. Perfect prototypes had vanished. Spells that took weeks to stabilize had to be redone every morning.
So I began cataloging every loss. Not just what had disappeared, but exactly how it had disappeared.
Some objects returned to their original state.
Others retained their structure but lost their magic.
Some preserved the magic but returned to their previous position. And there were those that seemed to exist in two different versions, as if the Prison World and my interference were vying for the same space.
Each failure became a lesson. The Rune of the Interstice was the result. After that, I began to recover what I had lost.
My first storage cores were small metal reservoirs.
They worked, but the capacity was limited.
The solution came from engineering. A reservoir without partitions would work, but I needed much more magic. So I created smaller chambers inside the core, connected by runic channels.
They're portable, about the size of a small apple.
With them, magic began to be stored in layers. When one chamber reached its limit, the excess was transferred to the next one. If one failed, the others remained intact.
It wasn't an infinite battery. It was a containment network.
I also added magical valves. They could release the energy in small, controlled amounts into other objects, preventing them from receiving more power than they needed.
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I had already obtained the blood before I was arrested.
A few months before 1994, I funded an expedition to the remote island where Silas's tomb was located. I didn't go alone; I paid for guides, rented equipment, and came up with a plausible archaeological justification.
The hard part wasn't getting there; it was retrieving the material without destroying the tomb.
Qetsiyah's blood was calcified and incorporated into the magical structure associated with Silas. It wasn't liquid blood inside a bottle. It was an ancient relic, preserved by magic for centuries. The tomb itself was linked to the history of the Cure for Immortality.
I managed to obtain a small amount—more than enough.
I divided the blood into separate containers and left everything in my apartment. The Cure remained there as well.
I had no intention of drinking it, since I'm not immortal. And even if I were, the idea wouldn't even cross my mind. The Cure could be used as a bargaining chip in the future—a weapon, a way to control someone.
The blood, on the other hand, had immediate utility. Its magical signature was immense. It didn't just function as a component of the escape ritual; it could enhance other rituals.
To me, Qetsiyah's calcified blood was a celestial event stored in matter. I compare its scale to that of an eclipse or a full moon—capable of amplifying circles, breaking seals, and stabilizing spells that would normally require dozens of witches or an entire coven.
I left everything in a safe hidden in my apartment. The hiding place was behind a secret passage in my bedroom closet. The door looked like part of the wall and only revealed itself when three runes were activated in sequence.
Behind it was a narrow compartment. The safe had ordinary padlocks, because magic shouldn't be the only protection.
It also featured: mechanical locks; sealing runes; a barrier against detection; an illusion that altered the appearance of the interior; a return spell that restored the safe to its original state if anyone tried to break into it; and an alert signal linked to my listening devices.
If Joshua found the apartment, he would see an ordinary wardrobe; if he found the passageway, he would see a blank wall; if he passed through the illusion, he would find a worthless safe.
The true blood was stored in smaller compartments, each wrapped in preservative material. The Cure was kept separate, inside a reinforced glass capsule.
I had left the items there because I didn't need them before I was imprisoned, and because I knew that the Prison World would copy the apartment, the safe, the closet, and everything inside them at the moment of anchoring.
Joshua thought he had separated me from my tools. In fact, he duplicated my hiding place.
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In the meantime, I began disassembling the Ascendant.
Before removing any part, I recorded the artifact's complete condition: the position of each component; the orientation of the gears; the tension of the springs; the magical signature; the residual charge; the condition of the runes; and the relationship between the internal mechanisms.
Then, I marked the Ascendant with a preservation matrix. When the cycle ended, the Rune of the Interstice would maintain the state in which I had left the artifact. If anything went wrong, I could activate the Restore command and return the Ascendant to its originally recorded state.
This allowed me to work without the risk of losing my only key. I could disassemble an entire section, study it, temporarily replace it, and test the result. If the experiment failed, I simply restored the previous version.
The Ascendant was no longer an untouchable relic. It had become an object of study.
I didn't treat it as a sacred artifact. To me, it was an extremely complex magical machine, built to manipulate space, time, and dimensions.
First, I removed the outer plates; then, I examined the internal gears.
Next, I studied the runic channels engraved into the metal, the sharp edges on the sides, and the way each component connected to the others. Nothing there was decorative.
The larger gears controlled the mechanism's rotation. The smaller ones distributed the energy from the celestial event. Some parts functioned as dimensional locks, preventing the portal from opening to the wrong destination.
There were also components I still couldn't explain. That was the problem with the Ascendant.
It wasn't just an artifact that opened a door.
It helped create a complete replica of the world. It didn't just copy a house, a room, or a small area. The Prison-World reproduced cities, roads, forests, oceans, buildings, objects, and the entire physical structure of the world at the moment it was created.
To do this, the Ascendant had to work with an absurd amount of information.
It had to record space, matter, the position of objects, environmental conditions, the passage of time, and the rules of the cycle.
Then, it had to transform all of that into an independent dimension.
My first task was to reproduce the exterior.
I used steel, copper, metal alloys, and components taken from clocks, motors, locks, and industrial equipment. Some parts were handmade. Others were produced with tools I had modified myself.
The replica had to have the same weight, the same dimensions, and the same internal layout as the original.
More importantly: it had to channel magic in a similar way. The mechanical part was relatively simple.
The runic part was a nightmare. The replicas had different flaws. Some gears spun too fast; others couldn't channel enough energy.
Certain metals cracked when exposed to the energy of a celestial event. One of the copies created a space just a few meters wide, but the interior became trapped in a four-second cycle. Another opened a passage leading back to the same point of origin, creating a closed loop.
A third one didn't create any dimension at all. It merely erased the area of the floor where I had placed the prototype.
I recovered as much as I could before restoring the lab. The failures were dangerous, but informative.
Each test revealed a new layer of how the Ascendant works. I also experimented with replacing the energy source.
Qetsiyah's blood proved compatible with some of my components, but not all of them. It amplified the ritual, but it could also push a gear beyond its limit.
An excessive amount of blood did not make the process safer; it merely increased the scale of the error.
My goal was to build my own Ascendant, an artifact independent of the Gemini Coven. An Ascendant that wasn't just for escaping the Prison World of 1994.
I wanted something capable of creating other prison worlds. I wanted to choose the anchoring date, choose the space to be copied, determine the cycle's duration, control who could enter, and control who could leave.
And, if possible, access existing prison worlds without relying on Joshua, the Bennetts, or any other coven.
I also wanted to develop a way to use the duplicate as a testing platform. If my artifact could create a small, stable dimension, I could study how it worked before attempting to replicate an entire world.
But that was still a distant project. The original Ascendant remained far too complex. I understood its mechanical structure better than before, but I still didn't fully grasp the dimensional aspect.
I could reconstruct the gears, I could replicate some runes, I could replace certain components. But I still didn't know how to make an artifact copy an entire world without destroying the surrounding reality or creating a defective dimension.
That's why my own Ascendant was still a work in progress.