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Elise sat with him, a look of awe on her face at the treasures before them. Maia was sitting on his other side, looking much calmer, but her lake-blue eyes never left the apples. Cassandra was openly staring across the table, while only Valeria watched Leon, a subtle smile on her lips. The last of his spectators, meanwhile, seemed hardly fazed at all—Anzu was in griffin form and had curled up in the sunniest spot on the floor. He was slowly blinking, treating what was going on like it was barely interesting enough to keep his eyes open.

Without much further ado, Leon sighed and reached out to the first apple. The fruit was practically magic power given physical form, and his skin tingled as he picked it up. He brought the golden apple to his lips and took his first hesitant bite, delighting in the spectacular taste. That taste lit the fire in him, and in a little more than a minute, he’d eaten all but the apple core. Buried in the core was a single seed, which he carefully extracted and placed in a small dish next to the apples.

There, he paused as he waited for the fruit to take effect. He didn’t have to wait long as warmth exploded out from his stomach, power flowing through his body that was both fast and fierce, yet light and soft at the same time. It flowed through his veins like it was his own power, and flowed straight into his soul realm, where it vanished into the sea of power that he’d stored within, which in turn provided outward pressure that expanded his soul realm. However, unlike other methods that might try to forcibly expand the soul realm, this power was able to do so without damaging the soul realm at all.

He cast his gaze inward, watching as the boundaries of his soul realm expanded outward in fits and starts, pushing back against the Mists of Chaos before settling for just a moment, allowing itself to reach some kind of equilibrium before immediately pushing outward again.

However, as his soul realm expanded by dozens of miles, something caught his eye, something glowing in a gold container in his Mind Palace.

The Iron Needle. It was being stored in the smaller gold container that Nestor had recently built for it for closer inspection rather than the larger gold tube that he’d prepared during Leon’s acquisition of the Universe Fragment.

Power flowed around the Needle, power from the apple and power from the Needle itself. Wind picked up around the container, kicking up the dust and dirt around the Mind Palace, and as the twister became bigger and more opaque, Leon saw multicolored lightning occasionally illuminate the interior.

And yet, Leon felt no panic. A twister erupting in his soul realm might’ve come across as a problem that he needed to deal with, but the feeling he got from the Needle was one of peace and serenity, the power controlled and beneficial rather than dangerous and wild.

And then the twister dispersed, the contained wind suddenly flying in all directions as lightning shot out from the Needle and into the Mists of Chaos. The mist was pushed even further back, and Leon’s soul realm, already starting to slow in its growth, expanded to fill the gap.

Leon gasped as his soul realm grew even faster, with the remaining power from the apple and additional power from not only the Needle but also his bodily reserves contained in his blood rushed to fill that space.

His heart beat uncontrollably as his soul realm greedily devoured all the magic power that flowed into it, and for a moment, panic shot through his mind. But then, his soul realm began to slow its growth, and he calmed.

The Iron Needle, however, didn’t seem to be having any of that, and seven more bolts of rainbow lightning exploded outward, pushing the Mists of Chaos back again, inducing another growth of Leon’s soul realm. But with the power of the first apple having already been absorbed, Leon had significantly less power flowing into his soul realm to fill it.

Soul realms were a bit like balloons, and if they were expanded too quickly without enough magic power to fill them, the Mists of Chaos could collapse back in, causing some level of soul realm implosion. Leon had heard of a select few cases where such an implosion occurred, and it was never good. In fact, he was quite certain that this sort of thing was one of the reasons why Justin and Xaphan had been so injured following their stints as magic generators for his Clan’s old facilities.

Power was still flowing out from the Iron Needle, but Leon didn’t think it was enough. With panic starting to set in, he opened his eyes and quickly reached for the second apple. He needed to get power into his body as soon as he possibly could.

With growing concern in his ladies, Leon devoured the next apple in thirty seconds. A cursory look showed no seeds in it, so he tossed it away as the fruit’s power filled him. He quickly realized that only one apple wasn’t going to cut it, so he ate a third as quickly as the second. Only then did Xaphan finally wake up from one of his healing trances.

[Leon…? Leon! What’s going on?]

[Apples!] Leon shouted, the panic running through his mind doing a real number on his ability to communicate well. [Needle!]

Power flowed from his stomach and into his blood as the eaten apples swiftly dissolved, releasing their magic power. It flowed even faster into his soul realm now that most of his power reserves had already been absorbed back into it.

He was almost dismayed to see the Iron Needle react again, sending out another fourteen bolts of rainbow lightning arcing through all the corners of his soul realm and vanishing into the Mists of Chaos. His soul realm began growing even faster.

“Shit!” Leon practically shouted. “Fuck!” He dove headfirst into his soul realm, hoping there was something he could do to stop or control this. He felt terrible as his ladies started panicking as well, but he couldn’t pay any attention to their shouted concerns as he tried to deal with this problem.

His soul realm expanded ever further, pushing the boundaries of the Mists of Chaos far beyond what he would consider safe. He was in no mood to emulate the Bull King, but there wasn’t anything he could think to do to stop this.

“Leon!” Xaphan roared as Leon sprang up from his Mind Palace’s throne and into the air. “What is this?!”

“The Iron Needle is doing this!” Leon replied. “It’s reacting to the Hesperidic Apples, I think!”

Xaphan’s fires began burning even hotter as the fire demon turned on the spot, glaring in all directions. “This is bad!” he declared.

“I picked up on that!”

“Are you in any pain?!”

Leon focused a bit, trying to push his panic down enough for him to regain some measure of sensation. As soon as he did, he immediately stopped, for he felt his body wracked with pain. Unfortunately, now that he was aware of it, his adrenaline was of less help.

He practically fell out of the air, but he’d experienced his fair share of pain in the past, and so was able to stay conscious and floating. He instinctively reached out to the Iron Needle, hoping to cast it out of his soul realm and see if that helped things, but as he concentrated on doing just that, the Iron Needle seemed to strike out, a single arc of black lightning shooting out and orbiting around the Universe Fragment, preventing him from removing it from the situation it had caused.

“We need power!” Xaphan shouted as he sprang up from his pavilion to join Leon in the sky above the Mind Palace. “Something to fill in all of this space!”

“The Iron Needle has reacted to all the apples I’ve eaten!” Leon shouted. “Potions aren’t going to be enough!”

“They’ll buy time!” Xaphan declared. “Hurry!”

Leon plummeted down to his vault where he stored everything in his soul realm that he might need. He kept as a personal reserve a few potions that aided in regenerating magic power that Helen had made, but he rarely carried many. Still, he bulldozed into his vault, ignoring the door, and located the potions. He pulled them into the air from a distance with no more than a gesture, and he immediately threw them at the foot of his throne. The sealed glass bottles they were stored in shattered, spilling their contents across the carved stones in the exact center of his soul realm.

Magic potions were designed to be drunk and to interact with the body, especially stomach acid. However, that didn’t mean they were entirely inert in this state, as Helen’s potions evaporated in seconds, joining the thinning clouds of magic power in his soul realm.

“It’s still not enough!” Leon shouted.

“Get more potions, then!” Xaphan shouted. “We have time, so long as your soul realm continues to expand! Until the Mists of Chaos fall back inward, they won’t apply pressure to your soul realm!”

Leon bolted back down to his throne and sat. A moment later, he sprang up from his sofa and nearly smashed his head against Elise, who’d in her concern taken to standing just above his limp form.

“Leon?!” she screamed as he just barely held himself back from potentially fracturing both of their skulls.

“There’s a problem!” he declared as he pulled her close and spun her around. “I need power, but not from the apples!” And with that, he ran to a window and leaped right out of it.

The room he’d chosen to do this in was on the third floor of his temporary palace, and the window opened onto a small courtyard in a private wind. Normally, this would’ve been nothing for a ninth-tier mage, but Leon’s body was nearly devoid of magic power, save for the small amounts that his bone marrow was pumping out that were being almost instantly devoured by the still-growing vacuum in his soul realm.

So, he wasn’t able to use his magic power to brace against the fall or to catch himself and take off into the air. His body was still robust, having been greatly strengthened by containing and adapting to so much magic power throughout his life, but he still felt drained of energy and nearly collapsed as his feet touched the ground.

Stumbling, Leon ran as fast as his jelly legs could carry him, and he was almost embarrassed when Valeria easily caught up. She ducked under one of his arms and he felt her magic enclose him, lifting him up. The rest of Leon’s family were less than a second behind her.

“Where to?” she asked, her expression deadly serious.

“Helen’s workshop,” Leon replied.

Valeria didn’t waste another moment, and in a matter of seconds, she’d shot up from the courtyard, across the palace, and back down again in the nearest courtyard to their destination. Leon would’ve ordered her to simply fly through the damned roof if the palace hadn’t been so heavily reinforced against just such an intrusion.

They burst in through the door, eliciting a surprised scream from Helen as Valeria carried Leon through the door, followed by a terrified Elise, Maia, Cassandra, and Anzu. Leon could hear other disturbances his behavior was kicking up around the palace but paid them no mind.

“Out of magic power!” he shouted.

Valeria, fortunately, understood and bolted for the storehouse adjacent to the workshop, heedless of Helen’s shouted questions.

Inside the storehouse were rows and rows of potions that Helen had made. They were supposed to be shipped out to various apothecaries in the city and the Tribes, serving as examples of properly-made potions for their own alchemists to replicate. So, while there was a large number, Leon was immediately dismayed to see that, according to his estimation, they weren’t even close to filling his still-growing soul realm.

Still, Leon grabbed the nearest potion, ripped off the seal, and chugged it like his life depended on it, for it was becoming clearer and clearer that it probably did. As the potion entered his stomach, his magic power-deprived body immediately began absorbing it. Leon fought to keep it from being immediately absorbed into his soul realm and instead used that power to reach out and grab all the other bottles, absorbing them into his soul realm instead. Dozens of bottles began raining around his throne, the potions they contained releasing great clouds of power that did their best to fill Leon’s soul realm.

‘It’s not nearly enough…’ Leon thought. He didn’t need his soul realm to be completely filled, but until it stabilized, he had to maintain a floor of magic power density to keep it from being crushed when the Mists of Chaos closed back in. And it looked like that time was coming as the expansion was slowing.

From out of the mists came the Thunderbird, flying with panicked wingbeats.

[What is this!] she boomed.

Before anyone could respond, however, her yellow avian eyes took in what was going on, and she immediately flew for Xaphan’s pavilion, transforming into her human body along the way.

“Little Ember!” she shouted. “Get over here!”

Xaphan, a bit uncharacteristically, complied without so much as a word of argument.

“Activate your array!” the Thunderbird demanded.

“What?” Xaphan finally balked. “Using the Mists—”

“Just do it!” the Thunderbird responded.

Leon glanced at his family, gave them as confident of a smile as he could, and then dove back into his soul realm, his body once more emptied of magic power.

The array they were referring to was something that Leon had built for Xaphan years ago, something that he’d first shown off back when Leon was still a fifth-tier mage at the Bull’s Horns, serving under Prince Trajan. It was a large enchantment that channeled relatively small amounts of Mist of Chaos through Leon’s soul realm and into Xaphan, allowing him to use its energies to heal himself.

“Open it up!” the Thunderbird shouted as Leon stumbled back out into his Mind Palace. “We’re going to use the Mists of Chaos to fill in the gaps it’s creating!”

“That’ll erase all this progress!” Xaphan argued, though he flew around preparing the array anyway.

“No it won’t…” the Thunderbird replied as she trained her eyes upon Leon. “The Iron Needle is testing you, Leon! The Match will pull in the mist, you must use it to form land! And king, so long as it fills this empty space! Expand your soul realm! Consolidate as quickly as you can! Use this power!”

Leon’s heart raced, but with the Thunderbird advocating for this course of action, Leon sat upon the steps before his throne, determination filling his mind.

‘I won’t die here! This isn’t the end!’

All of the matter in his soul realm was created with the Mists of Chaos. He’d used it to build his Mind Palace, forge the mountains around it, and grow the grass and the trees and the flowers in the valley. It wasn’t ‘real’ in the sense that he could take any of it out of his soul realm without it dissolving back into mist, but he supposed he could see the logic behind the Thunderbird’s actions—if his soul realm couldn’t be filled in with magic power, then fill it in with matter created with the Mists of Chaos. He’d have to do so anyway to consolidate his gains, he just hadn’t been expecting to be forced to do so this quickly and under this kind of pressure.

His soul realm had expanded quite severely, but as Xaphan activated his enchantment, a river of pale white mist came flowing in. This change seemed to accelerate the slowdown of the Mist of Chaos’ expansion, but Leon didn’t need the extra motivation; he seized control over the mist as he’d done so many times before and began adding land as quickly as he was able. Xaphan’s enchantment was normally fairly moderate, but in this case, Xaphan imposed no limits upon the flow. Mist poured into Leon’s soul realm, and he concentrated wholly and completely on controlling it, channeling it into growing the island—rapidly becoming more and more a continent—floating in the Mists of Chaos.

Stone erupted from the edges of his soul realm proper, bare and unadorned. He didn’t bother with adding trees or dirt or grass or lakes, he just pushed stone out. It was porous and light sandstone rather than the much denser granite and marble that he favored, but it helped him to rapidly create land.

Mist poured in, and land expanded outward. Dozens, then hundreds, and then thousands of miles were filled in as Leon strained to control it all. Time ceased to have any meaning as his awareness was reduced to this one task.

The Mists of Chaos finally ceased expanding a great distance from their former limits. Leon didn’t bother measuring just yet as the mist slowly began to compress inward, meeting the barrier of his soul realm that had rushed out to meet it.

Leon’s body, already wracked with pain, felt like it was being torn apart as the Mists of Chaos pressed in on his soul realm, but he maintained his concentration and just made more stone, pushing the sphere of his direct control further out.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, but eventually, his soul realm began to stabilize. It was certainly larger than before, but by how much he didn’t care to judge. As the outward pressure of his landmass and slowly-filling magic reserves equalized against the inward pressure of the Mists of Chaos, he finally breathed a sigh of relief. Enough had been done that he wasn’t going to cripple himself. His soul realm wasn’t going to be destroyed, merely heavily damaged. That in itself felt like a win next to the pain he’d been blocking out and how disastrously this could’ve ended.

So, with that silver lining in mind, Leon stayed conscious just long enough to remember the Bull King and the problems he’d faced after trying to force his soul realm to grow before sweet oblivion called. His eyes closed, and right there in front of his throne, he passed out.

And he had no idea when he might wake again.