Serenity had to admit that Aide had a point; maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to eat some greenstone from a direct power perspective. It was still eating the body of another sapient, however, and Serenity wasn’t willing to cross that line. He could understand why Aide didn’t see it that way; Aide had never eaten anything.

It left him with the question of what to do next, but really the answer was obvious. He needed to get some greenstone and repeat his experiments. He’d just have to control himself while using the greenstone instead of staying away from it.

Serenity didn’t expect it to be easy.

When Ita returned, she had only a single chunk of greenstone. It smelled deliciously rich and complex, almost meaty.

Serenity became very aware that it wasn’t really a smell when he reached out and incorporated it into his spell and the sensation increased in strength. He wanted to tell Aide to tamp down that feeling, but it seemed to be intimately connected to his ability to sense mana, which was absolutely necessary if he wanted to weave a spell. That made sense when he thought about it; a thaumivore, a magic-eater, would have to be able to sense magic to eat it, wouldn’t it?

It made casting the spell both distracting and an exercise in self-control. Not only did the rock look good enough to eat, the entire spell looked delicious.

Serenity actually had to restart the spellform once when he malformed a branch so badly that it was faster to start over than to fix it.

In the end, it didn’t work. The markings were clearer and Aide thought he might be able to make them out enough with time, but that wasn’t what Serenity wanted. What he really wanted was to break the spell hiding the marks; failing that, revealing them so they were obviously visible would be enough.

The next step was to combine the last two tests and try the spell with greenstone in the Origin. It was a fast test, made even faster by Serenity’s drive to get it done before he lost his self-control. What it wasn’t was a successful test; the results were actually clearly worse than they were on Aeon. While that was technically a success in that he got an indisputable result, it wasn’t the result he wanted.

Serenity set the greenstone on top of the scroll in disgust and went to find Rissa and Jenna. He was missing something and that meant he needed time away from the problem to digest it. Spending time with his family sounded like the perfect distraction.

The next day, Serenity sat at the table next to the scroll and greenstone while he waited for Rissa to finish getting Jenna ready to hand off to Ita for a few hours while they went to the Water Garden. Beyond all the normal preparations for handing a baby off to a babysitter, the fact that the child was blatantly Time Affinity, like Rissa, probably wouldn’t have mattered with most Affinities.

It did matter with Time, and it seemed like young Jenna took after her father’s brand of Time magic more than her mother’s. She was already affecting the flow of Time around herself and that meant that when Rissa was going to be away, she had to make the local flow of Time stable enough that Jenna wouldn’t accidentally do something that could hurt herself or someone else.

Despite the fact that it was closer to Serenity’s style of magic, he didn’t really understand Time well enough to reinforce it. It was the opposite of what he’d done to leave the Forest of Lost Regrets, but to this day he didn’t really understand that and didn’t know where to begin in an area where Time wasn’t already damaged.

Serenity wished Rissa didn’t have to send everyone away when she stabilized the area around Jenna, but she insisted that she had to. Sending Serenity away was apparently especially important because he passively worked against Time stability; he wouldn’t even be allowed to do more than wave at Jenna from another room until they got back. It was annoying.

Serenity? Please focus on the scroll. Aide’s voice interrupted Serenity’s ruminations.

“What?” Serenity had no idea what Aide wanted his eyes for, but he stared at the scroll anyway. It was a convenient distraction for a little bit.

Fortunately, before it stopped being a good distraction, Aide confirmed what he had noticed and filled Serenity in. The area of the scroll under the greenstone is not the same as it was before. See?

Aide overlaid the saved image on Serenity’s vision; that made what he was talking about obvious. The two didn’t match, but only the fuzzily distorted area that could be partially seen through the greenstone was affected. Serenity frowned. “It didn’t do that when I left last night, right?”

The image I am using for comparison is the last clear look at the scroll from this angle; it was taken right after you set the greenstone in its current position.

Serenity nodded and picked up the greenstone, watching the scroll as he did so. There was a clear discontinuity where the greenstone had been; the difference was even more obvious without the greenstone in the way. “It took time. The spell might have worked if I’d given it time. Or perhaps it’s because this is direct contact with greenstone? Maybe it needs greenstone and the eclipse? No, that can’t be it, there wasn’t an eclipse last night.”

Serenity glanced at the greenstone in his hand, wondering why the small chunk of rock worked when an eclipse didn’t. How was a chunk of rock like an eclipse?

Well, come to think of it, wasn’t a planet basically just a chunk of rock? Sure, there was water and atmosphere and stuff on it, but what blocked the Sun was the rock. For that matter, did it literally mean an eclipse or was that just a metaphor?

Having a code that might take months to decipher wasn’t that useful. It was probably just a metaphor for covering the scroll in greenstone, “eclipsing” it.

It was enough to make Serenity wonder if whoever was supposed to get the scroll had a thin sheet of greenstone; that would be a good way to handle it. He could decrypt one page at a time; more than that, he’d know how long the greenstone sheet had to sit on each portion of the scroll and would be able to move it along as needed. That would actually be a pretty effective way to decrypt a spell-locked scroll. All it would take would be the right tool, but it wasn’t a tool anyone who didn’t know what to do would bother having.

Serenity didn’t have that tool. How was he going to handle it? He probably needed a constant layer of greenstone across the scroll.

Serenity frowned at the map, then grinned as he thought of a possible solution. It didn’t have to be solid stone, did it? It just had to cover the map. Smaller individual stones would work as long as he could get the coverage, but that was difficult with irregular pieces, especially if they were large. Serenity wasn’t certain what the others looked like, but this one was only approximately rectangular.

A powder, on the other hand, could easily completely cover something. A pile of larger pieces might work, too, but they only had so much greenstone. It might be worth trying, but it would probably be slow. If they could use greendust, it would be far faster. Serenity knew Blaze had some greendust; he’d been examining it to try to determine its effects on the body to heal them so that he could help the man they were going to rescue from the infirmary.

Speaking of that man, Serenity still hadn’t checked in on him. He really should, but he should check with Blaze first.

Serenity set the greenstone on top of the scroll in a different spot. He wanted to know if the old spot would fade and how quickly the greenstone would reveal a new area.

Next, he needed to locate Blaze.

When Jeff woke up, he tested his restraints, the same way he always did.

Only this time they weren’t there.

He froze, then remembered. Someone had come and gotten him out of that hell. He was free, maybe? What he wasn’t was home.

Jeff wanted to get out of the bed and stand, but even sitting up was difficult. What had they done to him?

“Good, you’re up and moving. I was concerned that you might not be able to.” A warm voice from the doorway let Jeff know the door was open; he hadn’t noticed. The man in the doorway had pale skin and red hair, but his accent was distinctly American. “How are you feeling? Or would you prefer to have breakfast before we talk about anything else? I can help you to a table and we can order something.”

Jeff’s stomach growled at the thought of breakfast. Actual food sounded wonderful.

The redhead laughed. “That sounds like you want breakfast.” He walked over to Jeff and offered his arm. “I’m Blaze, and I’m our healer. I think you’d call that a doctor?”

“Jeff.” Jeff was bothered by having to accept the man’s help, doctor or not; a man should be strong enough to stand on his own two feet, dammit.

Falling on his face would be worse, and that was what was going to happen if he didn’t accept the help. He grumpily pulled on the man’s arm to level himself to his feet; even that didn’t really work until Blaze lifted as well. The doctor was surprisingly strong; he seemed to handle Jeff’s weight without any trouble. Most people would have problems; Jeff had never been a small man.

Jeff looked down at himself. Well, he was smaller now than he had been, especially in the gut area; he actually didn’t look half bad, even if he didn’t look like he exercised at all. Even so, he wasn’t small, and Blaze was handling him as though the weight wasn’t a problem.

Jeff’s legs threatened to give out the entire way out of the bedroom, down the hall, and into a larger room with a table. Jeff was so intent on the chairs at the table that he almost missed that there was a man already sitting at the table until he stood up and turned around and said something in a language Jeff completely didn’t understand. The one thing he did know was that it didn’t sound like the language his captors spoke.

“...and you must be the man Ekari rescued? It’s good to see you up and moving around. I’m sorry we didn’t get you out of there sooner.” The strange man with purple hair shifted languages smoothly. He also had an American accent, though it didn’t sound quite the same as Blaze’s.

Jeff concentrated on preserving whatever dignity he had left as he made his way to the table. The fact that the man with purple hair looked incredibly familiar, very much like the Serenity he’d seen on TV for months, and the woman who rescued him used his name couldn’t be coincidence. He felt a little giddy and more than a little angry about being left in Hell for … however long it was. It felt like years.

But he needed his breath for walking.

It wasn’t until Blaze helped Jeff into a seat that he could ask the question. “How long was I there?”

Serenity let out a long breath before he answered. “More than two months, less than a year. It hasn’t even been a year since the Tutorial started, though we’re getting close.”

“Five or six months, then.” Jeff felt sick at the thought. What about his family? “Why did you leave me there so long?”

Serenity sank back into the chair he’d recently risen from. He decided not to be entirely clear about how long they’d left him there after they found him; they’d done the best they could at the time. He’d admit it if Jeff asked. “We didn’t know. Once we found out, we started looking into the disappearances. We’ve recovered most of the people who were abducted, but I doubt we’ll find everyone. We were lucky to find you at all.”