There was far too much mana in the ritual for Serenity to hold it all, even though his mana pool was far larger than normal for his Tier. Lykandeon was a much higher Tier than Serenity; even so, Serenity suspected that Lykandeon was using something to enhance the amount of mana he had available. There was simply so much in the ritual that even a Tier 20 would have had trouble filling it, and Lykandeon was nowhere near Tier 20. It wasn’t really that big a problem; there were many ways to temporarily store mana, after all, and Lykandeon probably had more than one.

Serenity didn’t have any other than his ability to store spells, but he did have his Origin Rift, which he could use as a source for whatever he needed. It was tiring, cost him some mana and essence to use, and wouldn’t let him keep up with someone like Lykandeon if they were in good shape and experienced, but it was how he’d managed to fill his part of the ritual. While he’d put in less than Lykandeon, he’d still put in far more than he personally had even before the contributions from Eat Death and Death Himself were considered.

Serenity planned to refill his own mana pool then send the excess through the Origin Rift. It would be tiring again, but he was confident he could hold out long enough. Converting someone else’s mana into your own was a lossy process at its best, and this was definitely not the best circumstances.

When he pulled the mana into himself, it didn’t quite behave the way he expected. The first thing he had to do was make it his so that it could go in his mana pool. That step seemed to work fine, but when he added it to his mana pool, most of it seemed to disappear.

Mana didn’t just disappear. It always went somewhere or did something. It wasn’t technically conserved because it could be consumed by a spell, but even then that was doing something. It didn’t just disappear.

Keeping the ritual running was more important than investigating the discrepancy. Serenity knew there was a very good chance he’d regret not investigating quickly, but he also knew he’d regret not weakening Lykandeon as much as possible and the ritual wasn’t nearly as calm as it had been before. Lykandeon was fighting back, trying to get out.

Unfortunately for Lykandeon, Serenity knew rituals better than his opponent did and he’d had the time to thoroughly clamp it onto Lykandeon before he realized anything was wrong.

In many ways, this was a perfect lesson in what not to do if you wanted to have a long, successful life; Lykandeon had insulated himself enough that he thought he was completely safe on Aeon because of the bindings on his priests and his servants but hadn’t realized that those same bindings meant that many of them hated him. They’d worked around the bindings however they could and had finally found a way to bring him down.

It wouldn’t have been as easy if Lykandeon had taken even basic precautions. While it was true that the ritual was set up for a single caster and a group of sacrifices, that didn’t mean that it was impossible to have people in the area of the ritual. There were some places that needed to be left alone (such as all of the pools) to avoid potential interference in the ritual, but he could have had guards checking for interference or even for anything odd. That would have made Serenity’s task harder, perhaps even impossible. He’d likely have still found a way, but he doubted it would be as successful as this way might still be.

Instead, Lykandeon had run into the classic example of what not to do when fighting anyone with the skills to prepare before battle: he’d allowed his opponent to choose the battlefield. More than that; Lykandeon had willingly walked into a ritual modified by a skilled ritualist who wanted him dead. Serenity couldn’t call it luck; it was a combination of Lykandeon’s carelessness and belief in his invulnerability and Serenity’s planning.

None of that made keeping Lykandeon trapped any easier; it simply made it possible. Lykandeon pushed back on the mana flowing into him; he couldn’t halt it, but if he slowed it enough, the ritual might well fail explosively. That might or might not be worse for Serenity than Lykandeon, but either way it would prevent Serenity from using the ritual to pour more Death into Lykandeon.

Serenity more than half wished he’d been able to afford to have Ita wait longer to break the Tower of Broken Swords or that he had a second such attack available. Unfortunately, the only option any of them had come up with was breaking Aeon’s core and Serenity was unwilling to even consider that.

Rourke volunteered to handle it; with Lykandeon gone, he claimed that he could easily get into the room that held the core. Serenity had to talk him out of it. Not only would it potentially kill Aeon as a creature, it would kill Aeon as a world. Serenity couldn’t forget watching Earth shatter in front of his eyes; he wasn’t going to do that to another world, especially not an inhabited one.

Particularly not the one Rissa and Jenna were on.

Lykandeon started varying the pushback he gave to the Death mana; Serenity hoped that meant that he’d decided that he couldn’t win simply by resisting. This was more likely to break someone’s control of a spell, but with the ritual’s support, Serenity was spending far less to keep it going than Lykandeon was to try to stop the ritual. He also wasn’t being hurt by every wisp of Death-attuned mana that went by while Lykandeon was.

Serenity doubted the gaps were because Lykandeon was growing tired. It was too soon for that.

Serenity focused on smoothing the flow just a bit; all he had to do was take the edges off so that they wouldn’t hurt the ritual, but he smoothed it a little more than that in the hope that it would convince Lykandeon that he was accomplishing something. The longer Lykandeon kept up his useless effort, the better.

Lykandeon continued longer than Serenity had expected but not as long as he’d hoped. Lykandeon’s next gambit, fortunately, was one that Serenity had hoped the god would use: instead of pushing the mana away and trying to end the ritual by stalling it, he started pulling the mana into himself, working with the ritual to speed it up. Lykandeon was correct that this was a viable method to damage or destroy a ritual; overloading the traces would make it fail.

Fortunately for Serenity, excessively skimpy traces were not one of the problems with the Water Garden ritual layout; if anything, it was overbuilt. There was really no reason it shouldn’t be, since it was gigantic; the person who built it had plenty of room to put in as much as he wanted to.

Serenity had massively overfilled the outer portions of the ritual and even then only three minor traces had fizzled; they all had backups, as well. The traces Lykandeon was pulling on were specifically meant to carry a significant portion of the power of the ritual; he’d have to pull a great deal through them to have any chance of burning them out. Even if he succeeded, he’d have pulled so much Death mana into himself that Serenity would have reached his goal and more.

The draw increased and increased. As it did, the green-and-gold mana flowing into Serenity also sped up. Serenity didn’t dare try to slow it down; interfering now would be counter-productive. His mana pool was filling only slowly, but he started to feel a headache building. He wasn’t certain what was happening, simply that it was uncomfortable.

The sooner this was over, the better; at the same time, the more energy that went into Lykandeon, the better. Serenity needed to stay alert; the moment the ritual ended, he needed to change his form and gather himself back together.

The ancient yet young sapient being known as The Voice (or sometimes Order’s Voice) watched Serenity. He was doing something impossible. Again.

The Voice wanted to believe it was due to Serenity’s past as the Final Reaper, but he knew it wasn’t. Not this time. Sure, the Death mana stuff was, and the fact that there was no chance this would kill him was certainly related, but at its base this was something Serenity had caused in the roughly eleven months since the Voice threw him back in time in a scrambled incompletely compressed mess.

He’d become a dragon and somehow he was giving himself the greatest drawback of a young dragon. The Voice had never seen anything like it; when he helped a Pathed person take on draconic characteristics, he’d never seen this happen. He’d never even seen it when a monster evolved into a dragon with the help of his still nonsapient counterpart.

Serenity had increased his Core Tier without completing his Path, without being ready for a new Core Tier. Then he did it again and again. Each time, he filled in the Attributes that went with the new Core Tier, but his Path wasn’t moving nearly as quickly.

That wasn’t to say his Path wasn’t advancing; it was, and fairly quickly. Serenity was using his magitech - and Aide’s help - to manage everything he needed to do with four bodies and keep up with a huge ritual that he shouldn’t be powerful enough to handle the way he was handling it. He was even doing it without thinking about it, integrating his magitech into who he was; it was exactly the point of the Magitech Abomination Path.

It still wasn’t moving at anything like the speed of his Core.

The Voice watched as Serenity’s Core and Path became unbalanced. This was potentially far worse than Core Sickness; this was the reason the Voices froze anyone who was ready for Core advancement until they fulfilled their minimum criteria, which for Serenity was completing a Species Path at each Tier. Core Sickness was bad, but unbalancing the Tiers was far worse.

It was also why Voice-mediated evolution existed. It gave the Voices a chance to stabilize Tier increases.

The Voice suspected it was the reason that most sapients used the Paths instead of upgrading a Core. The Paths were more demanding up front but they didn’t bring nearly as high a risk of madness or spirit rupture.

Serenity was now unbalanced by three Tiers.

The very last thing the Voice wanted was for the unkillable man with the potential to kill everything to be driven mad by a shattered spirit. It reached into the mess it created when it tried to stuff the Final Reaper into a Tier Zero body; it was impossible to do, but it’d done the best it could. It had left some hooks for Serenity to tug it into a better shape over time, and he had, though the Voice was fairly confident he hadn’t realized that was what he was doing.

If it loosened some more of the restrictions it had placed on Serenity, it would give him some more cushion. Not enough to make the Voice happy about the situation but enough to help.

It couldn’t - no, wouldn’t - pull Serenity into an evolution right now. He couldn’t afford either the distraction or the downtime. It wasn’t sure what would happen if Serenity took several evolutions in a row after pushing his Core past multiple Tiers quickly but it knew that it had to be better than leaving them haphazardly created or doing them while he was in a fight.

The Voice pulled up the list of available Evolutions for Serenity. It was normally hundreds of items long; Serenity had qualified for all sorts of things during his lives and they all counted, just like he had hundreds of Paths.

Only there weren’t hundreds of options. There were two. Voice had never seen either before; in fact, it had never seen anything quite like them before, even though they were clearly Serenity-flavored variations on their themes.

Dungeon Deity

Incarnate of Death

With only those two choices, the Voice’s next action was clear: it would grant Serenity the Dungeon Deity evolution. It had promised him that it wouldn’t present Death-related Paths, after all.

It was willing to break that promise if it had to, but that didn’t mean it wanted to.