After the first full day of mediation, Isaac was starting to look for ways to answer the riddle that mana, or Mannen, had given him. Two were related to each other, one was vision related, and then there was a final pair after the first three. The question was, should he try to tackle the singular vision related one, or the pair first. Seeing and being aware were entirely different things but he had experience with being sort of aware during mediation so he had decided to try and figure that one out first. He simply had no idea where to start with the pair of abilities that were supposed to be so tightly related as to come together.

Day two had Isaac attempting to see through the mana vortex pouring through him while he meditated. After the fifth time of simply knocking himself out of meditation, he gave up and took the rest of the day to just meditate as he was supposed to for healing purposes. He sort of felt like he might have been slightly in the right direction but he had no idea which direction he had to go from there so he decided to just put a pin on the feeling that he had and try again from a different direction the next day.

Day three had Isaac trying to meditate while keeping his eyes open. After an hour of failing to even begin, and without a single sign that he was going in the right direction, Isaac gave up and went back to mediating. Two thirds of the way through the day, when Isaac had awoken for food, to stretch, and see to his bodily needs, Isaac had another idea. He ordered his shadow to rise, solidified it, animated it, and then ordered it to stand behind Lenna and watch over her while she meditated. He then meditated for the next few hours until he had to take a break again.

In the wee hours of the morning, of the fourth day, Isaac awoke from his meditation and stared at the created shadow minion. The shadow minion was not strong, they never had been, but it was strong enough to handle any copper level melee combatant. He stared at his shadow for a long moment while his stomach growled from a lack of recent intake of calories. He could sense the animated shadow, the solid silhouette, the dark minion, and it turned to regard its master as his gaze intently stared through it down to the underlying principals of why it was able to exist in the first place. Isaac nodded once to himself and closed his eyes again. "Show me what you see." Isaac ordered the shadow and he was assaulted by a sudden feeling of disjointed senses and vertigo.

Through Isaac's closed eyes, he could see the world from the perspective of the shadow minion staring at him. The vision was completely grayscale and Isaac knew that it could never be any other way. He heard Lenna shift. "Turn around and look at her." He directed his animated shadow and it did. Isaac almost fell over as his vision blurred with rotational movement even though his body was entirely still. The shadow looked down at Lenna and she looked at it with a raised eyebrow.

"Yes?" Lenna questioned.

"I figured it out." Isaac told her. "I can see you."

Lenna leaned to look past the animated shadow to look at Isaac. "Well of-" She cut herself off as she realized that Isaac's eyes were closed. "Wait, as in, you can see through it like how you can see through the shadows directly connected to you?" She wondered.

Isaac nodded which gave him another feeling of vertigo and he nearly toppled over like a cup hit by a cat. "Yes." He told her with a slight feeling of nauseousness.

"Did you level up?" Lenna asked immediately afterwards.

"Yes, I think so." He told her. "I can feel myself becoming, more? My mana density isn't really increasing but my volume is. Maybe my density is increasing too, I don't know, it's hard to tell the difference between fifteen and sixteen thousand." He didn't actually have thousands of spell levels worth of mana but his point still stood.

"Just like that, you are one step closer to me, again." Lenna commented with a shake of her head. "I think leveling up might be too easy for you."

"Well, I did have a hint." Isaac confessed. "Without a hint to point me in the right direction, who knows how long it would have taken me."

Lenna nodded in understanding and agreement. Isaac rarely ever actually pushed for a level up. There were plenty of other things that held his attention and it wasn't like he was a weakling or anything. With his soul integrity degradation and the weakened state that he had been in since it had happened, he hadn't really been trying to level up either for fear that doing so would simply prolong his recovery time. In a way, it sort of had. If he had spent all of the time meditating that he had wasted messing around over the last few days, he would've been a quarter of a day ahead of where he was, which wasn't a lot but it could mean the difference between being ready and not being ready when the time came to meet with the Fatebreaker again.

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"I'm going to try to get used to this new ability while we eat and then I'll get right back to meditating. I don't want to waste too much time." Isaac told her.

Lenna nodded in agreement. "I'll order room service." She told him and got up to do just that.

The rest of the fourth day passed with Isaac using his newly acquired skill whenever he wasn't meditating. It took him a bit longer to get to the bathroom, using an alternate perspective to see where he was going, but it was good practice in the event that he needed to do something of the sort in the future. Eating was only awkward if he focused too much on the movements of his body instead of just the outcome he wished. If he tried to manually control each joint movement with only the outside perspective to go off of, he would often find himself missing his target morsel with his fork or hitting his cheek with it once he had impaled it. If he was just eating normally while using his alternate perspective to subconsciously direct his movements, he found better results even if it wasn't as effective training.

From the fifth day to the eighth, Isaac's mind drifted to what the pair of abilities could be. He didn't have a lot of time to ponder between meditation sessions but he still tried to use all of his time wisely. He also asked Lenna to think about the problem with him as time passed. Soon enough, it was the night before second to last full moon of the year, and the duo had a goddess that they wished to consult with before what might've been their last meeting with the Fatebreaker.

—

"I do not care for your pathetic excuses!" The immortal king confined to his golden throne bellowed as he threw his solid gold chalice directly at his aide's head. "If I feel so much as one more shift in the perfect mana of my city, I will end you, permanently."

What was going on in the throne room was not something that Isaac would learn about for a very long time to come. In the throne room, that was located on the ground floor of the grand spire, sat the king of the high elven nation known as the Celestial Kingdom. This king had made a wish for immortality long ago. His wish had been granted, under one condition. The king was forced to remain on his throne, the proof of his sovereignty over the nation, or else he would return to being a normal high elf, If that happened, his strand of fate would immediately be hit with the entirety of the 'wear due to time's passage' of however long he had lived up until that point, and promptly snap like a string trying to hold up a falling mountain. As long as he sat on that throne, he was not an elf nor a mortal at all, he was the idea of the King of the Celestial Kingdom, and as long as he remained an idea and not a person, he would live forever.

In order to make his existence tolerable, things like permanently ongoing healing effects, and plumbing rigged up so he could relieve himself without standing, as well as an entire wardrobe that could be placed over him without him having to stand, were created and put into action. His moments of lacking dignity were only ever revealed to the small handful of maids that attended to his every need and would happen during the late hours of the night when the rest of the city was forced into slumber. He had grand rituals set up to allow him to scry upon anyone in the city whenever he wished, that was why there was ban on items that shielded one from divination magics as well as the use of protection magics to prevent his spying on people's most private moments. He was the king and he refused to be denied by the common peasantry.

Nights were the immortal king's time to rest and decompress with the maids even seeing to certain 'needs' that would typically not fall under a maid's purview. He also spent plenty of time simply observing those in his kingdom and using his guards to inspect the perfection that he had put into place. This time of contemplation, relaxation, decompression, and jubilation had been upset every night for the past eight nights by a certain dark mage entering and leaving meditation at anything but standard intervals. During the day, Isaac's irregular mana event durations could be somewhat overlooked as the king interacted with nobles, aides, adjuncts, and servants, but at night it was simply too jarring for him to handle. It might not have been as bad if he wasn't so completely in tune with the entire surrounding area. The king had become like a druid to their garden with his city and such a massive change in the way the mana moved was simply too much to ever overlook completely.

The king's current problem was that he wanted Isaac dead but he couldn't be completely sure that Isaac wouldn't just come back from the dead. Demigods were known to come back very, very, angry when killed and a demigod known as the Lord of Darkness was liable to come back with more than just a chip on his shoulder. In fact, there was a greater than zero chance that if the king did not end Isaac for good, but managed to kill his mate for good, that the demigod would not stop until there was nothing left of the Celestial Kingdom at all.

The king's fear and respect of human demigods came from a time when he was still able to move around freely, during the last dragon surge. He had been there when Blade cleaved a mountain range in two and Time had put it back as if it had never been damaged in the first place. At the same time, Gravity had dropped a star on the head of an ancient black dragon, one said to be entirely unkillable, yet had vaporized it in its entirety so thoroughly that a supposedly 'immortal' mythical being could not put itself back together. He had watched as Space disconnected the top of reality from the bottom and then put it back, causing the top and bottom halves of a dragon to simply fall free from each other. Those sights were not things that he would ever unsee.

Yet, despite his fear and respect of the power of demigods, he really, really, wanted Isaac dead. The only thing that kept him from acting on that want was the fear of the Lord of Darkness's return. So he waited, and yelled at his aides for being useless, until someone found definitive proof that Isaac either was or was not a demigod. His one glimmer of hope was that he had been informed that Isaac's off and on again meditation sessions would be ending come the end of the month, which luckily, was the day after next.

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