Cal tilted the healing potion into Jakob's mouth and waited. The man swallowed once, twice, purely on reflex. The potion was F-tier and seemed barely adequate for what it needed to accomplish in the merchant's body. But it was what he had.
He lowered Jakob's head to the pillow, set the half-empty vial on the desk, and settled into the desk's rickety chair to watch. Beneath the soft glow of a [Light Orb], Cal observed Jakob breathe. The desperate, hitching quality gradually smoothed out. Each inhalation drew slightly deeper than the last, the pattern settling into an arrangement that didn't seem quite as labored.
Jakob's color had shifted too. The waxy grey pallor had warmed by a shade as faint pink undertones returned to his lips and the bridge of his nose. Cal exhaled through his teeth and leaned back in the chair, the wood creaking beneath him. The merchant needed food. Real food. Something Jakob's body could process without rejecting it, something warm and simple that would give his gut a reason to keep working.
I need to find this man some broth. Plain hot broth, just like we'd do for the kids when they were sick.
Cal rose from the chair, tucked the blanket tighter around his patient, and headed for the stairs.
The stockroom below was still a disaster. Cal carefully made his way through the wreckage until he found what he needed on a low shelf near the front wall: a small iron cooking pot. The thing was dented but serviceable… it reminded him of the pot Jakob had tried to sell him when he'd first needed a spirit cauldron. He grabbed it by the handle and slipped out the back door.
The nearest tavern sat two blocks west on a side street off the main road, a squat building of dark timber with a sign he didn't bother reading. Noise spilled from the entrance, a comfortable outpouring of overlapping voices, scraping chairs, and the dull thunk of tankards on wood.
Cal pushed through the doorway and made straight for the bar. The interior was packed. Laborers and a scattering of merchants filled every table, their conversations loud after the apartment's suffocating quiet. He kept his head down and the pot held against his hip.
The barkeep was a broad woman with forearms like hams and an expression that suggested she had already dealt with enough for one day.
"Evening, ma'am. Might you have some broth or soup stock to trade?" Cal set the pot on the counter and placed a silver coin beside it. "I'd appreciate as much as this will hold. Keep the change."
She glanced at the coin, then at the pot, and back to him. Whatever she saw in his face didn't invite conversation. She took both without a word and disappeared into the kitchen.
Cal waited with his back to the room, counting heartbeats. Forty-seven of them passed before she returned, the pot now full and steaming, a wooden lid sealing the top. He nodded his thanks, gripped the handle, and left. The broth sloshed gently as he retraced his route through the alleys.
Passing back through the broken door, he returned to the apartment. Jakob hadn't moved. Cal set the pot on the desk, displacing the ledgers to make room, and arranged two pillows behind Jakob's back to prop him upright at a shallow angle.
Cal found a small tin spoon in one of the drawers and filled it from the pot, blew across the surface, and brought it to Jakob's lips. The broth smelled rich and savory, with a base of roasted bones and root vegetables that sent a thread of fragrant steam curling through the stale air. Jakob opened his mouth on instinct and swallowed.
Cal gave him another. And another. After a dozen spoonfuls, Cal paused and checked his breathing. It was still steady. Good.
He continued, pacing the feedings with long pauses between each one. Over the next thirty minutes, Jakob consumed perhaps a third of the pot's contents, and his pallor continued to recede slowly.
But the improvement only made the manacles worse.
Cal looked down at Jakob's wrists as he set the spoon aside. The iron cuffs were medieval in their construction: thick bands of dark metal, each one cinched tight enough to dig into the flesh beneath. The skin around the edges was raw and inflamed, rubbed to a glistening pink that darkened to an angry red where the shackles had bitten deepest. Dried blood crusted the seams. With every unconscious shift of Jakob's arms, the iron scraped against the wounds, and Cal watched the sleeping man's features twitch with each contact.
The broken chains and anchor plates lay coiled on the bed beside him, dead weight adding to the pressure on his wrists.
Those need to come off. Now.
Cal sat back and swept his eyes around the room. The mallet and chisel lay forgotten in the prison cell, but another pair was available downstairs. He could position the chisel against the lock mechanism and hammer away… but the margin for error was nonexistent. One slip and the chisel would punch through the thin skin of Jakob's wrist and into the tendons beneath. The last thing Cal wanted to do right now was cause this man any more pain.
The blacksmith? Yorrin could probably open these in minutes. But Yorrin would ask questions. Reasonable questions, like "whose manacles are these" and "why is a half-elf teenager carrying a man in chains through my shop?"
He needed a quieter solution.
Cal activated his [Spiritual Perception], narrowing his awareness into a focused beam. He fed Mana into the sense, honing it to a point, and aimed the concentrated cone directly at the manacle's lock mechanism.
The world outside the beam faded as data flooded his mind. His E-tier perception rendered the lock's interior into a three-dimensional model of startling detail, the upgrade from F-tier even more apparent. He easily identified four spring-loaded pin tumblers in a staggered line. A cylindrical core. It was a simple design, one he recognized from his life on Earth. Any decent locksmith could pick it in thirty seconds with the proper tools.
[Your proficiency with Spatial Mapping (E) has increased to Adept]
I just need some thin, stiff metal. He searched the room, but the spoon was too thick. He rose quietly and descended the stairs back into the wrecked stockroom.
For ten minutes, he combed through the debris and Jakob's assorted goods. Bent iron nails. Brass hooks. The shattered remains of a hand mirror. He found a set of small metal files in a leather roll, but they were too thick, designed for carving wood, not manipulating steel pins. Nothing he found had the right combination of length and thinness.
He returned to the apartment, mildly frustrated. A simple mechanical problem, and he was stumped by a lack of basic tools. Cal sank back into the chair and stared at the manacles. The mundane solution was out. He needed a different approach.
Cal closed his eyes and reached into [Perfect Memory]. The grimoire pages assembled themselves in his mind: the architecture and Spell requirements of [Mana Hand]. But the pages gave way almost immediately to something more useful. Aurelian, standing before his impressive spirit cauldron in the Golden Mortar's laboratory, declaring, "A novice is limited by their two hands. A master is not."
Without a word, three spectral hands of sapphire Mana had appeared over the cauldron. One plucked a small yellow crystal from a nearby shelf and added it to the mixture. Another held a delicate, silver-veined leaf in the rising steam, while the third stirred the liquid with a slender crystalline rod. It had been a masterful demonstration of multitasking.
They were true hands, precise enough to manipulate physical objects with a dexterity that belied their ethereal composition.
Cal opened his eyes.
If Aurelian's constructs can cork a vial, maybe they can pick a lock.
He straightened in the chair, centered himself, and pulled Mana from his core. He channeled it into the twelve-rune framework, holding each component in focus as he drew the construct in the air before him. The [Mana Hand] materialized a foot from his chest. Semi-transparent, glowing faintly, its five digits splayed in a loose approximation of an open palm. The form it took was crude compared to what Aurelian had produced; the fingers chunky and slightly blurred at the edges, the wrist joint too stiff. And there was only one of them.
But it had worked.
[New Spell Gained: Mana Hand (E) - Novice]
Cal flexed his Intent. The fingers curled inward, responding with a half-second delay. He directed the hand toward the desk and wrapped the ghostly fingers around the tin cup. It felt like trying to type while wearing winter gloves.
Lift.
The cup rose. A wobble traveled through the construct as the mass translated into a faint resistance against his concentration, a shadowy pressure in his mind where the real sensation of touch should have been. Telekinetic feedback? He could feel the cup's weight, its cool surface and cylindrical shape, all rendered as a dim echo transmitted through the Mana tether.
He set the cup down with a soft clink. Functional, if clumsy.
Cal guided the hand to the chain pooled beside Jakob's wrist and closed the fingers around a single link. He squeezed with his mind, but the iron was unyielding.
More. He fed another surge of Mana into the construct, forcing the ethereal digits to compress as hard as he could. The hand flared, its blue light intensifying until it was nearly opaque. A low hum vibrated up the telekinetic tether as the Spell's construction strained under the influx of power. The fingers wavered, threatening to dissolve, but the iron link didn't even budge. It remained perfectly rigid and utterly indifferent to his efforts.
He sighed. Too weak for iron, I suppose. Perhaps I can shrink the fingers and get them inside?
Redirecting the [Mana Hand] to the manacle on Jakob's left wrist, he rotated the construct until the index finger hovered above the keyhole. The opening was a slim vertical slot, perhaps three centimeters wide. Cal thinned his Intent and drove the finger forward.
It didn't fit. The glowing digit was too broad, its form too rigid to compress into the opening.
Cal tried again and focused his Intent, pouring more Mana into the construct and commanding the finger to narrow. The luminous digit pulsed, its edges contracting inward. For a moment, it thinned, the blue glow becoming brighter as the energy condensed. But the pushback from the runic framework was immense. He felt the Spell's structure fighting his will, a hard limit he couldn't seem to overcome.
He pushed harder. The finger warped, guttered violently, and began to destabilize as it lost cohesion. It was no use. It seemed like the shape initially taken was what the Spell wanted to maintain. Perhaps in the future he could find a way around this, or modify the Spell to allow it, but for now the limit held.
Cal released the magic with an intense exhale. The [Mana Hand] dissipated into fading motes.
He drummed his fingers on his knee, thinking. After a few minutes, he abruptly stopped drumming as he thought back to the [Spatial Mapping] imprint he'd previously taken of the lock mechanism.
He pictured the [Mana Hand] schematic in his mind, but this time he looked past the runes to the principle behind them. The grimoire had instructed him to visualize a hand, and he had obeyed. It was the same principle as the [Portal] Spell, which required a clear mental image of the destination to function. The architecture of runes was just a stable framework designed to hold and manipulate projected Mana that was guided by Intent.
The Spell construct didn't mandate that the shape had to be a hand… it was just the shape I was told to project for the magic to work as intended. But what if I intend for something else?
The core function was actually to create a stable, telekinetically controlled object out of pure air. The shape was defined by his will, not by the runes.
And I don't need a hand… I need a key.
He began with the lock's three-dimensional layout, still held perfectly in his mind, and built a new scaffolding of runes around it. He repurposed the Spell's core logic, swapping the five articulated emitters for a rigid spine and four forking tines. It was a construct less than half as complex as the original, but focused into a purpose-built tool.
Cal started drawing runes into the air and superimposed his mental model of the lock over them. He adjusted the construct's dimensions by fractions of a centimeter, ensuring the tines would depress all four pins and match the keyhole's profile exactly.
When the two images aligned, he opened his core and poured Mana into the new spellwork, all the while commanding the Spell to take the proper shape with his Intent.
A shining key of compressed air materialized in front of his face. It was small, little longer than his index finger, its translucent surface glowing with drifting internal currents of blue-white energy.
Cal's pulse rose with excitement. He guided the key toward the manacle on Jakob's left wrist, angling it to match the keyhole's orientation. The construct entered the slot without resistance, the translucent blade sliding into the mechanism as if… as if it had been made for it. He grinned in spite of himself.
Through the telekinetic feedback, he felt the pins. Small points of pressure, each one engaging the key's profile at a different level. He pushed the construct deeper, sensing the pins compress against their springs, clicking one by one into alignment as it reached its full depth.
All four pins sat in place.
Cal rotated the construct with a thought.
Click.
The manacle sprang open. Iron parted from ruined flesh, and the cuff swung wide on its hinge, releasing Jakob's left wrist. Cal gently held and lowered the arm, as the chain and anchor plate slid off the bed to clatter against the floor.
[New Spell Gained: Mana Key (E) - Novice]
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Happy Monday folks. I hope y'all had a pleasant weekend and enjoyed the chapter. Thanks for reading. Have a great week!
A few minor revisions below. Many of you probably already read the update I made to Chapter 130, because it happened on Friday. But for anyone who read the Chapter within the first few hours of the drop... this was added later based on some appreciated reader feedback.
Cheers,
Jon
REVISIONS
Chapter 130: input Cal's character motivation for breaking out Jakob on his own, after Muntu's comment. Thanks Muntu!
Not a risk I'm willing to take.
He paused in his rush as the thought of seeking help tempted him. Captain Hatch? With Zarven out of the picture, maybe he’d listen.
But listen to what? A wild story about a secret prison Cal had no proof of? How would I even explain how I know? He'd have to admit he'd used his [Spiritual Perception] to scan a private residence, a magical invasion of privacy that for all Cal knew was probably illegal. And even that wasn't the whole truth. It was his unique spatial mapping that had truly pinpointed Jakob's location. Revealing that ability, a power no one else seemed to possess, was a line he wouldn't cross.
He shook his head. In this world, the strong made their own justice.
So will I.
Turning off the main road and into a side street, he thought Jakob wouldn't mind him appropriating his tools for a rescue. Probably try to charge him for their use afterward. If he's still capable of charging anyone for anything…
Chapter 109: I also did end up changing Selara/Aurelian's old delving team name from "Meridian" to "Zenith." If and when they show up/get referenced again, I'll try to remind via another Author's Note, since this will be annoying for you to remember.