The House Argent dorms were originally designed to build character, which in the Empire is usually code for "give you hypothermia and back problems." But over the last few weeks, I'd diverted a significant chunk of the Jester's Laundry profits into an extreme home makeover.
The prison-issue cot was gone, replaced by a mattress that didn't feel like a sack of rocks, topped with a proper feather duvet and pillows that I sank into every night with a groan of spiritual relief. I'd added a sturdy oak desk with a bookcase bolted above it, currently stuffed with stolen library books and my new set of inscription tools. A proper Mana Lamp cast a warm, steady glow over the workspace, illuminating the sad little pot plant Grace had given me. I think she was testing if I could keep something alive that wasn't a clone.
There was a wash basin now, too. It was cold water only, and I still had to trek down the hall to the shared toilets like a peasant, but at least I could wash my face without an audience. A thick carpet covered the freezing stone floor, and heavy velvet curtains—which I'd bought for the entire dorm—blocked out the drafts.
In fact, I'd crammed the space with as much heavy fabric and timber as I could without blocking the meditation spots. I told the squad it was about luxury, but the truth was I just needed to kill the echo. There's a specific, hollow ring to a voice bouncing off bare stone walls that makes the hair on my arms stand up. I couldn't remember exactly why—probably a residual flinch from a dozen lifetimes spent rotting in a dungeon or shivering in an empty orphanage.
I'd even squeezed a single, overstuffed armchair into the corner. I could have filled the room with mahogany, but I'd deliberately kept the centre of the room empty. The "Night Shift"—my nine meditating clones—needed the floor space to sit without overlapping hitboxes.
Right now, however, the floor was clear for science.
"Right," I said, cracking my neck. "Phase Two. The 'Roach Motel' hypothesis. We know people can walk in voluntarily. Now we need to see if I can force them."
"The breaking point," I announced, staring at the magical equations floating in my mind, "is a toddler."
'Allow me,' Ronan said, seizing the opportunity to test the theory himself. 'I will prepare the subject.'
He didn't bother with props or loopholes. He just took control of the mana flow and compressed the full eighty kilograms of required mass into a three-foot frame.
The Toddler-Ronan materialised on the bed with a heavy thump, instantly sinking six inches into the lumpy mattress. He stood there, dense as a neutron star, looking up at me with big, solemn eyes and a scowl that looked ridiculous on a face that round.
"He's too dense," I noted, poking the rock-hard cheek of the tiny Paladin. "But he'll do for the victim. Now, I need a control subject to manage the variables."
I focused, and a Toddler-Murphy popped into existence next to him.
Unlike Ronan's lead-weight construct, my clone was struggling to stay upright beneath a teddy bear that was twice his size. It was a gargantuan, fluffy monstrosity that looked like it had eaten three smaller bears for breakfast.
"It's a sixteen-kilogram teddy bear," I explained, gesturing to the struggling child. "I'm maxing out the accessory weight so the kid himself only has to weigh sixty-four kilos. Takes the pressure off his spine."
'Okay,' Ronan admitted, eyeing the prop from inside his dense little avatar. 'Why a teddy?'
"Low density. I wanted to see how big I can make the accessory, and that isn't even the limit."
I pointed a finger at the dense Toddler-Ronan. "Now, assume the position, Tiny Golden Boy. I'm going to sit on you."
The Toddler-Ronan nodded solemnly. To him, this was a tactical exercise. He planted his little feet on the feather duvet and looked up, ready for the test.
I opened a portal on my backside—roughly the size of a dinner plate. I turned around and hovered over him in a squat, lining up my rear end with his head. The lighting cast a dark shadow over his tiny, serious face.
"Okay," I whispered, lowering myself slowly.
'Ready,' Ronan confirmed, his mental voice tight with concentration.
"Relax..." The tiny Murphy whispered to the tiny Ronan. "It's perfectly natural…"
The tiny Ronan blinked. He looked up at the descending darkness. He looked at the angle.
'Murphy...' he started, a note of sudden hesitation creeping into his voice.
"Shhh," the tiny Murphy clone hushed him, as I dropped lower.
'Wait… WHAT?!' The Ronan clone roared, his eyes going wide with horror. 'Let's take a second to…!'
I grinned, slamming my ass down on him.
Just like in combat when I Phased through a sword swing, the portal accepted him. His head vanished into the void. His shoulders followed. The spatial distortion swallowed him up to his waist without a hitch.
He kicked his little legs, bracing against the mattress. I grunted a deep groan escaping my nostrils as I pushed harder, trying to jam him in there while he flailed in a panic that was now definitely more personal than tactical.
Then, the portal reached his Core.
SPROING.
It was like trying to force a magnet's north pole against another north pole. The resistance wasn't physical; it was existential.
My vision greyed out. My knees buckled. It felt as though I had just sprinted a mile in full plate armour while holding my breath.
"Gah!" I gasped, the wind knocked out of me.
The rejection force was violent. I was bucked upward, stumbling forward onto the floor, while the Toddler-Ronan was spat out of the portal like a watermelon seed, bouncing off the mattress and tumbling into the pillows.
"Ow... wow," I wheezed, rubbing my lower back and clutching my chest. My heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. "That... that felt like a stroke."
'The Core,' Ronan deduced, ignoring my medical emergency and watching the tiny clone shake off the dizziness. 'Phasing works because you are usually accepting dead matter—a sword, a fist, a boot. The Inventory doesn't care about mass. But a Living Spark?'
"It fights back," I groaned, finally catching my breath. "The threshold hates it. It costs me stamina to open the door, but dragging a living soul across the event horizon? That costs life force. If I tried that in a fight, I'd pass out before I finished the sentence."
I turned to the Toddler-Murphy. "Let's confirm the cost. What if the subject is willing?"
I tiredly dropped on top of the Toddler-Murphy. He didn't resist. He reached up and embraced the void.
He slipped through the portal on my chest seamlessly, vanishing into the White Void.
THUD.
I collapsed onto the bed, staring at the ceiling, gasping for air. Even with him willing, the moment his spark crossed into the Inventory, it felt like someone had siphoned a pint of blood from my veins.
"Still... massive... drain," I panted. "Teleportation service is... cancelled. I can't ferry people. Two passengers and I'd be in a coma."
I lay there for a minute, recovering, before sitting up. "Right. He's in. Now, let's see if I can simply pull him out. Like a sword."
I reached into the Inventory with my mind. I could feel the items. I could feel the tiny Clone walking around on the white floor, inspecting a sandwich. Probably to see if it was still in Stasis.
I grabbed a sword with my mind; it floated up, ready to be summoned.
I tried to grab the Clone.
My mental grip slipped off him like oil on glass.
I tried again, focusing harder. Get out here you little shit!
Nothing. I couldn't "equip" him. I couldn't summon him. He was distinct from the Inventory—a guest, not an item in Stasis.
'So, we can't withdraw him,' Ronan realised. 'It appears the system does not register Living Sparks as stored data.'
To be absolutely sure, I looked around the room. A moth was fluttering near the oil lamp. You poor bastard.
I caught it in a cup, opened the portal on my chest again—wincing at the sharp sting of stamina loss as it passed through—and shook it inside.
Inside the memory feed, I saw the moth fluttering confusedly against the white backdrop.
"Okay," I said, sweating slightly. "Come on out."
I tried to pull the moth. Nothing. I tried to manually open an exit portal of some kind behind the moth inside the Void. Nothing happened. The moth flew upward, towards the Indigo Sky, looking for a way out.
It found nothing but infinite white.
'It seems to be a one-way trip,' Ronan said, his voice grave.
"It's not a prison," I realised with horror. "It's a roach motel. You check in, but you don't check out. If I shoved Lysander in there—assuming I knocked him out first—he'd be stuck until he starved to death. And if I let people in to hide? I'd be burying them alive unless I figured out a high-tier summoning ritual to fish them out."
The Toddler-Murphy inside looked around, gave a little salute, and dispelled himself. The moth wasn't so lucky. It was just... there. Forever now.
"Fair enough," I said, shelving my dreams of being a human transport service. "So, it's a workshop for me, a storage unit for my stuff, and a death trap for everyone who trusts me."
'And the mana?' Ronan asked. 'The sky? That's pure mana. If we can drink that...'
"Worth a shot."
Ronan spun up a clone and sent it through. It sat in the lotus position inside the Void for ten minutes, simply breathing. Then, it dispelled.
The memory and the mana hit Ronan, and a second later, the sensation bled over to me.
It didn't taste like ash. It tasted like pure, uncut adrenaline. It was cold, sharp, and incredibly dense.
"Whoa," I breathed, feeling the phantom rush in my own veins. "That's not normal mana. That's high-octane baby!"
'It is refined,' Ronan agreed, his mental voice humming with satisfaction. 'It's White Core mana. A clone meditating there should be able to process mana ten times faster than we can out here.'
"So we do have a cheat code," I grinned. "We can just sit in there and power-level until we hit Yellow Core."
'Well… There's probably a catch,' Ronan warned.
"There always is!" I said, the excitement dampening slightly.
'I'm pretty sure the Inventory uses that mana to maintain the space—the gravity, the air, the floor,' Ronan said. 'We can drink from the ocean, yes. And it will boost our cultivation significantly. But if we drink it dry...'
"The floor dissolves, and we fall into the void forever," I finished.
'We must be careful,' Ronan advised. 'We can sip from it to speed up our progress, but we cannot drain it. We risk de-evolving the Space back into a simple storage slot.'
"Wonder if they will let me near the Rift Portal Crystal? You know the one that powers the Rift games," I said, thinking out loud. "If I can just uncork that puppy..."
'Stop,' Ronan warned, his tone shifting from academic to icy fear. 'Do not even joke about that, Murphy.'
"I'm just saying, it's a free refill—"
'It is Heresy,' he cut me off sharply. 'Mana Draining is the signature of the Fae. Creatures of Pure Ego. That is exactly what the Inquisition was built to hunt. If they suspect a Fae is hiding within these walls, they won't just arrest us. They will burn the Academy to the ground to ensure we are ash. Not even the Emperor could stop them.'
The severity of his tone killed the joke.
"Right," I said, rubbing the back of my neck. "No drinking the architecture. A finite cheat code is still a cheat code. We just have to ration the cookies."
I looked around the dorm room. It was cluttered with laundry bags, books, and the remnants of my failed density experiments.
"This bedroom is too small for science," I declared, standing up. "To the armoury."
We relocated downstairs to the old armoury, which we customised. It was cooler here, the air smelling of oil and stone dust, and far more appropriate for the level of nonsense we were about to commit.
"Right," I said, cracking my knuckles. "First test: Pneumatics."
I focused, and a clone materialised. He wasn't holding a weapon; he was clutching a massive, heavy bundle of rubberised canvas that weighed exactly sixteen kilograms.
"Observe."
I opened a portal—just a small valve-sized aperture—connected to the high-pressure atmosphere of the Inventory. I grabbed the first nozzle from the bundle.
WHOOSH.
A six-foot-tall plastic palm tree with a weighted sand base exploded upward with a violent hiss, its fronds slapping the low stone ceiling.
"Tactical shrubbery," I grinned. "I can deploy cover anywhere."
I grabbed the next valve sticking out of the clone's bundle. WHOOSH. A bright pink inflatable flamingo, the size of a pony, sprang into existence. WHOOSH. A paddling pool. WHOOSH. A giant yellow rubber duck.
"And now," I announced, rubbing my hands together. "The masterpiece. I call it: The Decoy."
I pulled the final limp shape from the pile. It was shaped roughly like a human. My plan was simple: An inflatable Murphy.
I shoved the air nozzle in.
PH-WUMP.
The plastic expanded instantly. But I hadn't accounted for the internal baffles—the complex web of plastic strips inside high-end inflatables that keep them flat and shaped. I didn't know how to engineer those, so the Inventory didn't make them.
Instead of a dashing hero, the decoy ballooned into a horrifying, featureless sphere with four tiny, sausage-like limbs sticking out the sides. It wobbled on the floor, looking less like a human and more like a morbidly obese tick.
"Behold," I muttered, staring at the abomination. "The Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man's ugly cousin."
'It captures your likeness perfectly,' Ronan noted dryly.
"Shut up. Okay, so the breaking point seems to be when the object becomes more complex than my own understanding." I kicked the wobbly sphere aside.
'Fascinating,' Ronan continued, ignoring the bouncing blob.
My mind was racing through every possibility as I simply stared at the small clone in front of me. Suddenly, a mischievous thought sparked in an overactive sector of my brain. "Do you want to see the little guys fight it out? Tiny Sparring Match. Fists only. No Arts. But we make them as light as biologically possible, so they're fast!"
Ronan paused. I could feel the competitive itch scratching at his discipline. 'To test if these clones are worth using in a fight?'
"Sure, let's call it that. But mostly because I want to see a tiny you get punched in the face."
'Acceptable,' Ronan agreed.
"To bypass the density rule, we had to offload sixteen kilograms of mass into 'accessories'." I volunteered to go first, seeing an opportunity to test our fabrication limits while we were at it.
I summoned a Toddler-Murphy. He appeared, dragging a heavy leather golf bag that was nearly twice his height, the studs scraping loudly against the stone floor.
"Hold on," I said, reaching down to unsheathe a driver from the bag. "Material test."
I tapped the club against the stone floor. It rang with a crisp, high-pitched ping. "Titanium. Perfect replica." I pulled a putter next. "Solid gold." It was soft, heavy, and useless. Then I tested a driving iron made of Mithril. It snapped like tin in my hands.
"Okay, so I can only forge metals I've actually seen or touched? Or could magical alloys require a deeper understanding?" I muttered, tossing the broken club away. I made a mental note to revisit that experiment again at some point.
'How about technology?' Ronan added.
I spun up another clone—Toddler-Murphy Three—holding a smartphone. I smashed it against the workbench. Solid black resin inside. "So I can't build chips. Got it."
'Like this,' Ronan projected.
He summoned his champion. The Toddler-Ronan stood about three feet tall, wearing a miniature version of his stoic expression. But strapped to his back, like an absurdly heavy rucksack, was a pristine, antique wind-up gramophone with a brass horn.
I recognised it instantly. It wasn't some generic replica. It was the gramophone—the one belonging to the old man who originally owned the gas station back on Earth. That machine was the genesis of Ronan's obsession with classic rock.
The tiny clone unstrapped the heavy gramophone, placed it carefully on the workbench, and wound the crank. CRRK. CRRK. Then, he dropped the needle.
The opening riff of AC/DC's Thunderstruck began to play loudly through the brass horn, reverberating off the stone walls.
'It was able to etch the micro-grooves of the record from our shared memory. If it's mechanical and not technological, the Art fills in the blanks,' Ronan stated, confirming the semi-loophole.
"Well, now that we have some atmosphere, let's get this show on the road, shall we?" I grinned.
My clone dropped the heavy golf bag down next to him as both toddlers bounced on the balls of their feet, light and dangerously agile.
'Alright,' the little Ronan said, his mental voice projecting a sense of grim satisfaction as he cracked his tiny neck side to side. 'Let's do this.'
The two toddlers lunged at each other.
It was incredible. Their bodies were a blur. Toddler-Ronan spun—moving with unnatural speed with the reduced weight—and delivered a sharp jab. Toddler-Murphy slipped the punch, weaving under the hook, and countered with a crisp forearm block and a low kick that snapped like a whip.
I watched with a weird sense of pride. My hand-to-hand skills had increased significantly over the last few weeks—we hadn't just been doing sword forms with Elrend, and it felt like old muscle memory was returning. It was a rhythm I had forgotten I possessed, surfacing now that the body was running on pure instinct.
'I'm getting a better angle,' Ronan decided in my mind.
He summoned a second Toddler-Ronan. This one didn't fight. He materialised sitting in a massive, overstuffed leather recliner—a miniature Lazyboy replica the old man had. The tiny clone kicked back the footrest and crossed his legs, watching the violence with a critical eye.
The workshop was a cacophony of classic rock, thumping bodies, and inflatable junk as the little Ronan clone threw the Murphy clone at the work table.
BANG!
The Murphy clone hit the gramophone like a missile.
CREAAAAK.
The heavy workshop door groaned open.
The record skipped, and the music stopped as Grace stood in the doorway, oil-stained and exhausted, looking like she'd just walked into a fever dream.
In the centre of the room, the sparring match had frozen in a moment of disastrous impact. One toddler stood with his fists raised, looking utterly surprised by his own strength. The other was currently tangled in the brass horn of the gramophone.
To her right, the miniature Ronan in the Lazyboy simply stared at her with regal disdain, one tiny leg crossed over the other.
But the Toddler-Murphy—the one responsible for the inflatable palm tree—panicked.
Maybe his survival instinct kicked in, or maybe he was just committing to the bit (far more likely). Regardless, he did something impossible. He turned and dove headfirst at the six-foot plastic trunk.
I expected him to bounce off the PVC with a squeak.
Instead, the moment his hands touched the plastic, the surface rippled like water. A massive portal opened across the curved surface of the inflatable tree, sucking the toddler inside with a wet shlurp sound.
THUMP.
I dropped to one knee, clutching the workbench.
The drain was instantaneous and brutal. It felt as though someone had hooked a syringe to my spine and drawn a pint of marrow. Even though the portal was on a tree and not my chest, the cost of moving a Living Spark across the threshold remained absolute.
I wheezed, staring at the swaying plastic. The toddler was gone, safe inside the Inventory, but I was sweating like I'd just run a marathon.
The realisation hit me harder than the stamina loss.
'The tree...' Ronan whispered in my head, his voice tinged with awe. 'It is a mana construct. It is made of us.'
"It's an extension of the self," I realised, wiping my forehead. "The clone didn't open a portal on his skin. He opened it on the object he created. The inflatable tree is his skin."
'Murphy,' Ronan's tone shifted from shock to tactical glee. 'The surface area of that tree is enormous. If we can project a portal onto any construct we create...'
"We aren't limited to the size of my body anymore," I finished the thought, ignoring the trembling in my legs. "We can make a portal as big as the object. We could drive a carriage through a massive beach ball if we wanted to."
'This changes the exit strategy,' Ronan pressed, his mind racing ahead to logistics. 'The Roach Motel currently has no handle on the inside. But if we send two clones in, and one opens a portal on his chest... the other could walk through him and exit out of the Original.'
"And I die of exhaustion," I countered, rubbing my chest where the phantom ache still lingered. "Crossing the threshold drains my stamina. If they exit through me, I take the hit. I'd be a revolving door powered by my own life force."
I looked at the plastic debris scattered on the floor.
"Better idea," I said. "We create a clone holding two beach balls. He leaves one here, on the outside. He takes the second one inside the Void. Since they are both his 'skin,' they connect to the same network. You walk into the outside ball, you're in the Inventory. You walk into the inside ball... You pop back out here. Saves a third of my stamina."
It was a huge breakthrough, and It was also incredibly difficult to explain to the girl standing in the doorway.
Grace stared at the palm tree. She stared at the toddler tangled in the gramophone. She stared at the Lazyboy and the golf clubs.
She didn't blink. She didn't ask. She just let out a long, rattling sigh—the sound of a woman who had seen too much and slept too little to care about the laws of reality anymore.
I waved a hand.
POP.
The toddlers, the golf clubs, the palm tree, and the Lazyboy all vanished into smoke, leaving the workshop suddenly, violently empty.
"You look terrible," I said, sliding off the bench and leaning against it to hide my wobbling legs. "And I say that as a friend."
"Thanks," she muttered, pushing past the fading wisps of mana without even acknowledging the hallucinations she'd just witnessed. She slumped onto a stool and set the crate down with a heavy thud.
"What's in the box?" I asked, peering at the jumble of gears, springs, and unpolished crystal.
"Failure," she sighed, rubbing her face. "The Spider prototype. I have the parts. I have the theory. But the calibration..." She gestured vaguely at the mess. "It needs a thousand microscopic gear alignments. I can do it—my magnetic pulse lets me hold the parts in suspension—but the mental load is crushing me. I have to hold the field perfectly steady for six hours straight. Some of the parts are too small to even see, let alone inscribe with runes."
"First, you need to rest."
"I can't," she whispered.
I raised an eyebrow at her. "Can't?"
"Okay, I won't." Her voice cracked, sharp and brittle. "If I don't have a field-ready prototype by the expedition in three days... I need to prove it to them."
"To your parents?"
"To House Voss," she spat, dropping her head into her hands. "They want me to fail, Murphy. They want me to come crawling back, begging for forgiveness, and I won't give them the satisfaction."
She looked up at me, eyes shimmering with exhaustion and defiance. "I just need to focus. But my brain feels like it's packed with wet wool."
I looked at Grace. I looked at the crate of impossible work.
"You won't fail," I said, keeping my voice steady. "I think I have a way to solve your problem."