The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 740

Beatrix looked at Alex and whispered. "What did you give them?"

Alex looked at her and smiled.

"The perfection of magic formula."

Beatrix waited for more.

There wasn't any more.

"That's it? That's the whole answer?"

"That's the whole answer."

"Alex, forty people just knelt down in the dirt for that book. Nobody kneels for a formula."

"They did."

...

Here is what she didn't know.

For a long time now, Alex had been buying magic books.

Not a few. Not the good ones. Every single one that money could reach.

Public texts, first — the cheap ones, the school primers, the certification manuals any student could buy. Then private collections. Then auction lots he never bid on in person. Then entire libraries, bought sight-unseen from families who'd lost the last person who could read them, crated up and shipped without anyone ever asking who the buyer was.

None of it went to a shelf.

All of it went into his space inventory. And from there, all of it went to Gaia.

The Mother AI had been recording the magic formulas of all seven towers. Blue. Green. Brown. Yellow. Red. Black. White. Every spell, every variant, every half-finished note some dead magician left in a margin.

Recording it wasn't the point, though.

The point was what Alex asked her for next.

Don't just keep it. Perfect it.

Find where every formula wastes energy. Find where each one breaks at scale. Find the places where two traditions spent four hundred years solving the exact same problem, and one of them solved it better, and neither of them ever knew the other existed.

Then rebuild all of it. Clean.

For him to learn.

That was the real reason two impossible products came out of a mothballed lab floor in nine days.

He hadn't been inventing anything.

He'd been reading.

...

The White Tower was easy, in the end.

He already owned every text they had worth owning — a five-hundred-year tradition nobody else had bothered to collect, because nobody else had wanted it. Gaia had run all of it years ago and set it aside, finished, waiting.

So what he'd handed Elias in that courtyard wasn't a better version of White magic.

It was White magic rebuilt from the foundation up.

And it didn't stop there.

Because Alex had bought and copied every other tower's magic money could reach, Gaia had folded all of it back in — taken what Red did with force, what Black did with distance, what Blue did with precision, and re-expressed every piece of it through the white element.

Which meant the thing sitting in Elias White's arms right now could do something no tower in the country could do.

The new White Tower wouldn't only teach White magic.

It would teach everything the other six could do. Through white.

Put plainly: the weakest tower in the United State of Magic had just been handed the ability to do all of it.

Nobody in that courtyard had ever seen anything like it.

Nobody in the country had.

...

They'd gone back inside before they left.

The elders were on their feet by then, but not by much. Forty of them crowded into a hall built for four hundred, and not one of them sat down.

Elias came forward with the book still against his chest.

"We're not selling you this tower," he said.

Beatrix's head came up.

"We discussed a number."

"You did. I accepted it. My elders will take it, and thank you for it, and I'll hold you to every word about the young ones." Elias set the book down on the table between them. "But you're not buying anything. I'm giving it to you."

"Elias—"

"I've been running this place for thirty-four years." The old man's voice didn't shake at all. "I know exactly what I've got and exactly what it's worth, and I have never in my life had anything worth what's inside that cover."

He lowered himself down again.

Behind him, forty elders went down with him, and this time nobody looked surprised.

"Grandmaster. Please lead our White Tower." Elias kept his head down. "We're willing to put this tower in your hands."

Alex looked at them for a moment.

"Get up," he said. "All of you. I'm not going to talk to the tops of your heads."

They got up.

...

Alex turned to Beatrix.

"How much would it cost to renovate every White Tower branch we have?"

Beatrix blinked. "All of them?"

...

Willowmere hadn't changed either.

Same road in. Same low hedges. Same three houses on the bend before his.

He came around the bend and stopped walking.

The roof was gone. The whole front wall had come down and taken half the second floor with it. What was standing was black all the way through, and rain had already been in it — the ash was packed flat and grey in the corners where the water had sat.

Not yesterday. Not last night.

Days ago.

Alex stood at the end of his own path and didn't move for a while.

Then a door opened behind him.

...

An old man from the house on the bend came halfway down his own path and stopped there, keeping the distance.

"You're him," he said. "You're the one they were looking for."

"What happened."

"Magicians." The old man's hands were shaking and he put them in his pockets to stop it. "Six days back. Middle of the afternoon."

"How many?"

"I didn't count. More than ten. They came up this road asking for a man named Alexander, and they asked once."

"And?"

"And when nobody gave them one they liked—" He stopped. Started over. "They burned it. All of it. They stood in that road and watched it burn, and then they left. Nobody came. The whole village heard it and nobody came."

Alex looked at the house.

"Monica," he said.

The old man's face did something terrible.

"Yolanda."

The old man shook his head.

He kept shaking it, small, like he couldn't work out how to stop.

"All of them," he said. "Everyone who was inside. They didn't come out."

Alex didn't say anything.

"The bird, too," the old man said, quieter. "And your dog. He was the only one who went at them. He got two of them off the path before—"

He stopped.

"They didn't make it," he said. "None of it made it. There's nothing in there, son. There's nothing left in there at all."