As Pax entered his mother’s mental landscape, he felt a fresh wave of appreciation for the progress he’d made since earning his Mana Ascendant Integration skill two weeks ago. Every evening since, he’d repaired and healed as much of her mind and body as he could.

  He’d also worked carefully with the aspects of his skill that allowed him to access her thoughts and memories. With a healthy fear of messing anything up in his mother’s mind, he’d stuck to observing, gaining a greater familiarity with her inner map of suppressed memories with each session.

  His healing did the same for her physical body. By now, he was deeply familiar with nearly every muscle, bone, and organ. He’d even found success in healing the small voids he’d discovered in her brain once he’d spent days examining them from every angle. Once he’d felt confident that he understood as much about the damage as possible, he’d chosen the smallest one and gotten to work.

  It turned out using only light mana with his Healing Others skill to flood the scarred damage had been the most effective. Pax had kept the mana level as low as possible, and over multiple careful sessions, finally seen progress. Now, all the voids he’d been able to identify had regained blood flow and had new cells growing back.

  Sadly, all his work fixing the voids hadn’t restored his mother to her former self as he’d hoped. He knew it had been a long shot to think the memory issue was a physical one. He’d decided there was some other force at work, a power that held her memories hostage. At least having a fully functional brain gave her a solid foundation to come back to.

  Now Pax knew destructive magic had to be involved. Most likely it was the work of her captors, likely Inquisitors, using thought-probing skills or something similar to the torturous method they used to burn out the magic of condemned mages.

  There was also the possibility that his mother’s own magic or resources had contributed to the problem somehow. His parents had once been student mages at the academy. But they’d somehow altered their menus enough to fool everyone in Thanhil into believing them to be crafters specializing in tailoring.

  And now? Vitur officially recognized her as an unknown worker with the name Mistress Harkness had given her. Pax knew Vitur could change a person’s official menu occasionally, but only if it matched their true inner beliefs. He and his brother had changed their surnames through that loophole.

  It also explained Jane’s current menu, considering she had no genuine memories of her former life. But how had she changed her official class from mage to crafter during their childhood? And had that somehow impacted the tangled mess of memories now kept locked away inside her mind somewhere?

  Pax didn’t have the answers, which only increased his reluctance to take the next step. But if he didn’t, he might never get to speak to his actual mother again. A mix of anticipation and dread filled him at what he was about to do.

  Pax started with a light touch, skirting over her surface thoughts. Her mind now held a much kinder impression of him than when he’d started, associating him with relief from her pains and a fresh energy she hadn’t felt in years. At least he’d managed that.

  As he got to work, Pax took care to maintain a thread of mana attached to both his shield and the mana storage crystal in his inventory. With the ease of plenty of practice, he gathered and formed his light mana with the four primary elements, like he’d done over the past weeks. In seconds, he spread the delicate weave of combined energy over a specific section along the outer layer of her brain.

  While Pax had focused mostly on her physical healing, he hadn’t neglected some tentative work with her memories. He’d discovered that her oldest memories were often closest to the surface of her brain. He’d even marked where some of the best and worst memories could be found.

  While carefully examining her mind and doing his best not to disturb anything, Pax had occasionally sensed echoes of a strange energy during his studying over the last weeks. It was difficult to pin down, a twisted mana that felt wrong and unlike any he’d encountered before.

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  Pax suspected a link between this tainted energy and her memory loss. But was it a defense mechanism her own mind had formed, or had Inquisitors used a malicious skill to alter her thoughts?

  Pax kept up a steady flow of mana into his Ascendant skill’s mental abilities as he made contact. When he brushed against the first memory, he extended another mana thread to his Extrasensory Sphere, simultaneously activating his Haste skill. He’d need everything to make this work.

  As memories trickled in and then streamed forward, Pax limited his attention to a small portion of her mind to avoid triggering an overwhelming flood. A jumbled mix of happy, brutal, and mundane scenes pulsed past him with familiar intensity. But he was ready.

  His Meditation skill steadied him. Together with the slowing effect of Haste, and his Sphere’s ability to process the incoming data, the rush was manageable. Pax sampled the memories cautiously, just dipping in before moving on, resisting the urge to immerse himself in the emotions of each one.

  It was harder than any mental challenge he’d faced. How could he avoid sinking into the joy his mother felt as she strolled along the academy grounds, holding hands with his father? Or her pride as she sewed new clothes late into the night for the Winter Solstice gifts she’d made for her boys?

  Darker memories threatened to pull him in with vastly different emotions. Anger rushed through him at the masked figures screaming at her. He hated her exhaustion and pain-colored recollections of the darkened rooms where she lay bound and weak.

  The most difficult were the glimpses of his father’s face, desperate to protect his wife. Pax’s fear spiked, dreading that he might see his father’s last moments of life or, perhaps worse, that his father would disappear from his mother’s memories, leaving no answers behind. Whatever he uncovered, Pax would have to share it with Titus, a thought that compounded his anxiety.

  But today, right now, Pax had a single purpose. He was here to recover a precious memory, to restore a single moment of joy for his mother that contained both her sons. Then, once restored, Jane would remember her real name: Kindra, mother of Pax and Titus.

  He nearly stopped when he glimpsed a memory of Kindra leaning over a bassinet, cooing at a laughing baby who clung to her finger. But it wasn’t clear which son it was. They needed her to recognize them as adults, not infants.

  As he sifted through painful and happy memories alike, Pax had to unclench his jaw more than once, his patience stretched thin. Come on. Where are you?

  Finally, after long minutes, he found it. Pax stilled, taking in every detail to make sure this was the perfect memory he needed. From his mother’s perspective, he watched Titus, full of boyish energy, lean over a workbench to help Pax thread a needle. Kindra’s heart swelled with pride and love, marveling at how much her sons cared for each other.

  That was it, the memory Pax needed to restore. Tamping down on his excitement, he withdrew all the tendrils of mana back to a small, focused section of his mother’s mind. He concentrated the energy on a singular point, doing his best to hold on to the individual memory while letting all the others fade to the background.

  It didn’t quite work as he’d hoped. While the sights, sounds, and even smells of the memory blossomed and grew, Pax still caught glimpses of others flitting by in the background. They were more faded, gossamer-thin, but Pax couldn’t completely banish them.

  Instead, he did his best to ignore them, focusing the energy of his mana skill on the memory he’d chosen. As it fleshed out more fully from the influx of energy, Pax searched for a cause of the memory’s suppression from his mother’s active memory.

  Nothing stood out, which gave him no target for his efforts. He examined the younger versions of himself and his brother diligently working and seated at the bench. Pax only felt the slightest hint of the twisted energy he’d noticed contaminating other memories during recent work.

  But where was the source? He took his time, examining every aspect of the scene before him. Frustrated, he growled and spun around. Something caught his attention. It wasn’t part of the scene itself, but what contained it.

  A thin membrane enclosed the memory, keeping it contained in a discrete bubble. And there, he saw what had caught his attention and now gave him the sense of something vague that felt off. Pax drew on his mana and, using it like an actual light, highlighted the membrane around the memory.

  The more he worked with the thought aspect of his new skill, examining memories without trying to interact with them, the better he understood how they worked. His goal so far had been to do the opposite of using brute force, like the Inquisitors. He took his time using delicate touches to understand as much as possible before he acted.

  All of that practice was paying off. Now, he could make out subtle threads of dark control twined around the bubble of memory. They had to be what was interfering with his mother’s access to her past. Now he just needed to figure out the safest way to remove them, starting with this critical memory as a test.

  Ideas came and went as he brainstormed how to cordon it off to contain his experimentation to a single memory. He knew anything he did with her mind could quickly spiral out of control.

  So, Pax took extra time to prepare as much as possible. He would take all the time he needed tonight without rushing things.