Invert the Loop

Was it even possible to break the loop?

This wasn't something he could just solve with a Break Imprint, this was a fundamental part of existence.

What was the purpose of life without death? Wouldn't it stagnate? Wasn't the reason humanity had come so far was that they were determined to prolong their lives, to foil the common enemy that all life shared?

Fate recalled reading during one of his independent study sessions that the body was composed of cells, and these cells multiplied and died billions of times a day within the human body.

This was how a human body could grow, repair itself, and just live in general.

Removing death would mean removing life from himself. He'd be stuck as a teenager forever.

And he couldn't remove life from death. That would just kill him.

'Cells live to die,' he pondered, pushing away that nagging voice at the back of his mind. 'But what if it was the opposite?

'What if instead of dying when they weren't needed, they were brought to life when they WERE needed, like to fix the gaping hole in my leg?'

He couldn't break the life-death loop without taking away a vital part of the way his body functioned.

'All right then. Instead of perpetual life, what about perpetual death?'

He had heard tales of undead reanimated by Skills or "liches" that were nothing more than empty vessels formed around their consciousness. The first was just a glorified puppet, but the second didn't have a living or even undead body, per se.

Their body was just dead.

The drawbacks to that were manyfold, one of the largest ones being that the body couldn't repair itself. Which Fate currently needed. Even now, his blood was spilling out onto the concrete.

And this change would still break the loop and cause him irreparable harm.

But if these dead cells could be brought back to life to perform these functions when necessary, that problem would be alleviated.

Instead of constantly dying off, the cells would constantly be kindled with life, multiplying and returning to death as normal. A small difference on paper, but it was anything but in reality.

Such a system would change his body's natural state from one of life to one of death. He wouldn't be destroying the loop, merely inverting it.

It was an interesting idea, but one he didn't have the power to execute.

But as the grip of consciousness loosened on his mind, and he felt death creep closer, it finally clicked.

He didn't have the power? Wasn't his Facet Negativity? What was an inversion, if not switching the negatives and positives of something?

This was apparent in math, of which he had passing knowledge thanks to the heavy hand of his father.

Inverting a line on a graph would give you its inverse function, which inherently could undo or cancel the base function of the line. But that was only with a positive and a negative, and only applied to addition.

What was death in this case, as he lay bleeding on the ground, if not a negative, and what was life if not a positive?

Hadn't he proved before that he could create a positive from two negatives? That was exactly what he had been doing when he had made his first wand core!

And if that was possible, then why couldn't he multiply the negative of death with his own Negativity? Building on that, wasn't making life a negative simple as well? He just had to multiply its positive by his negative!

As for how he would do this, Imprints were a no-go. He had neither the knowledge nor the willingness to Imprint upon his own body.

But weren't Imprints weaker versions of Spells? And Spells were just the knowledge of one's Skill. Likewise, the Skill was rooted in one's Facet.

No, that was wrong. Imprints weren't weaker versions of Spells. They were entirely separate things. How else could Fate create results his Skill was incapable of?

And Imprints were powered by feelings… and Mana!

What a fool he was, thinking he would have to Imprint his own body. Imprints were a way to impart one's Facet onto others, not yourself!

Which meant, theoretically, all he needed was his feelings and Mana.

Upon reaching this conclusion, he rushed to work.

His mind was so murky that he could hardly think, but he didn't need critical thinking skills for this, that part was over. Now he just needed to let his Facet and this idea guide his hand.

He felt the vague impression of something pressing against his lips and a liquid pouring down his throat as he worked, along with that same voice at the back of his head screaming distantly at him, but he ignored both.

His Mana coursed through his body in strange, instinctual patterns that curved and wound around each other like an ouroboros trying to bite its own tail and getting tangled in the process.

When new vitality coursed through his veins, stemming from his stomach and the liquid he had drank, he kept his eyes closed and shut himself off to all other stimuli, lest he lose this feeling.

As he worked, he felt something stirring within the depths of his mind, a gentle pull that soon became a roaring black hole, swallowing up his thoughts to the point he couldn't feel the frantic slapping of whoever had given him the liquid in his stomach.

The rush of new energy in his limbs likewise was a distant thought to Fate, who felt like he was floating in a void. The black hole in his mind pulled that energy toward itself, tearing it to pieces and restructuring it before sending it back through his body.

Then his cells lit on fire, the energy coursing through his veins like molten lava that burned worse than the Azure Anarchist's "game," though he had no knowledge of that event.

All he knew was that it hurt.

But the pain only motivated him further, his mind working in overdrive to direct his Mana to flow faster and faster.

The energy coursing through him joined his Mana, the two fonts of power pulsing deeply as they spun together and merged into one, rampaging through him with wanton abandon.

Then, all at once, the tempest exploded into a tide of energy that soaked into every fiber of his being.