Over the next twenty days, Leo entered Castle Bravo again and again.
Every morning, just after the priest vanished into the main tower, he slipped through the same breach in the wall, and made his way across the courtyard and towards the teleportation gate.
Once within the Castle Walls, he did not so much as breathe too loud, as if the sound of oxygen entering his lungs might draw death toward him.
However, no matter how many times he returned to the Castle, the pressure he felt within never faded, as everyday he felt the same ancient corrupted mana coil against his skin like wet ropes….. making his body inevitably sweat buckets, and his knees to turn into jello.
However, despite the pressure, he did manage to creep across the courtyard everyday, moving past the collapsed arches until he reached that weathered ring of stone and glyphs that was his new work station.
Each session, Leo gave himself precisely one hour.
Sixty minutes and not a second more.
As he hid behind a broken pillar, unwrapped his tools with care, and began to work.
On the first day, he spent the entire hour clearing moss.
Not with magic, as he did not dare disrupt the mana around him, but with a dagger and a soft cloth, as he cleared every inch of sickly green growth that pulsed faintly with decayed energy.
It was the mana absorbing kind of moss, the one that could interfere with circuitry if left unchecked, and hence had to be unquestionably removed.
However, the process of removal was not without its problems, as the removed bits often clung to his hands like a parasite, and even after he brushed it off, the itchiness lingered, and a significant chunk of the mana within his body was drained.
The second and third days were spent on rune cleaning.
Lacking proper tools, Leo fashioned a makeshift brush by binding supple tree branches to whittled roots, its bristles coarse but precise.
He dipped it into high-grade mana potions, then gently traced the ancient, corroded lines—each stroke slow, deliberate, and respectful.
Once the outlines were reawakened, he pressed a mana stone against each glyph, coaxing the dormant energy to stir and resume its flow.
Many glyphs had fused or cracked due to corrosion, so he charted them meticulously in his notebook before beginning repairs.
Every curve, every flourish of a rune mattered; one misplaced stroke and the gate might overload the moment it received power again, so he did it with extreme care.
However, the nerve wrecking part wasn't the work…. But rather the not knowing.
He had no idea if the whisper behind him was just his paranoia or death.
No idea if that shift in energy he spotted inside the barracks was the armored guard waking up, or just a random spike.
No idea if that flicker of mana in the air meant detection, or it was just an environmental phenomenon.
And yet… he continued.
He brought out mana stones that he had carried with him from the outside world to serve as replacement array cores, as although he did not have the traditional crystals used to power the structure, the high grade mana crystals theoretically contained more power than the ancient crudely mined crystals, and could serve as a viable replacement.
To test his theory, he reconnected the circuit's from the power board to the command plate, and thankfully he could see the mana flowing through the circuits again, as everything from the power core to the command station began to work smoothly.
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The next step was to repair the command station, and input it with the correct geological code linking it to the exact teleportation centre that he wanted it to move him to, which was a slightly tricky job, considering how his knowledge about this world's language was self taught and not something he was fluent in.
Regardless, by the twelfth day, he managed to successfully re-etch two of the primary coordinate rings, as he cross referenced them to the geological books he had brought with him from within the conclave to make sure that he had calibrated the device correctly.
During his repair work of the central command, he discovered that most of the gate's outer mechanism was still intact but badly imbalanced.
That imbalance had to be corrected slowly, segment by segment, or the reactivation sequence would be turbulent and the structure could collapse.
Hence, starting from the fourteenth day, he began repairing the external structure as best as he could.
He was no stone mason, but he placed stones near the chipped parts of the gate and tied them tight with ropes, hoping to give it enough structural strength to hold strong.
It wasn't the best method for sure, but it was the best he could do, as he worked as methodically as he could to reduce the imbalances to a minimum.
However, with him constantly feeling paranoid for his life while working, whenever he heard even the faintest rustle or screech in his surroundings, he immediately activated [Stormflash Traverse] and bolted, leaving his work at once, and returned to safety at his vantage point.
Often, this affected his work speed, and stalled his progress, but despite the slow work, by the end of the seventeen day, he somehow managed to complete most of the reconstruction, bar for the final part which was entering the third and final coordinate ring.
Each time he came back, the fear he felt in his bones was the same.
He never got used to it.
Never felt comfortable.
Every stone he touched felt like it might explode. Every glyph he activated felt like it might sing to the priest and every step he took inside that courtyard made him feel like a condemned man walking the gallows, waiting for the rope to tighten.
But the gate…
The gate slowly came alive.
Piece by agonizing piece, Leo managed to bring it back from the dead.
And when at the twenty first day, he finally repaired the third and final coordinate ring, he knew that it was time to finally start planning the actual heist, as the escape mechanism was finally ready to be used.