Though many of our mornings of research resulted in breakthroughs, even more yielded only roadblocks and frustration. Our study of enchanting was almost entirely fruitless, despite the cumulative week of work we spent on it. We were able to activate the enchantment stored within the onyx greatsword after a few hours of trial and error, but the secret behind its creation and mechanics remained a mystery. The enchantment over the heavy gauntlets was baffling in its own right; while it was second nature to activate the enhanced force ability stored within the gloves, I could neither replicate the ability on my own nor find any hint of how the magic was built into the metal.
My equipment from Alderea added a further element of confusion into the mix. As opposed to the King’s Primes that radiated an obvious glow from their stored mana, my cloak, coin purse, and underclothes lacked any magical aura under our Detection, even as they continued to carry out their clearly magical purposes. It was a concept I had failed to question until our investigation brought it into the spotlight, where it immediately became the greatest mystery on our noteboard and remained as such despite our many attempts to solve it.
Progress on expanding our Detection capabilities was similarly difficult. The concept of suffusing mana into the air around us was frustratingly simple, but in practice, the task felt impossible to perform. After failing to achieve my goal on a large scale for the greater part of a morning, I focused on the smallest proof of concept I could think of: Holding my pointer fingers together, I ran a continuous loop of mana from one hand to the other while slowly pulling them apart until the physical connection broke. The flow of mana immediately stopped, and no matter how hard I pushed, it refused to bridge the centimeter-wide gap of space between my fingertips.
While I failed in my tasks, Lia faced hardships of her own. In an effort to discover a way to pick up sounds through Detection, she chose to pursue sound magic under the assumption that if she could figure out how to create sound, it would be easy enough to reverse engineer a way to hear sound as well. Unfortunately for her, the first half of her plan never materialized; after hours of planning and writing notes, she worked through a long list of potential invocations to activate the spell, all of which failed. By the time she had finished for the day, she had resorted to speaking in prayer to the Wind Primeval, but the pleas went unanswered.
At the end of my third consecutive day of ineffective meditation, I let out a frustrated yell and fell back onto the deck. “This shouldn’t be so damn hard! It’s just moving mana from one place to another.” Rubbing my eyes angrily, I rolled onto my side and looked up at Lia as she prepared to fetch Marin for her training. “I’ve been working with mana for a hundred years now. Why is this the thing that’s so difficult to figure out?”
“I know how you feel,” she said, stretching the stiffness from her legs, “but you shouldn’t let it bother you so much. Just think of all the things we’ve learned over the past few weeks!” To illustrate her point, she held up her hand and murmured a word under her breath, which caused her palm to glow with a radiant white light. She waved it back and forth, laughing giddily as the light shone between her fingers. “Isn’t this cool?”
A grin curled the corner of my lips as I rested my head back against the floor. “You’re right. I just feel like I’m...missing something, you know?” I bounced my head lightly off the wooden boards in a dull rhythm. “Like, if I found the one piece of information eluding us, it would open all of these doors blocking our way.”
Lia shrugged. “Maybe. Or, maybe it just doesn’t work; it could be one of the rules of magic that mana has to suffuse through something, and you’re trying to force it to go through nothing.”
“It’s not like there’s actually nothing, though,” I complained. “I’m trying to force it to go through the air.”
“Well, sure, but air isn’t a thing,” she laughed. “You can’t hold it in your hands like a rock. Mana probably has to exist within something, otherwise it just...I don’t know, fades away?” She knelt down beside me and tousled my hair. “Don’t think about it too much while I’m gone, okay? I expect you to be working on something by the time I get back!” A self-satisfied cackle escaped her lips as she left me lying on the deck and made her way into the forest to fetch her pupil.
“Right,” I muttered, far too late for her to hear me. Contrary to her order, my mind had instantly fixated on the problem with a renewed vigor. She’s wrong. Regardless of whether you can hold it or not, air has physical properties like any other matter. It’s just in a different state. I bolted upright and took a centering breath.
Channeling mana through solid objects is easy because the structure is uniform and unchanging. Based on our tests, you can even divide it into categories: gemstones can transfer and hold mana far more efficiently than wood and stone. That’s not a fluke. I found the answer I had been searching for in the earliest memories of my first life. It’s the molecular structure. That diamond orb is made of a pure, uninterrupted lattice of carbon. Of course the energy could transfer through that more efficiently than a rock full of impurities or a messy, complicated tree branch.
My brow furrowed as I continued to look over my available information. I didn’t have a problem suffusing that bucket of water with mana, so it’s clearly not a property of solids. If I could do that so easily with a liquid, why not a gas? It’s still made up of atoms and molecules like everything else, just...more spread out. I closed my eyes and sat with my hands palm-up against my knees. I can’t feel it, but it’s there. I don’t know how to force my mana out into nothing, but if I could just feel the air…
Light rippled across my body as the Heighten Senses enhancement flared to life, and I focused on the sensations across my empty palms. After every few seconds of uneventful meditation, I increased the flow of mana to my enhancements, hunting for the feeling I knew would eventually appear. My overstimulated skin tingled as I became intensely aware of every thread out of place in my shirt and each strand that ran wild in my overgrown mop of hair. I know you’re there. Let me find you.
At some point, my heightened senses passed some unknown threshold, and I suddenly felt a gentle weight over my entire body as the air itself came into focus. Faint wisps of motion played over my upturned hands in lazy swirls, constantly shifting in and out of sight. Found you. I sent a rush of mana excitedly down my arms towards the new sensation, but as soon as the energy reached my fingertips, the swirling air rippled away, and the mana pooled against my skin as it had before. Opening my eyes, I stared down at my hands suspiciously. Huh.
I repeated the process twice more, increasing my Heighten Senses enhancement after each failure. Just as I felt like my body couldn’t handle more sensory input without shutting down, I found the answer to my problem: the act of pushing my mana towards the surface of my skin was physically repelling the air around me. Of course I was failing before. The harder I tried to channel my mana outwards, the harder I pushed away the medium I was trying to suffuse. While the explanation was immensely satisfying, I still didn’t have a solution to the problem.
If I can’t actively force the mana out, I guess I need to let it...diffuse out passively? I let my enhancements fade away with a metered breath. I had told Lia I’d been doing this for a century; it was time to prove I’d actually learned something from it. As the mana began to flow around my body, I ignored my usual routine of looking inward and instead focused on the boundary at my skin. Though the concept had rarely come up in our studies, I knew the issue was in the unconscious barrier that separated my mana from the outside world. Through my experience activating both Lia and Marin’s mana reserves, I had learned that the body held an outward defense against foreign energy, but my current focus proved that this outer barrier held a second purpose.
“I have control of my mana,” I stated out loud to myself. “I don’t need to lock it inside anymore. It won’t run out if I let the barrier down.” Though the proclamation made me feel foolish, the potential of it affecting my subconscious mi
nd was too important to pass up. “I’m going to lower it now, for a moment.” It took a moment to visualize the barrier I so often ignored, but I soon held a picture of it clearly in my mind. I prepared a spike of energy as I had done when activating Marin’s mana for the first time, then pressed up against the wall around a single fingertip.
A flash of panic tingled down my spine as the mana in my hand began to dissipate, rushing out from the newly opened hole like a burst dam. The sensation only lasted for a heartbeat as my subconscious sealed the leak, but it was all I needed to prove my hypothesis was correct. “I saw it!” I shouted, jumping to my feet in a joyful rush. The image was burned into my mind as my celebration continued; in the brief moment before the connection was severed, a shimmering, translucent cloud had formed around my hand as the mana suffused outwards in all directions. “It works! I knew it would work!”
When my fist-pumping subsided, I immediately set out to replicate the sensation. Knowing that my body would naturally attempt to close any leaks allowed me to prepare a method to combat the stoppage, and each attempt at the new ability stretched out longer than the last until I was able to stave off the closure indefinitely. It still set off a primal alarm within my head each time the barrier was broken, but the fear lessened with every subsequent breach until the mental warning was reduced to a gentle reminder.
The resulting cloud of mana that formed around me with each activation was much more difficult to control than my usual Detection, and it came with its own unique oddities. It required a constant stream of new energy to maintain a continuous cloud; if I reduced the amount of mana flowing from my fingertips, the edge of the cloud became fuzzy and indistinct as natural currents carried the suffused air away from my influence. Likewise, if I stopped the flow entirely, I had only a few moments until my connection to the cloud was entirely lost and the energy burned away into the atmosphere, unable to be reclaimed.
It was clear from my initial experiments that the technique would require days of practice to gain any real competency, but it only took minutes to realize what I had truly discovered in attempting to improve our Detection spell: air magic. The issue that had halted my progress in the area for days was now my greatest asset; with the slightest suggestion from my channeling, the suffused air immediately flowed in any direction, granting me the ability to create small gusts of wind by directing the mana in a steady stream. I blew a quick gust around my head in a circle to prove the concept was true, and although I lost fine control of the air by the end of the demonstration, I was ecstatic.
“I thought I told you not to think about it too much while I was gone!” Lia’s voice caught me by surprise as she entered the clearing with Marin in tow. “You’re still right where I left you!”
“Lia, I did it!” I exclaimed as I sprinted out to meet her. “I figured it out!”
She turned to look at Marin with an amused expression, then looked back at me expectantly. “I was only gone for half an hour. You really figured out how to use Detection through the air that quickly?” she asked with an eyebrow askew.
“Yeah! Well, sort of. I’m sure it’ll work eventually,” I conceded. “That doesn’t matter, though. I figured out something even better!”
“What’s better than—” she began, but was cut off by a burst of air from my upturned palms. She jumped back and brushed a displaced strand of hair from her face. “How did you figure that out?!”
“I was thinking about what you said before you left, about how there was nothing to suffuse mana into and air not being a thing,” I said, mimicking her earlier inflection. “It’s certainly different from how our Detection works over solid objects, but air is still made of the same, uhm...the same sort of…” I trailed off as I searched for an explanation that avoided the topic of molecular structures and other, more advanced sciences. “It’s hard to explain with words. I can just show you later, once you’re done for the day.”
“Show her what?” Marin asked, popping up beside her. “I want to learn whatever it is too!” At her request, I sent a swirl of air around her head as well, which elicited an amazed gasp. “That’s amazing! You’ve got to teach me how to do that!”
“I think you’re still working on your basic combat enhancements, aren’t you?” I asked. “This is one of the more difficult bits of magic I’ve figured out, but you’ll get to it eventually. I promise.”
She screwed up her face and brushed by me. “Fine, fine. But Lia says I’m learning quickly, so it won’t be long!”
Lia rolled her eyes and grinned as she followed her enthusiastic student to their usual training spot. “You’d be learning a lot faster if you could settle down and meditate without talking so much!”
I made my way around to the back of the house with a laugh as the girls began their usual back-and-forth. Lia approached training differently than I had, but her style seemed no less effective based on their results. Although they had only been training for a few weeks, Marin had progressed rapidly through both the combat and magic lessons. Her combat style was much more aggressive than anything Lia or I taught her, most likely influenced by both her energetic personality and her burning desire to learn everything she could as quickly as possible.
While Lia did her best to temper Marin into a more thoughtful, deliberate fighter, the fiery passion she brought to her lessons always kept their sparring matches interesting. They trained with an impressive assortment of weapons, all created from the onyx blade of the King’s Sword; Lia had developed a fondness for the artifact once we had mastered its enchantment, and she used the power to create matching sets of weapons for her teaching plans. Through every implement they used, Marin excelled in one particular style: unarmed combat. Something about the form had clicked with her natural aggressiveness, and she advanced so quickly that she began to put Lia through her paces when they sparred without enhancements.
Although the main focus was on teaching Marin the basics of combat and magic, Lia always insisted that she and I should spar with Marin watching to show what all of her training was working towards. I wholeheartedly agreed, though mostly for my own personal benefit; while our magic study was intensely rewarding, my calisthenics and solo workouts were boring and ineffective compared to true combat drills. Unfortunately, the clearing around our house proved too constricting for any battles that involved enhancements, so I had quickly added a training ring to my continually shifting list of projects. The list had grown significantly shorter as I worked through furnishing our home every afternoon, but the remaining items were large multi-day endeavors which would require Lia’s help to finish.
Even without a training ring, I was surprised at how far my own skills progressed during our short practice bouts on the lawn. Our forced adherence to fighting without enhancements narrowed our focus to technique, strength, and endurance, all of which grew rapidly day over day. I often found myself on the losing end of the battles, with Lia standing over me triumphantly as I rolled in the dirt. It was clear that she had become comfortable in her own unique fighting style that combined my teachings with things she had learned from our short time with Val and her extended combat with the General. The enchanted onyx greatsword only further exemplified her skills; usually in the form of paired longswords, she swung the blades with a speed I had difficulty matching without a boost from Combat Acceleration.
Our daily routine became comfortable enough that I eventually lost track of how many days had passed. Apart from the shifting nature of Marin’s work, we had no use for marking which day of the week it was, and our contact with the outside world consisted entirely of dinners with the Corells and any random traffic we happened to see passing on the main road through Detection. The isolation suited us perfectly; I found myself smiling freely around the house without the cloud of Virram’s influence hanging over my head, and Lia’s infectiously upbeat attitude told me she felt the same.
“How do you think Marin’s training is going?” Lia asked me during one of our morning meditations. “It mus
t have been at least a month by now, right? Do you think she’s, erm, on track?”
“On track compared to what, exactly?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “She’s been slower than you were with picking up mana manipulation and using magic, but she’s certainly progressing. In terms of combat ability, she’s already way beyond anything a regular soldier could do, even without enhancements.”
She nodded. “I’d say that magic comes differently to different people, but I think she’d be a lot further along if she could just sit still and concentrate for longer than a minute at a time.” Despite the fact that Marin was away with Marten on a day long business trip, Lia still scanned around the room with an amused look to see if she had overheard the assessment. “Apart from that, I think she’s doing really well.”
“I agree. She must have a good teacher.”
Lia giggled quietly and swayed side to side in her meditative stance. “So...do you think it’s time?”
“Time for what?”
“Our adventure!” she exclaimed loudly. “That’s the reason we asked Marin to train with us in the first place, remember?”
“Of course I remember,” I said with an amused chuckle. In truth, the initial reasoning had been overshadowed in my mind by the passion Marin had shown when confronted with the idea of seeing her sister again. “Have you decided where you’d like to go?”
“I’d like to see the capital,” she answered. “If we’re going to be living here, we should get to know the country a little better, and there’s no better way to do that than visiting its biggest city! Plus, if we’re going that direction anyway, we could visit all of the southern port cities that make Lybesa so famous.”
“A sightseeing tour, then,” I mused. “That sounds nice. Exploring a new city without the entire guard force after you isn’t an experience I’ve had in a long time.” I looked around the room and let out a small sigh. “Though I have to admit, I think I’ll miss this place. I’ve grown pretty comfortable here, and the thought of leaving feels...weird.”
Restart Again: Volume 3 Page 21
