Mana Mirror: Chapter Twenty Seven (Patreon)

The following day was Knoday, which was the weekend, and thus one of my days off – even though I usually spent the time doing missions. As soon as I was up, I reached into my mana to sketch the Analyze Death spell, but caught myself, surprised I’d already formed the habit.

Alvaro had mentioned that mastery was just shaping your mana to be able to form the spell instantly, but that there were two parts to ingraining a spell.

The first was gobs of mana. My mana-garden was pretty average in size, but I had hoped that I may be able to get some assistance there.

The second was using and understanding the spell itself. That was something I had a plan for.

I drew out my life and death mana in equal measure and sketched the Fungal Lock spell until those gates were empty.

Well. Technically, I still had a bit left in the tank when it came to life mana, but my death mana was empty.

Then I sketched out the Internal Pocketwatch spell until my temporal mana had run dry, then did the same with Analyze Space.

With my mana-garden finally drained, I drank a Mana Shock with breakfast, then grabbed my broom and headed out.

My first stop was at the pharmacy. Not Kene’s pharmacy – I would have gone there if I could, but even on my broom, it would have taken me five hours. A tiny part of me regretted not taking Orykson’s broom, which could have done it in two and a half, but I ultimately felt like the tree was better for my long term.

The pharmacy I entered was the one I’d gone to when I’d just started practicing magic, about a month ago – the one that had steered me to the lethetic tea.

The inside was the same as I remembered – more clinical and less herbal than Kene’s clinic, but still with walls lined with elixirs, pills, and poultices.

I headed over to the counter, where a young man with hair so short that he was almost bald, and bright orange piercings. He had a… thing… on his shoulder.

It looked sort of like a woodlouse or another isopod, but it was easily the size of my entire palm, and its shell was a riot of colors, each one of its segments a different shade that shifted from red to yellow to green to blue to purple.

It was kinda cute, but in a very creepy sort of way.

The guy looked up at me and waved.

“Sup?” he said in greeting.

“Hey,” I said. “I got a tip a little while ago about lethetic tea to expand my first gate mana. I was wondering if you had any advice about expanding death, spatial, and temporal mana?”

He gave me strange look for a second, as if he didn’t understand why I was asking, then shrugged.

“Sorta,” he said. “Death’s the easy one. There are some mana infused bone broths that can do something similar. Just a trickle of death mana to push your boundaries. Not gonna lie, though, the time and space are a lot harder. Not a lot of foods or supplements out there for first gate time or space, let alone the cheap alternate stuff, like lethetic tea or mana broth.”

“Is there nothing?” I asked.

“I didn’t say there was nothing, just not the cheap stuff,” he said. “We have a few pills.”

“Any powders?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said, “we don’t stock those. Too easy for someone to accidentally wind up hurting themselves with those.”

I sighed and nodded, but didn’t press. I bought some bullion cubes to turn into mana enriched broth, since they were cheaper than buying the broth straight up. I dropped it off at home, practiced my spells a bit more, then flew out to make my next stop.

Trollstone forest.

I wasn’t certain about draining mana from my Emperor’s Tree yet, and my Blood Carnations needed a few more days of feeding before they were ready, but those weren’t the only trees in the world.

As I landed on one of the hiking trails, I slung my broom over my shoulder and set it back into charging mode. I could have left the broom, but I wanted to have it. Just in case.

I’d recovered only a little bit of mana in the flight, but I had enough life mana left in me for one or two spells.

I sketched out the Harvest Plant Life spell and focused on the nearest plant. I felt mana slowly start to trickle into my life’s first gate. I sent that energy into my Analyze Life spell.

Instantly, the forest around me bloomed into color. Vibrant lines of life energy flooded through the trees in twisting patterns. The physical structure of trees was simpler than what I’d seen in humans, as was the energy, but they were much… deeper, perhaps?

I wasn’t sure that was the right word, exactly. But these trees were old, having stood in the woods for centuries. The power I was able to pull from it was weak, struggling to even be transformed into first gate. But…

There was so much.

Meadow had said that the spell wouldn’t let me drain enough to harm the plants, only slow their growth…

I cut off the flow to my Analyze Life spell, since that was draining my mana faster than my harvesting spell would refill it. Once I had enough life mana built back up, I sketched up another harvesting spell and focused on another tree.

My connection to the first tree faded before I even connected to the second, however.

That wasn’t right. I felt like Meadow would have told me if it wasn’t able to be used on more than one thing at a time. She’d mentioned wide area versions of the spell that existed at third gate, but that didn’t imply I couldn’t use this more than once, just that each casting would only effect one thing.

I drew mana from the tree until I had enough, then I intentionally split my focus. I kept part of my mind focused on the tree I was already draining, and turned another part of my mind to focus on a second tree. I slowly sketched out the spell and began to drain from the tree.

The rate of mana I was pulling in doubled.

As soon as I had enough mana, I connected a third tree to me. When I tried to do a fourth, however, I lost my concentration and was forced to start again.

For right now, I focused on holding the drain on three trees as stably as I could. I let the power stream into my life mana, then redirected it into my Analyze Life spell.

The power I was drawing in from the trees was less than the Analyze Life spell would drain, but it was still considerable enough that I was able to fairly quickly refill my mana.

Once it was brimming with power, I sent it into my death gate. It pained me that I was burning so much mana on a simple conversion like that, but I didn’t have a ‘Harvest Dead Plants’ spell, and even if I did, I didn’t have the ability to concentrate on six spells at once.

Once both my life and death mana were full, I fueled both the Analyze spells at the same time.

The world exploded. An endless cycle of life and death. The turning of the seasons represented it on a large scale, but it happened on a small scale every single day.

Every hour. Minute. Second.

Death happened, and its power was drunk in by the soil. The soil fueled the trees, who brought forth new life. The trees were eaten and consumed, broken down into death once again, then reforged into new life within the body. Then the body died, and the cycle began anew.

At every level, from the leaves and worms, to the birds, and even to myself.

I took in a deep breath, staring at the riot of colors and connections. I didn’t even realize I’d lost my concentration on my harvesting spells. At least, not until my mana flickered out.

My mana flickered out? Had I really burnt through everything so quickly?

No, that wasn’t right. I didn’t need to use the Internal Pocketwatch to tell me that more time had passed than I’d thought. It had been at least half an hour, lost into the trance of the endless cycle of life and death.

I sat down under the tree. I didn’t close my eyes – I’d never found that particular meditation practice effective for me anyhow. Instead, I let my hands run over the ground, feeling the earth, leaves, roots, and nature. I turned over the revelations I’d seen with my spells, both the harvesting spells and the analysis spell.

I didn’t know if my meditation would have any real effect, but I knew a lot of sects, guilds, and schools had their students do something similar. I was sure they’d refined their meditation to be optimally effective, but at the very least, thinking deeply about the spell wasn’t going to hurt.

Time ticked by, my mana refilling at its normal rate, and by the time it had refilled enough for it to be time to practice my sketching again, I somehow felt like I’d advanced my understanding of the spell, but I also felt… Strangely empty. I knew I could do better; I just wasn’t sure how.

So, before I went home, I made one final stop at the library.

“Is Alvaro in?” I asked the first librarian I found, a woman as short as I was, with neon blue hair. It didn’t look like dye, so it was either an exceptionally well done dye, done with magic of some sort, or something else.

“Nah,” she said, her accent strange. It reminded me vaguely of the ones that I thought they spoke in western Elohi. “But what did you need?”

I let out a small sigh of disappointment, but I supposed that I didn’t technically need to see Alvaro in order to get what I needed.

“I’m trying to find meditation techniques to help me ingrain spells,” I said, “but I’m… not great with sitting still? Especially if I have to have my eyes closed and also can’t move.”

“Oh!” she said brightly. “Moving mediation. Here, c’mere.”

She began to rapidly move through the library and led me up to the first floor, where she then proceeded to dart around some more. She came back with her arms filled with nearly two dozen different… scrolls.

Not books, scrolls.

She dumped them all out on a nearby table.

“Here, these are all really good. They’re movement meditations, and you’re supposed to move your mana around as you do them. There are pictures and stuff.”

I picked up one of the scrolls and opened it. It had a line running vertically down the center, with one half describing movements that I was supposed to make with my body, accompanied with pictures, and the other half doing the same with the motion of mana.

The movements I was supposed to hold reminded me oddly of dancing, or maybe like fighting. I rolled it up and picked up another. It was similar, but with a different set and style of motions, these using a short staff. The text in this one was in a language I didn’t recognize, maybe Kijani, but the diagrams were clear enough.

“So, there are all kinds of meditation techniques,” the Elohi librarian said. “I got the movement meditation kind, but there are still a ton of them. Now, there are purely mundane ones, and those are good to help you relax and focus, but these also use the circulation, flexing, and moving of the mana inside your mana-garden.”

“What does that do?” I asked curiously.

“Depends on the mana technique,” she said. “Let’s find one that’s right for you.”

We spent a while sifting through the scrolls, and I stood and tried most of the meditative exercises, at least for the ones that drew my attention.

In the end, I narrowed it down to three meditative exercises. No mana meditation was going to fundamentally rewrite the way a spell wrote, but they could help improve small bits and pieces with enough practice.

It was a small thing, but enough small factors stacking together could be quite important.

The first, Thundercloud Faerie Steps, I’d almost discarded due to the name. To my surprise, however, it hadn’t been meant exclusively for tempest mana. Rather, it focused on the reach of one’s mana by stretching it out around in the mana-garden like elastic, expanding the range within which spells could be cast, and improve the mana cost of spells that effected an area. It wasn’t going to do anything extreme, but pushing the range of spells even a bit would be helpful for teleportation, and I’d heard of time area spells. The physical movements involved large, deep steps, and spreading the arms wide, rising and lowering them.

The second, Truths of the Mirror, was all about moving one way with a slow and deliberate movement, then mirroring it on the other side sharply. This motion bounced back and forth, pulling one side and relaxing the other. Its mana technique involved similar soft and then sharp movements, and it was designed for the pushing into the sky and roots of your mana-garden, helping improve the speed at which mana could be pushed into a spell to cast it. That wasn’t much, but a half a second of speed would be quite important in a fight… or at least, so I’d heard. I’d caught a toad, but I wasn’t a master combatant.

The third, Depths of Starry Night, was focused on flowing motion with the body, with lots of steps and phases, some of which looked pretty difficult. It was a lot more complex than the others, and didn’t offer a huge advantage in the motion of the mana. Rather, it seemed to involve pushing your mana deep into the ground of the garden, and up into the sky, then pulling it around the spells you’d cast. Spells inherently grew with the caster’s power and experience, and this technique leaned into the growth. It didn’t bestow any particular change upon the mana, but rather, it made each spell more of itself, deeper and stronger, increasing their power and the power of their imbued effects. It wasn’t going to transform a first gate spell into that of an Arcanist’s masterwork, but it could still help make every spell a little bit more powerful and effective.