Mana Mirror: Chapter Thirty Nine (Patreon)

I clacked my tongue in thought as I stared at the contract. The extra cash in hand was appealing, but it didn’t hold a candle to the other two options. The real money – literally – would be in the potions or the profit percentage.

In the end, there were three factors that swayed my choice. First, the draconic potion was going to be the kind of absurdly rare item that I’d probably not encounter again, unless I spent a fair amount of time around Ivy – enough to get his dad to make me custom potions.

Second, the profit percentage would take at least a few years to mature into anything, and if Orykson was to be believed, I should be running towards third gate by then, and I’d probably have better ways of making money. Staking everything on future growth wasn’t a strategy I loved, but that was something I’d have to do with the profit percentage or myself. Between Davies or myself, I trusted myself more.

Finally, Orykson. He’d offered some pretty intense rewards last time, and if I managed to meet all of his deadlines, then I’d be able to get something like that again, according to him.

I did note that I was starting to base a lot of my choices around what made him happy. I paused for a few moments, thinking about that, but ultimately, I shrugged and still signed under the potions, as well as the triplicate copies that Ivy had prepared.

If Orykson started asking me to do some horrible stuff, then I’d worry more about following his orders, but for right now I was happy to just grow under his guidance. Especially since he was fairly hands off about it – he’d let me get the Fungal Lock spell, after all, despite it not being in his perfect planned book.

“Excellent,” Davies said. “Now, if you don’t mind, this spot of late-night excitement and horror has left me exhausted. I’ll be headed to bed. Both of you are welcome to a guest room, if you’d like.”

“I may take you up on that,” Ivy said with a nod. “The flight here took a lot out of me.”

“I’ll probably head back to the city,” I said. “This took a lot out of me.”

Of course, the truth of the matter was that my broom was nowhere near recharged, but neither of them had to know that. I didn’t fancy my odds of sleeping out in the wilderness, but I also didn’t much like staying with a man who I very deeply mistrusted.

Ivy gave me a strange look, but nodded. After another second, he spoke.

“You know, Teffordshire is about two or three hours away by horse. If your broom could manage it, you could rest up there and then make the flight back.”

I glanced at my broom and bit my bottom lip. That’d be cutting it close, but… I thought I’d just have enough juice in the tank to make it.

“Thank you for the advice,” I said with a nod.

“Sure,” Ivy said.

Jacobs Davies made a noise that was probably intended to come out like a polite cough, but instead sounded more like an angry bullfrog. I glanced at his rakish frame, impressed by the sound, but nodded.

“I’ll be off. Thank you for your hospitality.”

I shook his hand, and then shook Ivy’s, though I was much warmer with Ivy. As I switched my broom back into flight mode, Ivy called out to me.

“If you ever visit Teffordshire, you should visit the shop ‘The Emerald Scale’! It’s where my parents work, and we could hang out. Teffordshire’s got one of the best enchanted item markets in Mossford.”

“I may take you up on that!” I called as I started to rise into the sky.

In truth, I didn’t actually stop in Teffordshire that night. My broom had recovered a bit of juice from the rest period, but a few hours of recharge was nowhere enough to get me all the way out there. I just flew back towards Mossford, stopping in one of the larger villages that I’d passed on the way, and rented a room for the night. The following morning, I made the trip back home.

I sorted everything out with the Wyldwatch, submitting my copy of all of the paperwork, then set things up with the Spiritwatch to get my money. By the time I had all of that sorted, I swung by the bank to deposit the silver.

As I glanced at the slip they’d given to represent the account balance, my eyebrows climbed up. Between Orykson’s forward payment, and the money I’d been earning in my missions – this new one in particular – I’d actually managed to sock away quite a bit of cash. Orykson had suggested I invest it in that ore that we’d be getting a shipment of soon, and I probably would at the end of next week, since I thought that was when the price should be dropping.

Still, there was just something nice about having a bit of extra money in my account.

With a few hours left in the day, I went home and greeted my dad and brother, then headed to my room. I laid out the two potions I’d just gotten, and put the Lesser Marrow Death Mana Extract next to it.

These weren’t trickle potions, like the one Alvaro had given me, so I didn’t need much time for their effects to kick in. I was a bit worried about overloading my mana-garden, but I’d just take things one at a time.

I’d start with the hardest to digest first, then work my way down.

I picked up the sensory potion out. The draconic potion was probably going to be a bit harder to focus the effects of, since it wasn’t human magic, but the sensory potion was second gate, so it’d put more strain on me.

I twisted off the cap and took a long sip. It tasted completely empty. If it had possessed a little more flavor, I might have worried that Ivy had scammed me with water, but this was a complete void. It was like trying to stare into thermal light without a spell – it just wasn’t there.

The effect on my mana-garden was far more substantial, however. Power rippled through me, pushing hard against my spells. I tried to use my own mana to push it towards my Analyze Life and Death spells, but it was like pushing through mud with my hands. If I hadn’t spent some time pitting my mana against Ivy, and hadn’t suffered the crushing power of Orykson’s seventh gate, I wasn’t sure I would have been able to do it at all.

I managed to shove most of the power into the Analysis spells before it bled out of my garden, then I paused to take a breath and close my eyes. I didn’t need to condense the power around the spells, since it was already so dense compared to what I could do, so instead I just fed my normal mana into the spells, trying to mix it in with the potion’s power, diluting it and letting it change into my own.

When I opened my eyes, I could feel something strange happening in my mana garden. If the mastery of the spells had been a near-painful splitting of the plants from the earth, this seemed more like a stretch. They were reaching deeper into my mana-garden, accessing power I didn’t even know I had. The power rolled up the roots of the tree, and then there was a sense of… Right.

My senses expanded. It wasn’t sudden or extreme, but it was there. My mana sense grew sharper, and I realized that it now let me sense some of the flows of life energy in my own body. That was definitely not something I’d been able to do before – energy was like the potential state for mana, as far as I understood it. My mana senses shouldn’t be able to pick up on it.

I felt a small tingle under my feet, then glanced down. I could feel the small flows of death energy in the wood there. Neither this new death-sense or life-sense gave me anywhere near the level of detail that the Analysis spells did when cast, but I was sensing some of the flows.

It was strange. The new information feeding into my mana sense, alongside the increased clarity of the sense itself, should have been a lot to process. It should have taken concentration to block it out and keep myself.

Curiously, I felt around in my mana-garden. Like Ed had warned, by rushing for the advancement of the spells, rather than letting it come naturally, I’d actually decreased the amount of mana I could pull from.

But Orykson wouldn’t have had me do this for no reason. I curiously fed power into my Analyze Life spell. The world blossomed with lines of viridian light, just as always.

But the burden that it put on my mana-garden was tiny. I wouldn’t be able to keep the spell up all day, or anything like that, but I’d be able to keep it up far longer than I would have been able to before.

More than that, the spell seemed to interact with my new senses well, letting me interpret the knowledge it brought me far more intuitively than I had before.

I cut off the power I was feeding, and my vision returned to normal, a grin slowly spreading across my face.

If this was what ingraining a spell was like, then I definitely wanted more. I’d ingrain all of my spells if I could.

I took a fifteen-minute break to let the mana flush out of my system, using the time to walk around the house and get a sense of it with my new ingrained abilities, then returned to my room.

I took the draconic potion next. This one was far less weighty in my mana-garden, though it did feel strange, as if I was shoving a square peg into a round hole.

Once it slipped inside, though, it went to work completely on its own. It built up around the Enhance Plant Life and Harvest Plant Life spells, and to my surprise, it also built up some around Fungal Lock.

Mentally, I gave the spell some side-eye. Mushrooms weren’t really plants, and in some ways, were more like animals than anything. But they were distinctly part of the forest, and this was made by a forest dragon, so perhaps that was more important than taxonomical classifications.

All three of the spells drank the potion in like a man in the desert did water, and a moment later I was met with a strange mix of sensations as my Harvest Plant Life, Enhance Plant Life, and Fungal Lock spells broke through to the mastered and ingrained states respectively.

I was a little surprised that Fungal Lock had been ingrained, but I had used it a lot recently, and it was a fairly simple spell, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been.

There was no expanding of senses with the Fungal Lock spell. Instead, I felt something settle into place, mycelium tendrils touching the roots of my Harvest Plant Life spell.

I took another short break, then turned to the Lesser Marrow Death Mana Extract. I put the thick, jelly-like substance onto my tongue and swallowed.

I felt it settle into my mana-garden, congealing around the Pinpoint Boneshard spell, but there was something wrong.

It hurt.

It wasn’t the worst pain I’d ever experienced in my life, but it was a deep ache that grew worse each second as the mana passed into me. By the time it reached its crescendo, I was clutching my head, my eyes squeezed shut, taking long, shuddering gasps.

“Mal?” came Ed’s concerned voice, followed by a sharp knock on my door.

I looked up at him, blinking away tears.

When had I started crying?

I didn’t know.

“Yeah?” I managed to rasp out.

“Are you ok? I heard… Well, it sounded like you were in pain. Can I come in?”

I walked over and opened my door, and Ed pulled me into a gentle hug. He must have seen the potion bottles over my shoulder, because he murmured “Overtraining?” to me as he held me.

“I overdid it on potions,” I confirmed. My head, throat, and soul all still ached dully with the remnants of the mana-toxicity.

“I did that a few times,” Ed said, “especially when I first started.”

He guided me downstairs and got me a glass of water as he told me about how he’d thought it would be a good idea to burn through his entire month’s training supplements in his first day, and had wound up in the academy’s infirmary for nearly a full day, and lost his supplement privileges for the next two months.

To my surprise, the water and conversation helped some. After an hour, I checked on my mana-garden.

There wasn’t damage, thankfully, but most of the power of the extract had gone to waste. Some of it had clung to my Pinpoint Boneshard spell, but most had simply passed in and out of me like water.

That night, I skipped the lethetic tea and bone broth, giving my mana a chance to recover from my ordeal. Instead, I just spent it with my brother and dad, talking about the bakery, and an order he had coming up for some uptown party before finally turning in.