Mana Mirror: Chapter Forty-Eight (Patreon)

I popped open a Mana Shock and sat down on the couch to sketch out the Analyze Space spell. A half a dozen sketches later, and I felt something crack deep in my spirit, the familiar, near-painful stretching of my spirit as the spell broke free and into the air of the mana-garden.

This time, however, it was different. There was a depth, a strange growing downwards as well as upwards. A moment later, I was able to place it.

Ingraining.

Between the sensory potion, Orykson portaling me around the world to examine the spatial threads, searching the forest for Pointer Moss, and my most recent training with examining distance, I’d accumulated enough understanding of the skill to push it over the limit. I’d only needed to master it.

Sensing the strange fluctuation of mana, the peacepyre slipped out of its bottle and bobbed around my head. As the sensation faded, and the peacepyre returned to its bottle, I felt around with my newly enhanced mana senses.

It was… strange. Definitely much more unnatural than the life and death senses that I’d developed.

Unlike when I had the spell active, I didn’t intimately know distances, and I couldn’t see the weave of space. But I did get a sort of… sense of it.

It was like the sense you had when you were walking down stairs while carrying a bunch of boxes – unable to see the next step, but still instinctively knowing it’s there.

I couldn’t see that there was a window behind me. My mana sense hadn’t expanded to let me see it. Nor could I feel it, as if it was an extra limb. It wasn’t any sense I could name, but if I focused, I got the vague impression of a subtle shift in the space that the wall took up behind me. I swept my mana sense out, and I knew that there was a table in the living room, and a loveseat across from me.

Apart from the sense of space, there was an understanding that space was as it should be. Everything was normal and right.

Curiously, I headed to my room and swept my mana senses over my spatially enhanced bag. Space felt slightly warped there, bulging outwards like an overripe fruit.

I examined the rest of the house with my mana senses, but I wasn’t able to find much of anything.

This new sense – which I mentally dubbed spatial sense – was subtle, much more so than the life or death senses that I’d developed. If I wasn’t paying attention, then I’d be able to ignore it completely, but it was there. I definitely understood why Ikki had suggested that my spatial sense, life sense, and a solid internal clock would be able to work well together to help me in a fight.

I definitely needed to work on ingraining Internal Pocketwatch. It wasn’t likely to have an effect, given how little room it took up in my mana-garden, but even reducing the already low mana cost even further would be pretty useful.

But first…

I returned to my seat on the couch and sketched out Pinpoint Boneshard until I was entirely dry on mana. The following morning, when Orykson didn’t appear, as expected, I spent the entire day working on sketching the spell, draining my plants to refuel, and chugging Mana Shock as quickly as my spirit could process the energy.

When Temsday rolled around, I decided to skip out on doing missions to focus on working the Pinpoint Boneshard spell. I didn’t want to make a habit of doing that too often, especially since I didn’t know what it would take to get Orykson upset at me, but I decided that, this time, it was worth it.

Phyday and Knoday both passed by with me spending as much mana as I could gather on simply sketching the spell, and I felt the strain on my brain starting to wrack up. I wasn’t meant to sit around and just repeat the same spell over and over again, and if it weren’t for the impending deadline, I didn’t think I’d have had the motivation to do anything at all.

As it was, a part of me was tempted to give up. If I failed this deadline, I wouldn’t fail out as Orykson’s apprentice, just lose out on better rewards.

I put a stop to that thinking by leaning on my greed. His rewards last time had been good. Really good. I wasn’t going to loose out on the better rewards unless I absolutely had to, and I still had Cretday left to master the spell. It wasn’t much, but I did have one more day.

And hey, I’d reserved a bit of silver in my bank account, just in case I needed it. And given how close I was to the deadline, I definitely counted this as a worthwhile investment.

I headed to the pharmacy nearby, where I’d gotten the tips about bone broth and lethetic tea, and to the counter, passing some sparrhunks on the way.

I imagined Ed bonding to a choruk or a sparrhunk and chuckled. The racoon-like choruk was cute, but it definitely wasn’t Ed’s style, and the fusion of sparrow and chipmunk creature was arguably even less so.

They could learn to imitate humans, though, which brought on a fit of giggles as I imagined Ed with a sparrhunk on his shoulder, reading out the rights of someone Ed had found breaking the law.

When I entered the pharmacy, I found the medical student who’d helped me the first time working behind the counter, and I approached.

“Oh, hey,” she said with a smile. “How’s thing’s going with the apprenticeship?”

“Pretty good,” I said. “Though that’s actually why I’m here. I need something to help me master a bone spell. I had a Lesser Marrow Death Extract, could I get something like that again?”

“Probably, but that particular extract is good for pushing a spell to ingrained status, not mastered.”

I immediately felt like smacking myself. She’d told me as much before, and I’d forgotten, only to stupidly waste it. Not only had I wasted it, but I’d wasted it trying to do something that it couldn’t even do!

“What about…”

I cast about for the name of the elixir that Alvaro had let me use, but no name came to mind. I described the potion effect and she frowned.

“I’ve heard of a few things like that, but they’re special order. We could make one, but it’d take a few days.”

“That’s no good,” I said. “I’ve got to get this spell mastered today.”

The woman made a hmm sound and flipped through a book, looking for something to help. After a bit, she spoke.

“What about this? It’s not really a solution, per se, but it could help if you put in the work. It’s a huge temporary boost of mana, but it accumulates a debt of mana as well. You might be able to pump out more mana in a day than you could in a week, for example, but you’d be paying off the debt with interest. It might wipe you totally dry for a bit longer than a week, or you might spread it out over a month and run on less mana for the entire month.”

“That sounds… Absurdly useful,” I said. “Even paying it back with interest, you could endlessly release a flamethrower spell in a fight while maintaining a shielding spell.”

“That’s true, but the debt puts pressure on your spirit, so you can risk damaging the spells you’ve already got, or even collapsing your mana-garden entirely,” she said. “It’s all in the instructions of the pill. There are a thousand limitations on it, and it does present some risk. According to the notes in here, though, it really all comes down to how you use it. You’d be using it to give you enough power to sketch a spell to mastery, right?”

I nodded, and she pressed on.

“Then the debt you accumulate shouldn’t put so much pressure on you that you have to worry. If the pressure does start to get to be too much, stop using the pill and work on paying it off. And hey, if you’ve got a way to generate some extra mana, like through a legacy or imbued skill or something, that should help you pay it off even faster.”

I waffled back and forth for a bit before I finally decided to take a leap of faith. I signed a waiver, paid far more than I was comfortable with, read through the instructions, and then went home with the pill. It was large, larger than any other pill I’d taken before, and a glossy black color. It tasted like rosewater and licorice, and as soon as its power touched my mana-garden, I could feel it.

It wasn’t like a wash of power entering my mana-garden from the outside, but instead, it was like there was a leech connected to my soul. It was happy to give me anything I wanted, but it would suck it all back out of me with a vengeance.

It felt almost alive, and I did not like the sensation one bit. But still, I had paid for it, and I needed to master the spell.

I fell into myself, sketching the spell out over and over again until my mana was gone, then began to draw from the pill.

It happily refueled my mana, and I could feel a bit of pressure on my garden, but nothing I wasn’t able to handle.

I kept repeating the process, burning through mana, and cursing myself for riving my Briarthreads spell. I knew I was closer than that, and if I didn’t have the lingering effects of the rive stopping me from advancing as quickly, I would have been able to get this already.

Finally, after I’d burnt through nearly four days’ worth of mana, I felt the familiar sensation of a dead tree bursting through the earth of my mana garden. A part of it kept flickering between my spatial and death mana parts of the garden, as if it were teleporting back and forth every once in a while. It was strange, but it slowly seemed to stabilize into a superposition.

I stopped draining the pill for power as soon as I could, and began to feed mana into the parasite that was left inside my mana-garden. I might have to use mana tomorrow, when Meadow came, but I’d do what I could to focus on repaying the mana-debt.

I was relieved that Meadow had insisted I start growing a garden so early – that would definitely help me produce extra mana to pay it off quicker.

As I stood up from my bed to stretch my legs, Orykson appeared in my room.

I didn’t scream this time, though I admitted to myself that a large part of that was because I’d been expecting something like that to happen. The only question would be if it was Orykson or Aerde, his bound elemental, who showed up.

I felt Orykson study me for a moment, then slowly nodded, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.

“You took on a mana-debt to make the deadline. That’s good – too many people are afraid of debt. Accepting debt as a step forward in life is a good thing, but only if it’s calculated. Taking on more than you can repay leads to disaster, but if it’s well managed, it can be an advantage. This goes for both money, mana, and favors.”

“Thank you,” I said, and he nodded, then waved his hand and conjured a portal. We stepped through and arrived in a room made of smooth black stone, with a table laid out in front of us.

It was slightly dark, and my peacepyre slipped out and floated around my head, providing light. It was rendered pointless a moment later, when Orykson flipped the lights on, but I appreciated it nevertheless.

The table had several items laid out on it. The first was a bottle containing a single pill, then a plush pillow with a blood red orb the size of a marble on it. After that was a sword, with a shimmering heat haze around the blade. Fourth was a slender black thread that almost seemed to move on its own. After that came a jar with what looked like a preserved eye within, and then a wand made of a white chitinous, almost crystalline material, with blue light shining softly from the inside. The final item on the table was a key made of a slate gray material that reminded me of a storage ring.

I swept my mana sense over the room, and felt the power radiating off of each of these objects.

“I assume you would like a description of each of the items?” Orykson asked.

“Yes, except for this one,” I said, pointing to the pill. “That’s the Fundament Pill, isn’t it? It would push all my mastered spells to ingrained, and my non-mastered spells to mastered, but put me in a coma for a week to process the power.”

“Correct,” Orykson said with a nod. “It’s also the only item here that’s not a growth item. But on the plus side, if you took some time to master the few remaining spells you need, it could advance you to nearly the peak of power within the first gate, ready to build your staff and then advance instantly.”

That was a massive boon, but something else had caught my attention in his words.

“Growth item? Given the name, I assume those grow in power?”

Orykson made a so-so gesture with his hand.

“The enchanting principles for creating a growth item were based on the bonds that happen at spellbinder, as well as the effects of an imbued spell in the mana garden. Each of these items will permanently decrease your total amount of mana, but they will provide more power than a normal enchantment could. Not only that, but given the proper materials, each of them will be able to grow with you.”

“Like an unbonded staff?” I asked. “It can grow and reinforce you without a bond, but bonding a staff allows most of the growth to happen automatically?”

“Similar, but these don’t produce resonance effects,” Orykson said. He tapped the orb. “This is an energizer. It is perhaps the simplest of the items here, but don’t let that fool you. It, much like ingrained harvesting spells, will provide you with a steady stream of mana. Unlike harvesting spells, the mana is not aspected, and instead will fill all of your gates equally.”

“That’s useful. Will I ever learn other harvesting spells, though?”

“Yes,” Orykson nodded. “They’re all but necessary as you advance. You’ll learn one for all of your gates. However, this item will compound that effect. Your mana recovery will be more than most others would be. Don't underestimate just how useful this it. It may not be especially complex, but mana regeneration has made the difference between life and death for many a mage."

Orykson moved onto the next item, his fingers dancing along the hilt of the blade.

“This is an enchanted sword, wrought from suncopper and nightsteel. It’s little more than a flame blade would be now, but given the time and resources, and its cutting potential will increase along with its burning potential. It’s a powerful offensive tool, if a bit… Basic.”

With that, he moved onto the eye.

“This is the eye of a now-extinct magical creature known as an Argos Milia. I can implant this into you, merging it with your own eye. Unlike the others, it does not require materials to advance with you, but it will take up nearly a fifth of your mana each gate. For now, it will enhance your ability to process visual and mana sensory input. Each eye is unique, and frankly I’m not sure how it will develop, but it is likely you will gain a variety of sensory related abilities from the eye. In the past, I’ve seen thermal vision, the ability to see mana, permanently active spell effects like Analyze Life, and more.”

He picked up the thread and twined it into a loop around his fingers before he put it back on the table, where it immediately became undone.

“This is an enchanted thread from Tenebrous Lacewing silk.”

When he looked at me expectantly, I tapped my arm.

“That’s my suit’s enchanted base, right?”

“Exactly. This thread will bind to the suit. In the short term, it will actually decrease the defensive properties to just that of your level, but in the long term, it will allow its defenses to expand with you, giving you a source of protection. It also allows you to shift the suit and control it with your will. Right now, that mostly means shifting the cut and color, but as you advance, you could use strips of cloth to bind your enemies, create shields, or more.”

I eagerly watched as he lifted the wand.

“This wand is one of the stranger items on the list, and it's based on principles of both Spellbinders, as all growth items are, as well as higher tier secrets. I picked it up roughly half a century ago from a lucrative deal with the Knowledge King's right hand, the Headmaster of Lledrith University. It will serve as a channel for your magic, allowing your spells to come out faster and be slightly more mana efficient. But that’s the smallest point of it. It contains a set of internal mana reserves, and can imprint a single spell per gate from a willing target. Those spells can then be sketched, and in time fully mastered, and cast from the wand’s internal mana. The larger the spell, the more of a strain it will place on your spirit, though. Absorbing an average spell like your Fungal Lock, Lesser Image Recall, or Briarthreads should be fine, but I’d advise against imprinting something like an Analyze spell.”

“Can the spells be ingrained?” I asked.

“Sadly, no. Mastery is the furthest you can go, and even then, there’s no way to work out the inefficiencies. The mana reserve is also fairly small – far, far smaller than your mana garden is, and it will also recover mana at a slower rate as well. Even with all the limitations, it’s a worthy tool.”

Finally, he picked up the slate-colored key and smiled fondly.

“This one was actually made by one of my rivals, the Space King, initially to give to her protégé.”

“But what is it?” I asked.

“It’s the key which conjures a portal to a separated space that only you or those you allow may enter. Or those with enough power to force their way in, but that’s true of any defense in the entire world. Nothing is absolute,” Orykson said. “Right now, it’s roughly the size of a walk-in closet, which is quite impressive – that would normally take third gate mana to pull off, like with the standard spatial ring’s creation, and either wouldn’t be able to be bonded to someone as a growth item, or else wouldn’t be able to be handled by a first gate spirit. But she’s subsidized a significant amount of the mana from a well-built spatial core that’s just a touch smaller than what’s needed for the space, allowing its growth to outpace a normal spatial spell. It’s…”

He must have noticed my eyes starting to glaze over, because he waved his hand.

“Ah, never mind. Regardless, the attached space will grow, and more interestingly in my opinion, has the ability to add rooms and adapt to spells, items, and materials that it is fed. If you were to feed it well, you could easily turn it into a small portable greenhouse at second gate. Perhaps by third it could be a small cottage with a greenhouse. Or you could take it in a completely different direction, creating a luxury bedroom and ensuite at second, and a home at third. Perhaps you use it to store weapons, and it becomes an armory. Its defenses will also grow with your tier.”

I stared over the table greedily. I wanted all of them, though I knew that wasn’t practical for many reasons.