Mana Mirror: Chapter Forty-Nine (Patreon)

“Do you have a growth item?” I asked as I looked over the table.

“No, the magic for building growth items wasn’t developed when I was beginning my journey,” he said. “I have the bonds I formed at Spellbinder, but that is all.”

“I see…”

I looked over all of them seriously. The Argos Milia eye was undeniably an excellent choice, and it wouldn’t take resources to upgrade. But the fact that it took nearly twenty percent of my total mana was too much for me to justify.

That left one option.

“The key,” I said, and Orykson smiled so wide that it actually scared me a little bit as he handed it over to me.

“Excellent choice.”

I turned it over in my hand. It was lighter than I’d expected, no heavier than a normal key would be, and perhaps even less than that.

That felt strange to me, for some reason. I felt like such an important object should be heavier, but it was a key made of stone. I supposed there wasn’t anything intrinsic to its physical weight at all.

“How do I bond it?” I asked.

“Run your mana through the item, a bit from all four of your gates, blending them in equal measure.”

I did as he said, and felt the mana trickle deeper into the item than should have been possible. The item began to pull on my mana, harder and harder, until finally, something snapped into place and the key vanished. I let out a soft gasp as I felt… something… in my spirit. It was almost like when a spell was ingrained, mixed with when it was mastered, with a bit of something entirely new inside.

I could feel that I’d lost some of my mana permanently, but it wasn’t too horrible – about on par with ingraining the Analyze spells were.

“If you search your ungated mana section of your mana-garden, you should be able to find the key and remove it back into the real world,” Orykson advised.

I closed my eyes and felt around inside. Sure enough, it was floating there, just as he’d said. I touched it as if I was going to push mana through it, and the key appeared in my hands.

I actually did flow a bit of mana through it, though only the smallest bit of ungated mana, and a doorway snapped into existence.

It led into a small room. Bigger than what I would have called a closet, personally, but I supposed that with how absurdly wealthy Orykson was, his perspective was a bit skewed. It definitely wasn’t big enough to be a bedroom, but it was a solid walk-in closet size.

The walls, floor, and ceiling were made from a gray-blue material that somewhat reminded me of the threads of space that I was able to see with Analyze Space, and to my new spatial sense, it felt kind of similar as well.

It didn’t drain any mana to keep the separated space open, but a tiny touch of ungated mana closed it again.

I opened and closed it a few times, and to my surprise, Orykson didn’t say anything to stop me. Instead, here merely watched me like a father would a child who’d just gotten a new toy.

That made me think of our relationship in an odd new way, and I wasn’t sure I liked it, so I let the key slip back into my spirit.

“Well done,” Orykson said. “I admit, I was worried that you’d take the Fundament Pill. It’s been shown that those raised in poorer circumstances have a harder time accepting delayed gratification, even when they should be.”

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a ball, one that was definitely too large to have fit inside his suit without me noticing it. At this point, though, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen him pull objects from nothing. He was a powerful spatial mage, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.

A part of me hoped I’d never lose the interest in magic that made seeing people pull something from nothing fun, though.

“I’m not sure if you remember, but a while ago, but Aerde did let you know that after you mastered Pinpoint Boneshard, we would be spending two weeks training your combat magic.”

I actually hadn’t remembered that, but I didn’t tell him that.

“What’s the ball?” I asked instead.

“It’s a training tool for your mana sense and manipulation,” Orykson said. “You’ll be expected to tinker with it when we’re not training. Your peacepyre should find it particularly interesting as well…”

I ran my mana senses through the orb. It registered with my overall mana sense, as it gave off a general sense of ungated mana, but it also seemed to react to my spatial sense. It gave me strange feedback of narrow pathways built into it.

A moment later, it clicked. The inside of the ball was a maze, but one that I had to navigate with my mana senses, and especially my spatial sense.

“Your spatial sense should work well with the Pinpoint Boneshard spell,” Orykson said, then he gave me a savage smile. “Well, you should head home. Fill your key, test out its ability to absorb materials – perhaps feed it some items and materials. Its mundane assembly ability alone is worth a small fortune. Take a week to repay your mana debt, then prepare. You’ll be training with me, eight hours a day, for two weeks.”

He waved his hand and a portal appeared. I stepped through, and did as he said, pulling out the key and opening the space.

The peacepyre, which had been idly floating around the lamp, shot over to me and spun around my body, then ducked in and out of the extra-spatial pocket excitedly.

Curiously, I held up the training sphere that Orykson had handed me. The peacepyre flowed into it, the opalescent flame contracting. I followed it with my mana sense.

The peacepyre moved forwards, pushed by my mana sense, but since it was moving ahead of me, it was entering parts of the maze before I could sense them. Whenever I hit a dead end, I had to forcibly stop my mana sense from following the paths built into the sphere to instead pull it back manually, which added a layer of complexity.

No wonder he’d said that this would be good training.

After a few minutes of playing with the orb, the peacepyre got bored, so I put it to the side as well and returned my attention to the key.

I started with some mundane objects. Normal clothes, some dried fruits and nuts that wouldn’t go too bad, and a jug of water.

After that, I got one of my suits. It was enchanted, so the key might eat it to empower its own defenses, I wasn’t sure.

I carefully placed it inside the spatial pocket, but nothing happened. I let out a sigh of relief, then frowned. How did I feed materials to it?

I headed to my dresser and got out the case with the five ounces of structure-ore, then tossed one marble inside.

It clinked to the gray-blue floor of the separated space, where it rolled around a bit before stopping.

Huh.

I stepped into the separated space and picked up the marble. I poked it against the wall, but nothing happened. I imagined it absorbing into the wall, ran mana through it, and then tried poking the key to the marble.

Finally, something happened. There was a pull from the key, a hunger to consume the marble, constrained by my will.

I allowed it, and could feel two separate pathways, carved within my own spirit. One of them felt like a fold in space, and the other felt like a pit.

There were dozens of other pathways that I got a vague sense of the uses for, but many of them were totally inactive right now.

I fed it to the warp in space first, and the sense of spiritual suction began, though it felt hard, like sucking mud through a thin reed.

After almost half an hour, the marble vanished, only to appear inside of the separated space open in the air next to me.

The power, I realized. Structure-ore was a fourth gate material, it had way more power than a normal first gate item was supposed to be able to handle. If it hadn’t been bound to my mana-garden, it may not have been able to work at all…

Now that the key was free, though, I could feel the first two pathways close, but the third open. I ran my mana sense through it, and got a mental image of the separated space.

It was oddly disorienting to have both the firm mental image and the physical space in front of me, so I used a touch of mana to close the space, then focused on the small box of peanuts I’d put inside.

It appeared in my hand after about two seconds. Way better than the time it had taken for the structure-ore, presumably because peanuts didn’t have much magical power.

I spent a while experimenting with putting things in and out of the key, until I felt like I had a solid grasp on it. The storage and retrieval feature seemed to work on a couple of factors: mana, size, and mass. Putting my entire bed inside it had still taken ages, though not as long as the structure-ore.

Next, I experimented with the void feature. I fed the structure-ore into the void. It took even longer this time, absorbing after nearly a full hour. During that time, I was able to open and close the space, but I couldn’t use the storage or retrieval functions.

Once it was absorbed, it felt like a massive star of blinding power burning in a bottle too small to contain it, and I could feel the power slowly being directed. I could shape the changes to some extent, but only partially.

Since there wasn’t much that the key could do with structure-ore anyways, I simply helped push the burning power through the way the key naturally wanted to use the ore. My own power that I flowed into it was paltry compared to what the ore had, but it was enough to push at least a bit.

But it was slow going, and by the time another hour had passed, my boredom had set in, as well as my exhaustion. It was late, so I let the key absorb the material on its own, then went to bed.

The next morning, the key had finished absorbing the power from the structure-ore, and I opened the space.

It had gotten bigger, expanding outwards in all directions. Curiously, I applied my will to the key into the pathway that I thought would let me reshape the space, and lowered the height and width of the cube to about the same shape as it had been the day before. The space’s depth increased gradually, and by the time I’d reshaped it, I was confident the structure ore had at least doubled the available space, if not more.

I picked up another marble of the ore – I could afford to burn one more – and tried to feed it into the key.

The key didn’t accept it, and I got a gut understanding that until I increased the key’s power to second gate, I wouldn’t be able to feed it any more structure-ore. I’d already strained the device.

Could I feed it other things though?

Before I went full in on the testing, I set all of my mana towards paying off the mana debt I’d accumulated, alongside the power of my plants, then I set off.

The first place I went was the hardware store. The key was happy to devour mundane materials, and it did so far faster than it had been able to absorb the structure-ore. It also gave me thousands of ways I could apply the materials to create mundane objects.

For now, I simply created some shelving, then checked it. They were simply built, seeming to have used my own understanding of how to make shelving.

No wonder he’d said this would be worth a fortune on its own. I’d definitely need to pick up some books on… everything… from the library. Especially if I wound up turning it into a cottage.

I burnt through my paycheck feeding it a considerable amount of random mundane materials. Interestingly, they didn’t need to be used right away, though I felt like there had to be some limit of how many things it could store in the potential-creation state – I simply hadn’t hit it yet.

I was surprised when I heard Ed call out.

“Mal!”

I turned to see him and Meadow walking towards me.