Published at 24th of February 2024 10:31 am

Chapter 12

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The next few days of my life was a mixture of awkward tension and peaceful, uninterrupted work. My mana crystal progressed by leaps and bounds, so much so that I had to revise my initial estimates. Mother had been let in on the secret and, while she was initially more wary than Father, she was now allowing me to work without constantly dragging me away. At this rate, I’d finish the mana crystal in well under two weeks.

Part of me wanted to shake my head at how much easier it was to make swift progress now after spending eight months toiling in secret, but the truth of the matter was that if I hadn’t ignited my core, I wouldn’t have had the proof to convince my parents in the first place. Even with hindsight, I didn’t see much of a way I could have reached this point any faster.

Our routine was interrupted on the day of the Testing. Father left in the morning as usual, and Mother had taken to walking Senica to school following the monster attack. I followed along to keep up the pretense that I was a normal child since I was far too young to be left unattended and had far too nosy of a neighbor not to go through the motions.

The village’s school was a one-room building on the eastern side, and Cherok was usually already inside by the time we got there. Today, he was talking to another parent, but he took a moment to give me a sneer as we approached before returning to ignoring me. I might have been insulted if anyone else had done it, but my opinion of Cherok couldn’t get much lower. Only people whose egos ruled their lives let others dictate their actions with such petty displays.

We left Senica behind and left without being forced to interact with the teacher again. “Do you worry about her?” I asked Mother after we’d left. “That Cherok isn’t treating her fairly, I mean?”

Mother shook her head. “No. Senica would tell me if she thought she was being singled out. It’s just old drama from my generation. Cherok and your father have never gotten along. It spilled over onto me when we got married, not that he liked me to begin with. But as unpleasant as he might be to us personally, he is professional about his job. And besides, anything she doesn’t learn at school, you can teach her, right?”

I chuckled. That was true, I supposed. “Only when it comes to magic,” I said. “I leave mathematics and literacy lessons to someone else to handle.”

“I can already tell you’re going to be a headache when you go to school.”

“I wasn’t planning on going,” I told her.

“Everyone has to go. There are no exceptions.”

It was interesting that the village placed such a high priority on basic education. I’d seen plenty of small villages just like this one where knowledge was passed down family lines instead of having a centralized learning institution, places where it wasn’t unusual for literacy to start and end with a single family or clergyman.

Considering that they did no trade and I’d seen precious few books in the village, the emphasis on schooling struck me as an oddity. If it had just been for the purposes of learning introductory mana usage, it would have made sense. Fortunately for me, I had an easy way to find out.

“Mother, I have a question.”

She didn’t quite flinch at my calling her ‘Mother’ anymore, but it had taken a day or two. It really was something she needed to work on before someone noticed. Between the nosy neighbor and my sister, sooner or later she was going to get called out on it.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Why does the village have a school? Specifically, why is it teaching letters and numbers? It’s not that literacy isn’t a laudable goal in its own right, but there are no books here to read, no paper to write on, and no pens to write with.”

“Of course there are. There are dozens of books in Lord Noctra’s library. He makes them publicly available for us to read there.”

I missed a step. “There’s a library?” I asked, flabbergasted. How had I not known this? I’d been living here for close to a year now.

Then again, Gravin couldn’t read or write, and Senica got her fill from the school itself. Father spent all day in the fields, and Mother handled the garden and other domestic duties. Nobody seemed to have the time, energy, or desire to read in my home. Mother visited with the neighbors for entertainment, and Father presumably had plenty of friends out in the fields.

It was no wonder no one had bothered to tell me, and I was probably letting my imagination get the better of me anyway. ‘Dozens of books’ described a single shelf, not a whole library, and there was scant reason to believe it would contain anything interesting or useful.

I was still going to check it out, of course. I would probably need Mother to cover for me and check out any books I deemed worth the time to read, as I doubted whoever was in charge would hand off such an expensive item to a small child. Then I needed to find time to read it somewhere I didn’t have to worry about being spied upon. I couldn’t do it in the garden while I worked on my mana crystal, and I couldn’t do it in the house in the evening when Senica was home.

Completing my mana crystal was very much at the top of my priorities right now, so the books would just have to wait.

“Maybe I’ll take you there when you get a bit older… I mean, you know…” Mother trailed off. She really hadn’t taken the news about me as well as Father had. It was the eight months of lying that got to her, I think. Rationally, it was understandable. That didn’t make her feel any less betrayed by my actions.

On the bright side, I finally got my own pallet to sleep on. That was the first thing they did once it became clear that I didn’t have the mind of a three-year-old, and that I was actually something of a stranger to them. That particular change suited me just fine.

The rest of the day passed by in its typical routine. I judged I’d need another eight days just like this one to finish building the crystal and another day after that to properly shield it and attune myself to it. Then I could start pouring mana into it so I’d have a reservoir to pull from for when I needed to do something big.

It was too bad that only I could use it, but that was the drawback to using a mana crystal over a storage crystal. I got better efficiency from it and it would even generate a bit of mana on its own, but nobody else could contribute to it. There were some ways around that, of course. I could take mana from others and then feed it into the crystal, but there was precious little to give here and once I did finally ignite another person, they were going to need their mana for their own training.

Without ambient mana to quickly refill their cores, new apprentices were in for a long slog when it came time to practice their spells. As sloppy as they were with mana usage, they’d be lucky to cast three or four spells a day. Any apprentice curriculum designed to work here would need to focus heavily on mana control before even starting to learn a spell. I would probably have to start a theoretical apprentice on a regime of invocations to practice with, since they were both the most cost-efficient and the easiest to keep control over.

I missed my old stage nine core. I’d practically been a god inside the Night Vale, but after so many centuries, the mana upkeep to keep my heart beating and my brain working had just gotten to be too much. The Night Vale itself had begun suffering for me, which had led me to my reincarnation plan. Other than the terrible location I’d been reborn into, things were working out well. I couldn’t wait to see my true home once again.

Father came home early, several hours before Senica, and gathered us inside our hut to talk. “Testing is tonight,” he said. “We need to plan for it.”

“What’s there to plan?” Mother asked. “The Collector will measure how much mana we’re tithing, and it will either be enough or it won’t.”

“Are they measuring us individually?” I asked. “If not, it would be easy for me to contribute enough mana to make up for any deficiency.”

“That’s the problem,” Father said. “It is individual measurements, so you’ll need to make sure your results are close to normal. Can you do that?”

“Easily. I’ve seen what Senica’s tithe looks like hundreds of times. I can match that with about an hour to prepare.”

Mother did a double take. “You can produce enough mana in an hour to match what your sister makes in an entire day?”

“Roughly speaking,” I said. “To be more precise, it’s about an hour and twelve minutes, assuming both our mana cores have equal capacity. Senica’s is probably slightly larger than mine, given the age difference, so if I wanted to match her contribution exactly, I’d spend an hour and a half to be safe.”

Father just shook his head and laughed while Mother muttered something under her breath about mages and the world not being fair. “It would be better for me to contribute slightly less mana than Senica does if they’re going to measure our individual contributions, but with all four of us, I believe we should have no problems with the Testing?”

“I hope not. I tried not to work too hard today,” Father said. “Mostly succeeded. Might be… a little bit low.”

“Would you like some of mine?” I asked.

Father’s eyebrows shot up. “You can do that?”

“Of course. It’s not particularly efficient, but it’s possible. The question is how much. You’re a bit lower than Mother right now. Maybe enough to match her? Close to it anyway, it might be suspicious if you two have identical results.”

My parents exchanged glances. “How inefficient are we talking about? I’ll probably be fine on my own,” Father said.

“It depends on how much I transfer. It’s essentially a modified mana drain spell that works in reverse. The basic concept is that I use a spell to create a temporary mana core and place it inside your core. It absorbs mana from you, then returns to me to be harvested for my own use. In this version, I simply reverse the direction and partition off a portion of my own mana, then send it through the connection to you and unravel the shell. The mana will stay in your core, and the amount used in the shell and the connection will be spent.”

“I’ve got to go get Senica,” Mother said, standing up. “You two figure this out while I’m gone.”

“I hate to say it,” Father said after she’d gone, “but it probably wouldn’t hurt to get a little more mana. It used to be that when a family did a Testing, everyone took the whole day off. Lord Noctra put a stop to that years ago, said there was no point in doing it if it wasn’t going to show how much mana we had left after a normal day. I’m not technically supposed to even take the few hours off that I did, but nobody’ll complain if I cheat a little. It’s what everyone else does.”

“Take my hand,” I told him. I held my own hand up, so much smaller than his that it disappeared inside his grasp. The spell took only a few moments to put together, and I carefully measured out a portion of mana to bring him roughly up to par with Mother. It left me a bit low, but we still had a few more hours before our Testing and I’d regenerate it by then.

By the time Mother and Senica returned a few minutes later, I’d walked Father through how to break down the artificial mana core and absorb its contents. Mother’s face was grim, and Senica was spitting mad. “I told him,” my sister said. “I told him! But he wouldn’t listen.”

“What’s this now?” Father asked, looking to Mother.

“Cherok apparently decided to make Senica practice mana control exercises until she’d completely exhausted all of her mana today. He knows our Testing is in a few hours.”

It wasn’t hard to tell from the grim looks on my parents’ faces. This was going to be a problem.

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