Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 64

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

After I got back, I had tonight’s door guard help me test my new shield ward by throwing things at me. Maintaining something like a mana shield at all times was far too expensive, but wards had the advantage of being extremely cheap to power. At least, they did if they weren’t designed to create a miles-wide barrier. For a single person, a personal defense ward was far more manageable.

The key to a good ward was that it relied heavily on divinations to detect the conditions under which it should activate another spell. Most of what made my amulet complicated was defining what those conditions were. Any physical object coming at me with significant speed and mass would cause the runes to activate a mana shield. The ward did its best to automatically regulate how much mana needed to go into it to keep me safe, so it needed additional runes to judge factors like weight and pointiness.

If a spell came my way, the ward would do its best to disrupt it. Failing that, the amulet would try to slow the attack down so that I could react to the magic. At its heart, that was the shield ward’s purpose: to give me enough time to evaluate the threat and prevent an ambush from taking me out. I had to sacrifice flexibility to keep it portable, but it worked.

I did have to imbue a significant chunk of mana into it to keep the wards active and so that it would have the resources necessary to repel an attack. Once every few days, I’d want to top it off, but if all the mana did get drained out—such as if I was attacked—the inscription wouldn’t break like an enchantment would.

For my next project, I created a piece of glass shaped to be about three feet by one foot in dimensions. That was the easy part. Scrying mirrors didn’t work if they weren’t mirrors. Unlike a regular mirror that used silver paint as a backing, a scrying mirror needed liquid mana infused into it in order to serve as a lens for the spell. Unfortunately for me, the easiest way to collect liquid mana was through various plant life that thrived in mana-rich environments.

That didn’t mean it was impossible to get my hands on, just that I’d have to do the conversions myself. I borrowed a wooden bowl from one of my new neighbors and was in the process of slowly dripping beads of liquified mana off my finger tip into the bowl when someone knocked on my door.

“Come in,” I called out, not looking up from my work. Mana didn’t like to exist in physical form, and it rapidly converted through states until it crystallized. Keeping it in that medium state of liquid was an exercise in concentration and stamina.

“Gravvy!” my sister said as she rushed across the room to tackle me with a hug. The drop of liquid mana that had been about to drop off my finger went flying into the air, where it flashed apart back into its natural state. Her eyes wide, Senica watched it disappear while she ignored my glare.

“What was that?” she asked.

“Just a magic thing. Don’t worry about it,” I said as I looked past her to see Father standing in the door frame.

“Sorry to visit so late,” he said. “Senica wanted to come see you. She was not happy that she was asleep when you came to visit us.”

“I don’t see why you have to live out here anyway,” she complained.

“Well, partially it’s because I use my magic to help the Arborists. We’re fixing up all the greenhouses and building a new one, and making the trees grow healthier so there’s more fruit for everyone. And partially it’s because they’re afraid I’ll blow something up in the middle of the village and people will get hurt. This was a compromise as a place to live that’s not too close to the middle of everything.”

“They’re still working on a new home for you on the east side where there are no fields,” Father said.

“Are they? No one has mentioned it to me since it was floated as an idea before I ended up here.”

“There were a few guys working on it, but it’s a slow process. We’ll probably have another harvest in before it’s done.”

“I’m sure the Arborists will appreciate it,” I said as I extracted myself from Senica’s hug so that I could relocate the bowl to a safer spot on a shelf. “They haven’t said anything, but I get the sense this place was being used for storage and none of them are thrilled about giving up a corner in their own homes for all the things that used to be in here.”

“What have you been doing here?” Senica asked.

“Mostly teaching people how to use magic,” I said. “Making glass for the greenhouses. Preventing insects from getting into the trees.”

I wasn’t about to tell anyone that I’d brought my core up to stage two. Noctra’s experiments told me that the concept of a mana lattice wasn’t unknown to the local mages. He might not have known exactly what the best lattice for himself was, but he was smart enough to be trying to figure it out. There was no reason not to expect the other mages in his cabal to not have the same knowledge or even more.

I could be facing several mages with stage three cores. If that was the case, I needed every advantage I could get, which right now meant stockpiling as much mana as I possibly could. My next piece of equipment might need to be a larger mana crystal at the rate I was going.

My current mana crystal would give me everything I needed to handle one stage three mage. If I got lucky, I could take on two. I would have to catch them completely off-guard in order to kill three mages.

“Insects? That sounds boring and gross,” Senica said.

“It can be both of those things,” I agreed. “And not all insects are bad, but these ones were.”

“Maybe I should learn how to do this,” Senica said, a thoughtful frown on her face. “Would it help Mom in the garden?”

I glanced over at Father and asked, “She needs help in the garden? It looked fine to me.”

“No, no. I’ve been giving the full tithe amount for the whole family so your mother can get the garden back in order and your sister can practice.”

That explained why Senica still had mana in her core less than an hour after the tithing. She should have been running on empty and exhausted enough to already be asleep.

“And I’ve been practicing a lot!” Senica announced. “Father showed me how to do the stuff you taught him.”

“Really? Can I see?” I asked.

I wasn’t expecting much. I’d already taken a measure of Senica’s talents and while she was good for a child, that wasn’t that same as just being good. I was sure that if she kept at it, one day she’d be a prime candidate to learn magic, but that day was still years down the road.

Mana swirled in Senica’s core, slowly at first, but faster and faster as she concentrated on it. I shot Father a look, knowing he could also feel Senica’s mana move, and he nodded back. “Huh,” I said. “How about that.”

The mana jumped out of her core, flashing down her limbs and back again, just like she’d done back in the wastes, except much faster now. Then an orb of it manifested in her hand. She threw it up into the air, where it perfectly maintained its shape without leaking a single bit out, before she caught it in her other hand and absorbed it back into her core.

The entire time she was doing that, her mana kept spinning, faster and faster. She wasn’t quite up to the point where I’d let her complete an ignition ritual on her own, but she could probably do it if she was given enough mana. Against any expectations I had, she was inexplicably ready to move her core to stage one right now, at least if I helped her.

“That’s… very impressive,” I said.

“Like I said, I’ve been practicing a lot,” she told me smugly.

“Father, how much time have you spent on practice with her?” I asked.

“Not too much. They’ve been working me pretty late up until last week. I went over what you taught me and made sure she was doing it right, and she’s just been going at it on her own every night.”

“I bet I’m better than you now,” Senica told me.

“Maybe not quite yet,” I said. “Give it a few more weeks to practice and I’m sure you’ll catch up. I can teach you some other exercises if you’d like.”

It took me less than twenty minutes to figure out that Senica was better than any of my current four candidates. Maybe it was the free time, or how much energy she had to goof around and mana was a shiny new toy, or maybe it was just that our family line was talented. It was hard for me to say what Gravin would have been capable of if I hadn’t awakened my past life’s memories.

I gave brief consideration to performing the ignition ritual on her, but ultimately decided against offering it. Despite her apparent talents, she was still a child and soon there would be spells circulating through the village. It wasn’t impossible to imagine her getting her hands on instructions to cast dangerous magic. Of course, a dormant core by itself wouldn’t be enough to stop her, but it would mitigate her ability to practice it to such a degree that she was unlikely to catch anything on fire in the next year or two.

All the same, I made a note to talk to our parents about her progress when she wasn’t around. Perhaps finding out that his daughter was so talented would convince Father to reconsider wasting his own mana as a field hand. It also might just get Mother to accept her own ignition, even if all she ever learned were gardening spells.

The pair stayed an hour or so, just long enough to catch up on everything. Mother had come down sick and decided to stay home and rest. Father’s duties were more in line with everyone else’s now. Senica wasn’t necessarily enjoying school, but Cherok hadn’t tried to pull any new tricks on our family using her as a weak point.

Other than resolving to stop by sometime in the near future to check on Mother and see if she needed magical healing, it was a good visit. It gave me time to relax, to disengage from work for just a little while. I’d been so focused on creating new tools, training new mages, and piecing together my mana lattice that I’d barely taken time to breathe. Every night, I slept less and less and I’d begun pulling all-nighters.

“Thank you for visiting,” I said. “I didn’t realize how much I missed you.”

Father gave me a hug on his way out, but didn’t linger at my doorway. Senica was already racing ahead, mana faintly coursing through her body to give her more strength and speed. “You should come home more often,” he offered as his parting words. “It’s not like we’re that far away.”

“I will,” I promised, though it was a lot more complicated than that. I found that I meant that, too. As soon as my preparations were complete, I was going to make more time to see my family, Karad’s house arrest be damned.

My temporary home empty once more, I turned back to my bowl of liquid mana. The sooner I finished this step, the sooner I’d have the scrying mirror operational. Then we’d see just how much danger we were really in.

Share