Over the next few hours, Vance became familiar with his mana reservoir. It didn't have a particular feeling about it that he could discern like the cold, hot, or metallic mana types he'd come across so far.
Elijah explained that these reservoirs contain mana in its purest form. While not especially useful, it was easily malleable. All living things tend to create mana of this kind. For the most part, it's just used by the body as a barrier to distinguish internal mana systems from external ones, the human body uses such negligible amounts of mana for this purpose that it doesn't tend to deplete naturally, nor does it afford them any significant protection from outside sources of mana.
"Master Elijah, I'm fairly certain I've got a grip on it, am I supposed to be trying to do something with it?"
"Not yet, but I think you're ready to move on, let's see if your awareness is up to scratch."
Elijah placed his hand on Vance again.
"I want you to tell me when you feel me probing your reservoir."
Vance waited and at first, he didn't feel anything. But a few moments later, he felt something pushing at the edges of his reservoir. It felt indistinct. It was like something was gently pushing on the side of a thin membrane, worried that it might cause a puncture.
"Now."
Elijah moved his hand away and turned back to his notes. "Interesting."
"Vance, how long did you spend trying to figure out how to sense mana?"
"Pretty much the whole 2 years since I last saw you. I spent most hours every day meditating, searching internally. I didn't really find anything until I deprived myself of the rest of my senses."
Elijah lit up, this was getting better and better.
"Such dedication. Well done. You've done yourself a great service. Self-awareness is one of the most important things for an Arcanist, if you can't tell what's going on internally quickly, you won't know when something is going wrong, or when you're under attack."
Elijah continued to poke and probe at Vance for the rest of the day. He escorted Vance to a room on-premises that seemed to have been a storage room which Elijah had converted into a bedroom. Elijah told him that he'd be staying here instead of with the other students for now until he was ready.
The next morning, Elijah gave him no time for breaks, they got breakfast and then went straight back to training.
This continued for the next few weeks uninterrupted.
Every day, Elijah would take him through several exercises.
He would test his ability to detect interference from foreign mana in different areas of his body, starting at his reservoir and slowly moving outwards, by the end of the first week, he could tell the moment Elijah pushed mana through any point in his skin.
More importantly, Elijah would have him attempt to sense varying intensities of mana in the area. At first, he could only sense very intense sources of mana, but pretty soon, something Vance considered pretty incredible occurred.
Elijah was holding a small, condensed ball of pure mana in his hands, as pure as he could conjure. He was walking around the room. He'd used some kind of spell to mask his footsteps so that Vance couldn't hear him, yet Vance found that he was able to keep an outstretched finger pointed at the ball of mana as he walked around. It was difficult, but after a few days, he was able to keep track of multiple mana sources at once without trying particularly hard.
Eventually, by the end of the third week, he finally started to sense the ambient mana around him. Elijah was extremely pleased with this particular advancement.
"It feels like a fog is covering my mana sense." He described his experience at Elijah's request.
"The larger sources of mana are piercing through, I can sense them clearly, but it's hard to separate the smaller ones out from the fog."
"This, young Vance is the first point of divergence in our paths." Elijah proclaimed proudly. "You can sense ambient mana, we who do not feel mana and simply see it, cannot. We only perceive larger concentrations of mana. We learn to use the ambient mana because we know it's there, but we cannot see it. I do not know yet whether this will be useful to you, but you should know it is abnormal. I am aware of a few Arcanists from antiquity who claim to have the ability to feel mana rather than see it, but let it be known that I have never met one."
"So, all of this is just a theory, really?" Vance asked.
"Until now. I am aware of a few researchers who have attempted such a feat, though all of these people were fully-fledged Arcanists by the time they thought to give it a try, and their efforts yielded no result. At the moment, that is the key factor I am attributing to your initial successes, you started with no experience, and thus have built something of a different foundation."
At the end of the month, Vance convinced Elijah to allow him to send a message to his brother so that he wouldn't come searching for him. He had to promise not to tell Leon that he was training under Elijah yet.
By now, Vance could confidently identify small sources of mana in his near vicinity and he was beginning to identify the types of mana based on how they felt, as well as approximate their relative power to one another based on the intensity of the associated feelings. He could track them and could tell when something external was moving through his internal mana systems.
"Alright Vance, Today I'd like you to try transference again, now that you've got a better idea of what you're doing."
Vance produced his coin and his sword excitedly and began the process of pulling mana from the sword, its current location and moving it to the coin.
It felt bad, really bad. It was like something was grinding up against his veins as it moved through his body, he didn't even allow the mana to get halfway up his arm before he pushed it back into the sword, he could feel hundreds of tiny spots of mana having shaved themselves off in his arm. They began to move through his body like blood in his veins towards his reservoir, each of the tiny dots gave off that similar metallic feeling.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
"Ah!" Vance reacted out loud as he pushed the mana back out. "That feels so different to how it did."
"Well, now you can feel your own internal mana, it's just the same as physical discomfort for you now. This sense however is not unique to you, most Arcanists eventually get a sense of what's going on inside to a similar level."
"So what do I do?"
"This is where the art of mana shaping comes into play. Right now, you're grabbing an amorphous, loosely shaped blob of mana, and just sort of trying to force it through your body. Instead, you need to adjust the shape of the mana using your will, for each person, it's a little different, but at your stage, you just need to wrap the mana in some of your own whilst it travels through your body. But that's for later, it requires you to master a few more basics. For now, I want you to draw the mana out without touching the object, then I want you to try and have the mana stay in place above your palm."
It only took him 5 minutes.
Elijah stared, eyes wide open at the floating ball of metallic mana hovering above Vance's hand. Just 5 minutes. It took some of the best in the world hours to learn to handle mana without contact, it took the average student days, hell, it took Elijah a day and a half.
"Remarkable."
Vance discovered that as he bent his will to this purpose, he could feel how the mana inside the sword was reacting, whether it was shaking or being squashed, whether it was getting closer to him or further away, or how hard the vessel was pushing back. He found just the right amount of force to exert to bring it closer, then exit the confines of the sword.
"What's next, Master Elijah?"
He took a moment to reply. "I would like you to try and manipulate the shape of the mana, can you feel its shape?"
"Yes, It's round, It bulges out at a few points...it reminds me of the coin, actually, but it's not quite the same."
"Precisely. Form it into a cube, or a pyramid, something simple."
Vance once again exerted his will, this was a bit more difficult. It was like trying to shape clay with one hand. It took him nearly an hour, and he had to stop several times to let his will recover, it still wasn't strong enough.
Eventually, he managed to force the mana to take the shape of a square for a few seconds before he lost his hold and had to release the mana back into its original shape.
By this point, he'd found that holding the mana in place outside of his body wasn't particularly difficult, he reasoned he could do it for a few hours without wearing his will down.
Elijah frantically made notes, another incredible improvement. The shaping of mana was one of the most difficult tasks for budding Arcanists, not to mention this mana had already been shaped by him before. This meant it was locked into its form, constantly trying to reassert itself into its original shape. For Vance to be able to manipulate it like this, the level of feedback his new sense was providing him must be incredible.
He hadn't actually expected him to succeed, even for a few seconds. What he just did was effectively half of the process one went through to break an enchantment, if he'd had a stronger will, he could've reshaped the mana permanently. In a real magical object, that could cause it to stop functioning. Elijah thought it was best to keep this to himself for now.
"Please place the metallic mana back into the sword."
Vance did so, then shook out his hand.
"Vance, I would like you to try the same thing you just did, but I'd like you to try and use ambient mana instead of the mana within the sword. This should be easier on your will than draining the blade."
"Alright."
He focused his mana sense, honing in on that omnipresent faint fog surrounding him. He flexed his will towards it, trying to grip and pull. To his surprise, it came easily. It was like a vacuum, the more he pulled, the more it would rush towards him, gathering above his palm the way he was holding the metallic mana.
It was even lighter, he barely had to put forth effort at all to keep the similar-sized chunk of ambient mana hovering there. He shaped it, it was much easier this time. He turned it into a sphere, then into a cube, then a pyramid.
"Master, why is this so much easier?"
"Because this mana has never been shaped before, the mana I locked in the coin was fighting you back. I already shaped it 2 years ago. You not only had to exert your will but battle an echo of my own, which is much, much stronger."
Elijah continued.
"You've done excellently Vance. The next part will be very difficult, so I expect you to spend a few days figuring this one out."
Vance listened intently. Every secret that came out of Elijah was like gold to him, he was quickly becoming addicted to this.
In truth, Elijah expected a normal student to spend months, but he wanted to push Vance.
"I want you to take ambient mana, shape it into roughly the same shape as that silver coin you carry around, and then I want you to change the mana at a more fundamental level. I want you to make it feel like a coin, cold, metallic, heavy. Then I want you to transfer that mana into the coin while keeping it shaped properly. There are books and tomes I could read to you on this theory, but I have a feeling you will be able to do this based entirely off of...well, feeling."
And so, Vance began his next task. He stayed in his room, where he was brought food and drink on occasion by Thomas, who seemed to be making a point of being nice to Vance but not engaging him in proper conversation.
He knew the shape of the coin intimately. After just a few hours he was able to consistently gather ambient mana and shape it into the form of a coin. He found this shape was quite a bit more complex than just a simple sphere, so that made it a lot tougher.
For days, he tried to manipulate the coin in different ways to alter its properties. Attempt after attempt went by in failure, each time he made no progress, but each time he failed, he would find that his will was starting to feel stronger, more real. It became easier and easier for him to tap into it and he was gaining finer control by the minute, but he couldn't figure out how to change the mana from one aspect into another.
Once a day, Elijah would stop by and ask how Vance was getting on. He brought his journals and recorded their conversations but he never pressured him. He offered no advice or speculation, opting to see if Vance could work his way through the problem.
By the start of the third week, Vance was getting really frustrated. Thomas stopped by to deliver his afternoon meal, and Vance stopped him as he was leaving with a whisper-yell.
"Hey, Thomas, do you have a second?"
"Vance, I'm really not supp-"
"It's just something small, I wanted to ask if you had any advice for changing mana attributes? I'm stuck, no matter what I do, nothing happens!"
Thomas took a few cautious steps back towards the room and looked about conspiratorially, Elijah was nowhere to be seen.
"Look, I don't know what you and Elijah are doing, but all I can tell you is that I was taught that your imagination and your will are linked strongly, if you don't have a clear mental image of what your desired outcome is for the mana, then your will can't shape it to match. Most students learn using references, examples, stuff like that. Sorry, Vance, I can't stick around, Good luck."
Thomas made haste down the hallway, worried he'd get caught.
Vance took in his meal and closed the door, putting his back against it. Before he ate, he decided to give it one more try, this time, he held the real coin in his hand and superimposed his mental image of the coin over the feeling he held of the gathered ambient mana.
He ran his fingers across the surface of the coin. It was everything that Elijah wanted; cold, metallic, heavy.
He focused on that, he kept that image firmly in mind and reached out to his will, rather than flexing it like a muscle, he instructed it. It was a mental command, something like screaming a desire silently in your own head, then he pushed his will towards that mana, hard.
The mana changed.
He realised, and snapped his attention to the mana he'd gathered, it was heavier, changing slowly from one type to another, but his concentration lapsed.
It reverted back in an instant. But that was OK, now it was just a matter of practice.
"Thomas, I could kiss you," he said quietly to himself.