Within three days of his return, at the beginning of the last third of the fourth month, from the House of Pain and Pleasure, Tercius had fallen back into a comfortable routine.
The main difference between the bunker and the mansion was that instead of people banging on his door, gentle sunlight started waking him up. Granted, it was a few hours too early for classes as the students and teachers recharged the batteries for the day ahead, and for that precious hour or two, the mansion felt solely his— a sense of peace and quiet that was his alone. Sleep was all well and good, but he needed some time alone while awake.
Servants who cleaned the mansion were the only ones awake at the time, careful to never wake those sleeping. Individual rooms were, like dorm rooms back at the Academy, left in the care of the students who lived in it. Mistress Porfira was the one nominally in charge of the first years, and she was known to pop in for a surprise inspection of the space students inhabited, though rarely. Mistress Dea had been much more frequent in exercising that right, as Tercius recalled.
Breakfast, followed by classes, breaks between classes, and lunch breaks were the norm. All in all, he had between four to five hours of classes in a day, five days a week.
In the afternoons students who didn’t have Mana Manipulation would have an additional half an hour to an hour of one on one tutoring with the staff of the Academy, at least twice per week. Those students who had the skill would also have a one on one session, but here the main focus would be teaching the basics of mana shapes. Once the teachers were sure that the students knew the shapes, they were left for a while on their own, to simply experience the skill and gain a few levels in it.
Once these shapes were mastered to a satisfactory degree, students began using their first chosen path to guide the skill from thought-based use to action-based use, for once Mana Metamorphosis came into play, it would require the complete focus any mage in training could get a hold of.
Surprisingly, to Tercius at least, very few of the students who got Mana Manipulation used it in the way he did. Even completely immobile, he could command his mana, while these kids required at least some kind of action on their part— a swipe of a hand or something similar, no matter how small, seemed to help them immensely. This difference could be attributed to his higher skill level, but somehow he doubted it was only that. After all, he remembered the low levels, when he just got the skill, and even then he had only used his mind.
His normally free weekends became crowded with pages upon pages of topics of things he missed while he developed his Well. For the most part, the lessons were very clear and concise, which, when he considered for what age they were written, made a lot of sense. Only a handful of times did he have to ask for clarification.
Days went by.
One late afternoon, a few days before the return to the Pyramid was scheduled to happen, Mistress Helfira placed a package on the table. The gray box was made of metal, with a large triangle engraved on top.
"Is this what I think it is?" Tercius asked with a smile on his face when the woman pushed it towards him.
He had seen these boxes fall and never even dent or scratch and yet he didn’t dare squeeze it between his palms, but rather let it rest on them. His fingers brushed over the runes engraved along the edges, and tried to parse the meaning the runes held.
“Let some mana seep into it,”
As ordered, he gathered mana in his hand and pushed it onto the tops of his fingers. Only to his eyes, the red gas sank into the box. It took but a moment, yet to him, it felt much longer, for Mistress Helfira to notify him that he had claimed the box as his own.
Delicately, he used his fingers to open the container and it gave way with a small hollow pop, revealing two objects. A rolled-up piece of paper, of bone-white texture, held in its shape by a wide gray belt around the middle of the shape. Next to it, held in place by a foam of some kind, was a gray sculpture made of glass. Shaped like a mountain peak it was as if someone melted wax, adding little by little to a single spot and letting gravity and heat dissipation do the rest of the work, it was half the volume of his closed fist. A crystal, Tercius thought with eyes wide open.
“A sample of stone morphed mana along with a simple spell for stone attraction written down in simple Runes, to help you get Mana Metamorphosis,” Mistress Helfira said as a corner of her mouth turned upwards. “You will get the other spell, once we return to the Academy,”
The white-haired woman paced around the room, her feet silent. "You will need to attune yourself to that crystal every day, for at least a week, before you start with the spell. Let your mana flow through the crystal and return to you. Feel what changes happened on its way, see them with your mana sense. Let … actually, I can talk here all day, but a single experience is more valuable here. Try." she commanded.
Tercius gripped the crystal and pulled, gently.
A snort came from the elder, one that Tercius liked to imagine as amusement. “Give a firm pull, don’t worry about damaging it,”
So he did and the crystal abruptly gave way with a sucking noise. In his surprise, he had almost allowed it to flee his hand, and Mistress Helfira snorted once more. He looked up, only to see a smile on her face.
Frowning, he placed the flat side of the crystal on his palm, and let mana out just under it. Minutes went by without a change until the top of the small mountain crystal started ejecting mana. He placed his other hand over it and felt the mana pass. His body shuddered for a moment, alerting him that a foreign invader was attempting to enter the premises, and then it settled, confused. The crystal had changed his mana, making it different from his own, in some way.
What the crystal was doing to his mana, he would have to learn to do for himself.
A few days later, he went and spent some time with Seliana and Penelope, and even there he spent his time with the stone mana attuned crystal. The knowledge that he was not practicing in wain, for the skill crystals grew even as he had unstable skills, gave him comfort. Of course, Seliana’s place was off-limits for Energy experimentation, as it should have been the first time around.
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When that brief weekend came to a close, all of the students were returned to the Academy using the underground tunnels.
There were a lot more of the platforms carrying other people, this time around. The Central Station was filled with platforms that carried people and packages. Winter was the one season where very little traffic occurred, especially with the Pyramid, but with Spring in full bloom that changed. Isolated communities from all over the world came to Chameos and the Pyramid, Mistress Helfira had informed him, mostly mages who came to visit the Repository and some who came to trade.
The Pyramid was not as isolated as Tercius previously believed. He learned of Conclaves— secret communities of mages and non-mages mostly founded by those who were not exactly welcome at the Pyramid for various reasons, mostly because they broke some minor laws or had a disagreement with the leadership over something— and then Cabals— small groups of mages mostly led by outlaw mages who escaped from criminal charges. Both of these existed in almost all major cities, but they knew how to hide their tracks. If the Empire knew of them, or possibly even worked with them, they weren't telling it to anyone, of that Tercius was sure.
Warrants for arrest on many mages who broke Laws of Magi existed, but older mages were difficult to pin down. Portals gave mages mobility of personnel and resources that eclipsed even the aerial travel from his old world. Once a portal was established, it could last hours and that could mean a lot. Teleportation was also fairly common in older mages, he learned from Mistress Helfira. If a mage was sure that he was about to be whisked away by someone sent by the Repository, they would rather dash and hide for a while. The spells of teleportation were a bit pricey, especially those of a long-range, but anyone with at least one moderately successful Expedition under belt could usually afford one.
Upon their return to the Pyramid, when platforms deposited them at the Academy's Platform Pavilion, Tercius had noticed a change. Anyone with eyes would, really. The students gawked at giant pillars made of glass, slender and two stories tall, that seemingly sprouted out of nowhere. In Academy parks, near Academy buildings… they were everywhere. Mistress Helfira called them Security Pylons and was seemingly pleased they were activated. From what the elderly Mistress said, these Pylons were capable of containment using mage shields for defense purposes. If someone were to be attacked, a shield that drew strength from the Pyramid would envelop all parties individually, regardless of who it was.
What Mistress excluded from her explanation was how these things knew who was under attack. Tercius didn’t ask, for he could guess how. Observation of some kind, spying essentially. He didn’t like them from the moment he realized that.
His sour mood was improved when he saw Mistress Dea. She had hardly changed since he last saw her, the busty middle-aged blonde greeting her returning charges with a tight smile and narrowed eyes. He guessed that she had enjoyed the temporary vacuum the abrupt departure of the first years gave her.
Once more he returned to his routine. Sleep, eat, study, expand his Well, and think about useful skills. He did want to send some news to his family in Nurium, but he wasn't yet sure the time was right. After all, he had placed Spheros as his city of origin for a reason.
They were now allowed to use the parks and Tercius and J’ro returned to their daily habits of running. Eunim reluctantly came along, after a lot of persuasion. Complaints about pain in his legs, lungs, the futility of the exercise abounded, but a few teases from J’ro were usually enough to put a stop to it. When that failed to work, Tercius would invite Penelope to join them. That did the trick.
In his free time, mostly just before he went to sleep or when he had his daily bath, he would ruminate on what he knew about skills and how these theories affected his view of the world that now surrounded him.
That instability that he witnessed in Energy Manipulation and Energy Sense, the chaos that plagued the center of their cores, was inherent for all new skills, from what he observed then he tried to make effigies for his newly gained skills. Every skill, except Familiar Bond, had the same reaction. The buzzing and pain started wracking him, even under the influence of Meditation. Familiar Bond, on the other hand, had no such painful effects, yet it didn’t even manifest and Tercius found that strange, yet not entirely unexpected.
Stabilization of chaos of skills required Energy, from what he had seen so far, and the time requirement varied based on the skill in question.
Simple skills that everyday citizens used, like Gardening, for example, took about less time to stabilize than skills like Energy Manipulation, by orders of magnitude measured in the tens of dozens, most likely. Many factors had an influence here, the biggest of which was probably the Skill Garden filled with new growth of Skill Crystals.
If Gardening took six months to stabilize for a child, it would take two or three years for an adult, or even seven to ten years for middle-aged people, simply because they accumulated too many Skill Crystals in their life. A new skill would not manifest in that time. Now, if these crystals could somehow be purged, and the Energy they accumulated in them over the years kept and used… Any time he thought of that, Tercius would lick his dry lips.
Skills like Energy Manipulation, in his theory, could take a child about six to seven years to stabilize, yet for an adult, that number climbed sharply into dozens of years and middle-aged people into hundreds, possibly thousands of years.
Which further gave Tercius an interesting thought, one close to his heart yet one he was wary to accept as true. Considering that these Elders— as he dubbed the mages who used Energy to stay alive longer— were probably stuck on Energy Manipulation and every following skill for centuries because they used up the Energy that would normally go for stabilization and skill growth in other ways. That further implied that they were not insanely powerful in terms of skills, at least. Spells really were a mage's best friend, from that angle at least.
The most likely case, provided that these Elders didn't have an active Energy source as he had, was that they stayed in some kind of skill stasis or slow skill growth period, both for levels of old skills and the acquisition of new skills. The true caveat here is their age, once more. The longer they live the more chance of new Skill Crystals to start growing. Tercius at forty mental years had hundreds of Skill Crystals, and he had to wonder how many does a three hundred years old mage have? Thousands at the very least, he guessed, and he could only guess how much Energy all those Skill Crystals ate up.
But what if these Elders knew how to trim the Skill Crystals or had some outside source of Energy?
Or the more important question, what if he was right? What if he had in his hands a weakness of powerful people, what might that bring about if they were to known that?
He didn’t even dare think about that.
Sources of Energy seemed possible, at least, but once Energy usage starts going along an exponential curve like it seems to go, another source of Energy would go a long way of parching dry land, but for how long? The longer you live, the more Energy your skills requirements, and surely there would come a point where no matter how much Energy you had, the demand for it would eclipse every source. How long would that take, he wondered, and what would happen then?
A shudder had run along his spine when he realized that he knew what happens when a body doesn't have Energy. Weak and shivering, he only had the desire to eat and sleep every time it happened. He realized the danger of relying on an outside source as he had immediately. What if you ran out of that additional Energy? What if there comes a point in time where skills, new and old, demanded more than he had? Lay down and have a nap, most likely, and wait for Energy to be replenished. But what if the body had no way to replenish more than what was spent? What then? Hibernation until eventual death?
The true solution, as he saw it, was to learn how to trim the Skill Crystals, and it was possible that these Elders knew that, but it was also possible that they did not.
He was sure that the amount of daily Energy his body produced or maybe invited had increased, rather than stay constant. This was most easily seen from the fact that skill level gains remained relatively linear from the time he was a baby with a single skill till now when he had ten more years under his belt and twenty skills to boot. But why? What was the reason for this? Biological aging itself, or some process of acclimatization of the body to Energy? Skills old or new? Maybe both? Maybe skills created some vacuum for Energy and the more skills he had the more they attracted?
A lot of questions in need of an answer.
As Summer showed its warm colors, Tercius came up with an idea, one that kept haunting him even as the end of the sixth month came around the corner and the half-year exams reared their head.
If Energy production, attraction, or whatever process it came from, slowly increased to accommodate new and old skills, then what would happen if he were to … shift that delicate balance between Energy gained and Energy spent? What if he were to somehow drain someone of Energy?
A non-lethal “go to sleep” weapon, he figured.
Tercius could, in theory, incapacitate anyone who didn't know how to defend themself from something like that. He knew that Mistress Kalina had taken his Energy, so at least it was possible. If one day his skills grew to high levels…