Training together would be fun if our lives weren't on the line. Instead, it is something deeper, somehow even more compelling. They say humans aren't as motivated by pleasure as by meaningful struggle. It's why demagogues who can create conflict while weaving an ideology that gives the conflict the illusion of meaning are so enticing to the masses.

But preparing to fight for our own survival is no illusion. It's what we humans evolved to do. Just not with spears, armor, and magic. With our meals provided by a supply of canned food, we devote ourselves to learning and sharing our skills.

I've done qigong for years, never with the thought of using it for any practical or martial purpose but just to focus my mind and calm my angry thoughts. But where I could once only imagine feeling the flow of qi, now I can see it manifest in the world around me, if only weakly at first.

Anat holds a piece of paper and I hold out my palm, pressing against the sheet with my qi until it moves. It isn't much but it's a start. Could all the old legends of great kung fu masters be stories from a time when magic was strong? Could the Atlantean and Edenic runes actually work now? I'll need to get back to my apartment and find my reference books and research notes eventually.

For now, I show the others the training exercises I do. And the taijiquan forms and push-hands exercises I'd learned many years ago but haven't practiced since.

Anat shares the philosophy of chaos magic, of will made manifest. She also explains her way of calling power through the visualization of balanced forces. The chaos of the fiery planet core and the infinite complexity of life below. The icy order of the heavens above us. The coldly stable rigidity of elemental earth, localized into the frigid pole to our north, mentally symbolized by a towering natural stone monolith. The flowing tumult of wind mentally localized by the plains and their violent storms to our east, symbolized by a massive thunderhead of roiling clouds. The passionate creative and destructive power of fire localized to the sunny southern regions, mentally symbolized by a cluster of volcanic fire fountains. The flowing, healing, and intuitive power of elemental water, localized into the sea to our west and mentally symbolized by a towering tsunami ever ready to engulf us. She visualizes a mighty tree in between it all, with herself protected by the strength of its trunk. To her, the tree's branches spread overhead, receiving the orderly energies of the heavens. She visualizes the tree's roots spreading downward, drawing in the world's chaos.

Anat's visualization doesn't work for me. The elements resonate, as do the ideas of orderly heavens above and chaotic core below, but for me they are more diffuse ideas. What I feel most powerfully though is the flow of elemental energy. My mind interprets it as something astronomical though.

I see myself as the center of the universe, which each of us literally is. Order, chaos, and the elements are somewhere out there, infinitely far away yet surrounding and infusing every cell and molecule of my being. The four elements swirl into me like four arms of a multicolored galaxy untold light-years across: green, yellow, red, and blue. Beams of impossible power blast across the cosmos perpendicular to that plane like the astrophysical jets gushing from the supermassive black hole of an active galactic nucleus. But these jets of burning white order and glowing black chaos sear inward into my dantian.

It tells Anat about the difference and she shrugs, smiling.

"There are so many paths to power in the world," she says. "Pagan, hermetic, shamanic, religious. And they all work, if your will is focused and disciplined."

"All?" She nods.

"And they all work better if your will is congruent with the will of the universe."

"The universe has a will?"

"Some call it the 'cosmic unconscious.' It may be the collective consciousness of all life or something like that. It's what I have a hard time with."

"Connecting to it?"

"No, I can feel it fine. Some parts I have no problem aligning with, the goal of enriching all life, of discipline, and constantly striving forward, for example."

"Other parts, not so much?"

"Love, joy, humility, acceptance, following the path of least resistance."

"Oh yeah, I see the trouble there." I smirk.

"Fuck yourself." She smiles.

"Seriously though, constantly striving to advance seems at odds with acceptance, and non-resistance."

"It's one of those balance things."

"Oh yeah, that would be a problem."

"It is for most people. We tend to be like the four blind men who met an elephant. Have you heard the story?"

"Where they each touch one part of it, ear, leg, side, and tail, then spend the rest of their lives arguing about what an elephant is like."

"Exactly. The truth of power and universal will us beyond what any mortal mind can grasp. So we each latch on to some limited understanding. And then mix it with our own personal bullshit, usually. It's one thing when we do it, but when spiritual leaders do it, then it can get ugly. Still, it's good enough to get the weaker of us through the trials of life, or for the strongest to wield some degree of power. But none of us knows the truth. Yet whether we see our muddled partial truth as spirits, gods, alchemy, qi, some form of quantum physics or whatever, all our limited truths work, to a degree."

I nod as I mull over her words. I guess I've seen the way of such things in the world.

"They work enough for the most inspired to have achieved a degree of working even when magic was weak," she continues. "And enough for those with any spiritual awareness to feel a resonance in their soul, and to follow that thread of wisdom. And hopefully not go around killing anyone who doesn't share their particular sliver of wisdom. But always in the past there were strict limits on how far one could progress."

"You think those limits are gone?"

"They've at least moved a great deal. I need to know how far they've moved. How far I can go."

"What do you want the power for?"

"For?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know. I feel like…" She thinks a moment. "I feel that that's a question that only makes sense in a world where individuals have internal limits to how far they can go within themselves. When we have internal limits, then those of us with ambition have to direct our ambition outward. But if there were no limits to our own potential, then any effort directed outward would be cheating ourselves of whatever potential that effort could achieve within ourselves."

"I guess that makes sense."

"On the other hand, progress seems likely to be far faster through slaying the zombies than through simply meditating. I haven't developed enough internal sense yet to use the energy taken from them when we fight them though. I'm doing your meditations and I feel progress, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to soon. But anyway, what I meant to say is there may be an interplay between how our lives and actions impact the world and how the world reinforces our own efforts. So maximal personal growth may require some degree, or even a great degree, of interaction with the world. I don't know how that will work out."

I sit and think about what Anat said for a bit. Something nags at me, but It takes a bit to figure out how to put it into words.

"It can't all be as simple as will alone. Because not everything works equally."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you can feel yourself gaining energy when we fight. But you can't feel it within you, nor can you manipulate it. At least not yet."

"Huh. That's a good point. Maybe there is some ground truth we just have been unable to approach before, so we couldn't tell what it was. The four elements, heavens, and earth are recognized by many traditions in some form. Your qigong is a fully internal system, while Susan's reiki is a combination of internal and external, and both seem to work. And they seem to follow similar principles, founded in traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy. Maybe we can take that as an internal ground truth, while the four elements, order, and chaos represent an external ground truth. Or at least approximations that we can start working from until we learn more."

"Yeah, that makes sense to me. There was probably once an external system in the east like the magic you use but it either isn't known to us or got corrupted by what people imagined might work in an era with low magic."

"So, you think it is cyclical?"

"Yeah, there are Atlantean and Edenic runes that didn't fit in with the kinds of things later cultures carved as blessings and enchantments on things. In particular a crucible with a formation to remove breathable air from the crucible."

"But, you'd want to remove oxygen from a crucible though, wouldn't you?"

"Right, if magic worked you would. But if magic was superstition then it doesn't make sense to make a formation like that. You put so many handfuls of bright green stones in a crucible with so much charcoal and heat it, and in the end, you get so much copper. If there's no magic it will obviously work the same whether you have a formation of runes or not. Blessings and enchantments in more recent times tend to be things that are more fungible. They make the user feel good about what they are doing instead of having a practical result. Like making the ingot you smelt strong or something. Or protecting you from death despite the contradiction that when it is your fated time then nothing will stop death. So when you narrowly escape death you feel good about how the rune works and are more confident in battle and less likely to make some stupid mistake out of fear. Stuff like that. The crucible has been a puzzle among the anthropologists to figure out how the Atlanteans saw the world that would make an enchantment make sense."

"Only, you think it just actually worked, back then."

"Exactly."

"When was that? I don't really pay attention to that kind of stuff."

"The last ice age lasted from roughly a hundred thousand years ago to about ten thousand years ago. That's the simple version. Sea levels fluctuated over the course of the glaciation. The peak was thirty thousand years ago, if I remember correctly. It was definitely ending by seventeen thousand. Ten thousand is the commonly accepted end, but ice was still melting and sea levels were still rising for thousands of years after. Eden started flooding eight thousand years ago and the Persian Gulf was fully formed six thousand years ago."

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"And that's the so-called narrow Edenics. And I get that narrow Atlanteans think they are looking for literal Atlantis to the west of the Strait of Gibraltar. I never understood the broad factions of those fields though."

"Well, I'm guessing you've mostly heard about narrow and broad because you've heard me ranting about the subject?"

"Yeah, it isn't something that most people talk about."

"Well, I'll try to be a bit less biased now. The whole field has only been around for a couple of decades, since the discovery of undersea ruins on Gorringe Ridge, a seamount west of the Straight of Gibraltar. The narrow Atlanteans and Edenics are the original faction within the field, because thats where most of the interest and funding was focused. To them, they are Atlantean and Edenic studies, and those of us who take a broad view are studying something else and are simply confused. Whereas, we on the broad side, see their studies as a sliver of a larger field. Unfortunately, there is a tendency in narrow Atlantean studies to see the Atlanteans as an advanced proto-European culture that they imagine swooped in to colonize Europe when the ice retreated. It is a narrative that appeals to certain unsavory political types."

"I can only imagine." Anat shakes her head.

"Broad Atlanteans by contrast study all of the civilizations of the ice age Atlantic shore, and we see it as an advanced African civilization, of which the Narrow Atlanteans are just studying the northern frontiers on the Bahamas, Azores and Gorringe Ridge. We have found ruins off the coast of northern east Africa, but everyone thinks the real prize is buried under ten thousand years of mud from the Congo river, in that river's ancient estuary. The region had some of the best climate for agriculture during the ice age. There are also some inland ruins in the region that are hard to definitively date but may be around thirty thousand years old."

"So then the narrow Edenics are studying literal Eden?"

"Yeah, the narrow ones tend to be drawn to the field as what they see to be confirmation of the Bible, but if you ask me, it is debunking the Bible and showing that those who wrote it were giving their god credit for shit he had nothing to do with. The disaster in Eden had nothing to do with their god getting mad about sex or disobedience, or whatever they think pissed him off that particular time. It was natural climate forces. And that there sure wasn't an angel with a flaming sword guarding Eden but hundreds of feet of water."

"Didn't you say you were going to be a bit less biased this time?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"So then what do broad Edenics study?"

"Eden was flooded quite recently, well after the end of the ice age. The irony is there is less controversy about an agrarian civilization in Eden because it fits the narrative everyone has held for a century or something. That agriculture was invented with the end of the ice age, when the climate became milder."

"That just seems sensible."

"Not when you really look hard at it. It is more complicated in the old world where humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years, but in the new world we see that within a few thousand years of moving into any part of the Americas, people figure out how to use the native species of plants for some kind of agriculture."

"But humans were evolving right?"

"Not that much. Evolution is fairly slow. Anatomically modern humans appeared three hundred thousand years ago. Behaviorally modern humans exhibiting what we consider a modern capacity for invention and communication were definitely doing their thing by seventy thousand years ago. And agriculture doesn't depend on how good your spear points are, it just depends on recognizing that if you spill some seeds outside your camp, next year you can harvest those plants right by your camp instead of having to walk back and forth a long way to gather them."

"And that happened in the Americas within a few thousand years of people settling any particular region on those continents?"

"Right. But the dominant narrative is that behaviorally modern humans didn't notice that kind of thing anywhere for sixty thousand years and then suddenly unconnected peoples all over the world started noticing it right after the ice age."

"But the climate was milder then, right?"

"The problem is, the climate where? In the places where people did agriculture after the ice age? Yeah, it is milder in those places now. Most of them were deserts during the ice age. But during the ice age, the areas that are tropical rainforests today were cooler and dryer. There were areas around the Congo that were tropical grasslands with plenty of rainfall for about a hundred thousand years, populated by anatomically modern humans during that whole time, and by behaviorally modern humans for sixty thousand years. It should have been ripe for agriculture, but even after the Atlantean finds, the dominant narrative is that nobody thought of doing agriculture there even though elsewhere agriculture was invented in less than a tenth that time."

"Ok, I can see there could be a problem."

"Then there is the area of the Java Sea in Indonesia and the Arafura Sea north of Australia which were also tropical grasslands. But modern humans probably only migrated to those areas recently, and we don't know if the hominids who lived there could have invented agriculture on their own. There is some evidence that neandertals in Eurasia were clearing large areas of forests. So there might have been some neanderthal agriculture, but it's hard finding evidence from so long ago."

"So, back to the original topic, you think that these ancient civilizations knew how to enchant items?"

"I'm pretty sure of it. I'm not sure how they went about it, but I know the runic formations they used for their enchantments."

"Do you think you can figure it out?"

"I sure hope so."

Susan teaches the basics of how to use reiki to speed healing and all of us except Anat receive the first attunement. Anat already had learned the first reiki attunement, and Susan helps her get ready for the second. After I feel comfortable, Anat cuts my arm. It is just a small cut but it sets my nerves on edge even beyond the pain, feeling my flesh violated by her blade.

Then I focus on drawing the energy of the universe to heal the wound, watching as the line of blood shrinks from the ends and closes, leaving a narrow scar.

"The scars are a problem. Hopefully, I can learn some kind of greater control because if say someone gets stabbed in the guts, the scars might block their intestines or something, and they might still die later from complications. Also, broken bones will have to be set. Stitches before healing would be ideal, and I might need to do surgery to reattach things like major blood vessels before healing."

"So armor that protects our vital organs is still extremely important."

"Absolutely."

I carry a load of sheet metal down into the basement of Stefan's house. I feel earth qi around me. Even if one is sensitive to it, it's easy not to realize that one is surrounded by air qi. It's the last load of my share. Rogers and Johnson are stashing it in a hidey-hole in the crawlspace of the house. We are hiding away the best sheet metal for later use when we can find a forge to form it into higher-quality armor.

When Stefan had shown the cops the hiding spot and explained that's where he hid his AK-47 and two uzis, contraband full-auto models at that, Rodgers's right eye twitched and he stood rigidly for about half a minute before saying "Good thing we're both on the same side," to which Stefan replied deadpan "Yup, it sure is."

That done, I climb back out of the basement and head to the warehouse where we train. I'm supposed to help Cas work on something. He was evasive like he didn't want to reveal too much to avoid embarrassment if it didn't work.

"Magic works better if you own it in every way," I'd said. "From a magical standpoint, the problem with lies and evasion isn't that they are immoral or something but that they split out consciousness, and that weakens our te, our integrity. Not ethical integrity, though they overlap. But integrity in the sense of functioning as an integrated whole."

"Gee, thanks DAD," he'd said before walking away shaking his head. I guess I could have made it sound less like a lecture. I open the warehouse door and enter.

Cas sits, meditating. We're in the disused back warehouse of the co-op. Various training devices are scattered around the area, along with a table, some chairs, and a few stools. Stefan says that as Beaumont grew, land values increased and fewer in the area were able to afford to keep horses. And more of those who could do so relocated to exurbs. So the co-op consolidated its goods into the front warehouse. The back warehouse is pretty basic, corrugated metal over wood beams, with translucent fiberglass panels in the roof to create skylights.

Cas is trying something he hopes to be able to do. But he says he needs someone to watch, to see if it works. As I watch, his form shimmers slightly before returning to normal. Again and again, it happens.

"You're definitely changing your visibility. You've got a long way to go though. But it is a start."

"Fuck."

"Yeah, I'll bet it is frustrating."

"I mean, it took way longer to learn lockpicking, so there's that. What'd it look like."

"Just a shimmer, like heat waves wrapping around you for a moment."

"Yeah, I'm trying to make myself seem small and for light to wrap around me."

"It makes sense. Invisibility would fit the whole thief paradigm."

"Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Or scout sniper, either way."

I hear footsteps and Stefan comes in. He has the crossbow slung over his shoulder and is carrying three plastic milk jugs. The jugs seem heavy. The side he's carrying two on seems more strained by the weight.

"Ready to work on archery coordination?" he asks Cas.

"Yeah, let's do this."

"We noticed interesting effects on target when we were shooting yesterday," he says to me. But by then we were too tired to try coordinating our shots."

"Watch from the side and tell us what you see," says Cas.

I walk to the side of the warehouse, where several rolls of carpet have been rolled together into a thick cylinder and wrapped in duct tape to make an archery target. Cas meditates while holding his arrow for a moment before drawing the bow, infusing the arrow with his qi. Then draws and holds for another moment, his face intense as he pushes more energy into the arrow before releasing it.

There's a flicker around the target like a shockwave as the stored spiritual energy is released on impact. I've never seen it from this angle before. It splashes out around the point of impact and seems to blast through the target even though the arrow was stopped.

"What I noticed yesterday is that the flickering around the impact suggests a lot of our qi is being wasted into the air, and that the effects are perpendicular." He grabs a couple of tall wooden stools and sets them on the floor, spaced out a few paces from each corner. Then he sets a third in the middle of the floor. He sets one of the heavy milk jugs on each stool. Then he pulls a tape measure from his pocket and sets it on the table.

"They are full of sand," he explains. "I want to do three test shots. One with just Cas charging the arrow, since he's better at it than I am. Then one with us standing next to each other, and the third with us standing at a right angle to the target."

"You think our energies will interact?"

"they might. I'm hoping it will be kinda like a magical version of a shaped charge where if two blasts collide they create a more intense directed blast."

"It's worth a shot. So the farther sand gets blasted, the more power must have been directed into the target?"

"Exactly."

"We'll have to coordinate. We could count 1-2-3 for the initial charge, 3-2-1 for the final charge, and the shoot."

"That works," says Stefan.

They do the first shot standing side by side. Sand explodes in a gray fountain before setting to the floor. Then they turn and spread out before the second shot. It's noticeably more violent, but there's also clearly a shape to it with much of the sand going straight up in the air between the hits.

When we look at the patterns of sand, the second shot has thrown sand about half again as far. And there's a clear difference in the shape of the bursts, with the first being more a T-shaped burst of sand, while the second threw sand in more of an extended line between the two impacts.

"That drill worked," says Stefan, "but the call is too technical."

"What do you mean?" asks Cas.

"We haven't really been tested yet. Eventually, it's bound to happen. In battle, when it's a real fight, adrenaline is pumping. Fear is overwhelming. A battle drill has to be simple, instinctive. It's gotta put fire in your belly."

"Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum?"

Stefan laughs. "Dude, I can't even."

"I feel like the energy flow could be improved too." It isn't what I'm used to for qigong, but I'm getting used to moving my qi much more aggressively, and see how the vocalizations of their shooting drill could be used akin to qi-focusing shouts in some martial arts systems. "Maybe a hiss or growl while drawing qi in before initially charging the arrow, then a yell or scream when charging it, another hiss or growl while drawing the bow and pulling in more qi, another yell or scream while doing the final charging of the shot, the a short shout when releasing?"

"What kind of visualization are you using for drawing energy?" Stefan asks. "That whole tree thing just feels too peaceful to me."

I explain about my cosmic imagery.

"I use that for slow stuff like healing," I continue, but for striking, I've started collecting that energy in a gleaming silver sphere around me. Then I drive it down to a tight compressed point like the implosion of a nuclear warhead's fission core, before releasing it into whatever I want to do with it." I see a fierce look in Stefan's eyes, but Cas looks confused. Stefan looks at Cas and back to me.

"Thanks, we'll get it worked out."

"Glad to." I nod to both of them, then turn and walk back to the tack shop where we've set up our quarters.