Chapter 17: Making Magic
When morning came the sound of birdsong that pulled me out of the depths of sleep.
I had been able to sleep a little in the end, but my dreams had not been restful. It didn’t take all that much for me to come wide awake.
Waking up was the easy part, getting out of bed, on the other hand, proved more of a challenge. At some point during my dreams, my wings had shifted and the sword-like feathers on my left wing had stabbed into the bedframe as they had covered me. Using my arms and legs to wrench the feathers free, I finally yanked the wing out. The perfect way to start the day.
As I unsteadily regained my footing I noticed that both the mattress and the bed itself had taken quite a bit of damage from my wings throughout the night. Both were still mostly holding together, but they were . . . not in good shape. Indeed, another couple of nights like this one and I’d probably end up being woken up by the bed falling apart.
All of this passed through my mind as I pulled myself to my feet, but a far more important issue held my attention, namely my magic!
My first impulse was to immediately sit on the floor and start meditating. Emma had been pretty clear that there was a chance I might end up damaging the general area around me when I finally ‘sparked’ it. I really didn’t want the farmhouse damaged, so I had to do this a good distance away.
Impatience gnawed at me in a way I’d never felt before. There was anticipation, there was eagerness, both of them keener than I’d ever felt before. There was also covetousness and greed. It was like waking up on Christmas morning when I was a child, only this time it was much more than mere toys that I was looking forward to.
I took a step away from my bed and then looked out of the window. I could see the white field outside, see the distant trees that were just as pale. I could see the wide-open space between the farmhouse and the nearby woods, and that seemed ideal for what I wanted.
I thought about getting started after breakfast, but then it occurred to me, did I even need to wait? I still didn’t feel hungry, even though it had been more than two days since I’d had anything to eat. Nor did I feel in any way thirsty, not even after a full night’s sleep.
Maybe it was a power that I’d already received, not needing food or water for long periods? That was convenient since I didn’t want to wait anymore!
Getting up I made my way over to the door that opened onto my room’s balcony and pulled it open. It was still early in the morning, and the sun was only just rising above the horizon. I took a moment to appreciate the view, then I jumped off my balcony.
This wasn’t as reckless as you might think. For one thing, I was pretty sure that the fall wouldn’t hurt me, I kind of knew that I was tougher than I had been before my Awakening. I was willing to bet that a single-story drop wouldn’t be enough to hurt me. And even if it did, I knew that Joan would be more than capable of me healing up if it came to it. But as it turned out neither outcome was an issue.
As soon as I jumped over the railings my wings spread out. The action was as instinctive as closing your eyes when faced with a bright light. As soon as I was in the air the large pinions on my back opened to catch the wind as I fell. They might not have been large enough to actually let me fly on their own, but they were wide enough and strong enough to catch the wind and turn my fall into a glide.
And it was AWESOME!
I’d never flown in a hang-glider, or done anything like sky diving or wingsuit diving, but as I felt the pleasure of the wind holding me up as I sailed through the air, I wondered if maybe I had been missing out. It was only a short flight, barely more than thirty yards from the top of the terrace to where I came to a stumbling finish. But even that was further than physics should have allowed. I was pretty sure that my wings didn’t quite have the coverage to have taken me this far, so I guessed that a hint of my magic must have shown itself then.
That thought only served to spur me on as I turned and made my way out further into the field that separated the farmstead from the forest. Once again, my wings were folded up close against my back, making it easier to walk, so I was able to make some decent time. In less than ten minutes I’d reached the halfway point and decided that this was far enough. Or at least I hoped it was far enough. Joan had said that my Awakening had been spectacular, to say the least. If this sparking of my magic was equally huge then it wouldn’t matter if I hiked to more than a mile away. I’d have to trust myself that I could control what happened or I might end up waiting until I was on the top of a mountain before I tried it.
Sitting down cross-legged I closed my eyes and tried to sink into the same state of meditation that had allowed me to perceive my mana before. It was difficult, the very act of knowing what I wanted made it harder for me to enter the state of defused attention that I needed, but I managed it in the end. Once again I could ‘see’ the energy running through me, and as I did so I remembered Emma’s instructions.
“The first thing you’ve got to remember is that mana is only a part of the secret recipe,” She’d explained. “Mana is powerful, or at least it can be, but on its own, it’ll just sit there and not do much. It might give you a couple of passive powers, stuff like a longer life or a bit of faster healing, but if you’re looking to actually use magic then you’re going to have to spark it!”
I could understand that now. During my initial meditation, I thought that my mana was my magic and tried to force it to my will. ‘Looking’ at it now I could see that I had been essentially trying to boil water over an unlit bonfire. I’d been trying to get it to act in a way that ran contrary to its nature. Mana was passive, pervasive, and inert, it was something that my being alive produced. It was the start of magic, but it was not the only part. Nor was it the only power that my body produced.
“Mana is a big part of magic, but it’s not the whole of it, y’get me? All mortal bodies produce several different kinds of power, and as a demigod, the amount of those powers that you produce is magnitudes more than most mortals could ever manage. This should make it easier for you to sense them like it’s easier to see a light if it’s brighter.
“After mana, the first power that you’ve got to find is your chi. Well, that’s the most common name for it. The Japanese called it Ki, the old Greeks just called it vitality, there’ve been lots of different names for it. I think the Chinese gods and sages were the ones to grow most advanced in using it though, so I’m using their name for it.
“Chi is basically the energy of life, the power of you being alive. It’s not like mana though, mana is something you create by just being alive, it is as much a by-product of living as the heat that your body generates. Chi, instead, is the power that makes you alive in the first place, it’s the thing that keeps you going even when you should stop and die. Umm, okay, that’s a bit complicated. Let’s say it like this; mana is the power created by being alive, but chi is the power of being alive, does that make sense?”
I’d nodded, so she’d continued.
“Unlike mana chi is a very active force, something that everyone uses all their lives. Y’know how some people can die of a disease, and then there’s someone else with the same illness, and in the same condition, and they survive? Half the time that comes down to chi, to the simple strength of their lifeforce. Y’know that old story about a parent lifting a car to save their kids? Yeah, that’s adrenaline and briefly using all the body’s strength without limiters, but the strength of their chi can also be an important factor, understand?
“Y’see, chi is normally just there in the background, as much a part of you as your blood, but just acting in response to your lifestyle. People who put more effort into stuff, whether it's martial arts or writing poetry, tend to have more of it, but that just means they tend to get more out of it, they live harder, brighter. Back before all the Legends were sealed off it was possible to build up your chi, to make it grow greater and greater until you could do things that would normally take magic. Y’know all those Kung Fu movies, stuff like running on water, smashing stones with a touch, or throwing chi blasts? Once upon a time you really could do that, if you were willing to put in the time, sweat and blood to train to that level.
“Anyway, chi is essential to magic because it’s what you use to spark mana into magical energy. You don’t even need that much of it, just like you only need a single spark in the right place to start up a forest fire, but you must be careful in how you gather it.
“Chi permeates the body, but unlike mana, it doesn’t leave it. Chi is right there, in every part of you that’s alive. It’s in your blood, your bones, your organs and your muscles, always, from before the moment you were born, right up until the instant you take your final breath. All you need to do is recognize it, and it will come to you. Learning to make it serve you is gonna be more difficult, it’s different for everyone, so I can’t just tell you how to do it, but when you get a lock on it the next part’s easy.”
Her instructions ran through my mind as though she was right there speaking to me. It was so clear that for a moment I wondered if part of the power I’d already gained from my Awakening had been some kind of boost to my memory. I could recall everything that Emma had told me word for word, something I would have loved to be able to do for classes leading up to my exams. Of course, learning how to gain magic provided lots more motivation, so that might have something to do with it.
I could sense the mana, so now I had to find my chi. And . . . I wasn’t entirely sure of just how to do that. How was I meant to find it? I mean, the vast majority of anything I knew about internal energy came from watching either martial arts movies or fighting animes, and just how reliable might those be? Half the time the main characters in those shows were able to gain their power through some sort of contrived plot device, like an ancient temple filled with magic crystals, or some old and wise master that could unlock their power for them, not anything that could be even slightly applied to my situation.
I started to feel a little bit of panic trying to worm its way into my thoughts as I wondered if I’d be able to find it, but then I took another deep breath and forced myself to once more relax before I lost my meditative state.
Maybe I wasn’t coming at this from the right direction. Emma had said that chi was essentially lifeforce energy, so it would be best to think of it like that. The thought made it easier for me to conceptualize what I was looking for and made it more real than the vague notions of ‘battle auras’ and ‘spirit energy’ that I had become familiar with in Japanese entertainment.
Life energy would have to be a part of me, fixed, not like the mana, which ran through me and then left my body. Instead, it would have to be more contained, something that moved beneath my skin, but which didn’t leave it. I remember reading once that the top layer of the skin is composed of dead cells, which is why it's dry. It was only under that layer that you got to the living stuff, the cells that were still feeding, splitting and growing. If that was true then I had to think of the lifeforce being under it, amidst all the living parts of me.
It was difficult, and I wasn’t sure how long it took me, but eventually, I started to sense something. I finally found another energy within me, but it was difficult because it had been hidden ‘underneath’ the flow of mana, but at the same time it had been sitting on top of it as well, or maybe within it? It was hard to put into words because there weren’t words to describe the concept properly.
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I suppose that the closest description would be two contradictory metaphors being simultaneously true. The new power I had found had been within me, but the mana had been so bright that it had blotted this other energy out. At the same time, it was as though this new energy had been overlaid with the mana, but I hadn’t been able to ‘see’ it because they were the same colour. Except they weren’t. Seriously, I started having a headache as I tried to make sense of what I was perceiving, but in the end, I just gave up. It was like one of those paintings where they use a trick to paint an infinite staircase. It was like that, only times a hundred, and inside my skull, so I couldn’t get away from it.
Fortunately, I found that if I concentrated on one energy then the other would sort of sink out of my attention until there was just the one I was focussed on. It wasn’t perfect, and I could see it causing some trouble later, but for the time being, it served well enough to let me concentrate on this discovery without my brain feeling as though it wanted to turn off.
And there was quite a bit to concentrate on, because while this new energy bore superficial resemblances to mana it was also different in so many ways.
For one thing, it was faster, so much faster that it took me a moment to realize it was moving at all. Mana flowed about my body in a recognizable stream, but this energy . . . well, it seemed to be everywhere at once, flowing throughout all of me. It was only when I reached out to try and touch it with my will that I felt it, the current, the feeling of motion, of vitality. Mana might run through me in a flow, but this chi, this lifeforce, it raced through me like electricity along a wire. Describing it as electric was quite accurate since everything about it made me think of lightning. It was bright, fast, and it felt potent, strong in a way that wasn’t like fire, no matter how hot or fierce it was.
Oh, and it stung when I first reached out to it.
It wasn’t really pain that I felt when my mind made contact with it, rather I was surprised by the way it kept on moving even as I tried to get my mental fingers to get a hold of it. If you could somehow have grabbed a worked chainsaw without it hurting you, then I suppose it would have felt something like what I experienced. The constant motion, the teeth trying to bite and tear but finding no grip, the barely contained energy that wanted to get loose.
I immediately recoiled, an instinctive response to the feeling that was transmitted to my mind. Again, I almost lost my meditative state, but manage to hold onto it by remaining fixed on the flow of energy inside me. I reached out for it again, this time trying to make myself ready for the strange feeling of frantic motion. Again, I poked at it, trying to get a gentle grip, but once more it pulled itself free, refusing to stop moving. I tried two more times before I realized that something had to change. I supposed that I could try grabbing it with more force, but I didn’t want to try the brute force option unless I had no other methods available.
I paused to think. My problem was that the life energy was too . . . energetic. When that thought ran through my head I couldn’t help but internally wince at the foolishness of it. Of course, the energy was going to be energetic, that was like saying water was wet, it was a natural component of its being. Still, there was a difference between it and my mana, even though both were energy. Mana was slower, but also more ethereal, untouchable. By contrast, chi was vibrant and moving, but also more tangible to my wishes, I just couldn’t actually get it to respond to them.
Maybe I needed to slow the flow of the chi enough to get a grip on it, the trouble was that I had no idea how to do that. My late-night visitor had told me that to spark my mana into magic all I needed to do was to take a small portion of my lifeforce and just put it into my mana, the natural reaction that followed would do all the work for me.
In the end, I decided to try and slow the racing chi by using a trick I’d heard that cowboys used to bring down bulls. I suspected that it might be more fiction than fact, a little something to spice up those Old West novels I used to read. But the principle might work. Basically, I would try to offer a slight resistance, then increase it slowly in an attempt to bleed off the momentum and slowly gain traction against the opposing motion. With a bull, this trick was used to slowly tire them down, but that probably wasn’t something that would work in this case, still, I decided to give it a try.
As it turned out, it was a catastrophic and painful failure.
I was successful in slowing the energy down somewhat, but this, as it turned out, wasn’t a good thing. At the start, I was able to push against the flow, and though the resistance was strong, with an effort I was able to maintain an opposing force strong enough that bit by bit I could feel the energy start to slow. I had just enough time to experience a moment of pride at my achievement, then the world swam around me, I fell out of my meditative state and found myself sprawled out on the white grass, my wings uncontrollably twitching, my stomach heaving as though I was suddenly sick and my heart hammering in my chest.
It didn’t take me all that long to recover physically. My body quickly normalized, the feelings of nausea fading and my heart slowing down, but it was the mental impact that took me a little longer to get over. There had been a moment there where I had honestly thought that I might be dying when I thought that my heart was about to stop beating. I couldn’t really say why I was so sure, but for that brief second, as I simply lay there trying to get some sort of hold on myself, it had struck me as true on a primal gut level. Sure, it had passed, and my heart had slowed, and I had lived, but even if the Grim Reaper had been standing over me, I couldn’t have been surer that I had only just avoided death.
I’m not quite sure how long it took, but the sun hadn’t moved too much so it can’t have been that long, but eventually, I was able to get back into a cross-legged seated position and tried to work out what the hell had just happened. Reaching the same state of mediation wasn’t as easy as it had been the first time, but I managed it after a while.
The first thing that I became sure of was that it was back to moving just as fast as before, maybe even faster. The next thing I noticed was that it had somehow become more . . . spiky than it had been. I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. I could still touch it with my mind, and it still didn’t hurt me, but the teeth that had been on the metaphorical chainsaw image that I’d used before had grown longer, making it even harder to get a grip on the life force.
I felt frustration beginning to rise up in me, but I did my best to just let it go, to let it flow out of me like water. I wasn’t totally successful, but at least my irritation lessened somewhat. I reminded myself that this was a learning experience. So, I hadn’t found what was right, but at least I now knew what not to do. Slowing down my chi was a bad thing, that was something I now knew loud and clear. Obviously, the speed was somehow related to it keeping me alive, something that seemed blindingly obvious in hindsight. Life is motion, and stillness is death, that was a simple concept, and one I was mentally kicking myself for having forgotten.
So, how was I meant to transfer some of my chi over to my mana? Slowing my life force enough to let me take out a portion of it was a no-go. What else I could do, I was left feeling more than a bit stumped.
I knew I needed a portion of my chi to ignite the mana in my body into proper magic, but so far I wasn’t seeing any way to extract a portion of it, the flow was simply too fast, too energetic, I might as well have been trying to catch lightning with my fingers.
. . . Catch lightning . . .
For some reason that particular portion of my last thought persisted, repeating itself in my head. There was something there, something that was important, but which I couldn’t put my finger on.
. . . Catch lightning . . .
. . . Catch lightning . . .
Lightning . . . that was it, I was sure of it, but the last connection refused to form. It was something to do with lightning, something that could help, but like a forgotten name on the tip of my tongue, it refused to come to me.
Lightning. Lightning. Storms? Rain? Wind? No, that was the wrong train of thought, I was sure of it. So . . . lightning, what did I think of when I thought of lightning? Spells for computer game characters? Superfast superheroes? Gods of sky and storm? Again, none of them struck the chord I was looking for. What was it? Why wasn’t I having my lightbulb moment?
I think it was that thought that finally did it, ironically enough. As soon as I thought of the old image of a lightbulb over one’s head signifying an idea it all finally clicked!
Lightning . . . nothing but a natural form of electricity! And electricity was lightning tamed, lightning harnessed to serve the needs of mortals in so many ways. It powered all our machines and devices, it let us do everything from watching the television to spin drying our socks! This lifeforce, this chi, I shouldn’t think of it as lightning, I should think of it as electricity! I shouldn’t be thinking of it in terms of taking off a piece and adding it to my mana like it was water from a stream, I should be thinking in terms of wires and connections!
It made so much more sense! It was even in keeping with the choice of words that Emma had used. She’d spoken of ‘sparking’ my magic, or ‘igniting’ it, both of which applied to short shocks of electricity!
Deep in meditation or not I could still feel the grin break out across my face as I finally felt like I was getting somewhere. Not that it was a simple matter after that. I now knew there was a strange dual existence between mana and chi, where both supernatural energies seemed to occupy simultaneous but different spaces, even as they were somehow mutually exclusive of each other. Simply being aware of them at the same time had been enough to make my brain itch in a deeply disturbing way, and now I had to somehow bridge the gap between them. Not something that I was eagerly looking forward to.
My first attempt was . . . less than successful. So, instead, I tried to focus on the mana, and then keep that focus as I tried to bring the chi into focus as well. For a short moment, I thought I might have something that could work, but then a wave of disorientation washed over me. I abruptly lost my meditative state almost as hard as when I tried to slow my chi.
It took me a little bit to recover, not that I was hurt or feeling sick this time, simply a bit woozy from bewilderment. That had been at once better and worse than my earlier attempt. On the one hand, I didn’t feel like I was doing any serious damage. On the other hand, the wild shift in my mental perspective had been a seriously unsettling experience. It was as though I’d gone cross-eyed, but rather than it being just my eyeballs that were overlapping it had been my whole brain. It wasn’t painful but, for just that little moment, it had been as though the entire world had gone off-kilter, and it had taken me with it for the ride.
Not fun.
My second attempt was a bit more successful, at least in that there were no negative effects for me, but again it failed to yield the results I wanted. That time I got the idea of trying to somehow get the mana and chi flows to occupy the same space at the same time. I knew that they already did, somehow, but at the same time, they didn’t seem to be in contact. Two forces occupying the same space at the same time but not coming into contact . . . It sounded like some strange reality-warping puzzle, sort of like Schrodinger’s Cat, the one that is simultaneously alive and dead as long as it is unobserved. That got me thinking about how the energies only seemed to exist to me when I was observing them, and that gave me the idea for my next effort.
I knew that the forces in me weren’t dependent upon observation to exist, but my trying to perceive them did seem to have at least some effect on them. I thought that if I could focus on both of them at the same time, if only on a small spot, then I might be able to force them to interact.
In the end, it was a failure, as I found it impossible to perceive them both at the same time in the same spot. Sure, if I was willing to take the headache it gave me, I could focus on both the mana pathways and the chi aura at once, but that was only seeing parts of them side by side. When trying to see them both in the same place it was like trying to have both ends of a seesaw up at once.
I wasn’t too sure how long I spent switching between the two as I tried to get them both to appear, but after a while, I had to give up on the idea.
However, I had learnt that since the two energies didn’t want to come into contact then I should not try to force the matter. That was when I got the idea of something like a wire, a bridge between the two to make the connection for them. It was actually pretty easy, once I put some thought into it. All I did was visualize my will as a simple line, one that extended from the flow of mana and reached across to touch the racing torrent of my chi. The ends touched and . . .
There are moments in your life that will forever be engraved upon your memory, regardless of what you might wish. Sometimes it’s a humiliating event. Other times it is a heart-warming time. These are events that are seared into your memory, and you’re more likely to end up forgetting your name than you are to forget them.
The feeling of my magic quickening into life instantly jumped to the top of that list of memories.
The chi ran through the small connection with the same ease that one might have expected from electricity flowing through a copper wire, though as it did so it seemed to burn up the connection behind it. Time seemed to slow as the charge ran along it, like the spark upon a fuse, before it disappeared into the stream of mana. For a brief moment that seemed to last for far too long, there was nothing, no reaction, no movement, nothing to show that I had achieved anything.
Then my mana ignited!
When Emma had spoken of ‘sparking’ my internal energy I’d thought she’d been speaking metaphorically, but there was absolutely no mistaking what happened as anything other than that, an ignition.
Up until then, mana had been largely colourless to me when I perceived it. It flowed through me, but it had been transparent, like clear water. It was something I could make out, but one that had no clear features of its own, save for its evident power. Chi had been different, in that it had been brighter, faster, and livelier, as one would expect from the energy of life. However, for all that, it had also been lacking in colour. It had been clear and bright. Up until then I had just perceived the internal energies of my body only in monochrome, and I’d come to assume that was how it was supposed to be.
In an instant that changed.