I spend the rest of the day exploring the surroundings, though other than the river I don’t find much of interest. So, as night begins to fall, I return to our humble abode.

Aiden is once again not at the clearing, although this time I sense him much nearer. Right in the cave, actually.

Floating inside, I see him crouching near the wall that had the beginnings of the engraving on it. He appears to be in a state of intense focus, continuing the carving with some earth magic.

Heeding his earlier words, I remain quiet as I float over to my corner and settle down. Still, I’m unwilling to just get back to meditating. I should be doing something! Helping him! But how can I do that when he barely even acknowledges me?

Sigh. All I know is some worldly knowledge that he isn’t interested in and some hyper specific knowledge that won’t help him much. Even the couple of spells I learnt that they didn’t cover in classes are mostly useless. He already has more than enough to focus on as is without me adding onto his pile.

With no interest in alchemy, enchanting or artificing, as much as my own knowledge in those fields is mostly theoretical, I can’t even help him with that. Am I truly going to be useless for another two months? There has to be something I can do!

I think and ponder, scouring every recesses of my memory. Over a whole year of pure studying, one learns a whole lot, and even if a bunch of it is non-magical fluff, there’s still a lot to go through.

As I’m revising all the subjects a read about and watching Aiden inscribe into the stone wall, it hits me. Formations!

A sub-profession of enchanting, formations focus on more stationary and permanent effects. Now, while I’m more of an expert (I’m not an expert even in this field, but whatever) in normal enchanting thanks to my focus on unlocking the soul book, I still know the basics of formation creation. At this point know the basics of almost everything though.

And as luck would have it one of the most basic, and therefore first taught, is a mana gathering formation. And what’d help Aiden, who is training as much as possible, more than more mana to train with?

So, I get to work.

I must admit that as much as this formation is the first one most students learn, it is in turn also extremely simplified and therefore also inefficient. And this is also going to be my first time trying to inscribe it. What could go wrong?

Hmm, now that I’ve asked myself that I have a bad feeling about this. Better practice outside for a while before truly starting.

Ok, now, basics of formations. All the basic ones are in circles, so let’s start with that. My habit of always flying in circles comes in handy as I leave a shallow line in the soft earth behind me, flying as low to the ground as I am. Good. Now a line here, cross this one there, some parabolas here, and then just add this small point here. And done!

I behold my grand masterwork. It’s sloppy. The line twist and wiggle as they shouldn’t, but that’s about as much as I can expect for my first try. Still, this isn’t the real formation anyway. Almost half the purpose of drawing it is actually in reminding myself of what it looks like and so that I have it right in front of me for visualisation purposes.

The hard part starts now. I reach out to all the external mana, as I had done all the time before I learned that it doesn’t help me with my growth. This time, I don’t absorb it.

Holding the mana in my grip, I slowly, clumsily move it roughly into the shape I’d already inscribed into the ground. It’s much harder to control external mana when it’s not just simple movements like sucking it into myself.

Nonetheless, I press on. Once it’s more or less in the correct shape, I ready myself for the hardest part. Carefully, I manage to get it moving, circulating throughout the formation. As I manage this, a weak force already exerts itself onto the nearby mana, which starts gathering towards it.

I’m on a time crunch now. If I’m too slow and too much mana gathers around the fruit of my effort, it’ll disperse my carefully constructed mana formation. I reach for my own mana inside me, when suddenly the mana reaches its saturation point and breaks out of my control.

Damn it! I almost had it!

A couple tries later, I’m once again at the point where I’m reaching for my own mana. I wrap it all around the formation, further refining it, and connect it with the drawing in the dirt, locking it into place.

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There we go, finally! It’s not very good and won’t last long even if the dirt were to remain undisturbed, but it’s still my first formation. Mana is slowly gathering around it, the shell of my own mana protecting the formation within itself. Soon though, it’ll become overwhelmed either way.

Looking around, I see that it’s the dead of night. Aiden’s probably asleep by now. The perfect time to create a proper formation for our cave. It’ll be a nice surprise in the morning, I’m sure.

How to go about it though. I don’t want to carve it into the floor, since that’s where Aiden walks about. The ceiling I’d rather leave for his own engraving training, just in case. Same goes for the walls. Very well then, I’ll just have to put it below the floor.

Inside of our hovel, past the cave entrance, it’s even more quiet than outside, the sound of nature barely reaching here. Aiden sleeps on his improvised moss bed in the corner. As silently as I can, which is very silent since I can fly, I move to more or less the centre of the room.

Preparing a simple enough spell for even me with my small mana pool to cast, I begin crushing stone below the floor. Since it’s stone, the end result is much mor precise than outside, though it’s still far from perfect.

Next, I dig a small tunnel off the side of the formation, leading outside. Through it, I move all the crushed rock outside with another spell, leaving behind only the hollow lines forming my formation.

Then, the difficult process of wrangling external mana begins. The formation is much bigger now though, at least a couple meters in diameter, so I’ll have to gather much more of it. A long time later I have enough for the effect to start taking place, though I’m one again too slow in containing it and it disperses.

The second time too, and the same goes for the third try. Again and again, I construct the formation, getting faster with each repetition. I severely underestimated the difficulty scaling it up brings.

Eventually, maybe an hour before sunrise, a succeed and am left in a mana formation wrapped in my own internal mana. The binding itself is a walk in the park in comparison. After all that, I’m left with a huge formation embedded in the stone below. And the mana all around congregates around it, already having visibly increased.

As much as I can’t sleep, this exercise has left me completely drained. Tiredly, I retreat to my corner, where I fall into a meditative trance. This one’s more focused on recovery though, and less on generating mana.

Some time passes and I stir awake. Even though I wasn’t truly asleep and could notice changes happening around me, such as Aiden waking up and being momentarily confused about the increase in mana, I also wasn’t completely awake.

Stretching out my non-existent muscles (still no advancement), I head out, where I spot Aiden once more diligently working on his spellwork.

This time he seems more focused on clean up instead of more devastation. Waves of earth and gusts of wind are carrying the heavy tree trunks onto a pile near the edge. He’ll probably still continue with his demolition once done with this.

I wait and observe for a while and my patience is rewarded. Aiden, likely noticing the changing position of his bond, stops and turns to face me.

“What’s with the mana?” he asks. No greeting, but that’s fine. At least he’s talking to me!

“I thought that you could train more if you had more mana to work with, so I created a mana gathering formation for you!” I beam at him. “And it should also help with edification too!”

He looks at me for a little while, then clears his throat. “Ok, good, “and with a small voice adds, “thanks.”

He goes back to his magic, but I don’t particularly care. I’m just happy that I could help.

Satisfied with my work I return to the cave, to my own personal little corner.

Maybe I should consider adding another formation behind the ceiling? It should increase the rate of mana fathering even more. Though that would also reduce the lifespan of both formations. I’ll decide later. For now, I still want to rest, so what better to do than some focus mana generation!

Focusing inwards, I repeat the now familiar process. Simulate my souls with the mana boosting technique, follow it into my mana pool. Wait for it to fill up and it’s done, divert it back to my soul. And yet, upon reaching this step, things are different.

Usually, as soon as my mana pool fills up and I can start sending the rest of my generation into strengthening my soul, the amount of mana decreases. It’s one of the reasons that cause me to take so long to advance, and yet I never found out why.

But now, as I’m about to send the stream of mana to reinforce my soul, it doesn’t diminish. Or rather, it diminishes by a sizable portion less than usual. My mind immediately jumps to the only feasible cause, the only thing that’s changed.

My mana gathering formation, or rather the increased mana concentration it caused. I thought that only Aiden would benefit from it, what with me unable to absorb foreign mana. It should have just made it easier for him to absorb more mana, but apparently it has some other effects. Some very nice effects.

It sort of reminds of another theory I read in one book; I forget its name. It said something about balance, that when there’s more of something somewhere, it’ll naturally move into an area where there’s less of it. Has this been happening to my mana?!

I suppose it makes sense, but still. It’s supposed to be my mana. And besides, I specifically try to get as much of it as possible to reinforce my soul. Does that mean that others lose even more of it, since they aren’t focused on retaining it?

Then again, most people just let it all flow naturally, so maybe all of their mana heads outside. Still, I don’t like it. I’ll have to learn some sort of technique later to stop it from leaving even when I’m not in mana rich areas.

For now, I’ll just accept this as the good fortune this is and grow happily in my corner. After all, this is just cut a lot of time from the expected time until the fabled promised advancement. Maybe I’ll catch up my second soul within the week? That’d be nice.