My life was soon composed of, as I had expected, a lot of reading and meditation, with meals and rest breaks interspersed in there as appropriate. There was something to everything I was reading that had me just on the edge of a discovery, I knew it. Happily, after a few days of increasingly successful sessions of navel contemplation and comparing my results to some texts in the library, I discovered what I was feeling.

That connection “out” I was sensing was apparently what the texts called the “voice of the ancestors”. Or, as it was better known to me: the Akasha. The collective unconscious of mankind, where everything that had ever been done or dreamt resided. Some folks also speculated that the Akasha was actually atemporal, so it would also include everything mankind would ever dream or do, as well. What it was telling me now, though, was that I had a potential solution to my lack of information and teachers.

That being said, discovering what the connection was didn't mean I had suddenly solved all of my problems, though. Maintaining a connection was quite difficult, and I was only successful periodically. It was also exhausting in a way that I hadn't anticipated. It required a certain state of mind, and it wasn't something I could maintain long term, and I would have to take breaks between attempts. It didn't necessarily feel like I was being drained of anything, per se, and certainly didn't seem to be magical in any way, but it was still effort and needed stepping away from occasionally.

That was another thing I had figured out. At least a part of my new senses was some kind of magic sense, paired with my newly ramped up ability to see magical auras. I could vaguely sense the connections between the wards that surrounded my home, the servants and constructs that resided there with me, and the pool of mana that I owed so much to. During one of my meditation sessions, I could also feel a connection between that pool and something so vast and deep that my pulse instinctively quickened and I pulled my senses away sharply. I didn't know that magical thalassophobia was a thing, but apparently I had it. Or maybe I had just a modicum of common sense.

Regardless, it did seem to indicate that I had access to some other form of energy, since my connection to the Akasha didn't seem to be using my magic. It was also nice to have confirmation that I did in fact have magic, even if I didn't know how to use it at the moment. Based on the fact that it was being activated during meditation and connecting with something like the collective unconscious, I deduced that it was probably some form of mental energy.

This reminded me once more of my old tabletop games and had me chuckling to myself, but I was somewhat serious. That analogy seemed to work pretty well, and I started to schedule my days around like so: once I woke up, I'd immediately go to the pool and meditate, expending all of my focus in an attempt to strengthen my connection to the Akasha, trying to figure out just what the heck was going on with my body, then I would eat, study, eat, study, then meditate again before finishing up with dinner and then bed.

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Not exactly the most exciting of schedules, but despite my newfound youth, I still had the mindset of a reasonably successful adult. I could hunker down and put my nose to the grindstone if I needed to, and I certainly needed to at the moment. It looked like I had a few years worth of food, based on the size of things, which was actually pretty impressive, but I wasn't sure a few years would be enough to get me out of here. I wasn't sure of much of anything at the moment, really. Hence, meditation.

So that was what the next few weeks evolved into. Studying - which involved a lot of reading one of the scroll or slates or what have you, checking a dictionary, then looking for other works that might further explain things, before returning to the original scroll with a slightly better understanding - and meditation, which involved fixing a specific thought or problem in my mind as my meditation began, trying to reach out to my connection, trying to stay focused, coming up with an idea, then wondering if I had just made that up, or if it had been an Akashic inspiration, and if that actually mattered. It was just when I was getting pretty discouraged about whether what I was doing was actually useful at all that I finally cracked the second meditation format, namely, reaching within instead of without.

This time, instead of connecting up and out into the “voice of the ancestors”, I was trying to connect with my “core self, to see the truth of [my] being in body, mind, and soul”. Apparently, this was supposed to be able to show me who I was, where I had come from, and where I could go. Which wasn’t really novel, as that is generally the type of thing that meditation was supposed to do - really, meditating for inner awareness or inspiration for solving problems wasn't completely alien to my understanding, this just seemed to be a bit more literal than it was in my first life.

That certainly seemed to be true once more, as I began to get brief glimpses into what I could only assume was my “inner being”. My “self” seemed to be a mishmash of layered identities - at the core, I was human, the child of my mother, with the blood of Atlantis in my veins. But the rituals and procedures that had been performed on me had changed me drastically, unlocking something ancient in my heritage, then going even further. My mind and magic were much stronger than they should be, and my body was also irrevocably altered.

I also noticed that I could sense that there were multiple paths open to me - a sense of where I could go, and what I could be. I didn't have any details, it was all very nebulous at this point, but there was something definite there.

I knew all of this to be true, if not the exact details of how, what, or why. That would require a lot more research and, you guessed it, meditation.