Chapter 61 - Learn to Breathe
I sat on the floor with my legs crossed, both of my arms relaxed and resting on my lap. The white stone floor underneath me felt cold and uncomfortable after so much time, and I knew that when I got up, I’d be sore from being in this position for too long.
*Click* *click* *click* The delicate rhythm of the automatic magazine loader’s rubber tipped plunger kept time for me, since my heart could not. The hopper that fed the machine shifted slightly as some cavity the drain had created over the course of minutes finally collapsed, and the whole machine squeaked as it wobbled in place as fifty or so pounds of ammunition found a new comfortable position.
Way across the workshop, another newly shaped conical bullet slapped onto the corrugated tin with a *POCK* and rolled down the surface to join the rest of its kin in the rain barrel. Judging by the sound, the barrel was almost full, and the automated turnstile would be moving soon to put a new empty barrel in its place. That meant I’d been at this for multiple hours with very little to show for it.
The blue motes floated out there in the ether, tantalizingly close yet stubbornly independent in their behavior. No matter how many times I gathered them and ran them through my mana channels, the moment I took my attention away from them they seemed to grow a mind of their own and fly off into the wild blue yonder to do whatever me-mana liked to do. Herding cats is how others might have put it but not me. Cats were at least intelligent animals.
Just get in here, so I can be done, you little jerks.
I didn’t open my eyes. If I did that, I knew I’d find Jassin there doing that squinty eyed stare of his that made me feel like a bug under a microscope. There had to be something more important that he could be doing right now. Why was he still here watching me try and fail to do the thing?
Don’t think about Jassin. Think about how you did it before. Focus.
I longingly fantasized about a scenario where a harried guard would burst into the room and yell “My Lord Headmaster! The goblins have gotten into the tea, and they’ve begun constructing a giant war barge made of scones!” and we’d all have to rush off and deal with the crisis and forget we were ever going to sit down and do nothing over the course of several hours.
We’d been back in the Spire for a day and a half now, and I’d accomplished precious little other than getting the factory humming again. Oh, and getting the magazine loader up and running. The interns had been glad for that. More than a few of them were sporting bandaged fingers and tired eyes now after being at the job for so long.
We’d lost surprisingly few people getting everyone from the wall to the underground. Given the circumstances, I thought we’d take heavy casualties once everyone got to ground level as they bottlenecked at the entrance to the Smugglers’ Tunnels. However, most of our losses came from surprise attacks like the big camouflage monster that had almost killed me after I set it on fire. Another two fell to the dive bombing pikurs after my overwatch turret ran dry on ammo, but that was near the tail end of the evacuation. The church guards took the brunt of it all, doing their duty to the last to protect the goblins and other civilians in the group.
Once we’d made our way through the tunnels and spilled out into the Spire, everything seemed to slow down to a crawl. Maybe it was the adrenaline finally drying up for everyone, but most of the guards and a good portion of the goblins just flopped down on the floor and fell asleep once they got a look at real walls and friendly faces. They must have been running on empty for a long time before we’d even met.
I wasn’t one of those lucky enough to pass out. If anything, being back in the Spire was more stressful than being out there and fighting for my life. There were all these people that had come here after I’d more or less spurred them on, and I couldn’t help but worry for all of them. The problem was that I didn’t know how to take care of them. The wounded were being tended to by the med students and the Bishop, the hungry were being fed, and the tired were being given beds. What was a guy that built autonomous death machines to do at a time like that?
Jassin with the help of Angol found everyone a place to stay, mostly in the dormitories, and I kind of hung around the two of them just in case they needed me in some way. They didn’t though. Angol knew where the empty rooms were, and Jassin had the pull to make things happen. The hardest people to accommodate were the goblins, because they just wouldn’t stand still long enough to be assigned anything. I translated for Tiba and Jassin as best I could, but though the scholar was interested in the goblins, he was also coordinating the care for the tall folk at the same time. Other than telling them they could get together and talk later, there wasn’t much for me to do other than translate pleasantries.
Then the bodies of the fallen were lined up and given last rites by the Bishop. I hung around that one too, much to the displeasure of the Bishop, but he didn’t say anything directly. His broken hand that barely functioned did the speaking for him.
I did that. I did it for good reasons, but I still felt a little guilty about it.
I couldn’t pull myself away, though, not until I was chased away by the grateful. It started with one, just a guard, one of the goat legged ones with furry sideburns and flat teeth. He came up and shook my hand, nodding and saying a very quiet and earnest thank you. I did my best to tell him he did this himself, and I hadn’t done more than kill a few things. He was insistent though.
Then came the rest of them, the more lively ones at least. They would salute or slap me on the back or thank their light for me or something similar. I found myself in the middle of a swirling vortex of gratitude, but it felt like hail pelting me from above or maybe like I’d been placed in a pressure cooker. The attention and the earnest affection was a force bearing down on my body, crushing me slowly, so slowly I couldn’t really perceive it until it was almost unbearable.
Finally, I said my goodbyes and retreated to my ‘lab’ after that. I’d tried to sleep, but there was always something on the periphery of my mind I thought I should be doing for them, other than being with them. So, the work began. I tucked myself away and began to prepare for next time.
Next time, we’d lose no one.
Stop it. We’re manipulating mana now. What did you do before? Other than almost dying?
That was the problem though. What had I done before to make the mana flow through my body like that? I remember there being this hollow sensation that I needed to fill, a byproduct of having my mana ripped to shreds by the Bishop’s curse. I remembered grabbing singular motes, putting them in the hollow and telling them to flow. It had just worked. So far, any attempt I made to recreate the feeling ended in failure. My mana would do what I asked but only as long as I was focusing on it, and I couldn’t focus on them all at once.
Split Mind is now level 10.
Upgrade Paths available:
Efficiency Upgrade (Imbue)
Cognitive Offloading
Alert
Well, if anything, it was a good way to level up Split Mind.
Efficiency Upgrade (Imbue): Your ability: Imbue now uses 10% less mana and can be used 5% more quickly.
Cognitive Offloading: You may now designate a part of your total MP to facilitate any number of cognitive tasks. Ease and speed of cognitive tasks are proportional to the amount of MP used in this way.
Alert: Your mana is now a more conscious extension of yourself and may alert you to certain objects that come into contact with it.
More toys. Very nice. Cognitive Offloading and Alert were the more sexy options, obviously. Only Cognitive Offloading cost mana, and I wasn’t exactly hurting for that stuff. On the other hand, it looked like it would decrease my maximum MP, making me more vulnerable to debilitating mana migraines in the future if I didn’t use it properly. What’s more, I didn’t exactly like the idea of the System having even more influence over my mind, even if it was supposedly to help. If the scourge was a part of the power I was being fed, would letting them into my gray matter really be the best course of action? I didn’t think so.
Alert was, in a word, vague. At a glance it looked like a sixth sense sort of thing that would let me know if something entered my aura and bumped into one of my blue motes. Spidey-sense. Given how my machines could already do that, and all I would have to do is build a machine that did something similar, it made the ability less appealing to me.
I sighed sadly and chose the Efficiency Upgrade. I knew I was passing up on fun things to play with, but it couldn’t be denied that I was building things as my primary means of… well, everything. Imbue was one of those abilities that made up the synthesis of Automate, one of the more expensive components, actually. Any way I could make the process cheaper and faster, I felt the need to prioritize.
Jassin cleared his throat quietly.
Oh, right.
I felt like I’d been asked to pee in a cup, but the cup was across the room, and there was a guy with a clipboard taking notes on my technique. Very awkward. Very messy.
Alright, so the hollow feeling. I couldn’t seem to create it on my own, but maybe I could…
I summoned a metal hinge from my spatial storage, instantly spending 20 mana to saturate it. I watched the mana inside my body flow into the object easily through my channels and into the metal, how the metal resisted and ‘ate’ a portion of the mana I sent its way, my non-perfect affinity doing what it did. All the while, I focused on the feeling of the vacuum left behind by the mana I lost in the process.
The empty space inside of me, I felt it. It was hollow, and it should not have been.
Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, I set about gathering up my motes again. More eager this time, they rushed to fill the gap. That was good, but I needed them to do more. I kept them moving past the hollow, even after they filled it. Their momentum helped me usher them through my body, even those that were already in there. A current formed within me, and soon I had a rushing stream of gray-blue circulating around in there.
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I let myself have a quiet triumphant laugh.
“You have it then?” Jassin asked, his tone purposefully neutral.
“Yes,” I ground out between my teeth. Just thinking about conversing while having to do this almost made me lose control.
“Good. Now stay still.”
Mana Manipulation is now level 2.
Jassin’s hand passed over my chest, working its way from the metal part to the fleshy part, and a cool, tingly sensation suffused my body.
The Headmaster sighed. “It is as I suspected. Garret, we will need your expertise, I believe.”
“What? What does that mean?” I asked, opening my eyes and finally looking at the Jassin again. He looked disappointed almost as well as a good bit frazzled. Maybe he didn’t like sitting on the floor very much either.
“You-”
*FOOM*
Behind the explosion barrier, State Shift experiment number three went off for the… fourth(?) time. I’d know the exact number once I counted how many balls I had left over there. I didn’t bother looking over to check on it. Instead, I focused in on how Jassin’s eye twitched slightly.
“Uh. You okay?” I asked him.
“It is a wonder you are able to sleep in this room, much less concentrate on manipulating the primal forces of the universe.”
I let myself shrug slightly. “Oh. Sure. It’s busy, but- I don’t know. It’s kind of comforting to me. Like, it’s kind of chaotic, but it’s my chaos, you know?”
It was true. My machines were a little odd and loud, and they exploded sometimes (on purpose mostly), but I’d made them. They were mine, and they were working while I couldn’t. In a way, they were helping people even while I was wasting time playing with my aura. That was a comforting thought.
“You were saying?” I urged him to continue as another two bullets *POCK*ed onto the chute.
Jassin cleared his throat and squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment before finally going on. “As I was saying. You are not controlling your aura so much as feeding upon it.”
I could feel my control slipping even as the man talked. That was okay. Jassin had done his scan thingy.
“I had thought about that,” I said. “All of the mana I see in the air. It’s mine, so I thought it was part of my mana pool, but sometimes I’m not so sure. It seems to help though. Like it helped keep me alive when I was cursed.”
“I imagine it did. Your aura isn’t necessarily part of the mana you can tap into to cast spells. In a way, it is a spell that you constantly cast just by being alive. However, you are feeding upon it much as a Warden does. Like Garret here. It is not dominion magic, but it makes use of what scraps of power you have on hand.”
Garret, Jassin’s master at arms, the man with the bushy white mustache and easy smile that had almost shot me the day we met, sat up on my cot and stretched his thick neck. The man must have been sleeping while Jassin and I were sitting here staring into the microcosmos. Lucky guy.
“So, you’re a practitioner too?” I asked him.
“No, nothing so fancy or accomplished as that” Garret yawned, wriggling his mustache like it was another muscle to be stretched. “My master is one, therefore I am afforded some basic control, but I’m simply a jumped up warrior.”
Jassin gave Garret a frustrated look. “That is not necessarily true, Ryan. Despite Garret’s propensity for understatement, he is an accomplished Warden, one I trust with my life.”
I was still stuck on what Garret said, though. “Wait. So, because you work for him,” I said, pointing at Jassin. “You can use Mana Manipulation?”
“He does not just work for me, Ryan. Garret has sworn himself to my family, essentially becoming a part of it. In return for his loyalty, he gains access to the power of my dominion which he uses best he can. Wardens like Garret did not grow up with their dominion as I did, so his control over it is different from mine. While unlocking new functions of my dominion requires study and practice, the use of it is as easy as breathing for me, because since I was born I have been under its influence. Garret, on the other hand, is very deliberate in even its most basic use.”
“I simply dabble, young man,” Garret said, rising from the cot to stretch his legs.
Jassin explained further. “In theory, he could do everything I do if he went through the work of unlocking all the functions, but in practice it does not work like that.”
“Is this something everyone with a dominion can do? Just bring other people into the fold like that?” I asked.
“Many of the noble houses have developed the capability of doing so, yes. Mine was one of the first,” Jassin said with some pride. “It is not a perfect process, but we have come a long way since the early days.”
If that was something people like Jassin could do, would that mean I could do it too? It seemed unlikely, given that I’d never heard of any Exotics doing something similar. A lot of them had retinues of people that followed them around and did things with them, but I’d always thought it was some kind of celebrity thing. If inducting them into your service gave these people access to the System, it most definitely would have come out by now.
Garret seemed to sense what I was thinking. “I am not like my lord, Ryan. What I get from the arrangement isn’t anything so grand as what he inherited. It’s more that our connection gives me the ability to see what I hadn’t before. I’m aware of the magic around me, mostly that of my master and other types I’m familiar with, and I’m able to use it to an extent. It’s hard, painful sometimes too, but it gets easier as the years pass.”
“Can Garret ever match you in the magic department?” I asked Jassin.
“Theoretically, yes, though he would need to create his own dominion and cultivate it if he wishes to bring his capabilities up to my own. The amount of concentration and will it would take to do what I am capable of without offloading some of the work would be taxing for both the body and mind. If Garret were a genius with perfect affinity for a certain mana type, he might be able to do it all on his own, but that type of person would still benefit from creating their own dominion.”
I turned the idea over in my head for a few breaths. Dominions seemed to work a lot like magical computers, connected to their practitioners through some kind of metaphysical link. People like Jassin built his own computer back in the day and has been adding onto it and expanding its capabilities for a long time, generations. New generations inherit the link to the computer when they are born. Garret didn’t have anything like that, but he was given some access where he can make use of the computational power when he was inducted into Jassin’s family. He doesn’t know how to use it as well as the family, but he can, theoretically, do it on his own by writing his own code on the fly.
Or something.
The comparisons weren’t one to one though, especially when it came to my situation. I turned to Garret. “But I’m more like Jassin than you, right? Should I be able to control it like he does?”
“I have a theory about that,” Jassin interjected. “I believe it is a by-product of your explosive growth and your relative newness in your dominion… your System.”
“I’m not sure if the System works the same way your magic does, though. Your dominions may be derivative of the System, but there’s too much that doesn’t line up.”
“Yes, your System is different in many ways, but I am unsure as to why. It is far more advanced than anything we have here, but there is also something wrong with it. It is plain to see if you know how to look. It… forces itself upon you, flooding you with power but also restricting you and making you reliant upon it, writing itself upon you in a way our magic does not. It is like a medicine that, once taken, your body depends upon more and more. As you use it, you are becoming, at once, more powerful yet less able to use that power freely.”
With that, that dam finally broke. My control of my aura snapped, and the little mana motes exploded out from my body. With a frustrated sigh, I leaned my head back and let my stiff muscles finally relax.
“The more I level, the less freedom I have then,” I said with some trepidation.
Jassin scoffed. “Oh, I’m sure you receive many new boons along the way to give you the illusion of freedom, but, in reality, you are being conditioned to accept less. It is an insidious sort of enslavement, one that you readily volunteer for after being offered a short path to some power. The Dark Lord made note of this change before the Purge. He thought he’d broken his toy, but, in the end, he concluded that the nature of the human’s dominion had changed. The corrosive influence was coming from without.”
I thought back to the error messages I’d been getting since the day I’d awakened as an Exotic. “So, it wasn’t always like this then.”
“That is the theory.”
“Lucky me, inheriting a broken System. So what about my aura? Am I doing it right then? I feel like I’m sort of containing it. You said Wardens do it like this too?”
"What you are doing is... different. Garret is able to gather mana external to him and use it to fuel himself, but you are doing so with your own aura. You are creating a loop, a system that feeds into itself in a circular way. You take mana from your aura and put it to use elsewhere in your body. Like any closed system, this cannot be done in perpetuity. Stagnation and death would be inevitable. Strangely, that is not happening with you. If anything, it is repairing you."
"I've been calling the stuff 'me-mana' like it's my own personal flavor of mana. I'm good with me-mana. If the System works how you say it does, maybe I’ve been working with my own mana more than I have the System’s. Like, I’ve been putting all of my input through Engine, and it’s been acting as a filter.”
Jassin put a hand on his chin and tilted his head to stare through me that way he did.
“Hmmm. Perhaps. If most of if not entirely all of your pool is ‘your’ mana, then your System may be having a difficult time reshaping you to fit your new abilities. This may have mitigated some of the corrupting influence of your System but has also made you heavily reliant on your own mana type. Your meteoric rise in power was fueled primarily by your own type of power as opposed to that which is given to you. In a way, your unconventional use of your System has saved you from its machinations. It has also crippled you in some of the basic areas of control and left large gaps in your capabilities. Unbelievable."
“So, controlling my aura shouldn’t feel like pushing boulders uphill using just my breath?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to hear the answer.
“At first,” Garret replied in a consoling tone. “You’re trying to move something too heavy and complicated for you right now, but, at the same time, it’s the only thing you can do. I’ve seen it before in new people with an affinity for a more complex type of mana.”
Jassin spoke up again, this time seeming more energized. He leaned forward, looking bright and engaged. “This may actually be a boon, Ryan. Though it feels difficult now, I believe you may benefit from this deviation from your norms. Your body and spirit have not yet had a chance to acclimate to the power you’ve gathered, so you have not acquired the instincts to control your magic intuitively.”
The thought of my life being significantly harder because I was powerleveling instead of taking the road more traveled didn’t seem like a great boon to me. “That doesn’t sound great. I mean, it would be nice to be able to control myself and not blast other practitioners with my special flavor of mana.”
“Yes. That part is obnoxious to say the least. However, I think, despite the inconvenience, this may be an opportunity.”
“How so?”
Jassin’s new energy couldn’t seem to be contained. He shifted forward slightly, repositioning himself closer to me as if he wanted to be able to reach out and hold me down if I didn’t like what he wanted to say. “Imagine something complicated like your circulatory system. It works the way it does because that is how you were designed. You are also at the whims of your body’s involuntary processes. See?”
I shrugged.
“What if you had the opportunity to learn how to use it from scratch, be able to control it like a muscle. What then?”
I furrowed my brows, trying to imagine. “I guess… I could tell my body how fast to pump my blood.” I stopped to think about it some more. “I could tell it to bring extra oxygen and nutrients to my muscles, to my brain. I could… assuming I could get better at using it, have it flush out toxins, stop feeding blood to open wounds. If I was really good at it, I could probably get it to do lots of extra stuff.”
“Yes. Yes! Exactly. Think of yourself as a blank sheet of paper and your System, a portraitist. He is currently working on your portrait, only he is only now in the sketching phase. He is working with broad strokes and vague outlines. You have the opportunity to reach out and guide his hand.”
Garret spoke up again. “Think of it like water carving out a river over time. Your dominion’s power is the water. It might have some places where it naturally flows, and those places will one day become the river. Right now, you have some say on where the water flows, while you’re flat.”
“It is a theory,” Jassin said, finally leaning back and stretching as I had. “If you want my advice, attempt to stretch your abilities in the next few days. Experiment and go beyond what you think you should, and, with your permission, I would like to examine you again once you have done so.”
With that, Jassin, without saying another word, got up to leave. He seemed stiff but otherwise fine. Once the door to the workshop opened and closed again, Garret sat down in front of me where Jassin just vacated.
“Alright, young man. If you’re going to cycle your magic like a Warden, let’s make sure you do it right.”
I stopped, already almost all the way upright again, one knee under me and about to be on my feet. “Uh. Right,” I said.
“Wrong. That was all wrong. First, you need to learn how to breathe. Have a seat.”