Seven:
Leo was disappointed he didn’t have a way to split his attention. It would’ve made his life so much easier if he could concentrate on everything at once. The datapad, the ongoing ignition rituals, the mana around him. It didn’t help that he had to make a concerted effort to avoid the stink eye the healer kept throwing at him. While he’d always been excellent at multitasking, he knew his best insights came when he could devote his entire attention to a single process, a single activity, and before anything else, he needed to learn. His lack of information was leaving him at a dangerous disadvantage.
He estimated he had at least another few hours before it would be his turn in one of the chambers – if they even let him in. The healer wasn’t the only one throwing looks at him.
‘Well pardon me,’ he thought, ‘Next time I’ll be sure to have my forearm explode when it’s more convenient for everyone.’ He resisted scoffing, knowing that the 3rd Circle cultivator at least would probably be able to hear him if he did. He wasn’t interested in antagonizing these people with his existence any more than was strictly necessary.
Technically, it was mandatory for every sapient citizen of the Coalition to be tested in an ignition ritual. It was part of one of the many agreements the fractious leaders of Earth signed when the Coalition had arrived. In fact, it was one of their core tenets that any who had potential be given the opportunity to train it. ‘So that, together, all may grow.’ A whole lot of BS, he thought. Nowhere in that propaganda did they mention that the opportunities would be equal, or exactly what ‘grow together’ meant. In a world where might made right, just how much your potential was allowed to grow was entirely based on who you knew and whether or not you were even given the opportunity to become powerful before you were supressed, with great prejudice, by the current powers that be.
One did not disrupt the status quo lightly. The Stargazer clan was a prime example of this. Their history, a threat, masqueraded as a cautionary tale. Their story one of a woman, a 10th Circle cultivator who took a risk, a risk that failed, and because of how ‘disruptive’ the consequences were, she was ‘punished’. Her progression all but crippled, and her position within the collective given away, while she was demoted.
For a cultivator, a 10th Circle at that, to be denied the opportunity to progress was all but a death sentence. Sure, it would take centuries to millennia depending on how talented the Lady Stargazer was, but to be denied that which came after the peak. That was a blow she may never recover from.
Of course, while the powerful create history, it’s the victors who write it, and Leo couldn’t tell how much of the story was real, and how much was embellished for the sake of the narrative.
Sure, some of the Coalition leadership probably, genuinely believed their propaganda, but unfortunately, just like the governments of old, the leadership was made up of people. People who had individual agendas and ideals. People who liked the power they had and weren’t interested in sharing it. It was a sentiment Leo had never understood.
Why wouldn’t you share power? Sure, he understood being responsible about it, he’d read enough history to know that power was as much a responsibility as it was a burden, and that sharing it should be done with care. Wasn’t that supposed to be the whole purpose of the clans and sects, though? What he didn’t get was why everyone was so insistent on supressing people out of the selfish desire to stay alone at the top. Why did everything have to be a zero-sum game?
He’d learned in one of his many forays through the Public Library that humans worked best as a cooperative species, that they had survived because they were able to band together, to work together, to thrive together. If a rising tide could lift all ships, why was everyone so focused on poking holes in everyone else’s ship instead of rising together? He briefly imagined what could be accomplished under such a system. Then he ruthlessly crushed his juvenile ideals, and buried his foolish, impossible thoughts.
There was one phrase that everyone knew, it was that ‘One’s Path to Immortality is Theirs, and Theirs Alone’. Or some other configuration of the same sentiment. Why so many translated that to ‘every path not one’s own should be barred and those walking them crippled’, he didn’t understand. Perhaps someday, when he was powerful, he would. For now, though he knew one thing for certain. He was on his own.
So, Leo had made a vow to himself long ago that he would never take for granted that which he did not know or could not do for himself, and that it would be through his own merit and hard work that he would ascend. He would not reject assistance, but he would allow nobody to carry him, because power gained on the backs of others was no true power. It was a weak, fragile thing that could only take him so far on a path that wasn’t even his own.
Things would be just great if everything was sunshine and roses. If all people held hands and sang songs together, and nobody was mean, or bad. The world was hard, and why couldn’t everyone just be friends and get along, waah, waah. It wasn’t reality, and unfortunately, he existed in reality. The hostility he could feel radiating from the people around him, and the throbbing in his body were the constant reminders of that. In a universe ruled by the strong, and the well connected, the only truth, the only justice, and the only liberation, was power, and the only way he’d get it was the same way he’d lived the rest of his life, on his own. And that was just fine with him.
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His ascension would be his alone. His power, his path, one of his choosing.
His first step to gaining that power was right here in this room, and it began, not with the ignition ritual, but with information. In order to ascend, in order to gain power, he needed to understand just what was going on around him.
He settled against the wall and powered on the datapad. The information the healer had loaded up was the first thing he saw, and he relaxed into the same state of alert concentration that he used when he eavesdropped on the school lectures. He was aware of what was around him, but fully immersed in what he was doing.
It was in that active meditation that Leo began to feel something. Well, not something, but more everything? It began with a light prickling on his skin. At first, he thought his condition was acting up again, but it didn’t feel quite right. This felt less like when he felt the mana raging inside his body and more like his body was reacting to the mana outside of it. Like being immersed in it allowed it to connect to him somehow.
He concentrated harder on the sensation, and it felt like when he tried looking at those eye floaties he sometimes got. Like focusing more kept things just out of sight, or in this case, out of sense. He relaxed his focus again, allowing himself to simply exist within the dense ambient mana. It took a while, but eventually, the sensation returned. This time he just sat with it, let it be near him, another part of him. It felt similar to focusing on something in his periphery. He could feel it, feel all the mana around him, but by keeping it slightly out of focus, he was able to parse out more. It was in this state that Leo’s world suddenly expanded.
Like discovering taste, or smell, Leo discovered something that he could only describe as ‘sight’. ‘Mana-sight’ perhaps. It was how he imagined unpracticed, fuzzy, and imprecise echolocation might work.
Mana was everywhere, in all life, in all things, like atoms or gravity, ever since the Rending, mana had become one of the fundamental building blocks of existence. And mana opened up the world to him, like a flower opening its petals for the first time. In an environment this mana dense everything became clear.
Well, clear enough that he could make things out. It was like fuzzy shapes to his senses. He was visualizing the room by using mana density and, feedback? Echoes? Yes, echoes fit. Ambient mana bounced around, impacting things, and being… absorbed, Leo thought, by others. Then there were the stationary masses of mana. They all had different densities and different shapes, though he could see similarities in many. People, he realized, some of those masses were people. The brightest masses were the cultivators – something he checked with his normal vision – though the mundane youths around the room contained mana as well, though it was smaller, and less refined?
Then there were the ignition chambers themselves, for some reason they were blank spots in his new ‘vision’, though he couldn’t tell why. He could clearly see them with his eyes, but in his mana-sight they were just, empty spaces where he knew the chambers were supposed to be.
He stared at the chambers, but all he could see was the opaque crystalline like glass that he had no name for.
Finally, he decided to try focusing on a person. Perhaps the healer since she already seemed to dislike him. What then, could be the harm? He found her easily, his completely mundane, animal instincts telling him that someone was glaring daggers into the side of his head. It was when he tried to actively ‘look’ deeper than the surface, though, that she reacted. It wasn’t subtle, the way she whipped her head around to face the chambers and furrowed her brows, her expression thunderous as her eyes jumped from technician to technician.
Leo pulled away, his shock pulling him out of the trance like state he’d entered. Dangerous, he thought as he did exactly as he had been doing. Not freezing, or tensing, or changing anything, really, about his behaviour. He continued as he was. He’d learned long ago that the best way to be implicated in anything – weather justified or not – was to react. So, he didn’t.
Despite how much he desperately wanted to explore this new sense, he knew enough to know he didn’t know enough to be playing around with it. At least not actively, he decided. This was not a safe place to explore, and besides, he had something else to focus on.
Turning his attention back to the datapad, time passed as he read through the ‘assigned reading’ and began to skim through any information the device contained on mana, sects, clans, and life after ignition. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot.
He highly doubted he’d be able to get a favourable placement in any of the Earth sects, let alone be invited off-world, so he needed to be prepared. He needed to gather as much information on mana and the world of cultivators as he could, because when he did ignite his core – and he would ignite his core – he knew he would be facing a painfully uphill battle to even just get the resources he’d need to move past core formation and progress to the 1st Circle. But difficult paths didn’t scare him, painful paths even less so.
Leo knew pain.
He couldn’t remember a day without it, without the tingling ache and the burn, without the pulsing and the pressure. With that came the knowledge of how to manage discomfort, how to block out emotions and even feelings, to some extent. So, he did something he’d been doing for a long, long time; since his earliest memories, since he was forced to embrace his relationship with pain – the most consistent relationship he’d ever had.
Leo knew how to manage pain, how to drift off to a place in his mind where pain didn’t matter, where his body didn’t matter. All that mattered was that which was inside him, and that part of him raged, that part of him rejoiced.
Right now, that part of him was saying that the mana here was good. Really good. It told him to pay attention, to look up from his notebook, to sit up in his corner and watch. Not with his eyes, but with that part of him that sensed beyond. The part of him he’d always experienced in some form or another, but that he’d only tapped into now that the mana was so dense. He felt as though if he didn’t embrace the sensation in its entirety he would regret it. So, he embraced it.
He did not regret it.