“You excited for tomorrow?” Felix asked Sam as he joined him and Yvessa on the ground for the last part of Sam’s last cardio workout of the week (not counting Sam’s Saturday sessions with Lin as working out was a crucial part of maintaining the facade so necessary for maintaining his sanity).

“What’s tomorrow?” Yvessa asked Sam.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged.

“Your level test,” Felix said. “Don’t try to act like you forgot about that.”

“Of course I haven’t. But I’m not sure what I should be excited about. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to find out that I’m level 1. According to Farris, I’ll probably be somewhere around a tenth of the way there, so the limit’s pretty fucking limited. If anything, I should be worried about not being able to match up to that expectation.”

“Worry still counts as excitement.”

“I suppose it does. But you asked it in such a jovial tone and with your signature gay smile that I just instinctively dismissed the negative connotations of the word.”

“Does excitement really cover being worried about something, though?” Yvessa wondered.

“Oh no you don’t,” Felix said. “We are not getting into another linguistic debate today.”

“So we’re saving it for tomorrow, then?”

“I’d very much prefer that you we don’t.”

“Hmm… you are really putting me in a pickle here.”

“Unpickle yourself then.”

“How would that help? I didn’t say that I was a pickle. I said that I was in a pickle.”

They continued going on like that for the next couple of minutes. Sam placidly nodding along with their arguments but keeping from getting involved with anything more than a shrug or a low commitment “um” of affirmation. He was too distracted by anxious thoughts to let himself get distracted by the back-and-forth rambling of his two friends.

With Sarah changing tactics and this time telling him about the increase in his workout’s difficulty a full week and a half before they were to take place, Sam was laser focused on getting as much as he could from his current routine in order to ease the burden on his future self. He immediately realized that was Sarah’s plan, and while he couldn’t fault her for that, he could fault her for her ability to read him so easily by making self-deprecating jokes.

And now Felix brought to the fore yet another thing for him to worry about. Not that Sam forgot about tomorrow’s test—he hadn’t been able to do that ever since Dan told him about it last Friday (giving him the benefit of the doubt for having been able to forget about it beforehand, when he only had Farris’ words to go by)—but he had managed to put that avenue of worry aside somewhat. Mostly by focusing on the fact that he didn’t actually have a goal (besides the unattainable 1) to aim for, as he was not in possession of all the relevant knowledge required to have a goal.

What was the minimal rate of progression for him to be able to reach level 1 in half a year? How exponential was it (because it was clear, even to him, that his rate of core capacity growth will definitely increase exponentially in the foreseeable future) going to be? Would his “score” be a testament of his talents with cultivating whatever they were (and if they existed)? Or would it be a result of his… hard work?

“Ah! Fuck!” He burst out aloud and out of his thoughts. “Fucking leg cramp!” He alternated between spasming, retracting his legs, and trying to keep up the stretch. “Oooh…” he wallowed in self-misery as he sat up to massage his aching leg. Thankfully, it was the last stretch for it this evening.

Felix clapped him on the back. “Take a look on the bright side. It’s been like two years since I last had those. So sometime in the future, sooner than you think, you’ll have the last leg cramp of your life.”

“I’m really really grateful that’s what you ended up saying. I don’t agree with you. Cause this fucking hurts and you telling me to treasure it while it’s here is bullshit. But… you could have said much dumber things.”

“Nah. I wouldn’t do you like that.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Yvessa asked before turning to Sam. “Just to be clear, what Felix told you is pretty far from a universal guarantee. You need to be significantly higher than… level 1, to be able to confidently say that random muscle cramps are out of the cards for you. If he wasn’t lying, then he was just lucky in avoiding getting them.”

“Counterpoint, I wasn’t lying. I’m just that good.”

“Ah.” Sam nodded. “So it’s one of those… lovable quirks of yours. Yeah, in that case, fuck you.”

“You still have that other leg to go, mate.”

“That’s fucking disturbing that you watched me close enough to know that.”

“Not really. It’s just that you’re always doing your right leg before your left.”

“And watching him close enough to realize that, isn’t creepy?” Yvessa asked.

Felix shrugged. “That’s just called being a good friend.”

“Would a good friend use the opportunity of his friend being in pain in order to stroke his own ego?”

“I think a good friend would allow their friend to use their being in pain for that purpose. If the friend had no recourse to provide.”

“Ugh,” Sam said. “Give it up, you two. It’s confusing statements like those that give analytical philosophers a hard on—sorry, an excuse, for using formal logic in their writing. That being said, I’m totally on team Yvessa right now. Fuck you Felix. Now go grab me my bottle for atonement.”

“Sure thing. Sarah!” Felix turned his head towards her while she was mid-drink. “Could you bring Sam his water?”

“That doesn’t count,” Sam said as Sarah nodded and bent down to grab Sam’s bottle before making the four seconds journey to join them. “Thank you.” He took the bottle from Sarah and drank a big mouthful in preparation for the last stretch of his stretches. God, how many times has he told himself that joke in the last month?

“Did you get a muscle cramp?” Sarah asked him as she sat down.

“I wasn’t that loud…”

“You weren’t. But you’re sitting like someone who got a muscle cramp mid stretch. I’d have sent you to soak in a warm bath, but I know you wouldn’t agree to waste ‘all’ that time.”

“Now that’s just categorically not true. It’s not the bath I’m against. Quite the opposite. Baths are a great tool for efficient time usage, I could easily cultivate while sitting in a bathtub, for example. It’s the walking to and from the where the bathing takes place that I object to.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“I’d argue with you, but Felix already used up the second overdraft quota for our daily discussion of semantics. So I’ll concede to your point. As long as I don’t have to walk all the way to baths.”

“All five minutes…”

“Eight minutes. Bordering on nine. Remember that I’m at that gym three times a week to your none.”

She held up her hands. “And I’ll concede to you that point. Will you at least be willing to trace a little bit into your leg for my own mind’s comfort?”

“Hmm… fine. I suppose so. I’ll just have to make up for those three minutes of lost cultivating time.”

“Look on the bright side,” Felix said, “if you end up coming short tomorrow of your goal—whatever it is—at least you’ll have someone to blame. Aside from yourself, of course.”

“Yeah, I was about to correct you on that. Ahh…” he groaned with satisfaction as he got up for his standing stretches. “Alright… I’mma head out,” he said after he was finished with those. “See you guys tomorrow.”

“Don’t forget about tracing to that leg,” Sarah said.

“I won’t. I’m going to do that in the shower. Promise.” Unfortunately, he couldn’t promise to do that on while walking back to his room, that way getting it out of the way immediately, as he wasn’t yet competent enough with tracing to do it while paying attention to his surrounding. He had easier time than with gathering, sure, and he could even mange it at times—although the only time he did try was when his practice with Dan specifically called for that—but he’d rather not run the risk of ending the day by running into someone or something.

Once back in his room, he quickly stripped down—making a mental note to remind himself to set his alarm for Saturday a little early so he could get the laundry going before he left for his spear training—and stepped into the shower. The electric toothbrush was already there waiting for him—a recent behavioral innovation that saved him something like two seconds every day (more if he forgot to take it into the shower with him)—accompanied by the shower’s set of toothpaste and mouthwash (an older innovation; one that invited Sam to debate the moral quandary of buying a whole other toothbrush just for the shower).

He slotted his Sarah ordered tracing for after he was done with the lion’s share of the cleaning process—scrubbing with soap—which meant that he had to skip over his usual two to three minutes of standing under the hot water and doing nothing if he wanted the shower to not run too long.

Closing his eyes, he brought to mind his left leg and the pathways running through it. His muscle cramp came from his lower thigh, so he focused his tracing to that region. A month of constant training in tracing had brought improvement to his ability with the process, but not enough for there not to be a huge waste of time and energy from his still nascent skill. True, most of the energy he drew from his core appeared close enough to the pathways he envisioned in a way that would’ve been seen as adequate enough by your average non-pursuing-of-magic civilian. But Sam’s standards would have to be much higher than that. It wasn’t most of the energy that he was after, but as close to all of it as humanely possible. As it were, the wisps of energy making their way towards his thigh from either the sole of his foot or his kidneys were like a black mark, a stark reminder of how much more he had to improve.

Luckily, his demands from this current tracing were general enough to be easily satisfied by his lackluster drawing performance, and slow pure tracing speed, so he didn’t bother waiting for the magic to make its way through his pathways until it all coalesced where he wanted. Instead, he simply traced every couple of seconds—once enough energy had gathered to seem worth it (but still not enough for there not to be a huge waste)—the only actual tracing that he knew how to do: creating a bridge from his pathways into his physical body for the magic to cross. Roughly a minute after he started, and four sets of the tracing completed, he stopped drawing magic from his core and ran one more tracing, before letting what remained of the magical energy throughout his pathways peacefully dissipate.

He was still very far from understanding, and being able to understand, what exactly dissipation was and how it worked, but he knew enough to know that it was waste; it was always going to be waste. Some of the dissipating energy would find its way back to his core (provided that it was not full), a smaller fraction would manage to flow into his body. But most of the energy would be gone. Not really gone, he knew that much. Unaffected magical energy approximated the first law of thermodynamics close enough for that to not be possible. But it was certainly gone out of his grasp. Released back into the world. A whole can of worms that Sam didn’t need Dan to tell him was too complicated a subject for now.

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He took a couple of seconds to compose himself, resting his head under the warm current before returning to the principal function of the shower. His leg, of course, didn’t feel any different. It would take a lot more magical energy flowing into it to have any noticeable change. Dan’s showcase on the ability of magical energy to heal a small cut simply by its own properties was very much out of Sam’s grasp for the foreseeable future. Still, in his lessons with Dan, he had drawn his core to emptiness while tracing into his body plenty of times by now. And that did have a barely noticeable effect on his body. Sometimes.

With the shower done, he settled on his desk-chair for his daily second dose of fifteen minutes of meditation, after which he got dressed for bed and set his mind to planning the rest of the evening. He didn’t have much time left in the day, even after taking half an hour from his hour and a half mandatory leisure time because he didn’t think he needed all of it today. Granted, he hadn’t felt like needing it for quite a few days now, and he was growing dangerously close to habituating this new behavior, but he was only playing it by the ear. And most recent evenings, his ear kept telling him that giving up that half hour wasn’t a big deal.

Nah, it’s alright, he decided after a brief internal exchange, I can do without that half hour today. Let’s just use it for cultivating and keep the rest of the schedule as usual. Which meant an hour and a half of studying, going longer or shorter depending on the material and his pace with it, followed by whatever remained of the night (so plus half an hour today) for cultivating. On the study menu for today he had some more magical theory, same as tomorrow and yesterday, but thankfully (was it though?) not Saturday, as that day’s study subjects were barren of magic.

The next two and a half hours passed swiftly and without trouble as Sam didn’t pay any more attention to the time after he moved up his daily “end of the work-day” alarm clock by half an hour (and as long as that alarm remained on 2215, could anyone speak of him making this new routine a habit?) until he was brought out of focusing on his core by that very same alarm. Gritting his teeth, he let out an annoyed grunt as he got up to stretch for a bit. He kept hoping that this time he would be able to avoid losing focus due to the alarm. And he kept being disappointed. Which meant that not only did he have to contend with the annoyance of losing time due to a lost cycle, but also that his focus still had a long way to go before he could match up to just your average first year cadet.

He muttered some half-formulated thoughts about at least having something to complain about before swiftly throwing his mind away from that topic. Thinking more about that wasn’t going to help him fall asleep later. He finished the last of his obligation of the day by returning Sarah a thumbs-up to her question of whether he traced or not and gave a sigh as he sat, finally unfocused and without purpose, before the monitor. Deciding that now wasn’t the time for any change in routine, he ended up finishing the day in the same fashion as yesterday: forty-five minutes of TV and fifteen minutes of reading.

He was not surprised that the first thing to come out of Felix’s mouth when they met the following morning was, “So, are you excited for today?”

“Why would my answer have changed from yesterday?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you changed your mind. Or your definition of some words.”

“You can’t complain about people dragging you into semantic debates when you keep going on like that. You know that, right?”

“Look, this doesn’t have anything to do with semantics. Not today. I’m simply interested in how you’re feeling. And I can’t word it any other way, yes? I can’t ask, ‘So, Sam, are you worried about today?’ All in all, I think excited covers the meaning of what I mean to inquire of you quite clearly.”

Sam stared back at him blankly. “Yes, you can. You just did. ‘How are you feeling about today?’ It’s as simple as that.”

“I don’t know… If you ask me, that has negative connotations.”

“Whatever. I’m not getting into this with you first thing in the morning. I’m feeling fine. Thank you for asking.”

“My pleasure.” Felix gave him a wink and a fist-bump as they rejoined Saran and Yvessa for the warm-up.

Miraculously, Sarah had manged to avoid commenting on Sam’s “test” well into their breakfast (directly commenting that is, you had to discount her general behavior: more worried than usual, coupled with some innocent questions as to Sam’s wellbeing sprinkled throughout their time together). Even more amazingly, she managed to pass the comment off nonchalantly; just wishing Sam good luck on his test and stopping at that. Now that was character development if Sam’s ever seen some.

In truth, he wasn’t all that worried about the test. He worked as hard as he could in “preparation” for it, so if he got a bad score, that wasn’t due to anything he could’ve done otherwise. This was a level of self-assurance that was quite new to Sam. Sure, he had worked hard on some stuff before, be they tests or otherwise, but never to the level of being completely confident that he couldn’t have possibly tried harder. Of course, maybe he could’ve. Maybe he was just deluding himself about the amount of effort he put into cultivating for the last month. But his judgment wasn’t the only basis for his confidence, in fact it was the lesser of the two reasons. The other being, of course, the lack of any appearance from the being sharing his head for the last month. He had decided to put all of his trust into Web-Web’s appraisal of his efforts, after all. So as long as the AI hadn’t found something amiss with Sam’s efforts, that surely meant that Sam was doing just fine.

Although, it’s not like that reassuring argument didn’t have any logical holes in it. After all, Web-Web was only supposed to contact him if Sam was putting in less than the minimal amount of effort required from him in order to fulfil his Web-wide goal. If that minimal amount of overall effort did not equal the maximum amount of effort Sam could give to cultivating, then Sam had no reassurance that Web-Web’s lack of communication meant that Sam had cultivated to the best of his abilities.

Ugh! This line of thinking isn’t going to lead me anywhere. He shook his head in annoyance. Just use common sense and realize that I worked hard enough on cultivating and it’s unreasonable to worry about it anymore. Then again, where does common sense come into the picture when the fate of entire worlds is at stake? Fuck! Just stop thinking about it. He bit on his tongue as he opened the door to Dan’s office. He really was the master at making himself feel worse for no reason.

“Good morning Dan,” he greeted his, seated in the middle of the room and not the back for a change, private tutor. “What’s the occasion that you’re all ready for us to start straight from the get go?”

“No occasion. Just a lower workload today than usual. Since I finished with my work early, I was simply taking a break while waiting for you.”

“A well-deserved break. I approve,” Sam said as he sat down. “So what are we starting with today?”

“Hm… Up to you. Would you rather we test how far along your core has come now, or shall we save it for last?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “Doesn’t really matter to me,” he lied. “I’ll leave that decision up to you.”

“Very well, then. We’ll leave that for after lunch. If only because I left the artifact back in my desk and I don’t want to go and get it right now.”

“… I can also get up and get it.”

“No, let’s not waste any time on it. Start tracing. Empty your core once to each limb… No, scratch that, let’s go with the three major organs and the eyes. Do heart followed by lungs, then brain, then eyes. We haven’t practiced this yet, but it’s a great exercise for improving your drawing ability. As long as you’re really focusing on just the one organ—or the one set of organs when we get to that level—you’re after. So when you’re tracing to your lungs, really focus on differentiating between the sensations and the motions you followed while tracing to your heart.”

Sam nodded and started tracing as per Dan’s instructions. While he indeed hadn’t done this particular exercise as yet, he had traced to all those organs a couple of times by now. After the fourth time he emptied his core, Dan had Sam repeat the exercise, only this time with his hand leaning on Sam’s shoulder, following Sam’s tracing directly. Sam didn’t know how Dan could bear it, but if the older man suffered as a result of his teaching method, then he suffered in silence. He wasn’t completely silent, of course, as there were plenty of comments to be made on Sam’s tracing; what he did right and what he did wrong. Well, not plenty, but enough that it was clear Dan was actually paying close attention to the inside of Sam’s pathways. Again, Sam didn’t know how Dan could stomach it. No matter to what heights Sam would rise to in the future, he would never come to being as good a teacher as Dan was.

Eventually, Dan returned to his seat and to the less demanding part of the lesson for him and had Sam empty his core to each limb before emptying twice to the body at large. Tracing to his entire body at once was by far the hardest tracing Sam had had to do, and the difficulty hadn’t changed at all since Dan introduced the exercise more than a week ago. Dan told him that being able to articulate and correctly explain why that tracing was so much harder than any other would be the best benchmark for whether Sam mastered basic tracing. He really wished Dan would’ve given him a timetable of when it’s expected of him to reach that benchmark because, as it was, he didn’t feel anywhere close to having an answer.

It was still not quite time for lunch when Sam finished with this last exercise so Dan had him spend the remainder of their morning lesson by working on pure tracing—moving magic through his pathways without having the crutch of drawing helping focus his mind on speeding the energy on its way. Drawless tracing wasn’t really used in either civilian or military life but the latter one at least had a use for it in the (very) rare circumstance when a fighter’s core ran dry but the magic running through his pathways was enough to see him through the fight. Despite that, practicing drawless tracing was greatly used by the military, as it was a great tool for helping people improve their ability to trace.

Dan accompanied him to lunch today, using their walk to the mess-hall in order to refill Sam’s almost empty core. They were joined there by Maurice, the third time he ate with them as it happened, although this time, he made no pretense of not having an ulterior motive.

“You realize you didn’t have to come all the way here, right?” Sam asked him. “I could’ve just texted you the results.”

“Be that as it may,” the researcher said, “if it is possible for me to do so, then I much prefer personally taking part in any observations upon which I write.”

“Is your paper just about me, or about Taken in general?”

“Ehm… just about you. And it’s not a paper per se. It’s just a set of observations. Raw data about you. Nothing more.”

“Just raw data? No conclusions? Doesn’t sound like something that requires someone of your caliber to observe.”

“Yes… well—”

“He isn’t allowed to write about anything more than that,” Dan said. “At least not officially. Doing that would require your assent, first of all, which, even if you end up giving, isn’t going to get him anywhere. As the forces you’ve involved yourself with won’t allow you to be made a subject of published research.”

“Forces I’ve involved myself with?” Sam tilted his head. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Farris.”

“What? Why? Just because I’m—Oh, wait… never mind. I see where you’re going with this.” He turned to Maurice. “So what are you making those observations for if you can’t make any use of them? Or were you already committed to the endeavor before Farris got into the picture and you don’t want your efforts to go to waste?”

“Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is its own reward. Besides, I wasn’t going to draw any conclusion about you, least of all publish anything, even before Farris and you met. I have not drawn any conclusion about Sarah nor about any other living Taken I’ve observed. I have just collected whatever data I had about them for people to be able to use in case there was any reason to in the future. For example, if you were ever to stop being the only member of your set, be it an adult post-integration Taken or a Thread-Weaver Taken, we could make use of our information about you to better deal with this new Taken.”

“So you’re not going to use my information to try and figure out the secret behind the Taken or something like that?”

“No… That’s… that’s more the prerogative of people like Farris. I’m just interested in the empirical data; how we could use it to help other Taken.”

“A noble goal,” Sam said. What he didn’t say was that it was most likely a useless one. Unless he was mistaken, he was the last going to be Taken, or at least Terran Taken. From his understanding of Web-Web’s and their reasoning, the AI would’ve had no reason to return anyone else after Sam.

So it was that three of them came back to Dan’s office after lunch and four pairs of eyes landed on him as he took the familiar metallic artifact from Dan’s outstretched hand. This is my first time holding an artifact after my Awakening, he thought once he realized that he could actually see what it was that the artifact did. Just a shame that he couldn’t understand it. The formation composed of the many interwoven patterns imprinted beneath the artifact’s surface was already working when Sam got hold of it, which meant that Dan must’ve activated if beforehand—the only way for a pattern (and thus, a formation) to activate without sentient intervention was for a different pattern to trace magic through it. And since there wasn’t any point in having a conscious pattern performing that role, that meant a constant power source to keep the sustained pattern activated, a power source that this artifact did not have.

Alas, that was as far as his understanding of the artifact’s formation extended. He could not make heads nor tails of the individual patterns, not to mention how they all came together by causing magic to be drawn from his core and traced through his hand into the artifact. He was aware that he could’ve stopped the artifact from being able to draw energy from his core, or hold the energy in place once it was in his pathways. The slightest effort of will and the artifact would’ve been rendered powerless. He almost tried acting upon that sensation, just to see how it would’ve felt to impose his own will on his body, but decided against it. Save it for later.

Finally, the last remnants of the magic drawn from his core were gone from his hand—the artifact managing to both draw and trace much better than Sam could’ve—and the artifact released its old familiar click. Sam stared despondently at the inert artifact and the sole remaining pattern being traced on it. “So I’m assuming this jigsaw pattern tells you the result and I simply can’t read it yet?” he asked Dan while handing him back the artifact.

“Indeed,” Dan said, “not for too long, though. We’ll be starting on numeric patterns in a couple of weeks.” He then turned to Maurice. “Here doctor, for your observations.”

“And for mine?” Sam asked.

Dan nodded and took a sit, gesturing Sam and Maurice to do the same, which they both did. “I’m happy to report that you have exceeded my expectations. Although perhaps ‘expectations’ is the wrong word. Let’s say the minimal requirements for you to be able to continue with your plan of finishing your studies in two and a half years. I reasoned that an advancement of around seven to nine percent towards level 1 would’ve been that minimum goal that you had to meet. A very good progress, mind you, for just a over a month of both cultivating and learning how to cultivate from scratch.”

“Farris said he expected me to be around a tenth…”

“Yes, he told me the same. I’m sure that he’ll be happy to hear that you’ve also managed to exceed his expectations.”

“So? You gonna keeping beating around the bush?”

“You are currently a little over thirteen percent of the way to level 1. Congratulations.”