I spent a while filling Meadow in on everything that had happened, from the mantle estragon eggs to my desire to be a better host to the small folk. By the end, Meadow’s worn face had cracked into a smile.

“What?” I asked self consciously.

“I’m proud of you,” Meadow said. “You’ll face challenges in both of those tasks… Admittedly less so with the small folk, but it’s good.”

I felt my chest swell a little bit at that and couldn’t stop myself from returning her smile.

We spent a while talking about ways that I could improve the conditions inside of Dusk for the smallfolk. There were some simple solutions, like buying mineral packs to add into the water for the naiads. Those were normally used as a part of aquariums, but Dusk thought she could integrate them into her river too.

Mushrooms would be important for maintaining the environment too, and Meadow had a list of suggestions she thought I might be able to find in the Idyll-Flume, though even she wasn’t sure of what was inside.

Some heliacal sunflowers or fire lotuses would be good for the pixies, especially if I had a hive or two of solbees. Their solarhoney would be useful in a few potions, too.

That got us on the topic of alchemy, and Meadow asked if I’d replaced my temporal basin yet.

“No,” I admitted with some chagrin. “It’s been on my list of things that I need to do, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

“Well, how about this. Before we get into sensory training, we fix that. You have stonesprout, yes? Gather it, your old quartz crystal, managrass rhubarb, salt, mangrove leaves, and leaves from your emperor’s tree. And Ed.”

“I don’t have mangrove leaves,” I said. “It’s also not the kind of thing that’s easy to come across here.”

“Ah, right,” Meadow nodded. “They’re so common in Kijani, southern Elohi, Thornfront, and even parts of Daocheng… Hmm, we’ll use walnut tree root. It’s not as effective as mangrove leaves, but it will do for now.”

The quartz, salt, and emperor’s tree leaves were easy to find, but we had to go for a short walk to the nearby park to get roots from the tree.

With the help of the fungal folk and a few pixies, I was able to extract the roots with ease before channeling power to help the tree regrow the root that I’d cut off – I needed it for alchemy, but I didn’t want to kill an innocent tree for that.

Removing a few inches of root probably wouldn’t actually kill the tree, but even if it didn’t kill it, it would put a strain on the other roots. Sustainability was important.

With the root in hand, it was time to dive into the alchemy, with Ed’s help.

“I’ve never really done any crystal modification,” Ed admitted when Meadow explained what we were doing. “I know that some crystal magic can get absurdly complex, though.”

“This is fairly simple, nothing like the work that Darius does,” Meadow reassured him.

In theory, of course, I could have used the cauldron to try and remove the arrays that weren’t needed within all of the earthy components, but since Ed was here, it could serve well as mana control training for him.

While Ed worked on them, I was isolating the magical arrays within the organic components, then began the alchemy.

First, I had to boil the walnut root. Most of the salts and organic crystals inside of a tree were actually stored in the roots, at least for walnut trees, and they were water soluble. Boiling it sped the process up considerably, and using plant magic to remove all of the unneeded components sped it up even more.

Then I added in a small handful of managrass alongside my own power, letting it diffuse through the thick slurry in the cauldron.

The leaves of the emperor’s tree came next. They weren’t anywhere near strong enough to be used in creating healing potions yet, but they were still rich with temporal energy, and that was what I needed most.

The quartz crystal, looking rather filled with holes and oddly small, was added in next, alongside the salt. We were using table salt, which meant it hadn’t been purified by Ed – he hadn’t learned a mass draining spell yet.

Once it was dissolved in the cauldron and homogenized with the rest of the slurry, I was able to extract the unneeded parts using ungated mana and the cauldron’s enchantments, then skim them off the top.

Two more handfuls of managrass then, to enhance and strengthen the telluric components, before finally adding in the stonesprout.

Stonesprout was fairly subpar for direct combat – there was a reason I conjured blademoss – but it was excellent as a base for many crystal, earth, and stone potions.

I topped it off with one more handful of managrass then, and let it reduce over the fire. Once there was only a palmful of liquid, I poured it into a shallow bowl.

“That will need a few hours,” Meadow said, “Ed, would you like to join us for our sensory training?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Ed shook his head.

“Can’t today. I’m meeting with Liz to look at apartments.”

“This close to the competition?” I asked, and Ed grinned.

“Do you know how fierce the housing market is? For a chance at a nicer apartment at this cost, she’d skip the Idyll-Flume. Okay, maybe not, but… Skip a few hours of prep, at least.”

Meadow chuckled, and I grinned back. Ed waved goodbye, and I turned back to face Meadow.

“Mana sense training, then?” I asked, and Meadow took a seat on the grass. I followed, plucking at a few strands.

“How powerful do you think your mana senses are?” Meadow asked.

“I don’t know?” I said. “Average, I guess?”

Then I remembered that Kene hadn’t been able to sense Ivy’s absurd power, and I reconsidered the statement.

“Maybe a bit stronger than average. Or… Deeper? I don’t know, the Depths of Starry Night is definitely doing something to them, and I’m not sure what.”

Meadow arched an eyebrow at that, so I explained.

“It’s… hard to remember, now,” I said. “But when I was sensing the forest dragon’s mana, I got a sense for the same patterns as when I chose to follow constellations within the mana meditation. But… Differently aligned. Aligned to the power of a star, the burning destiny of power, and… It crushed mine,” I said, stumbling over the words slightly. Meadow listened along quietly, then stroked her chin.

“Well,” she said. “That’s not something you should overmuch concern yourself with at the moment. Most people develop a sense for it as they near the peak of fourth gate, but your own mana meditation draws on the same principles, and you’ve been exposed to it far more strongly than most of your peers.”

“What are they, though?” I asked. “Ikki talked about them too.”

“It’s the power that underlies mana-gardens, mana itself, energy, and more,” Meadow said. “The same power is what makes up the golden elixir within the Idyll-Flume, which is what makes it such a valuable resource. It can be used in a thousand and one ways – from actively burnt to empower other mana, to being used to shape the world, to being invested into items, to being used to water spells and enforce them. Once you form a well of your own, you’ll be able to begin generating one of the three, but the well will only generate a few drops of power each week.”

“What, so, we’re going to be collecting…”

“Drops of destiny,” Meadow said. “Yes. That’s part of what makes it so effective at reinforcing Kene’s tattoos. Destiny is strongly aligned to concepts of perfection and purity. A spell that’s been enhanced with it will be stronger and lose its inefficiencies.”

“What path do you follow?”

“Fortune. It’s the most fickle of the three, but it maintains the connections between people. The themes of unity and togetherness, so my spells that draw on more than one source work smoother and are more congealed.”

For a plant mage, that had to be absurdly useful. Heck, with my own beast magic and plant magic, it’d be amazing. One thing was bothering me, though.

“Surely bad fortune has to be a factor too,” I said.

“Hate is just as much a connection as love,” Meadow said, and I nodded at that before she continued. “The last is resolve. It contains vastness and eternity, so a spell that’s been enhanced with it will be broader, last longer, that sort of thing.”

“So… What now?” I asked.

“Mostly nothing,” Meadow said, shrugging. “You’re nowhere near the level to have developed a well yet. Indeed, most arcanists don’t even have a developed well. You know, but in truth… It makes very little impact on your life, for now at least. Though you should listen to your burgeoning sense for it. You’ve walked with great fortune – some of that is me repaying the world for my own fortune, or Orykson’s resolve to form an heir, but some is yours. You’ve done a decent job balancing it so far, giving to others to share and spread your fortune, but if you get a strong impulse… Listen to it.”

“Noted,” I said, nodding. “If that’s all, should we actually get into our mana sensing lesson?”

“Indeed,” Meadow said, a smile wrinkling her face. “Ignoring the forces of destiny, fortune, and resolve, how strong do you think your mana senses are?”

“A bit above average?” I said. “Maybe? Or average.”

Meadow shook her head in disagreement.

“Your mana senses are stronger than mine were when I was at your level of power. You have three Analyze spells ingrained, which expands the capabilities of your mana senses, but also their power. Now, don’t get me wrong – you’re never going to be able to get an exact list of what spells someone has without invading their mana-garden or ingraining the Analyze Mana-Garden spell, which is no longer an option for you. Same as you’re never going to be able to learn to have an earthsense, like if you ingrained Analyze Earth. But there are many tricks you can learn to use.”

Meadow started the lesson with expansion. With how strong my mana senses were, I didn’t need to prod something with my full focus at once to just get a sense of the magic. By slowly spinning and splitting the threads of my mana sense, I was able to spread it out into a more diffuse cloud that could cover a much larger area.

The information I got from the cloud was… strange. My life, death, and spatial senses were all much weaker through the splitting, but they were all distinctly still there.

Things got even stranger when I incorporated my Vampiric Senses spell. It wasn’t ingrained, but when actively cast, it did enhance my senses – including my mana sense to some extent.

When I actually started casting my Analyze spells in conjunction with my vampiric senses, I was able to send my mana sense over a huge area, nearly covering a quarter of Dusk’s entire realm.

The feedback I got was much less detailed than I normally got with the Analyze spells, but it still let me get a sense of the life, death, blood, and location of everything within the area, even if it wasn’t exact details.

Maintaining my senses over such a large area was hard, and I couldn’t keep it up for long, but I could maintain a more detailed sense in a bubble around me with much less strain.

After expansion, though, came compression. That was much easier for me – I was already used to focusing on something specific to gather information.

Meadow, however, had plenty to show me with compression. Some of it was limited of course – I’d never be able to match a dedicated knowledge mage – but by focusing my mana senses in a sort of spiral that incorporated all three of my senses, I could get a more precise sort of information from it.

The biggest issue with that was information – being able to see the arrays within an object and pick out the minute details was useful, sure, but it didn’t actually give me any information about what they meant.

Still, learning them was pattern recognition. If I could look at a mushroom and see lots of death and lunar mana spiraling through the same parts of the plant as the nutritional arrays, then it was a safe bet it was poison.

It wasn’t perfect – some poisons had evolved to avoid easy detection from things like that – but it was a start.

The training took hours, but when we were finally done, Meadow and I returned to the shallow bowl.

Inside, the liquid had formed a long, green, double terminated crystal. It felt strongly rhythmic to my senses, a steady repeating pattern that made it a good fit for a consistent storage of temporal power, and it took to the temporal basin spell with much more celerity than it had the amber, though it felt slightly less pungent, and it certainly didn’t mingle with my death mana in the same way.

Still, it was something, and it gave me a few ideas of spells and crystals that I shelved for when I got stronger.