Ikki arrived the following morning with his usual impeccable timing, glanced me up and down and nodded.

"Good. Now that you've properly advanced to second gate, we can begin."

He wrote down a spell on a notepad, and passed it to me, so I looked it over. It resembled the Lesser Image Recall spell, but there were layers of depth that made it clearly a second gate spell.

"This is the first spell you'll be learning, Material Echo. I know that Orykson has you using his Pinpoint Boneshard spell. Please draw them out."

I expelled the shards from my spirit, and set them spinning in a five point defensive pattern around me on instinct.

"Before you attack, capture the moment of its defensive point, then sketch the new spell."

I did as he said. Under the power of my newly opened second gate, Capture Moment flowed smoother and easier than ever before. The bone filled instantly, and as soon as I finished sketching the new spell, I sent the bone at Ikki.

He caught it out of the air, but I wasn't paying too much attention to that, impressive as it was.

The Material Echo spell had created a physical copy of the bone shard, frozen in its captured moment.

I quickly began to capture each of the points of Pinpoint Boneshard and sketch them out material echos.

By copying it, I was able to shift my pattern, guarding me effectively in even more directions.

The shards didn't move, but even still, it was incredibly useful.

"Excellent," Ikki said, nodding his approval. "What next?"

I thought for a moment, then threw a punch at Ikki while sketching with my good hand.

I left a shimmering, crystalline structure of mana in the shape of my arm and fist in the air behind me.

I dropped that and called Briarthreads, lashing out with the briars, capturing their moment in midair, and then calling a crystalline echo of them.

The spikey threads hung in midair, and while they may not have the force of movement behind them, I definitely wouldn't want to run into them.

The Material Echo spell was too slow to use in actual combat while sketching it, but once I mastered it, I had no doubt just how useful it would be.

My second gate mana was running dry, so I dismissed all of the remaining echoes and grinned at Ikki.

"I think I can definitely get used to that," I said, grinning.

"If you mix in some recalled images in with the echoes, you can stretch the effect even further," Ikki commented.

"Like adding a bit of water to help stretch juice," I said with a nod.

Ikki gave me a strange look, then gave a half-shrug, half-nod.

"Yes, I suppose. There are two more foundational spells I would like to share with you now. The first is Lesser Psychometry. Normally, it would be Instantaneous Step, but due to your spatial mana, you have better options."

"Psychometry? Isn't that Knowledge or Mental? Most psych things are."

"Most, yes, but not all. Psychometry in particular lies at the intersection of time and mental, along the equal parallel road of knowledge."

I blinked. Normally Ikki was very easy to understand, but the monolinguistic spell had some trouble with that. I assumed it was a cultural anomaly that was hard to translate.

While the specifics didn't quite come out, I did take the gist of what he was saying.

Ikki removed six marbles from his storage ring, and placed them on the table.

"Each of these has a temporal impression left on them. Your first homework assignment is to determine the impression left on each one."

"Sure!" I said, tucking the marbles into my pocket. "What's the next spell?"

Ikki took a deep breath and gave me a serious look. He always looked serious, but this was especially serious.

The only time I'd seen him this serious was when he'd told me to turn down his offer.

"The spell is called Burn Future, and it is a spell that is quite dangerous. On a small scale, it works similar to a mana debt. You can use it to strain your soul and call on power you would have gotten in the future, and then must repay it with interest."

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He paused to let that sink in, and I nodded.

"If that is all you use it for, then it is relatively safe. You could damage your spirit, but that is true of the pill too."

"I'm sensing a but," I said.

"Indeed. You can draw on more. Energy in the body you don't have. Power of the soul you lack. Higher gate mana, even. All is repaid with fierce interest, and the interest owed grows rapidly. I have seen supposed prodigies who have burnt away everything, just to prove a point."

"Why teach it at all, then?" I asked.

"It is a spell you would likely encounter, so you should be prepared. Furthermore, used sparingly, it can be a great tool. And finally… It is better to lose your mana forever than to die, and if you are going to die anyways, then die for something."

He shrugged.

"Or don't. Most die for nothing. More immortals die over petty grudges than to change the world for the better. Regardless, the general rule of thumb is that you’ve three days to pay it off before it grows faster than you can repay it, and starts to forcibly tear through your soul looking for power. But sooner is always better."

I shifted uncomfortably, and watched as Ikki drew the spell.

It was simple, more so than even most first gate combat spells I knew. I memorized it and sketched it once.

Rather than power flowing out of me and into the spell, it flowed out of the spell and into me. I felt a dozen or more sources I could draw from, some of which seemed beyond my understanding.

So I drew from the simplest.

Mana.

Mana surged into me, refilling my empty second gates. I was a touch surprised – I'd expected it to only restore my temporal gate.

Then the power surged past my current limits, and within moments I had half again the power I should have.

It burned, filling me with power, but it was a pleasant burning. Like a cleansing fire, or the feeling just after putting iodine on a wound.

I cut off the spell, and felt a void form inside of my spirit. It began to grow, but very, very slowly, but with some focus, I realized what Ikki meant about how dangerous it could be, with the growth of the void increasing.

It was still so early right now that the exponential growth wasn’t the most noticeable. In fact, if Ikki hadn’t warned me, I might not have noticed it.

I funneled all the power down into the void, and it shrank, though not completely, so I converted up my first gate mana and sent it in. It was inefficient, but I didn’t want the void in me longer than I needed.

Ikki studied me carefully before sighing.

“Good enough. It’s a useful tool, but it is a double edged sword. I hope that you use it well.”

I met his gaze seriously.

“I’ll do my best,” I said honestly.

We sparred for a little before he vanished.

I figured there was actually a good chance of Orykson showing up to do his job tomorrow, so instead of heading out to pick up a longer mission like I normally would have, I picked up Dusk who had been training on her own.

Since I’d advanced to second gate, she’d been working a lot on her own spellcraft. I couldn’t blame her, but I did miss having her there constantly.

We just grabbed a short mission that involved relocating a bunch of flowers that had a moderate paralytic effect that had popped up in a local park.

It was a second gate mission, since the flower's paralysis was strong enough to punch through most first gate defenses, but to my surprise it didn’t pay much more than a first gate mission did.

I asked the attendant about that, and she shrugged.

“There are two real factors that go into setting the reward: time and danger. Sure, as you get more powerful, you’ll find things that are a lot more dangerous, but moving some plants around really isn’t.”

That was fair enough, and as part of the Wyldwatch’s reward, I got a couple of fertilizers that Dusk consumed.

The following morning, Orykson arrived early, tearing out two pages from the small black book of spells he carried.

“We are going to begin with your first actual wardcrafting and one of the utility spells that I had always intended to teach you. I had a teleport in mind, but with your new full gate spells in mind, there are indeed some better options that will open up to you.”

“Oh, like shadowstepping?”

Orykson let out a derisive snort.

“Hardly. Shadowstepping is inferior to teleportation in nearly every way. It can only manage a short range teleport at third gate, middle distance at fifth, and long range at seventh. You’ll note that spatial magic can manage short range at second, middle distance at third, and long range at fifth.”

Those numbers felt strange to me, but I wasn’t able to put my finger on it. I shrugged, dismissing it, and focused on him.

“Then what spatial spell did you want me to learn?” I asked.

Orykson pointed at the table, and a pen appeared in his hand. He tossed it in the air, and it vanished, appearing back on the table.

“Transport Item,” he said. “It allows you to transmit an item between two points you can see.”

He tapped the page, and I looked over it. It was another horribly big spell. Nowhere near the size of a full gate spell, sure, but definitely still the size of an Analyze spell.

I sketched it out and sent mana into it.

Nothing happened.

“You have to bend the weave of space around the item and the point you are visualizing,” Orykson said. “Imagine a piece of…”

I warped the pen into my hand.

“I’ve read enough about wrinkles in time and space to get the gist of it,” I said, then sketched the spell a second time and warped the pen back.

Orykson’s eyebrows rose.

“I didn’t take you for a researcher.”

I made a noncommittal noise, not wanting to admit that the explanations I understood had come from adventure and fiction books, not highly detailed research journals.

I sketched the spell and tried to warp the couch two feet to the left. Trying to create a fold that large drained my mana rapidly until I stopped feeding it, and the spell collapsed.

“Mana density, physical density, and size all put an additional strain on your ability to move items,” Orykson commented.

That would have been nice to know before I’d wasted my mana, but I refrained from saying anything. Instead, I focused on Dusk. She was currently working with some spells of her own, some sort of shockwave-like effect that rippled through earth, water, and air in equal measure.

I sketched the spell out, and tried to bend space around her, but the spell shattered before it could even draw much mana.

“No living creatures?” I asked. “But… How does the spell know what’s living?”

“No living creatures,” Orykson confirmed. “And the spell doesn’t know. It’s a spell. But it has trouble with mana density, as I mentioned, and an entity with a mana-garden is enough to overwhelm the spell, and shatter it before you incur any serious damage. Truthfully, I doubt you could even teleport your broom, at least as you are now. Eventually, of course, you will be able to.”

“There’s a second spell that you ripped from your book,” I noted. “Why don’t we get to it before I’m completely burnt out on mana?”

“Indeed,” Orykson said, smiling, and it actually seemed to touch his eyes. “That spell is one that is moderately useful on its own, but forms the basis for the infinite complexities of wardwork. Spatial Tripwire.”