I tapped into the sketch I’d made and copied Briarthreads, then pulled them back. Mallory’s eyes widened, and she glanced at her claws, then at me.

Then I smashed into her with Briarthreads, pouring the last dregs of my life mana into the attack.

The sharp edges of the briars dug into Mallory and she fell back, bloody.

“Winner: Malachi,” the proctor said.

With my body draining itself dry to repay the physical debt from Burn Future, and the mana debt exerting a palpable pressure on my mana-garden, I stumbled back, then collapsed into a seat. There was no seat, though, so instead I just kind of sat on the floor awkwardly.

The doctor – who I couldn’t remember the name of, though I was sure that the proctor had said it – first checked over Mallory.

“I hate it when competitors use the self-healing strategy,” the doctor muttered, his eyes flashing green as he analyzed her. Light began to spiral out from his hands, gently soaking into her.

I wasn’t able to use Analyze Life to follow along, not with my mana completely drained dry, but with the ingrained life sense that it granted me, I got the impression that whatever he was doing, it was a lot more complex than just flooding her channels of life-energy with extra power.

“Hey, it’s a good strategy,” Mallory said defensively, and the doctor just snorted. After a few moments, he pulled away.

“You’re just lucky that you didn’t take any serious damage. Most of it’s too minor to be a major threat.”

He walked over to me then, and grabbed my shoulder. His eyes glowed again, and then light began to swirl into me.

It felt different than when Kene had healed me. That had been warm, but this was colder, more clinical. Still, the cuts on me slowly faded, and I felt something shift in my legs, where Mallory had hit me in wolf form. He was a competent doctor, at least.

Then his mana surged into my mana-garden, and he frowned. A different spell was cast then, and then a third.

“What is it?” I asked nervously.

“You’ve got hairline fractures in the base of your mana-garden,” he finally said. “Did you overtrain for the duel? I saw you using a mana debt spell to push past your limits…”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I pushed myself from a fairly middling and empty gate all the way to a full-gate spell.”

The doctor snorted and a bright, rose colored light flowed from his hands and into me.

“Children. Do you want the good or the bad news first?”

Before I could even answer, the doctor barreled onwards.

“The good news is that it’s not life threatening, and it should heal over time, probably about a month. The bad news is that the fracture’s spread through your second gate mana. Don’t even think about touching your second gate mana after your mana debt is paid off, not until a month has elapsed.”

That wasn’t so bad then. I’d already needed to take a break of several weeks to compensate for the overtraining. What was one more?

After the doctor left, the proctor shuffled Mallory and I together, had us shake hands, and then gave me the warding crystal that would allow me to access the Beastgate.

Mallory, on the other hand, received the bill, which she looked over with disinterest. In fact, she seemed far more concerned about the glowering looks that her brother shot her than the bill.

Finally, before she turned to leave, she glanced at me.

“If that was a real fight, I would have won,” she said.

“Yes,” I admitted.

To my surprise, that actually seemed to relax her a little bit, as if she hadn’t expected me to admit it.

“Good,” she said. “As long as we’ve got that sorted.”

Then, she turned and left. Dusk let out a peeping noise of annoyance, then turned and climbed up my side until she was sitting on my shoulder. She threw her hands around my neck and cheered.

“Would she really have won?” Ed asked. “Or were you just humoring her ego? Either way it’s smart. Helps smooth over her vendetta.”

“I think she would have,” I admitted. “In the end, she could have taken out my eye.”

“You did quite well, dear,” Meadow said, smiling.

“Not bad at all,” Liz said. “Your teleportation in particular is impressive. I’ve got a few ideas on how I could deal with that, but nothing jumps out at me as something I could do to hard counter it for sure.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Meadow seemed to beam with pride at that, as well she might. She had been the one to guide me to it.

I picked up the ward crystal and turned it over in my hand.

“So, the Beastgate opens on the longest night of the year, huh?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” Meadow said. “The moon-crystal tortoise who runs the trials is quite an accomplished ritual mage, and uses the peak of Lunar energy to power the combat spells that you’ll fight through.”

“Moon-crystal tortoise?” Ed asked.

“Yes,” Meadow said, nodding like that explained anything at all.

“Okay then,” Liz said. “I’m going to pretend that makes any sense at all. What sort of trials is it?”

I glanced at the crystal.

“It’s a test of combat and survival skill,” Meadow began.

I slipped the crystal into Dusk’s hoard of shiny objects, then shook my head.

“Not right now. I’ve got to worry about the Idyll-Flume first, and for right now, I just want to relax and rest.”

“Wise indeed,” Meadow said with a small smile.

We headed home, and Liz and Ed went out to do… Something. Probably eat. My dad peeked his head in to check on how it had gone, and to make sure I was okay, though I could tell he was still not entirely approving of the fact I’d gotten into a legal fight with another person.

After that, things went surprisingly smoothly. I paid off my mana-debt, and then faced the greatest challenge I’d had in a long time…

Just relax.

It was harder than I’d expected. I wasn’t able to use mana in any capacity, so when Ikki showed up, he just trained me on footwork and mundane movement skills. Meadow spent much of her time teaching me about plants and doing the actual, physical gardening.

While I may not have been able to use mana, that certainly didn’t excuse me from lugging around bags of soil, digging in the dirt, or other physical labor.

But despite the complaints of an aching back, it was enjoyable to do something so practical. We planted the last few of the mana apples in the spring section of the garden, to allow them to hopefully start to bloom sooner than they’d normally be able to, and we started to grow more samples of the plants that I used for healing potion construction, like Sunset Marigolds and Dewdrop Feverfew. We also managed to split and begin to grow more Blood Carnations as well.

As Harvest-Fount drew to a close, the harvest festival drew near. That was a big deal in some parts of the world, but Mossford tended to focus more on next month, Spirits-Walk, and the Feast of Spirits that took place then.

Still, there was a notable uptick in people coming into the bakery, and we made several spins on our classic dishes, like painting cream puffs with edible paint to resemble corn, or piles of peas, or other classic dishes.

And the bakery was one of the main places I spent time. I needed money, after all. Bills didn’t stop just because I wasn’t able to use mana.

I flew out to visit Kene a few times, and while I wasn’t able to go foresting with him, we still had fun. There weren’t a ton of places to eat in his small village, but we tried all of them. A particularly shady place serving cheap Daocheng food gave me food poisoning for three days, which I was annoyed to learn there was no cure for. No, I just had to ride it out, and use bile suppressors.

My broom was continuing to make those jitterings every time I turned, but it otherwise seemed to be in decent shape, so I ignored it.

As the days went by, I took out the book I’d won at auction and went through it. To my surprise, Orykson even showed up for a lesson once while I was doing this, helping me parse apart some of the spells. One of them in particular interested him – a third gate spell that was a variant of the standard pocket space construction.

It would use temporal mana to slow the spread of death energy through things placed inside of it. It wasn’t quite slowing down time within the space, but if I put in some chopped apple slices, they’d brown far slower.

It wasn’t a unique effect, far from it, but most people who had access to something like it kept the spell pretty secret, since it was in high demand. Hopefully, my donation to the library would at least make it slightly more accessible.

The spell had clearly been designed with food preservation in mind, but Orykson had other ideas for it, though he didn’t share them with me.

I didn’t mind. There was no way I’d have been able to make heads or tails of the book without his assistance. In a strange way, when it came to parsing together spell formulas out of notes and information, he seemed more alive and aware than normal.

We pulled out two other spells in the end, and while none of them were impossibly rare, they weren’t common spells either.

The locking spell was the first and most immediately useful for me. I still wasn’t able to test it out, but it was nice to have the notes on it and the spell formula.

The last wasn’t going to be useful to me, but it was still interesting. It was designed to store an active ward inside of an inert physical material via a tricky application of spatial magic that struck me as almost like the Temporal Basin spell.

I had hated the one time I’d tried wardcrafting, and apparently it wasn’t the kind of spell that would remain forever useful – a demiplane could hold wards just fine, so this was only really useful at third and fourth gate, where constructing one of those was hard.

But it would at least help some people if I donated it to the library.

I made copies of everything, just to keep in my own small-but-growing library, and then more copies of my notes to donate to the library, in the hopes that it’d help others parse through things better.

“Your handwriting is terrible,” Orykson commented as he glanced at my notes.

“I think too fast, my hand has to hurry to catch up,” I said defensively.

“Still, you should practice your handwriting more,” he said, tucking away the copies of the notes he’d made into a spatial storage of his own.

I said nothing, deciding that silence was the best option. He sighed and teleported away not long after, though he left me with one final bit of advice.

“Play with the spatial anchor and your teleport spell, once you’re able to use mana again.”

When Spirits-Walk actually rolled around, Ed, Dad, and I bought several large gourds for the store to decorate with, carving them into the shape of different faces. The peacepyre and small folk seemed drawn to the faces, and it became common for me to see a pixie or silver orb of light inside, glowing brightly.

Meadow commented that it was supposed to be good luck, and could in theory help drive off any malevolent spirits. It wasn’t a ward, really, more like a declaration of power and intent.

For my part, I was able to start slowly exercising my mana again, and by the second week of Spirits-Walk, I was finally able to take on missions again.

That had me ecstatic. I always loved Spirits-Walk, with the crisp autumn air, and the energy of death empowering spirits and shades of all stripes.

But before I could go look into missions, I decided to take a trip to the library. It was long past time to see Alvaro, and I had something to give them regardless.