The next two weeks were my introduction into what Ed affectionately called torment training.

Each day, Meadow, Ed, and Liz sparred with me until I was out of mana, pushing my combat skills hard. Ed also insisted on taking me to the gym to work out physically, which was terrible.

When Ikki learned what had happened, he seemed to be mildly amused by the whole thing, and he gave me a deadline extension for working with Lesser Psychometry.

I was grateful for the break from that, but Ikki insisted we spend our time sparring at an extreme intensity. He veiled himself down to the power of an early third gate and proceeded to utterly destroy me over and over again, barely even needing to use his haste spell.

I made my way through the stock of mana apples each day, until my second life gate was absolutely crackling with power. I actually felt a bit embarrassed by the time I finished – the walls in that part of my mana-garden were higher than any of my first gate walls.

That was good, though. It meant that my Magister’s Body was going to have a higher maximum capacity for the short term.

As soon as I finished my stock of mana apples, I took out the Dott’s Draught and began to sketch. The full gate spell was so absurdly large that it took me ages to actually finish sketching it, but the moment I finished, I drank the draught.

Power slid into me, looping through my spirit, spinning through my mana-garden and binding to the spell. Power lashed out of the spell and towards the walls, attaching and ripping them inwards, dissolving to become part of the spell itself.

I lost track of the spell after that as my vision began to swim. It wasn’t painful, exactly, but it was certainly uncomfortable.

Life mana rushed through my entire body, connecting to the tempest in my lungs, to the telluric in my bones, the lunar and solar in my blood. To my surprise, I found a tiny touch of telluric energy in my blood too. Was that normal?

I didn’t have time to contemplate as the energy rushed onwards. Desolation in my gut, but also in my everything as cells died, forming both death and desolation. But there was creation too, forming new cells and new power.

Knowledge and mental energy swirled through my brain, like two halves of a whole, which was strange, and I couldn’t fully process it.

Physical seemed to lace through my form, in my steps and movement and the forces that wove through my body, and abnegation did as well, repelling and stopping things, like caffeine stopping melatonin, or knowing when to stop the production of certain materials.

Time and space were fainter, but they were still markedly present, a steady makeup of the energetic structure that was me.

A moment later, my vision began to darken, and the world around me turned red, then black. The last thing I saw was a portal to Dusk’s realm snapping open and her leaping out to catch my fall with a spell.

I woke up on the floor an hour later, with Meadow holding a glass of water to my lips, and Dusk curled up on my stomach.

“Mastering a spell that large is intense,” she said. “Your Beast Mage’s Soul shouldn’t be as difficult, luckily, since the connector is already formed.”

I took the water gratefully and drained the whole glass before speaking.

“It was intense, that’s for sure… And thanks for the save, Dusk.”

She cawed like a raven in agreement, and I closed my eyes and fell into my mana-garden. Instead of the glowing second gate mana I was used to feeling, I felt a solid block, like a secondary form of power, a foundation for greater things.

I brought it into sharper focus and examined the large tree. Its roots were shallow, but I saw them spread throughout the entirety of the mana-garden’s second life gate, soaking up every bit of mana that would normally flow up to fill it.

It felt… Unbalanced.

Roots ran through the walls of the first gate and ungated mana, reaching towards the death gate, but there was something missing. They were meant to connect to something and complete a circuit, but that circuit wasn’t there, it was unbalanced.

“Is it supposed to feel that way? Like it’s missing a vital bit of itself?” I asked. I thought it was probably fine, and would fix itself when I mastered and ingrained the Beast Mage’s Soul, but there was no sense in not asking Meadow while she was there.

“It is,” Meadow confirmed. “Or at least, the one we worked on is.”

“Now what?” I asked.

“You’ve got to pass mana into the sapling so that it can grow. As much mana as you can reasonably manage. It typically takes about a week or so, but if you can speed it up, that would be good.”

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It wasn’t as easy as I’d have liked it to be. Mana was the limiting factor for everything. If I wanted to sketch and practice my Foxstep spell, that took mana. If I was going to get any good experience in a spar with someone, I’d need to spend mana. And to grow my tree, I needed mana.

Luckily, there was one quick trick I could use to help with the tree – healing potions. Still, even though Meadow guided me through my first massive batch, I was again limited by my mana, and by my time.

Making potions took up too much time for me to use it as my only path for advancing my power, and I found myself wishing I had more plants that produced large amounts of mana.

As Orykson had suggested, placing a Spatial Anchor into the Blademoss made it far easier to call without having to open a portal to Dusk’s realm, and it quickly became one of the offensive tools I used in sparring.

I contemplated putting a spatial anchor in some of my other plants, but none of them were especially useful in combat, so I opted against it for everything but Blueshade. The scent-producing plant wasn’t powerful, but I figured that as my skills increased and I learned to manipulate the scent it produced, I could make some use from it.

Finally, I placed a spatial anchor into me. That took an absurd amount of mana, and I actually had to skip one of my sparring sessions to manage it.

That was something of a relief, and also something of a pain. My body and mana felt completely and utterly wrung out, and in a weird way, the break made it feel worse.

“It’s overtraining,” Liz explained as she dropped a packet of iron dust that would constantly flow towards any source of spatial mana on the table. “You’ve pushed your body hard, and your mana even harder. Too hard, in fact. Doing this sort of hyper-intense training a few times in your life isn’t going to do anything damaging for your long-term development, but it’s dangerous to keep it up forever.”

They weren’t kidding, and I found myself re-evaluating just how well calibrated Orykson’s training programs had been. He’d pushed me, but not to this level. It was smart, I could give him that.

“You’re going to need to rest for at least a week once this is all done, and use no mana at all,” Meadow warned me. “And keep things fairly light for two weeks after that.”

I just nodded threw myself back into training. Six days later, I’d ingrained the Magister’s Body spell.

The ingraining wasn’t anything spiritual and insightful, like the mastery had been. The sapling in the center grew taller, its trunk thickening, and the roots grew down deeper into the soil of my mana-garden.

But the power that began to roll through my body?

That was definitely different.

My entire body felt like a kettle about to boil over, and as I sketched out the Foxstep spell with my time and space mana, it connected to the energies. Life and solar energy boiled out of me, turned to mana, and flooded the array of the spell, mixing into the mana that was already there.

And for the first time, I teleported.

Up until that point, I’d been working on the sketching of the spell, but hadn’t gotten a chance to cast it. Without the life and solar, it would have been so inefficient that it might not have been worth casting in the first place.

Now though?

I willed myself to appear behind Liz, and I simply… Did. I felt a tiny bit tired, like I’d moved at a very quick walk over to her, and my life sense noted that my life flows had drained a tiny bit, but the Magister’s Body chugged along, working to replace the lost energy.

I spent a good while training my Magister’s Body after that, which was convenient, since using any spell was good for it. My Briarthreads spell, was improved slightly by drawing upon my knowledge and mental, as well as some creation for the actual forging of mana into matter. Knowledge improved all my Analyze and data gathering spells, and the lunar pulled well into Vampiric Senses.

I didn’t have a whole lot of excess energies that could be converted into power, unfortunately, but each time I drained myself dry, the Magister’s Body helped replenish it to be just a little bit stronger.

There was also one other trick I had. A while ago, when learning to draw power from my garden through Dusk, I’d accidentally absorbed some of her mana, and had to break it down. I’d struggled, since her mana was like a dragon’s – a complex amalgam of all types.

Now, though, I was able to pull her mana into me and send it into the Magister’s Body, which helped break it down and spread it through the body.

That gave a huge boost to reserves of power I could draw on in my body, but each time I drew her mana into me to repeat the process, it was exponentially less effective. I figured that I’d probably get a pretty big jump once she reached third gate, but it was only really worth doing two or three times per gate.

Even still, it had done a fair bit to expand the power I had on tap, and by the time the duel was drawing close, I could cast more spells than I’d been able to at the beginning of the training period, and sustain spells like Vampiric Senses longer.

I wasn’t sure how much stronger I was, given that Ed had focused more heavily on cardio and movement, but I did feel lighter on my feet.

I was nowhere near the peak of second gate… But I’d made good progress.

With only two days left before the duel, I sat with a gourd of wine, slowly drinking it. I’d never been a huge fan of wine, but the peach flavor was subtle and sweet. It wasn’t good, but it was probably the least bad of all the wine I’d drank.

As I drained the last of the gourd, I felt a shifting in my spirit, and shadows crawled in around me. My connection to Dusk faded, and I panicked for a moment.

Then stars began to appear in the sky above me, lighting the dark and revealing that I stood on the edge of a cliff, grass under my feet.

Thin lines of light traced through the stars to form constellations, and the world spun. I was falling off the cliff then, into the vast ocean below.

Instead of water, I found myself floating in space, watching the planet far beneath me as three distinct possibilities slowly unveiled themselves.

The first possibility that stood out to me was the connections, the strings that formed the constellations. It spoke of chance and fortune, of harmony, of cohesion, a melodious waltz. I had a strong connection here, one that I had ridden for a long time.

It also revealed a quest to me. Just a hint, but I saw myself teleporting through a moorland, chasing after falling stars.

Then emerged the void between the stars. It sang of resolve and will, of vastness, of eternity, a mournful dirge. My connection here was weaker, newer, and while it may grow, it could also fade away.

It revealed a quest of its own. I saw myself swimming in a vast pool of icy muck, shocking and painful.

Finally, shakily, the burning power of a star began to glow. It sang of fate and destiny, of purity, and of perfection, a clarion call. My connection here was weak, only a tiny thread.

The final quest showed me holding an iron key, opening some sort of box.

I needed to enforce one, and all three of their songs pulled to me, in varying degrees.