When the witch reformed, she muttered something about holidays being made of eggs, butter, lemon, and pepper. I thought she meant hollandaise at first, but she was very stubborn and insisted that a beach vacation should absolutely be made of those ingredients.

I wasn’t sure what to make of it, honestly. I thought the old witch was probably suffering a drawback from her immortality, but I honestly couldn’t tell. She did attempt to teethe on my arm, as if she were a toddler, but when I shoved her back and commented how gross it was, I thought I might have seen a mischievous spark in her eyes.

It was… strange.

What was less strange, but far more fascinating, was the bath that Kene was in – not because they were in it, that actually made me feel bad, like I was spying on something private.

No, the interesting part was the alchemy.

The bath seemed to effectively be a giant, complex healing potion. Studying how the weaker portions integrated with the healing water and the dried herbs that the witch had added actually did a lot to clarify a few of the points of confusion I had with my own healing potions.

In a way, it was like when I added echinacea into my healing potion. Sure, it was a simple, mundane ingredient, but with the intermixing of energy, it was raised to the same status as the other components.

That weakened it, sure, but not as much as I expected. The energy might be spread through more arrays, but each of those arrays was critical to the performance of the potion, and when they interlinked, it made everything stronger, a strange form of… potion symbiosis.

The bath had a few different arrays too, namely that it was designed to be soaked in, rather than drank, and continually imbued the power into the person.

That had confused me too – how was that possible without slowleaf? I’d given her mana-grass, but nothing for slow release.

Eventually, I concluded that either she’d either added in dried slowleaf, or else there was some sort of strange principle at play that I had no idea about.

Honestly, despite telling me to mind the bath, there wasn’t much for me to do. Each time it got cooler, the power provided by the ash willow and the firecreep reheated it, and sent another pulse of… something. I didn’t know what, not recognizing the array, but at least this time, I was confident it had to do with the dried herbs she’d tossed in.

That was another thing I had to study. Whatever the witch had done, she’d thrown together one of the most powerful alchemical potion-bath-things I’d seen in minutes, where it would have taken me hours, even pretending I could actually work with the ingredients that she’d used.

Fascinatingly, she seemed to have connected the arrays to the ones in the ground that Dusk had set up for the growth of the Healer’s Heart. That, at least, explained why she’d needed the bath here specifically.

“The landed ones,” the witch muttered very seriously, putting her hand on my shoulder. “Watch out for them. I don’t want you to die, I remember that I care about you and the one in the tub.”

“Of course,” I responded, trying to sound as genuine as I could. In a way, her degraded mind reminded me of my paternal grandmother’s descent into mental disease, slowly losing her awareness of where she was, and even who she was.

I shuddered, and was suddenly thankful that I had a pair of grandparents, even if they were divorced. When I got back home, I should send a letter to my maternal grandma, the one who was working as an archeologist in Elohi. Maybe I could see if she had set up enough of a permanent camp to have a communication mirror.

Maybe even my grandpap too. Aergarde was far away, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t send a letter.

Sure, he didn’t even send letters to Ed and me for the unlit candle feast or our birthdays, like my grandma did, but communication went both ways. I was an adult now, I could reach out to him.

Then the moment was broken.

“Salmon swords!” cried the witch, hopping on top of the bath.

“Wait, no!” I shouted, trying to pry her off the tub without damaging her. She hissed like a cat, then turned into an actual cat, scratched my face, then darted away.

“Sealed primes,” I cursed as I dabbed at the bits of blood that were starting to bead up on my face. “I don’t blame you for feeling complex about her.”

It probably wasn’t a great sign I was talking to someone who was passed out in a stone bathtub.

When the witch didn’t seem to show any signs of returning to coherency after a few hours, Dusk whistled that she’d keep an eye on Kene, since I needed to get to the boat.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

I agreed with her, and left her realm, rejoining with Octavian and Liz as we trudged onto the boat. It was far less exciting this time – I wasn’t willing to push and fight to be one of the first people on board, so I just waited, mentally reaching out to Dusk every few minutes for a status update.

Eventually, she waspishly sent that she would tell me if anything changed, and sealed the connection between us.

I blinked, not even knowing that she could do that. I supposed that I had been rather annoying, though, so I couldn’t blame her.

Once I was on the boat, I knocked onto the door of the cabin next to me, and Riley opened the door.

“Hey,” they said, their eyes lingering on me for a moment. “You look good. The eyes are… fancy.”

“Thanks,” I said, shifting uncomfortably. It was always hard to tell if Riley was flirting with me or not, especially since flirtatious seemed to be their default state of being.

“Oh, hey Malachi,” Mallory called from the bed. “Need something?”

“No, I just wanted to check and make sure that you made it out.”

“Of course I did, I’m not incompetent,” Mallory sniffed.

I pressed my lips together and nodded, then left.

Without much else to do, I headed into Dusk’s room within my cabin and sat next to Kene, then retreated into my mana-garden to tend to it.

It was in amazing shape… But also rough shape. It had been reformed by the Idyll-Flume, there was no doubt about that. But all the pressure and cracking of all of the inefficiencies off had left a veritable mountain of solidified mana that I wasn’t using.

Some of it I extracted from my spirit, then started working into the shape of my spells. When my staff had broken and I’d reformed it, I’d updated the spells, but that had been before the massive influx of the three deep manas that had pushed me even further, which meant I needed to update the staff again, in order to get it to be a true external reflection of me.

That took several hours, and I left to get dinner. As I was headed down to the dining car, a blurry form shot at me, knocking into my legs. I looked down to see Siobhan, the fox-bird that I thought Octavian might have called it an enfield.

I let out a sigh of relief. I had been caught up with Kene, and not thinking about the newest addition to our group. Siobhan rubbed at my legs and let out a curious yip, before scratching at her collar.

“You can’t sense Kene,” I realized. “Here, let’s get some food, and I’ll bring you back.”

I got some for myself, Siobhan, the witch, and Kene, just in case they woke up. They didn’t, but the moment Siobhan saw Kene, it released a wave of five complex spells, each of which sunk into the bath, spinning into Kene’s form. Siobhan yawned then, and curled up near the tub, munching on her food.

The following morning, I gathered the rest of the spiritual detritus in the ungated portion of my mana-garden, where it just… sat there. It ate up a good bit of the space, locking me out from having my maximum amount of ungated mana, but I didn’t exactly use a lot of ungated mana anyhow, so it wasn’t a real loss.

I supposed that I could have extracted it and sold it to an enchanter, and probably should have, but the effort was too much for me at the moment. I’d do it another time.

I shifted my focus to my two least used spells – lesser psychometry and spatial tripwire. The tripwire at least had some use, and within my spirit, it had grown to the point that it was nearly mastered.

Lesser psychometry, on the other hand… I’d never used it, but Ikki had given it to me for a reason. Why?

I pulled out the small orbs that he’d given me to practice with, then shifted my mana, allowing my temporal mana and energy, along with knowledge and a bit of mental energy to shape into the spell array.

I had to admit, being able to do that, rather than having to sketch it out the normal way, was pretty useful.

As I tapped each of the stones that Ikki had given me and channeled the spell, I got half-broken images before the spell shattered.

I tried again, and each time, I was able to hold on a little longer. Bit by bit, I started to piece them together.

The first marble had strong impressions of being used in a sling to hunt a bird. I felt a bit bad about that, but people had to eat. I had worked in a butcher’s shop, after all, and while I felt bad for the animals, I wasn’t about to go full vegan or even vegetarian.

I might be able to swing pescetarian, though. Fish was one of my favorite types of food, and being able to eat it as the only type of meat…

I realized I was getting distracted and turned back to the marble. As I continued to press in on it, I got more and more detail.

The marble had once been enchanted. The enchantment had been used, but it had been there, and I could feel it. There were faint… echoes. Impressions. Impressions of magic that had once been there, but was now gone.

I raised an eyebrow at that, then moved onto the second marble, ignoring the witch who delightedly mentioned that she’d loved to play with marbles when she was a child, but it was a shame that they didn’t fit into people’s eyeballs the way that they used to.

This marble had been a part of something bigger than itself, and with a bit of amusement, I realized that the marble had once been a part of a larger stone – a chunk of stunstone, which I’d run into a few times in the trial. The stone had been removed, but it still had the imprint of being there, even though it wasn’t.

The third marble was more complex by far. It had begun as mud, laying in the ground in a mana and energy rich environment. I wasn’t sure if it had been magical itself, some sort of… sublime mud… or something, but it had been surrounded by magic.

Then it had been harvested by someone. An old man of Daocheng’s descent. He’d then separated it further, done… Something… with the rest of the mud, but rolled out a ball of clay and set it by the fire to dry.

I felt like there were layers to this that I was missing, so I delved further. The mud…

My mana ran dry, so I ambled over to the emperor’s tree sapling and regained some.

I spent most of the day practicing, working on the mud orb, but I also looked at the other three marbles that Ikki had given me. One of them seemed to be made from compressed plants, crushed down and dipped in lacquer or varnish or something, while another was clearly a half-active enchantment. Part of it had broken, but there were other parts that were active, and I couldn’t figure out what or why. The sixth and final orb seemed… violent.

It gave me impressions of a fight, but I struggled to pull out what those impressions truly were, let alone who was fighting or why. There were many impressions, but they clashed and conflicted.

I had definitely made progress by the time my temporal mana was so dwindled that I couldn’t practice any more, then moved onto working with Spatial Tripwire. When it had just clicked into place, mastering itself from raw repetition, Kene’s hand stirred in the bath.