A middle aged man stood in a small crack.

Strength of the earth flowed from him as he raised his hand and brought it down in a sharp cut.

The stone, conjoined for eras beyond human understanding of time, a timescale on which even those who reached the status that they called immortality were insignificant, split.

The stone-self stayed.

The stone-self was broken, dissolved and absorbed by the man.

Both true, both alive, both dead, both neither, created destruction of time forgone for the now.

Then time.

A small knip of time, nothing more. Mortal time.

I pressed my hand to the stone, and called on the echoes of the memories of the stone.

I pulled my hand back from the stone and parsed the feedback. It had been stronger than the items that Ikki had given me to train with, more… alive. Like diving into a living memory, rather than the simple echoes of the past that I was used to.

It gave me my answer, at least. This tunnel had been cut, but given the way that time flowed through the stone, it could have just as easily happened only recently as it could have happened a hundred years before Edgar was born.

To the mountains, the effort of a mere few hundred years was nothing. Even the glaciers, as vast and powerful and slow as they seemed to me, were like quick moving squirrels to them.

Still, I didn’t think it was likely that it happened that recently. Not within a year, probably. I wasn’t sure that little time would have been more than a half a blink to the stone composing the mountains.

That still left a lot of time when this could have happened, though. For all I knew, this could have been a previous competitor in the Beastgate Trial Trail who was cutting themselves…

No, that didn’t make sense. If I’d stumbled across a small, hidden alcove, then sure, I could believe it had been built by a competitor.

But it wasn’t.

It descended into the depths of the mountain, far too deep for a casual competitor.

Maybe they’d been trying to tunnel their way to the end?

Sure, I could accept that. It would help me sleep tonight, even if it was probably not true.

“Primes,” I swore, keeping my voice low so that it wouldn't carry down the tunnel. “This was totally built by a person for something terrible, wasn’t it?”

There was no response, thankfully, but that didn’t exactly make me feel better.

I debated pushing in, but this location was remote enough that I doubted – or maybe just hoped – that it wasn’t being used for something truly, horribly unethical. I also hoped that there would have been imprints of that on the wall if there were.

If it was just some person driving themselves away from society in an attempt to advance and grow in power, then I really didn’t care. If you needed or wanted to lock yourself away and dig tunnels forever in order to advance, then go for it. As long as others weren’t getting hurt by it, I really didn’t care. Maybe the man had really wanted to be an ant, for all I knew.

That might also explain the lack of animals. If the crazed mage had been killing anything that disturbed his attempts to break through, then it could have created a memory in the animals of this place that the tunnel was a bad idea to try and follow.

I couldn’t make a judgment call without knowing more and putting myself in dangerous circumstances, and I didn’t especially want to risk injury while on a time crunch. This wasn’t the Idyll-Flume, a carefully constructed set of rules and challenges by an ancient Occultist.

Okay, it was, but not in the sense that there would be random trial sites scattered about. The goal was simpler and clearer than that – survive.

So I parked myself by the entrance of the cave and started practicing shaping my spells again. When I grew bored with that, I moved on to experimenting with my mana senses.

The strange deer-bird creatures had been able to have their mana sense ride the wind without difficulty, and in that way, they were able to spread their senses through the storm stronger and further than I could, despite the fact that I’d had stronger senses than either of the creatures I’d fought, even the peak third gate opponent.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I didn’t know if it was a technique, a spell, or some combination therein, but I did know that I was going to try it out.

As I sat near the mouth of the cave, wrapped up in the blanket that was my tarp, I practiced, slowly extending my mana senses out of the mouth of the cave and into the thick sludge of the storm.

Then I tried to let go.

In the basic mana sensing classes I’d had in highschool, the entire technique had been about extending the spirit outward, either directly or in a field around you, how to identify the basic mana types, power input, activation and deactivation switches, all that sort of thing.

That was all you needed for day to day life. It let you use most magical devices like brooms or carpets, after all.

I’d learned a little bit more in the bakery – how to use it to check for more niche functions in the more high powered ovens, mainly, or using it to guide a spell to a stabilization enchantment.

But all of those built off the idea of pushing your spirit out of you, extending the barest trickles of it out in the direction you wanted.

I figured that if I was going to ride the storm, the most effective method I could use would be to let go. Give up control. The storm was a wild and protean thing, and it had strength of its own, and I figured it could just as easily push my power around as I could.

But the moment I relaxed my control over my spirit, it collapsed back into itself, rather than drifting being pushed around by the storm.

With a frown, I tried again, extending out my mana senses, then relaxing them, trying to let them get swept up in the storm, but again, they just collapsed back into myself.

My third and fourth attempts didn’t fare much better, and I was on the verge of giving up when I finally got something.

It was only for the barest of moments, but I felt my senses leave my control. They left it, but they were still a part of it, still a part of me. They whipped around in the wind, drifting over a stone, and then snapped back into me.

I frowned and tried to reframe the way that I was thinking about it. When I’d been letting go earlier, I’d still… cared. I’d stopped forcibly pushing out my mana senses into the air, but I’d still been paying attention.

On that final experiment, though, I’d barely cared.

Had I been self sabotaging by caring? I’d stopped pushing out my mana senses, sure, but I’d still been paying attention to them, and in doing so, I’d truly let go of control.

It was harder than I’d thought to let go completely, and to surrender over to the environment. Giving up control was hard, and counterintuitive to everything I’d learned about mana sensing.

It cheered me slightly that I’d been on the right track, just not fully dedicating myself to letting go.

Now that I knew I could, however, it would be easier to do it a second time.

At least, that’s what I thought.

The reality the situation was the opposite, if anything. Knowing that I could do it just made it more frustrating when I kept failing, putting too much effort into it. My attempts to surrender control only caused me to cling tighter to it.

After a while of frustration, I returned to the shaping of my Testudinal Reserve and Lesser Psychometry spells, working on trying to bring them close to mastery.

As my internal clock – bolstered by the internal pocketwatch spell – began to let me know it was getting on in the evening, I felt the near-painful rush of power from mastering a spell. Lesser Psychometry splintered out of the ground in my spirit.

A part of me hoped that I’d have used it enough to push it over the edge into becoming ingrained, as well as mastered, but I had no such luck.

I tapped my newly mastered spell onto the floor and channeled power into it, curious to see if I could get any more detail, but the overwhelming impression that I got from the floor was almost identical to the wall – the rock spent a very long time being a rock, and then was cut apart by the middle aged, bearded man’s spell.

I sighed and tapped another spot on the wall, and this time, I activated my Internal Pocketwatch, trying to weave the ticking of time into the spell to see if that could give me a better measure of when the man had appeared.

Once again the echoes of the rock, and the vast amount of time in that was too much for my pocketwatch spell to handle. The throughput of tens of millions of years was all I could get the vague sense for.

I tried again, this time only activating Internal Pocketwatch when the man appeared in the image.

This time, I got a more useful bit of information.

Sixty-seven and a quarter years flowed through the pocketwatch in the single blink of the stone’s lifespan before the moment of now re-asserted itself.

I bit my lip.

That ruled out the odds of it being an old competitor trying to tunnel their way to the end – for multiple reasons – but that had always been a long shot.

The odds that it was a random person seeking seclusion to push themselves to arcanist… That had raised some, though. I didn’t really mind that, though it was strange they’d cut so far down, such a long tunnel. The entire place really did resemble a mineshaft more than it did anything else.

I shoved my curiosity back down. If it was some hidden arcanist or occultist, there was a good chance they’d not take kindly to my intrusion.

I shifted back to practicing the new mana sensing technique, and strangely, the tiredness from the late hour made it slightly easier.

I shifted to try a couple of new variations to see if I could improve the technique that I was already working on, concentrating as much of my focus as I could in one spot. That made it much harder, so I flipped to the other method, spreading my mana senses out wide and thin, forgoing precise detail for sheer area.

That made it easier, and the edges of my mana senses seemed to catch themselves in the storm on their own accord. Each time I noticed and focused on that spot, it stopped doing it.

I knew I needed to stop focusing, but that was harder than it sounded, especially since I liked doing it.

Still, after a bit more time practicing, I’d gotten to the point where I was able to get my mana senses to be carried by the storm about one out of every three attempts. Progress!

With it getting late, I curled up in my bag and laid down to sleep, glad I’d found the well-sheltered cave.