I scratched my chin in thought, and then my eyes flew wide as I let out a gasp.

“What?!” Kene asked, magic spiraling out of his hands already.

“Feel my chin!” I said, elated, jutting my chin out a little bit. Kene ran their fingers over it, feeling the tiny amount of fuzz on the tip of my chin, and their face lit up.

“You’re growing facial hair!” Kene said, and I bobbed my head in a goofy grin.

It was only a little bit of hair, the kind of thing you’d see on someone in a traditionally masculine body that was just entering puberty. But it was more than I’d ever had before, and it left me absolutely delighted.

I was still running on that high when Kene and I set off to hunt one of the tortoises. Though, admittedly, using the word ‘hunt’ was something of a misnomer – I wanted to get close enough to examine one’s shell and the spells running through it, but I didn’t want to hurt the poor tortoise.

My first approach was simple. I tried to walk up to the nearest tortoise, moving both firmly and confidently, while also moving slowly enough that it shouldn’t – hopefully – view me as a threat.

Apparently, it thought I was a threat anyways. The moment I tried to bend down and take a good look, the world around me warped. I felt like I was moving through molasses as the tortoise took off. It was still only moving at tortoise speed, but I was moving so slowly that by comparison it was practically an Elysian level runner by comparison.

A brief pulse of my Internal Pocketwatch confirmed my fears – I’d been caught in some sort of temporal slowing field. Time was passing slower for me than it was for the world as a whole.

By the time the slowing magic that had caught me had faded away, the tortoise was at least ten paces away, its shell glowing a little bit less brightly, but still bright. Kene approached this time, running at it in a dead sprint, but they got results that were barely any more effective than my own, as the tortoise simply waddled away.

I Foxstepped right in front of the tortoise, but before I could get more than a cursory inspection in, the tortoise had already caught me in its slowing field again, and was wandering away.

I bit my lip as I reconsidered my options. I could try and bind it down with Fungal Lock, but that was a lot more aggressive than I was intending. Draining its life energy wasn’t the goal – I didn’t want to hurt it.

I didn’t even especially want to drain the temporal mana it kept built up in its shell. That was its own power. I just wanted a look at the patterns it held, so I could integrate them into my own magic.

I tried a different approach, focusing my Surveyor’s Eye and Witch Eyes spells together to focus in on the shell from afar, but the lingering mana and energy in the air where I cast the spell was apparently still enough of a threat that the tortoise released another wave of slowing magic around itself and quickly loped away, moving at the absolute top speed… for a tortoise.

But even still, as the magic settled around me and I fought to push it off with my own mana, I wasn’t able to keep my eyes tracking over the shell long enough to get a good look.

Kene and I tried various ways of tracking down the tortoise, though we lost the specific one we’d been following after a bit and had to turn our attention to a new one, but no matter what we tried, we couldn’t catch one or get it to hold still long enough to actually examine the spell.

We finally gave up around noon and headed for one of the three bistros in town, one that specialized in Vinopaen fare. Kene got a thick cut of beef, marinated in red wine and spices, cooked into a stew with vegetables. It was quite tasty, but it was also so rich and heavy that I wound up ordering a crusty bread sandwich with butter, thinly sliced smoked sausage, ham, and olives with a side salad.

I’d never put butter on a sandwich before, but I had to admit that it had a certain something to it that was quite tasty.

As I munched away at the sandwich, I felt a source of mana starting to approach, and I closed my eyes, letting out a groan.

“What?” Kene asked.

In response, I pulled several lettuce leaves out of my salad and placed it on the ground. There was a soft crunching a moment later, as one of the temporal tortoises started chewing on the salad leaves.

Kene hung his head in his hands and let out a sigh.

“Okay,” they said.

I studied the tortoiseshell as I ate, and slowly started to notice some strong similarities to the temporal basin, but some strong differences too.

I was no expert in spell design, but I did have the basic temporal basin, and I made use of enough beast spells to make out some details.

For one, since it had evolved to integrate with the body, it didn’t need a continuously updating captured moment, which made it a little more flexible about how it drew and stored power. When I drew on the basin, it was a surge of power, unleashing everything that I’d built up in a single burst.

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This spell, on the other hand, could draw the power out in smaller amounts. It was still in a chunk, but it could be smaller – breaking off a bit of a candy bar, as opposed to eating it whole.

For me, who didn’t have a shell, it was going to most likely redirect to the internal bones, as well as on my nails, and when I drew the spell array out for Kene to see, they gave a nod.

“That’s definitely going to store in your nails first, then your bones.”

“What about my teeth?” I asked, and Kene hesitated.

“I’m not sure,” they finally said. “They’re definitely mineral enough for the spell to take root, with the telluric mana running through them, but there isn't any life energy flowing into the teeth, unlike nails. Nails aren’t testudinal, but they’re at least connected into the life flows in the body. ”

“What’s… Testudinal?” I asked.

“Tortoiseshell,” Kene said, blinking. “It’s a common word.”

“It is not, I assure you,” I said with a grin. “Did you look up everything there is to know about tortoises before coming here?”

“Your lack of research capability is not my fault,” Kene sniffed haughtily before smiling back at me. “But not everything. Just a little bit.”

“It will be bones and nails, probably,” I said, nodding. “That’s not so bad, then. I don’t know if I love the idea of having sparkly diamond nails, though.”

Kene held up their own nails, painted black.

“I know,” I groaned, “It just still feels off.”

“We can try and modify the spell,” Kene said, but there was a hint of doubt in their voice.

“It’s fine,” I said, shaking my head. “Besides, with how it interacts with the Beast Mage’s Soul and Magister’s Body, that would be unpredictable for a spell engineer, let alone us.”

“Fair enough,” Kene acknowledged.

I put down more of my salad and started rifling through the tortoise’s other spells. It would have been easier to do with Analyze Mana-Garden, and if the tortoise hadn’t been a beast, and thus had its spells engraved in its body as well as spirit, it would have been impossible.

But the tortoise was a beast, so I did, focusing my considerable mana senses into the creature’s shell and looking for spells.

There were a few interesting ones, which I wrote down alongside the Testudinal Reserve. One spell, which was meant to accelerate the healing process of a damaged tortoiseshell, but it was even more focused on the shell than the Testudinal Reserve was, and using it on my own bones would be horribly inefficient.

I still considered it for a moment, but discarded the idea after a bit. The spell was good, but I didn't need something else eating into my temporal mana reserves, especially with how much I used it in Foxstep. It was easy to forget that the short range teleport was about half temporal mana as well.

The slowing spell it used seemed interesting to me, so I wrote it down too. It was third gate, so not anything that I was going to make use of right now, but it could be interesting for use later on, once I was third gate myself.

The rest of the spells were so highly specific to the biology of the tortoise that I didn’t think I’d be able to make any use out of them at all.

With the spells extracted, I turned my hands back to the napkin that I had written the Testudinal Reserve spell on, and took a breath.

If the spell worked even remotely like how I thought it would, casting it once would be enough to divert the drain, much as it had with my Temporal Basin spell. I’d need to sketch – or more accurately, mana shape – the spell out when I needed to draw mana from it or put extra mana in, but establishing the link should only require a single casting.

The natural treasures and drops of destiny that I’d found in the Idyll-Flume had done a lot to improve my mana, but my temporal mana still recovered at a slower rate than even my death mana. This was going to drop that slow recovery even further.

I tried to reframe how I was thinking about it. It wasn’t lost, just… invested differently. Instead of helping my mana recover, it was going to go to expanding my reserves, slowly but surely.

I raised my hand and flexed the mana and energy within my spirit and body, shifting them into the pattern of the Testudinal Reserve. I felt the power reach within me, an almost uncomfortable warmth. The probes of life searched for the telluric energy that should be my shell, but I had no shell, and so I guided the mana to my bones. Some tendrils found my hands and spread through to the nails, connecting them before moving off. The magic flowed through all of my bones to some extent, but the majority of them latched onto my spine, feet, and hands.

That was slightly unnerving. For some reason there was a difference between discussing my bones in the abstract, and imagining my spine slowly transforming into a sort of temporal diamond.

Kene studied me, eyes burning with green light that suggested use of Analyze Life.

“Try and move a few off of your hand bones,” they said. “Aim for your ribs and skull too. Having a strong spine is good, but those protect your lungs and heart, as well as your brain.”

I closed my eyes and tried to do what they’d suggested, but it was harder. The flows wanted to converge on my spine and nails, not my skull. It was like trying to force two ends of the same magnet together, with the telluric fields repulsing one another.

But like a magnet, with enough strength, it was possible to force them together. Slowly, one strand at a time, I spread the spell out until it was concentrated mostly around my spine, skull, and ribs, with a secondary focus on my hands and feet.

That was good enough for me, so I let go of the spell. The threads shrank slightly, but they were still there, just not actively powered.

More importantly, I could feel the drain. There was a slight, but continuous strain on my bones as it drew on the telluric energy to power the changes it was making, reinvesting that power in more efficient patterns for storage.

For a normal mage, this might have resulted in slightly weaker bones, but my Magister’s Body surged to meet the demand, replenishing the energy even as the spell took it away. The effects on the other magic in me, the life energy, solar, lunar, and creation, was less demanding, but still there, drawing on the Magister’s Body.

I couldn’t help but grin. I think I was starting to understand the benefit of choosing a growth spell. The Magister’s Body was going to slowly but surely adapt to this strain, and I’d wind up stronger from that pushing. If only I had a pair of lushloam seeds, I could really kick the spell into overdrive…

I stopped myself from going too far down that line of thought. That was just being greedy.

Next, I focused on the temporal mana and energy, and I could feel it slowly layering itself onto my bones and nails, like a canvas slowly being painted with new paint.

My recovery rate… Well, it wasn’t great, now sitting at about half of death’s, and far below spatial or life. But I’d known that was the price when I went in, so I accepted it.

“How does it feel?” Kene asked.