Oliver nodded. That made sense. It was the same problem he'd run into time after time, trying to make some forward progress with magic only to take two steps backwards for each attempted step forward. He'd reached a point where he'd no longer felt confident modifying his system independently. How had they circumvented that? he wondered.

Perhaps they hadn't. Perhaps they'd earned everything they had here, paid for it in blood. Many of his fellow Earthers had died after arriving in this world. Environmental hazards, indeed.

"So, is this the part where you download kung fu into my head?" he asked, standing from where he'd fallen onto the floor.

"Not exactly," said Gideon. "But it's interesting that you mention it, since that's essentially what the system is doing when you transfer a spell."

"Ah, right — that makes sense. Downloading spells?"

"Again, Sung is the expert on how the system works, but essentially, that's what it does. Although I think he prefers to think of it more as ungating spells, since there isn't any data transfer in the conventional sense taking place."

"I see. So it's not like the System is going into my head and manipulating my memories and nervous system to grant me new abilities, more that it's—what—casting the spell itself?"

"Yes. It empowers the spellforms it contains by pushing mana drawn from your reservoirs into patterns that it creates."

"So there's a complete distinction between the System as some kind of external entity, and my own brain?"

"Not complete, but yes, it doesn't interfere directly with your physiology, as a general rule. There are spells that can create electrical impulses in your mind, your neocortex and elsewhere, like Mana Sight, Sung's interface control panel, even the spells that power this very room. Memory, conscious and subconscious, is off the table, though. Too complicated to model with magic, is the general conclusion."

Oliver eyed the canyon opening up before them. It was larger, vaster, grander than the Grand Canyon.

"So this isn't actually here? The objects I'm seeing? Not a trick of the light or something?" Obviously they couldn't have been summoned or conjured, but it was so real. It was still hard to believe. Nothing like virtual reality, which you could still see through. This felt he was looking at it. His eyes were convinced he was standing there at a fundamental level.

"What is here?" asked Gideon, snapping his fingers.

Suddenly they were in a sparring ring sketched out in ancient stone beside a weathered Buddhist temple. A vista stretched out before that could have been from the Andes.

"How do you know what's before you?" Gideon.

"If you want to get technical about it, my visual receptors are catching photons bouncing around the scenery around me and my brain's translating those signals into what I perceive as imagery."

"Exactly. What if those signals could be supplanted, intercepted before your brain interprets them, and modified?"

"If that's possible, guess this spell can manipulate my perception of what's real."

"Indeed. You think those are photons bouncing off your eyeballs? There's no light in this room. It's all in your head. You notice that nothing you're seeing has a mana signature? That not even I have a mana signature?"

Oliver looked over at Gideon. It was true. He'd quickly grown accustomed to the visual noise that the constant pulsing of mana channels and clouds that surrounded him created, and his brain had begun to tune it out. But now that he looked, he realized that Gideon wasn't actually there, that his mana channels and cloud, his mana signature, were missing.

"Lesson one," said a voice behind him.

He whipped around. Gideon — the real Gideon, complete with mana signature — was standing there, wearing a combat outfit: a dark, padded jacket, pads on his elbows and knees. "Trust nothing you see or hear, unless you can verify it through mana."

Gideon tossed him a similar jacket, continuing to speak. "Put it on," he said. "It's time for some training."

Oliver did so as Gideon went on. "The System doesn't download spells into your brain or grant you the muscle and mana memory to use it. What it does is wires that spell to your personal interface, allowing you to access and trigger it directly."

"Let me get one thing clear. The system is some kind of mega-spell that holds all of the other spells in it?"

"A neural net. It contains a graph of every spell ever entered into it, which is a lot. Tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands. We don't know for sure, since we're still exploring and cataloguing, and there are many we'll never be able to use or haven't been able to safely try."

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"A neural net?" asked Oliver curiously. The term was vaguely familiar.

"It's a kind of reinforcement learning algorithm. Obviously this is an analogy, since we haven't been able to crack the magical encoding that the system is stored in. It's just too foreign. What we can tell, though, is that every year, when the census is held, every citizen of the Empire has to connect to the System at their temple, and their personal instance of the System is integrated. It's an incredibly invasive process that you're rewarded with a mana stamp for undergoing."

"A mana stamp?"

"You can think of it as a modification to your mana signature that's distinctive and unique to you. It allows enforcers to track who's made the census and who's avoided it."

"Sounds… dangerous. And problematic. Have you had to undergo it?"

"We've all undergone the census each year, yes," said Gideon. "But it doesn't cause that much trouble. The neural net nature of the System prevents individual sets of input data from being analyzed too closely. And we've found ways to encode the spells we've come up with, create triggers and locks to prevent the Empire from making use of them even after they've been upload to the system and redistributed out to everybody."

"Wait. Neural net? Isn't that some kind of AI thing?" asked Oliver, the term finally ringing a bell. He wasn't a programmer, but he'd come across the phrase in his studies.

"Yes. We think the system is a rudimentary AI, of a sort, that categorizes, mutates, and creates new spells based on the innovations and experiences of individual users of the system. It has the ability to traverse your memories, observe your spells, and modify them to make them accessible to others. It contains a vast amount of data, individual experiences making up collectively crafted spells. It's an amazingly unique and beautiful system."

"Wait, did you say it contains all of the individual experiences? So the System, my personal system, contains a bunch of other peoples' memories?"

"Essentially and in theory, yes," said Gideon.

"That makes so much sense! That explains all the visions I've been having."

"The visions?" asked Gideon with some alacrity.

"Yes! Each time I learn a new spell, I'm hit with a bunch of memories. That doesn't happen to you?"

"Nope, never heard of it. Our systems are fairly bog-standard, though, not the homegrown thing you've cultivated, from the sounds of it. We all cultivated traditional paths, were Impressed in temples in the area. What do the visions do?"

"As far as I can tell," said Oliver, "they're memories. Memories that I now realize must have been of people creating or modifying the spells."

"Fascinating," said Gideon. "Certainly something to explore when we have more time. It sounds like we might be able to use these memories to aid in our categorization and uncovering efforts. For now, though, I'm going to teach you a new spell. It's going to need to transfer directly from my System to yours, since I invented it some time after the last census. Are you prepared?"

"Yes," said Oliver, bracing himself.

Gideon reached over and held his hand in front of Oliver's forehead. Watching carefully with his mana sight, Oliver saw a tendril of mana reach out from his hand and connect with something behind Oliver's eyes, where frustratingly he couldn't see.

A moment later, he experienced a vision of Gideon himself running through what appeared to be for all intense and purposes a room clearing exercise, where he was shooting something moving too fast to be visible with flicks of his wrist, the small projectiles crashing into human-shaped dumies that uniformly were knocked backwards by the impact. It looked like he was shooting them with a hand gun, but there was no gun in sight. It was over before he could parse what he was seeing.

"There," said Gideon. "Did you see any visions that time?"

"I did, actually. I saw you, doing what looked like a room-clearing exercise through a series of rooms that weren't too dissimilar from this house."

"Ah, yes, that would be me testing that spell at the range. Take a look at your System. You should have a new spell accessible to you."

Oliver did so. Below Mana Sight he saw a spellform named "Bullet". Indeed, that was what he'd been thinking of it as.

"A bullet spell," he said. "Unique."

"You sound disappointed."

"I was hoping for something a little more, y'know, fantasy?" Oliver admitted.

"Sometimes it's best to stick with the tried and true," said Gideon. "Which isn't to say we don't have some real bangers cached away, but for now it's best to give you something you're already somewhat familiar with using: a bullet. I call the spell Gideon's Accelerated Lead."

Oliver let out a snort. It was an amusing name, drawing on the classic D&D stereotypical spell structure: inventory, adjective, subject.

"It works with anything, but we've found that a bullet-like projectile is the most efficient. So we forged these," he said, handing Oliver a handful of what looked like hollow-point bullets, minus the casing.

"The spell accelerates and rifles them. They're made of mana-reinforced clay designed to splash when they hit. Cheap to make, and very effective for anti-personnel tactics." Although they wouldn't work against people wearing armor. Then again, maybe that wasn't what they'd been designed for.

Oliver nodded. "That's fascinating. What other spells can you teach me?"

"Slow down there, cowboy," said Gideon. "Let's get you combat-worthy, first. We're going to take it a bit slow. Teaching you a bunch of spells at once is a sure-fire way to waste a bunch of mana, pick up some bad habits, dispense with any sense of tactics or strategy, and ultimately get yourself and your team killed. It's the same strategy all of the militaries around here have adopted. And besides all of that, I know how marines think. You're not ready for the big guns yet."

Gideon snapped his fingers again, hand down by his side. They were in a shooting range, a bright sunny day in a wide-open field with a desk in front of them, shooting cells with walls on either side, and a handful of targets a few dozen yards downrange. It was a small-arms range.

"Pick a few spells, learn them intimately—how to apply them, when to apply them, the muscle memory that will allow you to leverage their power," said Gideon. "Learn to use them in combat, in coordination with another team, by yourself. Learn them until you can use them in your sleep, in any situation, when surprised, when tired, when blind. So you don't get yourself or your teammates killed with a mistimed spell or a poorly conceived strategy that fails to take into account the properties of your spell. Then you can learn another spell. Here, you go slowly, unless you want to get somebody killed."

"I see," said Oliver, feeling thoroughly chastised. It was a familiar feeling, calling back to his boot camp days. It was a long time since he'd been schooled on anything, too long. He missed the feeling, felt the old hunger to learn waking.

"But don't worry, marine," said Gideon. "We'll get you up to speed in no time. Master this, and I'll teach you some real magic. Now, shoot."