Lilijoy put aside her internal dialog and related musings. Anda had everything under control, and she had her own mission; find the array, break it somehow, and then help the tree, whatever that meant.

Now, If I were Sinaloa, where would I put an immensely powerful array that surrounds the entire Greatwood?

Not knowing much on the subject, it seemed like the trees would be the best place to start. The Doctor had had many decades to get everything in place and perfected, though it was quite likely that some form of his trap was there from the very beginning. She quickly scanned through her memory of the various arrays she had seen.

The only one she had examined carefully was the mana suppressing array, which was those odd metal sign things. She could also clearly remember some of the other objects that were probably parts of the larger arrays in the tree-caldera. There had been stone monoliths, triangular flags, and some kind of wooden totem-pole looking things. If arrays could take on so many different forms, she might not even recognize what she was looking at when she found it, at least not until she found more than one of the components.

It was possible, even likely that the components were hidden; camouflaged, buried, the possibilities were endless.

The one thing I know for sure is that it’s currently active.

Somehow, against all common sense, she could hear the faint sounds of battle drifting over from the top of the Greatwood. There was still time for her to make a difference for her trainer.

She climbed the closest tree, thankful for the handholds provided by the bark, while regretting the lack of claws or any kind of other tools.

If I fall, I can always summon another monster to fall on. Maybe a giant lizard this time?

Continuing an internal debate about the pros and cons of using various creatures as landing pads, she made her way to the top of the tree and looked across to the Greatwood. Various colored smokes were rising into the air and bubbling over the sides, making the whole thing look more like a skinny volcano than ever.

Lilijoy surveyed the scene, looking for differences in concentration or any other pattern in the ambient mana that might guide her to the array. She allowed her eyes to relax and take it all in without rushing herself, making use of the calm focus her system seemed so eager to provide. Seconds of subjective time drifted by, then minutes, but only vague differences in the mana gradients appeared, and she had no way of knowing if they had any significance.

If I had a few weeks to train this skill, looking at a variety of settings that I understood well, then I might be able to use this, she thought. I’m sure there must be an ability hiding from me.

She thought back to gaining her Mana Manipulation ability. That had been the culmination of a several days of experimentation and development, longer than that if she counted her first fledgling steps to find her Qi and Prana.

Taking a deep breath, she cleared her mind once more, less to continue her sensory activities and more to release her thoughts, to meditate without grasping at the problem.

Meditate. That’s how I’ve always interacted with ambient mana until today, using my Meditation skill to enhance my gathering.

She closed her eyes and reached out to the mana in her immediate vicinity, the familiar sea of luminescence. When she meditated for the purpose of gathering mana she shut out all her other senses, allowing the subliminal to cross the threshold of her imagination and become tangible. Now, instead of pulling it into her core, she simply allowed herself to perceive the energy, following it out from her body as far as she could, using the limited understanding she had gained from the midges’ sense to look for gradients and timbres.

Then she opened her eyes and tried to maintain the experience. There was a brief overlap, so subtle that she couldn’t tell if it was a lingering memory of perception, and then her eyes were drawn to the light and sky and leaves of the world surrounding her and the vision from her meditation was gone.

Seeing is a strong habit, she realized. My expectations are more powerful than the vague possibility of what I’m attempting. Either that, or it’s not a thing at all.

She tried several more times, with no hint of improvement. Time was rolling by gently, and she knew that she should be feeling… something. Concerned? Frustrated? But she didn’t feel those things. She felt as if a hundred years could pass. Rosemallow would win, or not. Sinaloa would return, or not. The seasons would change, people would grow and die, and the new minds would have their own thoughts and all that she was in this moment would be the smallest atom of concern, whether she made a difference or not, and what tiny difference there was would only fade. She felt light, as the responsibility for acting was taken from her shoulders by the inevitable erosion of time, and-

Lilijoy! Jiannu interrupted. You’re falling into the Stage Two trap. Stop being all wise and enlightened, or we’ll never figure out how to find the array.

Lilijoy watched Jiannu’s words float through her mind with detachment.

Oh, for crying out loud, Jiannu said. She wasn’t too concerned, as this state would naturally resolve itself in time. Their organic brain was in a state similar to a deep coma, but she felt it would be easy to remedy once the worst of the damage had been addressed.

She could feel Lilijoy’s serenity beckoning.

***

“How can you possibly still be resisting?”

The annoying man’s voice was tinged with respect, though Rosemallow was beyond hearing it. Her awareness was condensed to a fine point of rage and pain. Pain that she welcomed as the very proof of her existence, exalted as the force that allowed life to persist within the universe. Pain was foundation, the very ground beneath her feet, separating her from the meaningless abyss.

And rage. Rage was the fiery engine that propelled her.

She pulled herself to her feet as she sensed the stone pooling around her and stumbled toward the annoying sound. The sheer idiocy of trying to capture an earth mage of her capabilities with stone fueled her anger, but it was nothing next to the growing frustration of her would-be captors as a source of delicious inspiration.

Part of her hoped it would never end.

She felt thin bones crack as her foot plunged through the rib cage of a fallen dhrowgos. Those poor creatures had learned the wrong lesson from their captivity, though she couldn’t blame them. After all, pain and suffering relied on their opposites to define their form; it was only later on the Path that those contradictory principles would resolve into joyous battle.

She kicked the corpse into the air with her foot and released a roar that shook the heavens as she heard her enemy’s cry of surprise and pain.

***

Lilijoy lost herself in bliss as she surveyed the mana around her. Fields of pale colors floated and trembled, rippled and flowed into one another. Though her eyes were closed, she could see the way her surroundings transfused the energy with different flavors of vitality. The fresh green of life mingled with the pale luminosity of wind, while the heat of the sun’s rays added sparks of saturation to the pastel clouds.

A thought drifted to her mind, a worthy thought that kindled momentary curiosity.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Why aren’t I using more senses for this experience?

She decided it was well worth thinking about. Vision was an artifact of her evolutionary past, a strength but also a boundary, as her earlier difficulty maintaining the meditative view of the surrounding mana had determined. Why should she allow herself to be limited by her genetic heritage in this way? Her experiences with developing and unifying her senses in the simulated reality of the Inside and her newest explorations of the midge’s sensory world were available to her, so why did her imagination lean so strongly on the crutch of light?

In the past, she had turned off her external vision, really little more than a more thorough form of eye closing. Now she went further, and blocked all the parts of her system related to sight, external and internal.

There was a moment of profound emptiness as her mind lost most of the connection to a host of metaphors and memories. She had never realized the extent to which the visual system was used in multiple ways by her language centers. It wasn’t losing a central hub, but was rather like a call to a reference that returned a null value.

She ignored that, and turned her focus to the mana around her, learning its smells, sounds and tastes. She had encounter some of these earlier in her synesthetic experiences with the ambient mana of the former torture garden, but now she was free of even the conceptual distraction offered by vision.

At first, she could only sense her external environment, the spice of tree sap, the faint smells of grass and char carried by the breeze. That same wind rushed past her ears, and carried the sounds of the forest, and the information that her echolocation used to understand space and size.

She filtered out all those impressions and stretched her imagination toward the sour citrus of wood Prana and the warmth of the sun upon imaginary skin stretched in three dimensions all around her. She heard the pure notes of a singing glass from within her body, and then from the branch she rested on, and from the air all around. Her spatial sense struggled to process the information, and she turned to what she had learned from the midges, without rainbows or light, but instead the sense of gradients unfolding in time and timbre, as all of her other primary senses combined, and she recruited still more, now using the internal senses, and her body felt hot and cold in a map that resembled the mana-filled space around her, and her proprioception expanded so that her fingers were air, and her feet were earth and she felt her body made of mana, moving and dancing through space, expanded and formless.

She realized that she could dissolve into this, release her body entirely and abandon her flesh, and it would be as easy as all the other times she had died.

Then came a call. The sound of roaring thunder pushed aside all the pale impressions she had gathered and filled her senses, her being, inside and out, this cry swept her up and tumbled her over and over, a feeling in her chest, in her gut, a raw power that made it clear to her how little she understood about senses, how words could hold and conceal truth, that an emotion was felt in her body the same way the mana was felt by her senses, and the word ‘feel’ was both true and false, for now she was perceiving a powerful magic that slapped her face and made her feel fierce and determined, and changed the entire universe because it changed how she felt.

She opened her eyes and returned to her senses as Rosemallow’s battle cry still lingered over the barren fields.

Jiannu?

She called the name once, before realizing they had merged at some point in her… in whatever that was.

Stage Two-itis. What the hell was that? Awesome and awful at the same time. I think I could have… died? Maybe? Rosemallow’s call did something. Was something. I’ve never felt anything like that.

Now how do I find that array without losing myself again?

She decided to try and use more of her organic brain. It wasn’t so much that her biological tissues weren’t working, as that the frontal lobes in particular were powered down. They served as a kind of clearing house for organizing the signals from many other parts of her brain that were still functioning to some extent, which made her wonder if she couldn’t reroute some of the signals from, say, her amygdala, and regain a reasonable level of anxiety.

I never thought I would want more anxiety in my life. I never thought a lot of things though, so that hardly means anything at all anymore.

Soon, her hands were shaking, and she was sweating, and she felt horrible. But it was better than the alternative, at least when she had to get stuff done.

Oh crap. I’ve got to find that array yesterday. What the hell was I thinking? Real smart, Lilijoy.

She felt a tear run down her face. Felt a memory of fingers underneath her skin, and saw an image of Jessila’s pained smile as Magpie sliced her throat.

She got to her feet, ignoring the sick feeling in her stomach. She looked out over the cleared area, up to the sky and the top of the Greatwood stump, trying to see the ambient mana yet again.

Scenes from her past kept flashing before her eyes, intruding and breaking her concentration. Tearing at a dog’s crushed face with her teeth. The feeling of beating a man’s head with a hammer over and over. She knew it was her system, or rather the crude way she had wired her Stage Two consciousness directly to the darkest parts of her primal brain, but she couldn’t control it, didn’t have time to figure out a healthy balance.

What would I be without the system protecting me all the time? Would I be like this, a wreck, unable to function? At least I can have a nervous breakdown way faster than most people. I’ve got to pull it together.

She took a deep breath and calmed herself as best she could, then set aside a part of Stage Two and split herself. One part connected to her primal fear, the other was free from bodily attachment. Light and dark, swirled and balanced.

We’ve got to work together, Lilijoy thought.

I understand what to do, the other Lilijoy thought.

I’m worried that we’re too different. What if we can’t merge? What if we get stuck like this?

That’s our amygdala talking. If I turn into a floaty flake again, you know what to do.

This sucks. I hate this.

It’ll be fine. Now get moving.

Lilijoy climbed down until she found a branch that led to another tree. She ran along that as fast as she could, which was far slower than she would have preferred. Still, it felt good to move, to act, and that sense of actually doing something helped take the edge off. She knew her other self, Light Lilijoy was how she had decided to think of her, was meditating, feeling the mana around them as she moved through the trees, looking for anything different, anything…

I’ve got a crazy idea, Light Lilijoy said.

I’m pretty sure that’s my department, she replied.

Ha ha. I want to spend two free points and raise Meditation to Upgraded.

But Professor Anaskafius said that wouldn’t do anything.

I said it was a crazy idea. It’s only two points.

Do what you want. I’m going to keep running.

***

Light Lilijoy pulled up her character sheet and raised Meditation before she could second-guess herself.

I guess Dark Lilijoy already did, so would it be third-guessing?

Then she dropped back into the world of ambient mana, hoping, searching for the difference she thought only she could see. And it was there.

Kind of.

She had been hoping that the scope of the area she could draw on would change in some way. After all, the primary limit on Mana Gathering wasn’t the ambient mana, at least not that she’d ever heard. It was the practitioner's ability to absorb the mana that determined how much they could gather in a certain amount of time. Who would even notice if they were gathering from a wider area when the end result was identical?

She was pretty sure that it would take someone with senses quite like hers to notice the difference. She couldn’t rule out some race of midge-people on the Inside, but if there was, and they noticed the difference, then they weren’t talking. Probably because it still wouldn’t help them gather more mana.

As it turned out, the area of the gathering didn’t change much, perhaps growing by a few percent, but her ability to change the shape of the area did. Now she could project it around her in more of a parabola, and by revolving that long oval shape, she could examine a much larger swath of the territory her other self was moving through.

It was a completely useless skill, unless you happened to be sensitive enough to find differences in mana gradients and thus be able to detect areas where the ambient mana was altered in some way. It was enough to make her wonder what the actual intent of the skill was. Could someone at an extremely high level gather all the mana from a very small area, say, the immediate vicinity of a spell or an enemy? How practical could that possibly be?

She decided it was a problem for another day, and concentrated all her efforts to using her new skill. Soon enough, she noted a distinct… slope to the mana around her, and began to guide her other self lower, and then lower still, until they were back on the dark, knotted ground.

She searched between the towering trunks in an ever narrowing pattern, until at last she found something, a spiraling tower of condensed mana shooting into the sky, leaning away from the Greatwood.

Um, Light Lilijoy, there’s something- her other self began to say

Shh, I know, just hold on a second, I want to figure out-

It’s moving.

She dropped her meditative state with a mild sigh, and looked with Dark Lilijoy’s eyes.

Her other self continued. I don’t think we’re the first ones to find it.

Draped around the barest outline of a squat obelisk was a faintly luminescent pile of yellow goo. Waving tendrils reached out from it as if trying to grasp the air.

Yay! A great slime mold. They’re not extinct! she thought. This is going to be so easy. I’ll just use my ability and-

Just in front of her, a patch of earth sunk between two mighty roots began to move and fluoresce. And then she became aware that the forest floor was coming alive all around her, like stars fighting through the last light of day, patches of dim yellow light were emerging from the dark ground.

Before she could say anything, her other self released a cry of pure frustration and rage, a pale echo of Rosemallow’s battle cry and began to run toward the obelisk, pulling out her ironwood cudgel as she went.