When Gust set out, he was confident he would find his destination within an hour or two. The compass would help point him in the right direction, but only as long as Gust knew where he was on his map. He travelled slowly just to make sure he didn’t lose his place.

It never ceased to amaze him how untouched nature was in this world. Instead of paved roads, there were well-beaten paths. Instead of car horns and light pollution, there were birds singing and air so clean Gust realized his own world’s air wasn’t.

After a bit of trial and error, he stumbled upon an old, overgrown path which led to Philo’s home.

This time, Gust approached carefully. He took the cultivation manual out of his pack and held it up over his face. “Don’t shoot! Valuable property here!”

Slowly, Gust pressed forward with the book protecting him. He held a wry smile the entire time and when he reached the pair of siblings, he pretended like he had just noticed them. “Oh, there you are! I was just worried about, you know, arrows. My head was just starting to feel better. Didn’t want to take a sudden turn for the worse.” His eye landed on a very unamused Philo as he said that. She crossed her arms and gave him a flat look.

Gust held the cultivation manual out to her with a grin. The front read, in pretty green lettering, ‘Path of the Will of the Woods.’

After a few seconds of silence, she snatched the book out of his hands and flipped through it quickly. Philo snorted. “How do I know this is even real?”

“Read it and try it. The method uses wood mana, so it should be perfect for you two.” Gust retrieved the paper, quill, and ink and handed them to Myles.

Meanwhile, Philo sat on the ground with the book in her lap. She found the page which detailed the cultivation technique and began contorting her body into something that resembled a tree. Her arms reached out like branches, fingers splayed like leaves.

Both Gust and Myles watched intently, though only the mage saw the more important details. Mana flowed slowly, subtly toward and into Philo’s body. Without any meridians, much of the mana was lost before it could reach her soul.

A strange expression appeared on Philo’s face, but she recovered quickly. “It works. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t sneak a few traps into the rest of the manual,” she snapped. Gust resisted the urge to roll his eyes and Myles pursed his lips in an apologetic expression.

“Does that mean we’re good?” Gust asked, wanting to move the deal along. There was no chance of rain, but he still wanted to make it home before dark. “That book costs me a hundred merits each day, and right now I only have enough for three days. So, if you want enough time to copy the entire thing, I’m going to need that goldenseal. And a lot of it.”

Philo sighed and said, “Come on,” as she brushed past Gust’s shoulder. She didn’t explain, nor did she speak the entire time.

They spent an hour navigating an increasingly dense part of the forest. The trees here were thicker and taller, the bushes and brush covered everything with big, dark leaves, and the sounds of insects and birds grew faint.

Gust’s mana sense told him these were all because of the local mana field. It thickened as they traveled and reached a density like that of the school but kept increasing.

Along the way, Myles stumbled and would have fallen if Gust hadn’t caught his arm. In the middle of apologizing, Myles glanced at Gust’s closed eye and decided to finally ask, “Is it hard walking through here with only one eye? I mean, I have two and I still can’t see every root.”

“It’s, uh, not so bad. My mana sense makes up for it.”

Myles nodded and spoke carefully. “Were you born like that? It’s just… I’ve heard cultivators heal quickly, especially as they advance.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“No… not born with it,” Gust muttered, not sure how to explain. His black eye was only good for seeding fear within his school. It kept him safe under the implication that a vastly powerful being might interfere if anyone attacked.

But Gust didn’t want to scare these two. Myles was friendly, and though Philo was not, Gust could understand her attitude. The world was a mix of mages and mortals, and these siblings sat somewhere between the two. They only wanted safety and survival.

Luckily, Myles took Gust’s silence as a cue that he didn’t want to talk. The trip was spent in silence until Philo pulled back a group of large leaves and stood aside with an uncharacteristic smile.

Within the valley she just revealed, an ancient, gigantic tree was surrounded by a few dozen yards of relatively open space on all sides. Flowers of a dozen colors grew large in that intermediate zone before the forest took over. While Philo stopped and put her hands on her hips, nodding proudly to herself, Gust pushed by and walked right up to the tree.

The air leaked out of his lungs in a gasp. The trunk seemed to keep getting bigger as he walked closer. It was easily three times wider than he was tall. A car could have driven through it! Although it didn’t grow very high, the amalgamation of branches and green leaves before him was the most amazing tree Gust had ever seen.

To his mana sense, the bark shone like elder Ephraim. Gust squinted as he saw it, a silly habit he was trying to get rid of. The mana sense wasn’t a function of his eyes, even if it felt that way sometimes.

Gust could sense mana entering through the roots and leaving via the branches, but the exiting mana was a light green color. “How did you find this? What is it?” the Demon muttered as he ran his hand along bark that felt as hard as stone.

Philo tapped the side of her head and said, “I saw it. The mana around here was clearly concentrating somewhere. I followed the flow and found this huge red maple. Myles, get the goldenseal. I want to try something.”

While her brother nodded and got to work, the girl walked up to the ancient tree’s trunk and sat down in her cultivation position.

The mana in this area was definitely dense, but Gust didn’t want to contaminate his soul with the wrong aspect. Instead of joining her, Gust stood nearby and watched as Philo’s jaw dropped. Her brow tightened and her breathing quickened as a river of mana flowed toward her soul.

A painful expression appeared on her face and Philo’s teeth clenched. Her posture faltered, but she continued cultivating through the evident discomfort.

The method she previously used was barely even a method. It was no more than simple meditation and, while that worked, it lacked some of the deeper details that made more advanced methods so efficient.

Whereas before, she would cultivate in any quiet place by just sitting, clearing her mind, and breathing steadily, this was more complicated. It required her to sit in a posture which felt unnatural, to breath in a way that left her short of breath.

The benefits, however, were immediately noticeable, and despite the prickling pain filling her body, Philo was in almost as good a mood as Augustus. Even when she took a break, she didn’t display the emotion so clearly, but there was a slight upward crescent to her lips that only her brother noticed.

For his part, Myles… grew extremely bored and started regretting going along for this trip. Harvesting the available goldenseal only took a few minutes, then he joined Gust in watching his sister. His own talent for cultivation was so low that he didn’t even want to try. The sorcerer who captured him even gave this reason for letting him live.

Mana was precious, after all, and there was only so much to go around. Myles’ former master didn’t want slaves taking up all the mana he intended for himself. The one time Myles tried cultivating in that place, his master beat him within an inch of his life, gave him a healing pill, then beat him again.

It would suffice to say that the entire idea of magic was soured to him. Myles recognized his sister’s talents, though, and did everything he could to help her grow strong so that one day she would find the man that caused them such suffering.

While Myles was no less dedicated to their goal now than ever, he still felt restless. Cultivation was an interesting process, but watching cultivators was much like watching grass grow or paint dry.

Not a half hour passed before he started wandering. He knew the area well enough to not get lost, but he and his sister spent very little time in this part of the forest. Although he could navigate it, he knew nothing of the local predators.

As Myles walked away, Gust checked on the goldenseal Myles harvested, and grinned. There were at least several pounds here, and Gust saw much more growing nearby, untouched. It was just one of the many types of flowers and herbs which flourished in the shadow of that ancient tree. He took out his compass and activated its location saving function so that it could always lead him back to this place. Gust didn’t plan on picking the place clean, but it could be a valuable source of reagents for either Jonas’s pills, or Ephraim’s future missions.

A savage scream suddenly ruined both cultivators’ focus. Gust’s eye immediately met Philo’s and they burst into motion without a word.