Weeks of near-constant failures passed as I tried again and again to work out the trick to my hypothetical technique. I altered my breathing pattern and attempted it near the Aether pool, hoping that higher mana density might change the result, yet success eluded me.

While I fully intended to crack the problem before I left Aresford for my next destination, I had to remain pragmatic. There were too many tasks to do, and slamming my head against a wall wasted time more than anything else.

Instead, I turned my focus toward the Aether pool. There was no chance I would uncover anything alchemic about the waters that prior researchers had missed, but that was not my intention. These waters had somehow fused stably with Aether, something vanishingly few physical materials could do. Thanks to them, I was now within 'eyeshot' of Mist and could ascend before winter. And beyond either of these, they had transformed a man into a monster.

I needed to understand my element, and there was no better way to do so than by observing it in nature. So, for the fifth day in a row, I sat in the clearing.

Or, more accurately, floated in the clearing.

Direct contact with the water helped me sense the Aether within more precisely, and I was not one for half-measures. The first time I had swam into the center of the pool had felt a little embarrassing, but I pushed it aside in favor of practicality. Who cared what the birds and bugs of the forest thought about me if I was learning more about magic?

From past research, I knew that Aether had no known 'natural' counterpart. This was a unique feature, a question without an answer. It was the prevailing riddle limiting my magic and one I hoped to solve.

Was it possible there was no natural counterpart to Aether? Maybe, but that felt wrong. Nonsensical. Why would this energy, which was clearly related to other forms of mana, be unique in that regard?

I thought back to my future self and his magic. He had used Aether to twist and bend time to his will. Was it possible that was the secret? Was Aether the mana of time and space? Of reality and existence itself?

But that made no sense. Why would I be unable to use the other elements? If anything, I should be uniquely poised to wield and twist everything. Fire and metal existed, right? If Aether was the power of existence itself, all fell under it.

I reconsidered his time spell and realized something. My future self had not moved time so much as stepped outside of it. He had anchored a portion of the Astral Plane to his will and allowed us to interact by taking advantage of the plane's properties.

How?

It had to be a property of Aether. That could be the trick to it. Maybe Aether was the power of will made manifest, a purer form of mana than all others. That might explain the apparent lack of a natural counterpart and innate power, but it still felt incomplete. Closer than my previous thought, but wrong nonetheless.

As I floated on my back, I reached out and felt the Aether swirl and pulse around me. It was soothing in a way, lending a strange, arcane warmth to my body, entirely at odds with the brisk late summer air that blew over Aresford.

The mana was not painful, even though it should be based on everything I knew. Aether broke down physical materials, whether it was iron ingots, steel weapons, or blood. Hell, it would kill me once I grew too powerful, tearing my body apart from the inside out.

Was that the truth? Would the mana of my will grow so powerful that it tore me apart. If so, it would be an ironic fate. I might become strong enough to fend off the invaders, only to die anyway.

A willful mage, killed by his own will. If it was not my life, I might laugh.

I opened my eyes, lifting one hand to my face to examine my skin. Thick calluses had grown to cover my palms, and my fingertips had wrinkled, but that was it. There were no noticeable wounds, no signs that hours within the water had done anything harmful to my body.

Why? What was I missing?

With one final sigh, I turned and swam to the shore. Though I felt closer to the truth than before, this was not a mystery I would solve within a day.

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***

I hit the boundary of Mist just as autumn reached Aresford in full. It was lightning-fast growth, all things considered, to the point where I doubted any other apprentice had beaten me. Well, any save Sophia, but comparing myself to her was pointless. As I had once told Flynn Sion, I had only one rival, and it was not a second-year lightning mage.

Still, that speed allowed me to test a hypothesis that had been in the back of my head for months. If it worked, it might help mitigate a few of my lingering deficiencies, and if it failed, it was one more question answered.

First, I cast my strengthening spell. By now, constant practice had rendered the magic faster and more efficient. I could hold it without any real focus on my part, move without risk of injury, and maintain it for about five minutes as long as I used no other magic.

While that time limit would only grow as I advanced, it was still too short and limiting. My magic would become more demanding as it grew more complex, requiring more energy rather than less. I had planned to rely upon efficiency rather than raw stamina...but if I could get a little of both, all the better.

I dropped the spell, taking several minutes to refill my core before reaching into my bag and pulling out a filled vial of Aether water. I made sure to take only a sip and felt the energy contained within stream into my core. It was not much, barely more than what I would get from a few days worth of gathering, but the effects were instantaneous.

Within seconds, there was a sensation of 'fullness' within my core, as though I had overeaten. I grunted, placing one hand against my chest before closing my eyes and diving inward.

The roiling emerald cloud within my core rippled. Thin wisps brushed the edges of the spherical chamber, which remained blackened from my tempering months earlier. Normally, there would be the tiniest gap between my Aether and the walls, a gulf that even active gathering could not fully bridge.

Yet now, even before my eyes, that gap shrunk and vanished. My grunt became a muffled shout as the cloud pushed against the walls of my core. The fullness became a dull ache, radiating through my chest in deep, throbbing waves of fire.

I considered casting a spell to drain the excess energy but paused. The pain, though substantial, was not an unhealthy or dangerous ache. It felt more akin to stretching a tight muscle or joint rather than straining a body part. So, I leveled my breathing and sat on the cave floor, trying to relax as much as possible.

Hours passed as I breathed, doing my best to ignore the aching, throbbing pain within my core that worsened by the moment. It reached an apex after the first few minutes and remained at that agonizing peak for about a half-hour before it slowly receded. Aching pains became dull, unpleasant twinges, which in turn faded to brief, faint flickers of discomfort.

When the last wisps of pain vanished, I let out a low breath and relaxed, opening my eyes and standing. I ran through a few light exercises, searching for any noticeable side effects and finding none—or rather, none that were external.

I closed my eyes and looked inward again, finding my core apparently unchanged. The walls remained the same deep green, verging on black, and the cloud at the center was the same mass of diffuse green with a bright star at the center holding my former self's legacy.

However, the gap between my mana and the vessel's walls had returned. As I looked around, I swore my core had grown larger, though I could not be sure. So, it seemed best to verify.

I cast my strengthening spell again, folding my arms over my chest as it settled into place, and began counting. It was an imperfect science without a proper time-keeping device, but a rough estimate should do just fine.

The spell collapsed after just under five minutes, as it always did, and I smiled. By my count, I had lasted four seconds longer. Even if I was off by a second or two, it was an undeniable improvement over what should be my theoretical maximum. I would need to repeat the test a few more times to be sure, but it looked promising.

I pulled out my notebook and began writing observations, hypotheses, and basic calculations. Magical development was an inexact science, but if I teased out a few extra seconds from one such session, how many would I get from ten? Or a hundred? Would my core double in size if I did this enough?

That seemed too convenient. If this process was so simple and effective, more mages would do it. It was such an obvious logical jump that I had to assume there were drawbacks I had not considered yet. Otherwise, every mage alive would have a titanic core and bottomless reserves.

After a few hours, I narrowed it down to five possibilities.

First, the process was too painful for too little benefit. How many would willingly subject themselves to this sort of pain for a few seconds longer with a first-year spell?

Second, the stretching process weakened the core in some way. Channels tore when too much mana passed through them, so the same might hold true for a core. Maybe it reached a point where a mage's core simply split open, growing too weak to hold itself together.

Third, there might be a 'maximum' core size, where the process slowed to a glacial pace or stopped entirely.

Fourth, most mages did not have enough supplies to constantly push their core larger and larger. Even a Duke could not afford an endless supply of elixirs, so it might be untenable for most.

And fifth, the nobility simply had better methods of doing the same thing. I had already hypothesized that Leon's gathering technique helped him store more mana within his core, and it stood to reason there were other similar techniques.

One or all of the explanations could be the truth, but I decided it did not matter much. My path forward seemed obvious.

I was uniquely positioned to take advantage of the opportunity, even if this makeshift process was wasteful and dangerous. The pain was bad, but not nearly so bad that I would pass up a chance to improve my magic. My core had been tempered enough to hold up even if I did 'thin' its walls a little. Finally, the Aether pool provided more than enough resources to make such an inefficient process viable.

More than any of those reasons, this might be the best chance to expand my core. I had no threats or rivals looming over me, making advancing necessary. It was a chance, a way to gain an advantage over my peers and one I would be a fool to pass up.

"Two months," I murmured, nodding to myself once, "Two months on this, and then I advance to Mist."

I would need to temper more often and spend more time meditating to try and smooth out instabilities from using the water, but two months would give me ample time to increase my core size. Or to see the errors of my way and learn a valuable lesson about untrained and untested magical techniques.

Cat meowed as if agreeing with my proclamation, and the noise sounded almost happy. I smiled at the feline, feeling almost optimistic for the first time since arriving in Aresford. At the risk of tempting fate, it felt as if things were finally looking up for us.