I crept forward into the study with my candle, opening the door as quietly as I could, and made my way into the room.

I checked around and found the rest of the lighting, transferring the flame to light the room enough for me to read by before replacing the candle where it belonged.

I sat down in the comfy chair for Anna’s desk and lay the book down, making a little room. Anna had been writing letters by the look of it. She had a quill still in the ink, and I quickly closed it after emptying the pen. It had the look of fancy ink, not just the cheap kind, and there were a few pieces of parchment ready to write on, and it drying out would be a waste.

I made an attempt to safely stack the things I could to not mess up and knock something over, while also not disordering Anna’s desk.

Once I got that over with, I placed the book on the desk and went to read, but I decided to bring the slate over as well and put Anna’s questions on it.

Under the types of mana, I put down the four Elements: Fire, Water, Air and Earth, with space to list out the details I needed; then I wrote the other four sections I needed to answer, with the corresponding mana types.

Then, for the shits of it, I added the colour because why not? It could prove important or just nifty. I had to flip through and found that none of the arcane ones had a colour but a pattern, so I left them out. Then I filled out Fire and Air with a quirk.

It read:

The Elements

Fire

Water

Air

Earth

Formed from two base mana types.

Fastest Element.

The Natural

Plant

Beasts

Heat

Growth

The Celestial

Sun

Moon

Stars

Holy

The Arcane

Conjuration

Evocation

Enchantment

Quagmire

I couldn’t remember a quirk for water, so I decided to quickly flip to water and give it a read again.

Water is one of the three most commonly available elements. Its middle-of-the-road range leaves it as an all-around generally fantastic pick, even if one only picks it up to learn spells like [Conjure Water], which, while confusingly named, is not Conjuration, but simple water concentration.

Water, while it can be used for combat, is most commonly used for things such as agriculture or as general utility. In the desert? Water to quench your thirst. Drowning? Make a bubble so you have room to breathe. Still drowning because there wasn't air around? Well, you could pick up the mixed spell [Airate] to suck air from the water. This, too, is not conjuration, which led to the discovery of how fish breath was made by the [Druid of Tides] in the year 1250 of the modern era.

Look at that, a little nugget of History to go along with your magical studies.

I went ahead and filled in, water has air in it for a water quirk and moved on again to earth. Earth was incredibly boring, as much as Earth could be, anyway. You could use it for almost anything on land, it included the highest number of known mana types for its components and could be used to make buildings and whatnot.

I was all for soil; Kobolds were all about soil and taking care of the land and all that good stuff, but it was a bit of a snooze. It was straightforward, like water.

I noted that a section further down mentioned specific component mana types that produced enchantment mana and formed a kind of ‘mana gem,’ which was interesting, though I didn’t know all that much about them, and the book didn’t go into detail about the gems in question.

I was about to discount them when an errant twitch of memory reminded me of something.

Mana had to move.

Wait… How can mana stick in one place? Wouldn’t that cause it to turn into dark magic? It would get all stuffed up and then stop being a mana gem and turn into a focus point of dark magic.

The book doesn’t mention that, but I bet it would if the gems were a problem… Which implies that the gems are okay, and they somehow don’t do that, which would be quite an interesting thing… Way more interesting than metal magic.

…I wonder if Grave magic is somehow similar… Locking Death magic inside a grave to stop the body from rising as an undead.

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Into the quirk it went, and I was a quarter of the way done. The book was an easy read, even for me. At some points, the writer would just spring out of nowhere with a mace and just hit you with a fact, like with water magic.

He did this again for plant magic when, while talking about how plant magic created most of the mana in existence, slipped in:

The high amount of mana they produce implies that plants are alive in an appreciable way, they produce more mana by volume than even a human does, it’s just that grass is much smaller than a human. Many druids believe that plants, while not intelligent in a matter that is appreciable next to something like an animal, nonetheless us, form a kind of collective being. This being is called a Genus Loci, and they are the source druids connect to, which makes them different from the likes of a green cleric or plant magi.

Did you step on the grass? Ever? Have you ever cut any foliage? It knows who you are and where you sleep. How often do you wear clothes?

Anyway, Sweet dreams.

His unhinged vibe leaked from the pages of his book, the totality of which I could only assume fell short of the true extent of his vibe. He passed it into the book, and it was both endearing at times, and at others, it was more like he was actively trying to crawl into your head.

I would give him this, it certainly got my attention, grabbing my mind as it began to slip into passively reading. He also got at least one part wrong.

The land, no matter what you called it, didn’t seem to care if you killed one plant or even a bunch of plants. That and it extended way further than he seemed to give it credit. The land was more than just plants, for all that, it seemed to use whisker grass and the eye trees to feel and see the world around it. It was also somewhat extended to the ground, mountains, sky, and animals. Is there a disaster coming? Chances were the animals would want to leave. It told them to run away.

“I’m reading this book that says you’re just plants. Can you believe that?” I thought towards the land.

The Genus Loci, whatever that meant, responded with something along the lines of “Am. Am. Cloud plants, and plant plants, and ground plants, and water plants,” Which was a bit of a strange way to answer.

It came more in feeling, distanced from concepts, and somewhat mixed in its message.

It came off as me misunderstanding the lands answer, though the idea of wrestling the right answer out of it right now felt like it would be more of a pain than it was worth. Instead, I filed it away in the back of my mind and got back to reading.

Then, I stopped and thought about something else that tickled my memory.

Mana moved, and the movement made more mana, that’s how mana worked. But life was important for mana to grow.

Anna had told me that mana was inside of us, and we moved it far faster than something like a flowing river. Anna’s grove was a kind of focus point for a leyline. Anna’s grove grew plants like there was no tomorrow, and why It grew stupidly fast seemed obvious.

Plants took in the mana, made more mana and then the mana would seep back into the leyline. They were getting a constant stream of new, highly energetic mana, and unlike me, plants never stopped growing.

Each of those parts clicked together inside of my head, and suddenly, I realized why life was so important for growing mana.

It had been explained that it was because it moved a lot; mana changed a bunch inside of the body, so it only made sense that we would make more mana.

But was that true for grass? For trees?

They were taking in a bunch of mana and spit out less than me, sure, but if they also made more mana overall, then that movement inside of a person or animal made less sense.

But plants were alive.

I felt a bit like a crazy person as it clicked together, but it made so much sense.

Life grew mana because of Life mana. Life mana excited mana and made it grow more.

It was so simple. It was so stupidly simple that I felt like I could have put it together faster by hitting myself over the head with a frying pan.

Was that idea backwards? If life mana was what made more mana, and plants made more mana, then Humans, and humanoids by the sound of it, then is it more likely that people are just… Less effective at making mana because it changes so much? Or is it something like how we move, and plants don’t? god-osh darn it. I wish I had an answer to that, its going to keep me away all darn night.

Keeping me up all night was right. The feeling of the idea going off in my head hit me like ten cups of kindly’s tea. It perked me right the hell up, and I was suddenly incredibly aware that I had been slipping into the quiet embrace of lethargy, and it was only helped along by my slip-up at almost reaching out to the gods.

I felt the sudden need to pace like I was a kid again, and I couldn’t sit still. I no longer needed sleep, I needed answers, and they were answers that I couldn’t get because no one knew a whole lot about Life mana.

Anna certainly didn’t, I didn’t know all that much about it either.

I got up and paced around for a bit. Walking in an ellipse in anna’s study, as quietly as I could. By the time I had walked off a bit of the energy, enough that there was no twinging in my muscles, it had been long enough the candle had burned down significantly. The long intermission had served to give it a small distance from the need to know, letting my mind go wild over the fact that it was life mana instead of some trick of our bodies. I had tread over the idea a few hundred times, over its nooks and crevices. I had tread over the idea for so long that I had practically worn a hole in Anna’s floor.

Ideas like, does life exist to make more mana, and does mana kill people by draining the life from them aside, the distance let me get my metaphorical fingers back on the reigns of my own mind. Let me bring myself back and away from a possibly terrifying truth.

If I wanted to have a panic, a proper existential panic, I would have to do it on my own time.

I mean, this was my own time, but I was in the middle of something important.

Something far more important than something silly, like a possibly horrifying reason for life to exist.

I would just need to keep it in the back of my head and forget about it. That was easy enough; just forget about it, and it couldn’t hurt me. It certainly wasn’t going to fester in the back of my mind, swelling in the dark like an infection, slowly but surely metastasizing until the disease it caused started to leak through. It wouldn’t grow in the dark recesses of my mind like a mushroom until it made me buckle at the worst possible time.

Certainly not.

I stopped pacing and sat back down at Anna’s desk, flipping through the book, past the natural mana and the celestial and arcane mana types, right to Occult magic.

Occult magic.

Occult magics were not a simple task to categorize, apparently. The book and its ever-energetic author were somewhat lost on how to best represent them. He had never used any of the occult magics, but he knew a few people who had.

He had apparently reached out and done interviews with them, talking about things like life and death magic, soul magic, and dark magics like necromancy, and each had been cryptic, all on their own merit. Apparently, the type of person that ignored the idea of the taboo and approached them as normal were often quite cryptic, outcast, and sometimes just straight-up scary. Each and every one of them gave lacklustre answers to questions that I wanted to know.

Magealin wrote a quick note that caught my eye, and I read it in a not quite fuge state. Tense and anxious, like I was reading something that would get me in trouble.

It should be noted that while Occult magic and Occultism seem like they would be one and the same, that is not the case. Nor is it the case that a Cultist and Occultist are the same thing, though they often share something similar. A Cultist is a member of a cult, surprise, surprise, which means that they come in groups, often of a religious or pseudo-religious persuasion. Some cultists are no threat, not the evil cultists you would think about, but things like the secretive topmost ranks of a church, like the Cult of Life. Others worship beings like Demons or Angels. Some worse things. They gain power through the connection between themselves and the being, like a cleric or warlock does, though they're not mages and don't have the same freedom to work magic.

The difference between the two is simple. Cults often keep hidden secrets, Occultists seek hidden secrets.

As a Magician, my class was once the work of several generations of Occultists, each dutifully working to figure out neich ways that magic works, unearthing secrets that eventually lead to the rediscovery of the Magician class.

One part magical researcher, one part explorer, one part secret keeper, and just a pinch of magic with no oversight from a being like a cultist.

So don’t go burning them at the steak, ok? You never know if they’re going to be the ones to discover or rediscover something very important.

The book had more on cultists, and I supposed Occultists, than it did on the secrets of life and death magic.

When I got to that section, I found that life magic is predominantly performed by Life clerics, and according to Magealin. They were incredibly cryptic, apparently almost as much as a genuine necromancer. They kept their cards close to the chest, not giving Magealin anything but the basics. Life mana is not like other kinds of mana. Life Mana didn’t change it’s type, except to Death Mana, and was generated by living things.

Apparently, Healing was quite a hard task, and it took a majority of the section. With just life mana, it could be quite hard to heal with because an excess of life mana, in the words of the book, caused problems.

Excess life mana, Magealin wrote, causes rapid growth of the tissue of living beings, but an extended amount of life mana used like this has the capability to cause abnormal tumorous growths that can kill the person being healed. The less experienced the mage, or more likely cleric, the more likely they are to cause these tumours, which do not go away and often cause issues after treatment.

Instead, healing is often performed by mixing life mana with other mana types, such as Hearth for normal healing, or paired with Growth for guided regeneration of tissues without tumours. Pairing life mana with other mana types is quite hard, which is why it’s often done using holy magic instead of the hard way by a normal mage.

It should also be noted that life mana, through processes that have been kept hidden, is able to bring a recently deceased person back from the dead, though the cleric in question refused to elaborate.

The bastard.

I skipped death for now. Instead, I got up and walked over to an empty spot on the floor and lay down on it, the bare wood of the floor a firm presence at my back. I breathed in, calming, and let out a groan to myself because I now had more questions and no answers.

I had to actively hold myself back from my horrible need to screech, a noise that would, no doubt, wake up Anna and Selly.

I rubbed my closed eyes with the palms of my hands as I forced myself not to pound my head in frustration into the floorboards.

It was getting on into the night, but I didn’t stop lying on the floor for what felt like a few bergillion years, which was how long it took to get my mind under control.

At least I had gotten some work in. I had gotten some answers, even if they weren’t what I wanted, and I had gotten a whole lot more questions. I got back up, and instead of getting back to reading. I packed it up for the night.

I went around and snuffed out the candles, suffocating them with [Cantrip], which was easier than lighting them. All I had to do was pull air mana away from the fire, and it snuffed out. I made my way out of the room, closing the door lightly and tossed some more wood into the hearth before I tiptoed my way to bed.

Anna was sprawled out like she was possessed by the infamous snuggle demon, and the demon demanded blankets. All the sheets on the bed were baled up in front of her or pulled around her like a nest.

I disentangled the sheets, setting them on the bed again, but only after a short tug-of-war with Anna.

I slipped into bed, tucking Anna up into me, positioning myself around her how she liked, curled around her like she was sitting on my lap. I tucked us in and wrapped one arm around Anna’s belly and another under her in an attempt to keep her in one position.

I closed my eyes…

And like a blink, I woke up to bird song and Anna trying to get me to let go of her.