Through firsthand experience alone, Val learned that days for a trainee adventurer slipped by as unnoticeably as clouds on a rainy day. Finally, using the downtime between diving license registrations, she had a moment to herself to seek out clues for Life’s Hymn.
To her surprise, the Laws of Secrecy didn’t suddenly vanish once she became a mage. Things were marked, dotted and written down in government files to prevent anything escalating to another war. Good for Ciazel, bad for me.
Without credentials, power or money, she was hard-pressed to find anyone willing to bend. Doors shut in her face and computers restricted her—yet again. "Membership required!" it would blare.
Only when she dragged Caro to work her charms on the library's helper, an adolescent boy doomed to fail against her wiles, did he sneak past the sole publications he found.
A book, now in the hands of Val, a Novice he'd never met.
Monochrome pictures of an aether fruit marked the open pages lying on her lap, captions underneath. So far, all she’d been able to learn about aether fruits—information about Life’s Hymn itself, a presumably tightly kept corporate secret—was that it existed in places significantly packed with high amounts of aether.
The news was more depressing than her aether strand count.
It wasn’t far stretched to assume that the power of fauna and flora scaled to the surrounding energy levels. It was a major piece in the creation of rift rungs. Adding the ones and twos quite quickly, a stress-related headache pressed at her skull. She held an inkling obtaining the main ingredient of Life’s Hymn might be a mountain of trouble for her.
At least, for the Novice she was currently.
“Calling for Efron, Valory Efron.”
Inclining her head at the announcement, she closed her book and joined the small queue of people. About time.
While not in one of the prominent CAU buildings, the Diving License Branch gave Val pause as she entered through its automatic doors. Lofty ceilings encaved the slow crawl of adventurer administration, its domed roof adding a distinct touch.
Stanchions bordered the few people ahead, the CAU’s iconic golden cloud emblazoned onto the red tapes between. Before long, she reached the front to meet a lady of the Eastern, Sarado Islands.
Mom's ethnicity.
Of pecan complexion, she pulled her dark-brown hair into a business bun and her green eyes flitted everywhere. Rummaging through the multitudes of cabinets behind the counter squashed between two pillars, she hurried to fill her station.
“Miss Efron.” The lady bowed her head and handed over a document and metal pin. “Here’s your diving license and your adventurer’s badge. Sixth-class adventures tend to rank up easily so I’ll tell you in advance, here’s the place to use your diving points to become fifth-class. If you wish to buy spells with them instead, there’s a separate branch for that.”
“Wait—I can buy spells with these diving points? What are they anyways?”
The lady mirrored Val’s shock. “You don’t know?”
“Been a bit busy.”
“Fair enough, I suppose,” she said. “Diving points are given whenever a mage dives into a rift and hands in the account of their winnings to the CAU. They calculate the amount they’ve done inside, as well as how much they’ve benefited the country and award them with diving points.
"And I can buy spells?"
"Spells, skills, items," the lady listed. "You could post up a notice of your own if you wanted, using your currency as payment," the lady informed. "It gives adventurers incentive to dive a rift at their own risk."
“I see,” Val muttered.
Risk and reward, the theme it seemed for many things of the arcane.
----------------------------------------
First Halo of Ciazel,
Atera,
Hall of Eons
-Five days later-
Sweat stung Val's eyes and she winced, gaze burning the steel rod within her tight grasp.
“C’mon,” she muttered, willing the energy in her Aetherial Vessel to flow into the unactivated Elemental shield. To her, it was like playing make-pretend, urging her brain to believe in something she couldn’t quite see, grasp or perceive. All this time, she never felt aether itself, just the pain of its mere presence working against her.
Regardless, lines of script washed over the shaft as it reached the magical tool. Water flowed out of its fringes like a furious tide and a liquid barrier formed, creating the perfect shield able to cover her body's height and width. Val whistled at the reborn weapon in her hands. Now that’s cool.
They’d been toying around with standard devices used in rifts, Instructor Hawke informing them which were faulty and how to tell. The tools stole massive chunks of her reserves. It hurt to swallow anything past her raw throat. Her windpipe suffered from dryness after vomiting her guts out.
“That’s not even the worst of it,” Instructor Hawke had said. “Once we get you casting,” she chuckled, “those rebounds will eat you alive.”
Her stomach twisted as the E-shield dried the remaining essence from her body, her AV sending a pulsing ache as it strained itself like a wrung towel. Yeah yeah, I hear the message loud and clear.
Val let the E-shield clatter to the ground. The liquid swallowed itself up as she released it, not a drop of water visible on the unblemished white of the floor.
Five seconds.
That was how long she could use a defective weapon. A shameful time compared to the minute Caro and others achieved. It wouldn’t matter much though. Today, she’d take the first steps toward raising her ASC.
…
“As a mage,” the instructor lectured the sixty trainees seated in rows before her, “we often talk about how to expend energy, but never how to regain it. It’s a necessary action proceeding and preceding any form of an engagement, prepped for or not. The process in which we do so is arranged into what we simply call breathing techniques.”
“This is it!” Caro said in a harsh whisper. “Cultivation. How long until we fly on those floating swords.”
Val stifled a laugh. “You watch too many movies.”
“We pass these along through manuals.” Golden gyroscope in hand, the instructor twiddled the ends of the spheric object. Rings whirred into motion and, once placed on the floor, purred feebly.
A core of hardened light formed and a screen hovered above. Stretching out of the gyroscope, an image of a person in a lotus position was made clear for all to see. Arrows flowed in and out of his body, directing a current of something—presumably aether—to the core of his form.
“I had you waste your aether on magitech for a reason,” the instructor informed them. “The first part of any breathing technique is meditation, the act of refilling your Aetherial Vessel with the surrounding energy.”
Instructor Hawke turned to stare at her students through a dark pair of sunglasses. “Look at the manual—brand it into your brain—and then close your eyes. You may proceed.”
The sixty trainees blinked at the stark, bare description.
“Go on,” Instructor Hawke said, her crossed arms saying the rest. Or do you want to run laps?
Once finished studying the Congruence of Prevalent Essence, Val welcomed the darkness and shut her eyelids. First, breathe in.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
And she did so, allowing the air to replenish her tired lungs. Breath out.
Through her mouth, a steady stream of air exited, ridding her of carbon dioxide. She fell into a monotonous cycle, void of any thoughts and wishes, gone from the frustrations plaguing her consciousness.
Subsist and live, that was all she was to do.
The EC-room’s panels vanished from her mind. Her peers disappeared. A mage lingered by herself in the vast emptiness of untouched water, serenity encapsulating her entire being. Finally, she perceived it.
Aether.
Motes of twinkling energy remained frozen in time, unmoving and yet drawing her internal gaze in captivation. Tiny, barely larger than a pupil, and capable of giving mortals the power of the Elemental Saints.
A visceral instinct filled her being, so powerful it felt more than desire.
It was hunger.
This time Val didn’t just inhale, she breathed. In that instance, a soft will echoed out, like a faintly strummed guitar harmonic. It resonated at her call, energy gravitating to where she meditated.
A wave of refreshment like she’d never experienced before followed, like a drop of water after centuries of drought. It coursed through her throat and the arteries of her heart. She guided it—she didn’t know how, really—and it listened, spreading throughout her bloodstream and filling her with an indescribable sense of wholeness.
As she breathed out, she reined it in and plugged it inside her AV. Aether particles seeped through, one at a time, and Val found herself grateful for the process. Each speck stripped away a sliver of her mortality. She grew ready to conquer the realities of the tomorrows to come. Nourished, her Aetherial Vessel unfurled, stretching back out into the size of a coin at her sternum and—
Val gasped, jolting back into the physical plane. Reality kicked in—chilled air, drenched active wear, a stench of body odour. Saints. She could hardly breathe.
“A protective reflex for when you top out,” Instructor Hawke said as Val adjusted to the bright walls of the room, blinking rapidly. “With your closed channels and unopened nodes, meditating any longer would cause harm worse than overextending your AV.”
“Closed channels?” Val parroted. “Unopened nodes?”
Instructor Hawke put a finger on her lips. “Quiet now, others are still meditating.”
Something to research on my own then, she thought, putting it to the back of her mind. Val frowned as she looked at her peers, for more than one reason. More than a few pinched their eyebrows in exertion and others drummed their fingers against their arms, indication enough that they hadn’t fallen deep into meditation.
She guessed the reason soon enough: a mage’s PAST.
It was frightening to glance at her enthusiastic friend and witness a statue. It was as if she was a corpse sitting up, waiting to be buried. Though as a high bronze, it was to be expected.
The second reason for her upside-down smile was that, well, despite being of a higher PAST, she envied them. Their ASC allowed them to remain in meditation longer, to embrace the neutral essence for an extensive period.
It wasn’t about chasing the next high. It was the sense that she was more than enough, a place where expectations couldn’t reach her. It was serenity.
…
“Heaven,” Caro muttered thirty minutes later. “That was incredible.”
“More than incredible,” Val said. “You alright, though? You were out of it for a while there, kinda scary seeing you... gone for moments on end.”
“You are the last one to talk, V.” Caro shook her head, reminiscent. “You disappeared the moment Instructor Hawke allowed you to. One second you were here and the next? Absent. That’s crazy.”
“Agreed. Can’t believe you were the first one to meditate out of all of us.”
A shadow loomed over Val. Her head careened upwards and she squinted at a girl standing above. She groaned internally at the sight of a certain trainee. What must be litres of hairspray glazed her detailed, scarlet coiffure, barely hanging on to pale face.
It never took long for a class to establish levels and cliques, even with adults ranging in their mid-twenties. Two prodigies—two queens, to be exact—settled on the very top: Novice Hayes and Novice Flamesworth.
“What’s your PAST, Efron?” Flamesworth pushed. “Enlighten us.”
“Have some tact, Novice Flamesworth.”
Val’s brow furrowed. Instructor Hawke, of all people, spoke in her place. “You wouldn’t want me yelling the amount in your bank across the room, would you? Here you are, asking something even more sensitive to mages. I sense you like running drills?”
Flamesworth tapped her boots together. “No, ma’am!”
“Good. I don’t want to have to add etiquette to the lesson regimen,” the instructor muttered. “Sit.”
Flamesworth lingered for one second, hazel irises withholding ire, before speeding to her seat in the back rows. Just great.
As soon as the class settled, a line of lapis-blue crystals appeared at the instructor's feet, enough to beat the group of trainees in numbers. The instructor raised a hand in the air and the surrounding presence condensed. Mist materialized into a cover around her, concentrating further into an opaque fog and then clouds?
Dusty smog moved past the line of transparent objects, encroaching on where Val sat and beyond. The throb across her temple was a telltale sign of it being a spell, yet Val held her breath despite all she learned about the act, scared to breathe.
Like a caress, the smoke coaxed her clenched fists open, dropping a hard object into her grasp.
Gasps cut across the obscure haze. Others likely received the same treatment. In an instant, the cloudy cover cleared up, disappearing as if it was never there. What type of element is she even bound to? Smoke? Dust? Clouds—does that one even exist?
“Alright.” Instructor Hawke’s voice pulled Val back from her bewildering experience, giving a pat to the gyroscope on the ground and rising to meet their gaze. “What you’re now holding are remnants, purified energy cores of the wild creatures within rifts.”
Another diagram appeared, one of an AV, alongside a bullet list of instructions. Val gaped at the ever-going list of instructions.
Caro sucked in a breath. “That’s a truckton to learn.”
“And it's just the basics,” Val whispered back.
“To enlarge our AV,” the instructor continued, “a dense amount of aether is required. You can’t find a place naturally overflowing in aether on this half of the continent, at least not for free. To compensate we use remnants.”
Summoning a remnant of her own, she spun the diamond-shaped item on a finger. “Draw the contents out of the remnants and use the energy to coax size into your AV. If you feel resistance, do not proceed. If you sense a struggle in your actions, cease to continue. Failing in doing so at such a low yet important stage is foolish and you’ll have only yourself to blame. Understood?”
“Yes, Instructor Hawke!”
“And before you begin, beware.” She raised a palm. “This uses your original aether strands in the process. When dry, simply engage in meditation once more. Go ahead.”
Go ahead? The guide, called Growth Assimilation apparently, had more steps than a trig equation. The fact was dumbfounding, so much so that Val pulled the tranquility she built in the previous hours to grow the nerve to attempt it.
Okay so first, serene state.
That was easy enough and before she knew it, Val had entered complete stillness. No movement, no sound, no unneeded thoughts or feelings.
Next, she greeted the remnant in her hand with a little aether of her own. Val forced energy out of her vessel and pushed it into her blood flow, allowing it to reach the veins of her forearms and eventually, her palm.
She winced as the energy inside repelled her will—her identity. According to the breathing technique, that was normal, to be expected. It was part of her job to subsume the aether inside the remnant and stamp it with her soul signature.
It appeared that refining was the following step—if she remembered correctly, that is—though it had been highlighted by an asterisk. The aether inside the remnant had already been purified in some form, leaving her with little to do than sift instead of compress.
Now of the same kind, the aether inside the remnant nudged against her palm. Val built a mental dam to break its strong flow, permitting only a trickle to pass through.
A sense of euphoric happiness filled her at the slow flux, followed by a daunting dread of the end of a being’s cycle, finished with a boundless feeling of rightness. Val didn’t have time to decipher her feelings, conducting the energy flow straight to her AV.
The final stage of the Growth Assimilation breathing technique was to piece together a larger version of your vessel, to intertwine both new and old aether strands and stitch together a vase capable of holding more than it could previously.
To call it difficult was an understatement. Yesterday, she had hardly been able to sense energy and today, she had to control it with acute accuracy. Only one thing to do.
Val dived head forward, using her will to spell volume into an enclosure, to build more from less. Her Aetherial Vessel expanded as she solved the puzzles of cultivation, asking the queries, and answering the questions. She discovered something about the prolonged, profound process.
She loved it.
It must’ve been hours by now and she gauged she perhaps didn’t even grow up to one aether strand in size. Yet, the contentment gained from diving into the metaphysical and witnessing how the material and immaterial parts of her interacted was a bottomless well, with no hope to glimpse the bottom.
Then, without her say once more, her grip on her aether unraveled, like a loose ball of yarn. Val searched for the answer within, desperately so before the imminent eviction of her mind occurred.
Zero aether strands remained in her AV. So quick?
In a flash, she bounced back into her natural body, gaze fluttering to the rest. Everyone continued cultivating and here she was, drained of aether and in need of meditation. That’s what Miss Rox was getting at. No matter how ‘talented’ she might be, all these pauses would delay her progress by an extreme amount, negating the effects of being a silver.
Caro’s favourite saying came to mind.
Well, shit.