“What I’m seeing here is that the hole will be a pain to sew back.” First Sergeant Shyz touched my shoulder and inspected the hole. “Damn, it’s a clean hole by both sides of the jacket but your shoulder is in perfect condition. I wished I could heal like that on demand.”

“Don’t you have a system or something for broken uniforms?” I asked him as he stepped away from my side.

“We do.” Shyz scratched his blue ears. “But the Vanguard Order’s uniforms are done by commission, we don’t have spares, we have to call a tailor.”

“Then how did you have one ready for me?”

The arcanist shrugged. “Ask the Arcane Veil or the Ceaseless Storm about that, I was only notified of your integration the day before I met you.”

I couldn’t help but sigh. Shyz didn’t seem annoyed by it and sighed a moment later.

“Then what are we going to do with the training?” I inquired. “I may be a reasonably competent arcanist, but I’m a mystic before all else.”

“We do not have mystics here, I’m afraid.” Tir’ne shook his head. “Training will have to remain with your Arcane element.”

“So, I’ll be training tomorrow too with Aln?”

“Firstly, it’s Sergeant Dukoi for you.” Was his surname Dukoi? I couldn’t even remember. “And no. Dukoi may be a good instructor and an excellent mage, but that plays against him here. He’s too serious and won’t go easy. You need a training partner. I’ll assign you to Corporal Tulle for the time being.”

A quick burst of True Recall reminded me that Tulle was the surname of Sheel, the young arcanist that questioned me when I was introduced to the Vanguard Order. I supposed that the name Sheel was common, as my deceased grandmother was also called that way.

“I could also give you free time to train with your soul magic if you want,” Shyz added.

“I would appreciate that.” I nodded.

“I’ll tell you the details later, but for now, let’s eat.” Tir’ne patted me on the shoulder with a strength worthy of a soldier.

Shyz guided me through the military camp toward the cafeteria. There were a lot of soldiers present, even the members of the Vanguard Order. It would seem there was no special treatment for the powerful in the Ferilyn military. I liked that; I had gone tired of the whole meritocracy thing as of late.

I followed my superior and swiftly got my rations. A plentiful salad bowl, a piece of fruit, and a curious-looking white juice. As I didn’t know anyone here, I sat at the same table as the rest of the members of the order, better get acquainted with them the sooner.

“Hmm…” A voice pondered at my side. “I have heard something but that’s quite the hole. These uniforms are made to withstand a lot of mistreatment.” The source was none other than Corporal Tulle, my new sparring partner.

“Hello, I guess?” I saluted the girl, or rather, woman. She still had like half a century or so more than me.

“Oh, hello!” Sheel saluted me back. “Sorry, I can get a bit pushy.”

“There’s no problem.” I dismissed with my head. “If I didn’t want conversation, I would have sat in another place.”

“That’s amazing.” Her eyes sparked in joy. “Thank you for sitting beside me. I was the youngest of the order, so I was always looked at a bit differently. Though I guess this has changed with your inclusion.”

“By the way, Tulle…”

“Please, call me Sheel.” She interjected me with a smile.

“Then call me Edrie…”

“Alright!” She intervened once more.

I gave her a slight look, but she looked at me ever-so-innocently. Sheel reminded me of Marissa, the young childish Marissa, not the current one. The current one had proven to be quite a different and forward person.

Anyways… I wasn’t against this type of attitude. Ellari were pretty dry as their behavior went, so I liked when I found energetic ones. Marissa had lost most of that energy with age, but Sheel, even when she was like a century old, maintained it.

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“So, Sheel…” I waited for a hot second, but this time she didn’t interrupt me. “It seems we’ll be training partners now.”

“Oh, really?” The arcanist exclaimed with overwhelming radiance. “First Sergeant Shyz never lets me train new Privates, so I mostly have sparred with members of the order all day, but because they look at me like they do, is a bit underwhelming, I’m also a ten-star mage, you know? But that’s good, having a new partner, someone who doesn't look down on me because of my age is a very good thing.”

That… that was certainly a stampede of words. If it wasn’t because of my accelerated train of thought and sophisticated ears, I doubted I could have caught every single word.

“You know that I’m a nine-star arcanist, right?”

“Yes?” Sheel responded with doubt but quickly steeled her expression. “I mean, yes, absolutely.”

Did she know? I told them at the presentation, didn’t I?

Hmm… A brief look with True Recall told me that I didn’t explicitly say I was a nine-star arcanist, but that was pretty obvious. Every mage had its way to evaluate other people’s power, but some were more flawed than others.

“But you are aware that my main magic is of Soul?” I asked her for confirmation. She nodded back. “Alright, so I was thinking we could spar with you using Arcane and me using Soul?”

That got a reaction out of her. Not of cheerfulness, but of doubt. There were a lot of bad things talked about of Soul affinity, and they were more or less justified. It was somewhat considered an “evil” element like Shadow and Void.

“We…” She started. “We could definitely try.”

Sheel had her doubts, but curiosity got the best of her and she wanted to see what the legendary soul magic was like. Or that’s what Mystic’s Dominion told me.

“Great,” I added with a clap. “Now if you allow me, I would like to try my food.”

“Oh, sure,” Sheel said. “Sorry for distracting you.”

“Then I should apologize for keeping this conversation afloat,” I added with a smile.

I munched on the salad with caution, expecting this to be the worst meal in the world as I had the preconception that military food could only be horrendous, but truth be told, it was decent. Not that good, but a good meal, nonetheless. The salad was correctly seasoned, the fruit was ripe, and the juice… I didn’t know what that was, but it was good.

I took my sweet time to finish my lunch, so when I ended, everyone had already left the cafeteria. I also had nothing to do until tomorrow, as First Sergeant Shyz had told me to take the afternoon free, so I decided to go back to my room-sized building (building-sized room?) and meditated more.

My soul had become a very chaotic place. Between the fact that I had lost an adult-sized chunk of soul and that I had become a superb-true affinity user, I couldn’t take my eyes off my soul.

Upon concentrating, I was transported inside my soulspace.

The interior of my very spirit had gradually shifted from two very separated walls of violet and white into a homogenous lavender. Slowly but surely, the arcane tumors were disappearing. My soul was overpowering the arcane energies of the world, but it took time.

Most of the disappeared tumors were of my actual Arcane affinity and not those generated by the leyline. The incredibly concentrated mana still lingered. I couldn’t determine if that was because of the mana capacitator filtering mana into my main soul or if leyline mana was that powerful.

I liberated a bit of the lavender mana into the real world.

Arcane mana tended to take a lightning or light aspect on the corporeal plane, and Soul mana was like a spectral wind, but this lavender mana shifted between a heavy fog and a light haze.

It wasn’t dangerous by any means, or more than the average mana, at minimum. Mana poisoning was a factor that affected every mana type. Yet with this mixture of mana, I could feel a sense of connection. As if I understood it better than Arcane or Soul mana.

“Is this what superb-true affinity means?” I whispered on my bed, gathering the haze with my burned hand.

I manipulated the mana with unstructured, one-star magic. The mana was dense and pure, not as much as the mana I had experimented on the leyline, but not that far off.

I recalled the lessons from Henry Innit back at the Academy of Ferilyn from a decade ago. He had taught us that mana affinity didn’t follow a scalar meter. Super mana was around the ninety-five and ninety-nine-mana purity. But as I dissected the lavender haze, I could tell it was uncomfortably close to the hundred percent mark.

Eyeballing it, I would say a ninety-nine-point-nine percent purity.

Yet that felt infinitely away from the hundred mark. On a logarithmic scale, ninety-nine and a hundred were separated by infinity, but even when I was closer than that, I still felt an infinity before me.

With spontaneous inspiration, I retracted the haze into my body. A surge of power drowned me. Along with a surge of questions.

Affinity had the property to give the mage intrinsic knowledge of the element. I couldn’t even understand how that was possible, and most mages just took that as a rule of the universe, not bothering to question it.

If you were more affined to an element, you knew how to use it better.

That was common knowledge, but something itched my mind about that. What was truly elemental affinity? Modifying the genetics of a baby during the conception stage could augment that affinity but doing so on an already-born being wouldn’t make a change.

People had also preset affinities, and the only possibility to change them more was to either modify one’s soul or to get better with the element.

I assumed the first case was the one that induced my elemental shifting. But I was mostly interested in the latter case. If you mastered an element, you would get new knowledge out of nowhere. What was that nowhere?

Information couldn’t truly come from nowhere, couldn’t it?

And if modifying my own soul had given me new, unfamiliar knowledge, did that mean I already knew that knowledge, to begin with?

I mean, if I modified my own soul, that would mean that it was me who inserted the information.

Lavender mana pulsed.

The burst of soul mana cleared my mind as it was beginning to hurt with this many metaphysical questions. I felt like a classical philosopher rather than a scholar.

As questioning the working of reality didn’t produce any results, I decided to do something more productive.

My soul traveled hundreds of kilometers.