I looked at the pawprint in the dirt, and just sighed.

It was over twice as long as my own foot, with the deep points of nails spread across the toes.

A dog’s track. Sinking inches down into the dirt here, as if it had put pressure onto its feet here for some reason. Perhaps sensing an intruder?

I looked around the area, and despite the loamy soil being soft, didn’t see any more tracks like this.

Lightfoot techniques for animals... and a canine of some sort that was going to be the size of an elephant.

The rats were incredibly tough Fives. The owls were Eights. The wolves would have to be Tens at least, and what would that make the bears and lions and stuff?

What was going to happen when the really fantastic beasts popped up?

I could potentially get some really sick damage going if I was given time to Level, but this was not a good situation any way I looked at it. Just sitting around doing nothing and Meditating would be fine at this point. If I really chose to pursue Theurgies, I was looking at literally months to build properly to power...

Building straight to Ten would waste so much Karma I’d be kicking myself for literally years... but was I going to be forced to do so?

In the meantime, I needed to find out more about this handy-dandy new rechargeable Mana system I had, and how to best exploit it.

------

I found a tree with some height in a rocky area that hopefully should have less traffic, if what few tracks I could see in the area was any example. The pine tree’s shadow was big enough that I could blast away at the rocky hillside right there without being visible to passing fliers.

Evocation, Transmutation, Illusion, Divination, Conjuration, Necromancy, Abjuration, and Enchantment were the main Style Schools of Arcane magic, where the incoming energy wasn’t as important as HOW you wielded it. This was the view of magic dominated by Wizards, who thought of magic as an engineer did their tools, and the means and methods to command it were what was important. The magic itself, not so much.

The Elemental view was dominated by Sorcerers, where the energy commanded was all that was important, and learning how to command in multiple ways was the whole point of things. The main Elements were the classic Air, Water, Earth, and Fire, with Positive, Negative, Astral, and Ethereal Elements accenting them. Lightning and Ice, for example, weren’t Elements on their own, but Positive and Negative Aspects of Air and Water, respectively. ‘Cold’ was actually the attack energy most associated with Earth...

A Wizard would learn to Cast a ‘Fireball’ using any of the Elements, not merely Fire. A Sorcerer would learn to use Fire in any of the eight Styles of magic.

The Elements in the air here included Lightning, Ice, and Light as primary Elements, their frequency dominating all the others. There were others, however, sifted out from the main ones, which were surely viable Spheres for the native Casters to address.

The Styles of Magic were completely foreign to the Manafield here, focusing and channeling the magic in ways it had never been wielded before. Likewise, Acidic and Force energies the way I wielded them were very new and strange to the Manafield, and the Stars swirled strangely when I called on them, or at the touch of Aligned energies like the Wrath.

Force was nominally Positive Earth, rigidity and strength without mass. Acidic energies subsumed both base and acid, and were simply subsets of Water.

I had no bias towards any of the energies I sensed, calmly using them all and slurrying them together properly into true arcane energies.

Currently, only Fire and Cold would stack onto my Matrix spells, doing so automatically unless I deliberately stopped them from doing so. The energy would be pulled out of the Stars, re-align itself with an internal flash, and stick to the outgoing spell.

I busied myself with trying to find out how the Stars worked and responded, using Meditation to recharge them and with them the Slots and Spells I expended while getting in rep counts faster than I ever might have envisioned.

Most refreshingly, I could get in Meta Counts using I’s, as I Cast Cantrips with +I Metas, and then just regained them from the Stars.

The fully actualized seven Stars could hold a grand total of seven levels each, for a 49-point Mana Pool. That was incredibly nice, but I couldn’t pull out more than one point at a time.

I found this number out by filling my top Star as high as it could go, and it began bouncing around ever more erratically when it was topped off and dominating all the other Stars with all that extra power. I rapidly drained it back down, and it fell into its more stable orbit.

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Follow-up Meditation lined them up and filled them in series, keeping them in close balance during the process. The dusty field of motes that the Stars were circling in actually held loose Mana that could be charged up and applied all at one time, seemingly just enough there to ensure that each Star could absorb one level at the same time.

It was enough to get in a lot of rep counts, the only limitation being my Meditation check, which now sat at a +14 or so.

I was naturally bringing in about ten points an hour. So, the base number needed was a 15, and I brought in an additional point for every point beyond that. With a base 24...

Clearly this was very slow, and I would need to increase it significantly in the future. It also wouldn’t compare to using Wrath to do the same, but that was something I could hope for tomorrow morning.

I could picture how horribly slow this process would be to a newcomer. If they weren’t mentally gifted, they’d have no or a small Stat bonus, no bonus for a Class Skill as yet, and they couldn’t Take 10 on the check, leaving them groping around for random success rates that would fail 2/3 of the time, making the accumulation of the shells of the Stars, and then the reserves within the Stars, a very time-consuming matter requiring hours and days of time and focused effort.

Ahhhh, that was why the Human/2 promotion came as soon as I finished the shells. In normal circumstances, that would signify the point they could actually become a mage. Before then, they simply wouldn’t have the power to do otherwise, and start actually filling the Stars.

Breakpoints. What would come next? Filling them to the top for the first time?

I spent four more hours in Meditation on a tree limb, pulling in the rebellious Mana in the air to find out.

When I was done, I had that ‘full to the brim’ feeling again, and glanced at my Assay again.

It... looked like it wanted to let me break through, but it couldn’t. I was assuming such unnatural speed was too much for the Stars to handle, and the magic they represented needed to be absorbed more fully before I could promote.

Tomorrow, dawn.

Nothing said I couldn’t go further. The only thing was... what direction to go in?

The logical choices were two: Add more Stars, and so more raw capacity, or refine the existing Stars and improve the amounts of Mana they could hold.

Was there a Mastery or Feat which allowed additional Stars? I didn’t know, but it didn’t feel like it. The Seven Stars with seven Mana seemed pretty thematic, but eight Stars with eight Mana wouldn’t be out of line. I considered the two options, and decided that reinforcement of foundation sounded better than expansion of foundation without guidance.

So... inputting more Mana into the Stars was not possible. That meant... I had to reinforce the shell of the Stars.

I tried Cantrips again, but this time they didn’t work. It appeared I was going to have to use straight Mana to reinforce the shell of the Stars so they could hold more, and then after they were done I was going to have to refine and compress the Mana inside them.

I was pretty sure I was on the right track when the first Star absorbed a level of Mana, and seemed to get stronger. I didn’t know how many passes I was going to have to make, or how many levels of Mana the shell was going to require, but I had a sinking feeling the number was going to be fifteen at least... the combined Elemental and Style magicks the Stars were attuned to off of my Matrix, and likely the Holy and Force energies, at least, would have to be represented, too.

Seventeen passes, seven Stars, one hundred and nineteen Mana, twelve hours of Meditation.

Well, there was nothing to do but to get to it, and I didn’t have a lot better to do with my time.

Moreover, tomorrow was coming, and should accelerate this process greatly.

--------

The weight of their footsteps shaking the tree slightly was the herald of their coming. I opened my eyes and looked around at the disturbance.

Dusk was coming and creatures were moving, once again not announced. I sighed as I recited Aethra’s Salute, and paused.

A herd of Deer was coming along the hill-line I’d picked. The adults were all ten feet high at the shoulder, and the males all had gorgeous racks on them, going tall and wide, gleaming golden and looking very sharp, indeed, like curving arcs of spears ready to impale anything which was a threat.

They were calling out to one another with huffs and puffs and ear-twitches and tail-shifts, bending of necks and shifting of shoulders and differences in canter all part of what they were saying as they drew attention to possible ambush points, remarked on the feeding grounds they were heading to, kept their formation intact, and made sure the more vulnerable does and smaller deer and fawns were in the center of the herd.

I was forty feet off the ground, and definitely didn’t feel very safe, because the alpha of this herd was twenty feet at the shoulder, and the tips of his glorious antlers were higher than the branch I was sitting on. He was sitting square in the middle of the herd, where he could rapidly move to face any attacker, alert and constantly scanning the area for signs of threats.

The massive Deer were solid yet dainty of build, more white-tail than mule deer, not quite antelope, with brownish-gold fur that gleamed with something that would doubtless prove to be extremely defiant to harm, a combination of natural armor and damage reduction that worked against magic as well as physical harm.

They didn’t seem to be meat eaters, but going higher certainly wasn’t going to save me. The boss could easily reach sixty feet off the ground on his hind legs, and that was without jumping. I wasn’t sure he could take down the tree, which was steely strong itself, but I wouldn’t put it past him. He definitely had a pretty suffocating Aura about him, which my own was diverting around me, but I could clearly feel the weight of it.

Yeah, he’d just kick any rats around him to death while they squealed and failed to walk under his Aural Suppression.

I just sat there quietly and watched them pass. They made remarkably little noise for their size and weight, and kept all their grace. It would have been interesting seeing animals of such size bounding along as if they were much smaller, quite a sight if you could understand the strength required.

Then the head Stag drew even with the tree, and his dark eye fixed unerringly on me, despite my unmoving quiet. A puff escaped his nose as he studied me. “A Human, here?” I heard as plain as day.