“I don’t think I broke it,” Sarah said, “it just didn’t work. I’m no [Mage] though.”
Connor nodded absentmindedly—half his mind was on another plane of thought, half on the grass lawn of the Tower plaza with his friends.
He inspected the magical residue on a bulky prototype glove he held in both hands. It had a compartment sewn on the back that could hold a crystal, though it was empty now, and multiple layers of materials: metal nubs, insulated gloves, wood and mana ring ink wiring, another layer of glove, cotton for comfort, and outside armoring.
He could always slim the design down later, he just needed to make sure it worked now.
Magic was fickle. Something as simple as your Class could mess with it, [Mages] could go either way, but Sarah was a [Scout]. He didn’t think she had any auras that should interfere. He trusted her to tell him if she thought otherwise.
A quick inspection didn’t show up any glaring issues. Finer ones would take a deeper appraisal, but he couldn’t let a figurative hairline fracture break his design.
“Could you try it again, please?” he asked and passed the gauntlet back to her.
It took her a moment to don it. She ran her mana through it and its signal connected. A rapid clicking hum filled the air just before a starburst web of lightning crackled in the palm of the glove.
“Huh. Works.”
“Did you change something?” Patrick asked him.
“No.”
“I swear, I tried and—” Sarah threw her arms up in helpless gesture. Brian leaned away from the stun glove.
“No, no,” Connor clarified, “I’m thinking it was a fluke. Interference, or …” He trailed off, already getting lost in thought again. He still noticed his friends’ looks.
Could he really afford to let a ‘fluke’ break his design?
Was it something about the floor they’d been on? The floor itself, or maybe dirt on the glove, could have had enough of a magical signature to interfere with the connection—this was the Tower he was thinking of. Magic was everywhere.
It could just as well have been a monster’s, or teammate’s, aura. Patrick was a [Shepherd] who practiced defensive magic, that made him a prime suspect. His glove had worked just fine all day, though.
Argh!
He laid his journal flat against the outside of his knee and took notes. Maybe a bug had crawled into the glove or something. That seemed just as likely.
Seeing him scribbling, his teammates shrugged and went back to sorting through their loot.
Connor had finally made a prototype practical magic item for the final exam, but it still needed testing, so he’d opened up to his teammates about it. They’d immediately agreed to help him.
Not the gloves of [Shocking Grasp], though they were part of it, he had made an item that could temporarily create gloves of [Shocking Grasp]: it was a small, fortified box he kept in his pack that sent out a signal. His current name for it was the Storm Planter. The gloves he‘d armed his friends with shaped mana in cheap and crude ways to let them pick up that signal, which then aspected the mana and finished the spell for them, no knowledge of spellcraft required. All they needed to do was supply mana as any ordinary fighter would for an item.
He thought, maybe, he could arm guardhouses or climbing teams with something like it. He could create half a dozen gloves with the materials others would use to create one.
Or he could have, a year ago. Now, Candletails were gone and with them, their main source of mana crystals.
He already had ideas on how to adapt. Then, his box would be a more reliable way of providing stun equipment than hiring someone with the right Skills …
… if only it weren’t so fickle. Why did people have to have so many auras?
This would work better in literally any other country.
Connor had used Ryan’s mana crystal for this. He wanted to make it work, not just for sentimental reasons, but because that crystal would have been worth a fortune in a few years if Candletails didn’t come back.
He didn’t want to waste that hypothetical fortune. He had considered keeping it but … it had been a gift. And it had felt wrong.
Besides, Connor had leveled from this. Twice. He had gotten two new Skills, [Basic Woodcraft] and [Mana Charge] which were … fine. He worked at lot with spellwoods so the first one was nice, though Mac and one of his adoptive mothers also worked with wood and they hadn’t needed the Skill.
The second had let him test his enchantment to find flaws and improvements before he had used the crystal … though he could have hired someone to do the same. And it was a Skill he could have learned in time.
Neither could help him here. How to fix this? A stronger signal? Maybe instead of stronger, could he make it weaker? Subtler?
He thought those Overseas radios used a similar method. Frequencies or something, he was pretty sure. Could he find out how to do that?
If not … maybe he should write off enchanting for people as a lost cause? He could always look into their budding electrical grid for work. There were opportunities there.
Did it matter what he did? All he wanted to do was earn money to pay back his debts and yet … he couldn’t help a bit of childlike wonder at the thought of crafting magic items like the Towers did.
Connor hesitated, pen to paper, when Patrick hurriedly slapped his knee. He jerked up and caught his meaning.
Someone coming?
His stun glove was obviously not normal. Sometimes, people thought it was okay to just … stand over them and watch. Like privacy wasn’t a thing.
Other times, they actually talked to him, which felt worse. Like an ambush. He could never know what they wanted from him ahead of time.
Heart racing, Connor folded his journal shut and pulled the stun gloves across the grass under a sack. He froze when he saw who it was.
Micah. Ryan’s grade-skipper friend. Prime example: what did he want?
Connor didn’t really know what to think of the guy. He saw him in the workshop sometimes and had shared a course or two with him.
Mostly, he saw him hanging out with Ryan or heard his name mentioned by the gossips.
He wore a simple tan climbing shirt, limb guards, dark padded pants, and thick boots … though one sole was thicker. Your average affordable climbing get-up. His clothes had small scuffs, cuts, and layers of grass, dirt, and blood stains on them, typical for someone fresh out of the Tower. A helmet hung from one of his backpack straps, and he wore Ryan’s yellow raincoat, though Ryan wasn’t around. He had rolled the back of the jacket up to his neck as if he'd put his hands in his pockets and flipped his jacket over his head.
He gave them a hesitant bright smile. His hair curled by his sweat, he looked invigorated.
It was a marked improvement from the last time Connor had seen him, during exam season when most students had looked like walking husks.
And it wasn’t the only improvement.
He carried a treasure chest in front of him with two loot sacks piled on top. His pack looked like a snail’s shell, bulging at the seams, and nets and strings of other things hung from his shoulders, including a string of four paired golem gauntlets, cut halfway off the arm.
What?
Connor glanced behind him but didn’t see anyone he recognized. Micah was alone.
As he leaned to the side, he glimpsed an emblem of a glowing crystal on the chest beneath the sacks. It almost made him tip over entirely.
“Hey! Brian. Hugh.” Micah looked at Connor as he said it, his face briefly turning serious like a guardsman saluting someone.
Connor frowned. Did he think his name was Hugh?
No, because then he scrunched up his face and said, “You’re Connor, right? And … uhm, wait—”
“Patrick,” Patrick said, not waiting.
“Sarah.”
“And Lukas!” he interrupted him before Lucas could introduce himself. “I’m Micah.” He paused awkwardly. “So uhm … how is it going? Slow day, huh?”
Connor eyed his strings of golem gauntlets and enchanting chest. He wondered if he had used it.
Sarcastically, he said, “Yeah.” He looked like he was carrying as much loot as all of them combined.
“Huh? No, I meant—” He nodded at the loot tents. Even an hour after their shift had ended, traffic had piled up after the [Harvesters] has come home. Now, [Greeters] were directing traffic and forming queues based on loot priority and quantity. They’d had too much for the small haul line so they were sorting out what they wanted to keep.
Connor pointed. “Are you selling that?”
Micah glanced down and ignored his question. “Not the hands, but some of the veins, maybe?”
Did he want privacy? Connor could understand that.
“Golem veins … which golems?”
“Open Sewers. Ninth floor. Two were weird, two sentries. I also got some boars if you need them?”
Connor did. “How much would you want?”
He hesitated and went up with his voice, hopeful. “Would you give me a better price than the loot tents?”
“No?”
He pushed his lips to the side and squinted. “Same price?”
“What do you want?” Brian interrupted, sounding uncharacteristically impatient with them.
As if he’d been forcing it the entire time, Micah lost his smile. That wasn’t surprising.
“I dunno. Lines so long.” He tilted his head into a sideways nod. “I saw you and thought, ‘Hey, already made an ass of myself enough today, what’s one more try?’ Not like I had anything better to do.”
“Don’t you have any friends?” Lukas asked.
Micah must have missed the insult. He gave a sad sigh. “They’re all off summering in Lighthouse and on trips and stuff. Nobody’s around.”
“Oh, so you weren’t rich enough to hang out with your so-called friends?” Patrick asked.
Lukas clicked his tongue and gave him a tight smile as he shrugged, as if to say, Tough luck.
“It was only a matter of time before they dropped you.”
This time, Micah blinked and slowly turned away from the two as if to ignore them. He asked Brian, “So are you all just assholes or what?”
“What?” Lukas laughed.
“Hey, I didn’t even say anything?” Sarah complained.
“Nice, Stranya. Great way not to make an ass of yourself.”
“They started it? So I’m guessing you don’t want to meet up for our lunch date with—”
“Date?” Lukas smiled. “What, you’re one of those types, huh? You want a little piece of Brian here?”
Connor shrunk together.
Brian turned red, half-caught in the accusation, but ignored him. “Did you lose the address or what?”
“No?”
“You’d be the type. Go find the place on your own then.”
Micah flashed him a look like he was trying to stick his tongue out with his face alone and glanced at the line again as if to leave.
“Micah and Brian sitting in a tree—” Lukas sang.
“What’d you use the chest on?” Connor blurted out. Anything to change the topic. If he left now, the others would continue to gossip along those lines for ages.
Micah lifted the chest up a little. “This? I thought I could sell it. It looks fancier than other treasure chests.” He made a face. ”And I fought a golem for it who ended up being a dick like you guys, and the chest ended up being empty afterward—“
“Ha!”
“—so I took it with me out of spite.” He smiled. “Want it? It’d be fitting.”
Connor didn’t … but he couldn’t believe how much of an idiot Micah, and his friends too, apparently were.
Did none of them see it?
“That’s not a treasure chest,” Connor said, loud enough to silence the heckling and pointed at the logo. “It’s an enchanting chest.”
Micah blinked at him. “Huh …?”
“Enchanting chest? You know, put an object in, close the lid, get an item out …?”
Before Connor even finished his sentence, Micah had dropped the box. He swept the sacks off and threw the lid open.
Connor crawled over the grass through their sitting circle to join him. “You put your stuff inside it?!”
“I wasn’t going to waste an arm on an empty chest!”
He had smaller loot sacks, ingredient boxes, and other odds and ends inside of it. It looked like a closet clutter drawer.
Micah opened a sack, looked inside, shook it about, then tossed it aside.
Did he have a way to detect enchantments or why was he so confident?
Connor joined him. “How did you not know—”
“I knew! I know, I just didn’t think of it in the moment. They’re supposed to be super rare?”
They were. Rather than contain any loot, enchanting chests let you decide what you wanted. The strength and manifestation of the enchantments differed from floor to floor, but people had begun to notice themes. There were different types of enchantments for different types of objects—weapons, armor, and so on.
The Guild hadn’t analyzed enough records of the chests to be sure yet—and some factions hoarded their information and unused chests in vaults so it would take a while for the public to know.
You could still try to make an educated guess. Some people had commissioned entirely new, high-quality weapons and armor from Mac for chests like this.
Stolen novel; please report.
The thought of throwing a pile of junk into one and hoping for the best made his heart ache.
Searching through the monster parts, magic plants, crystals, marbles, and empty sacks, he found a reinforced glass bottle containing a yellow liquid that shimmered blue. Focus potion?
“Was this enchanted before?”
“Yeah.”
“And the potion—”
“It’s blood. And yeah.”
Blood? Connor dropped the bottle and it shook his hand in disgust.
“This—”
“Yeah. Obviously.”
He’d found a lamp made of jade resin shaped like a clothing iron, but set it aside. A hand from one of his friends reached out to fiddle with it.
“And this?”
“Yeah,” Micah said, barely looking at him. He tore the lid of a herb box and squinted suspiciously at the plants inside as if he expected one of them to grow legs and run.
… which was possible, Connor had to admit.
He moved to put the slingshot away.
Micah caught the movement of his arm, glanced over, and did a double-take. “Wait, what? That’s not enchanted?”
Connor paused. “This?” He held the slingshot up. It was a simple steel one with a wooden handle and leather pouch. Nothing special, but not a kid’s toy either.
Micah reached for it, but Connor leaned back, running a cloud of mana over it in the quickest appraisal he could do.
“What are you doing?”
“Just a second—”
“Gimme—”
Connor rolled away. He wanted to know, to see if he had wasted it. “Hang on, I want to see what it does—”
Micah scrambled over the open chest and threw himself at him, wrestling his arm to grab the slingshot. “That’s mine—”
Connor noticed something from the leather pouch but nothing else. At a closer look, blue and silver streaks ran through the leather when it caught the light, and he doubted they had been there before.
Only the leather itself was enchanted, nothing else. It probably came from a Tower animal, too. Maybe it hadn’t been a waste after all …
Connor focused his cloud of mana on the pouch and the enchantment drew it in, rapidly condensing it into a glowing blue ball of jagged undulating light, like a tiny star.
They froze. Connor glanced to the side and saw Micah’s bright eyes locked on it with a smile.
----------------------------------------
Micah minced a board of dried flower petals, scraped them off into his mortar, and began to grind them as he checked on his pot of Cavern Prowler plasma. He glanced down, fiddled with his ring with his thumb, and pulled the pot a little back to hide the flames.
The crushed flower petals went into tea bags, which then went into the plasma as he stirred. He checked the temperature with a thermometer, but he could guess. It wasn’t ready.
His eyes wandered to the side to his slingshot poking out of his emptied pack. Next to it, at the golem hands he’d gathered, and above on the far end of the table, the pages he’d copied from a spell guide in the library.
Not yet.
He was lucky he hadn't had the time to make any alchemical ammunition for himself yesterday. Otherwise, he wouldn't have put the slingshot in the chest at all to free up space on his belt. And then the only things that could have been enchanted would have been the cheap hemp sacks they used, a wooden box, glass bottle, or some rope. And who knew how that would have turned out?
He was excited to test the slingshot out, but he already had other plans for this evening. He had to hurry to finish the potion before the workshop closed but by the time he was done, the gym would close. Nowhere to test it.
Besides, he had so much else he had to do, or wanted to do, including this.
He hummed as he washed the blueberries he’d picked, the last ingredient he had gotten from the Open Sewers. Many fruits from the Tower would work for his purposes, or any fruit grown with magical help. Their essence and pattern qualities were the important bits. The higher the floor you got them from, the better the potion, up to a limit.
He’d chosen blueberries because they’d been there, but he remembered eating them with Ryan when they had been trapped. They tasted good. Not that he expected this potion to.
He dried them, turned a second stove on, and placed a saucepan over the flames.
One benefit to the school being abandoned: fewer people in the workshop, he didn’t have to share as much space.
The plasma was heated enough, the flowers thoroughly steeped, he added a few more blue Cavern Prowler crystals and the brown Stone Golem veins and cast, “[Infuse].”
The yellow-blue liquid turned grey. The patterns of the petals he had blended into near-uselessness cut into the already-diminished patterns of the plasma and broke pieces off. The essences infused those and the activated patterns spun with a healthy indigo sheen like leaves in the breeze.
All in all, it reminded him of spring; those first few drab grey weeks after winter, when leaves dotted the trees and the grass filled out into lawns again.
Micah squinted and checked his notes. The recipe had told him to separate the plasma from the blood himself, but he’d seen in the bowl combinations book that the Open Sewers could do that for him so he’d given it a try. He hadn’t been sure it would work.
“Looks good …?” he mumbled. Too late to undo now. He lowered the heat, though his spell had consumed it, removed the tea bags, and let the mixture simmer.
Next, the blueberries went into the saucepan with a sparring amount of sugar, a pinch of salt, and lemon juice.
He turned the heat up, cracked Honey Ant crystals into the pan, and lightly mashed it all.
The thick smell of boiling fruit filled the workshop and Micah reached over for his copied pages. With one hand, he stirred, and with the other, he read.
Elemental Elementalism, the book was called. Its language was a bit dense and it was on the older side, but Mrs. Denner had included it in the library—he assumed she’d read it when she’d been in school.
Once Micah had gotten past the initial hurdles, he’d found he preferred its style to the more modern educational one that tried to be engaging through design rather than just subject matter, with things like tips and tricks boxes, quizzes, and answer keys in the back.
Those tended to dangle the answers out of his reach, similar to how Lisa taught, as if they assumed he had a Path to boost his comprehension speed. Which he didn’t in this case. It was frustrating. Besides, magic was supposed to be magical, not a reskinned math textbook.
He did check the new books for improvements on older spellscripts and to know the modern standards, but this one could guide him through the theory.
He’d copied most of its second chapter and some of the spellscripts. It went into the most basic elementalism spells: shape water or fluids, condense, conjure, and create water, and [Water Bolt]—or as the book called it, [Aqua Bolt].
For wind, it mentioned the same, as well as a basic air filter, and an older, archaic version of [Gust] that had fallen out of style apparently, [Aero].
Nomenclature was one of the reasons for the difficulty the Registry had with tracking the evolution of Skills. The same Skill’s name evolved across city to city, or generation to generation as language evolved, while a Skill that kept its name over time and place could have its effect subtly change with none the wiser.
Skills were already individualized. They differed from person to person, Path to Path, and Class to Class, they could be influenced by other Skills or the world around them.
Their nomenclature was an illusion. If this one had already fallen out of favor …
“Aero,” Micah tried the word out and hummed as he stirred, but folded the pages until he got back to [Shape Fluid].
So what if he didn’t have a spellcraft Path to help him? Ryan didn’t have a combat Path and he still worked his butt off to barely keep up with those who did.
Stephanie didn’t either, and she’d trained [Firebolt] until it could hit like a crossbow so she could have a reliable weapon to explore any spells she wanted.
Micah wanted to be like them. He put the spoon aside and kept his eyes on the page.
He wasn’t quite trying to make jam. He wanted it to be watery when it was done, and he didn’t have that much experience with cooking, even though he’d consulted a cookbook his sister owned, so he was going to err on the side of caution.
That still gave him fifteen minutes to multitask. Without looking—because looking at his field of influence was a distraction—Micah intentionally moved his mana throughout his body and held an image of flowing water.
Carefully, he guided wisps from that water and let his lines of influence, or ‘strings of power’ as the author called them, carry them away. They surrounded him like a magnetic field, and he had to be careful. They could only carry so much at his level, but he slowly added more and more wisps until it felt like that flow extended out from him and back into his body.
[Candle] worked similarly to this. The lines could only reach so far at his level, without interference or aid, which determined his range, but the pot was right in front of him.
Concentrating to hold the image of water flowing throughout his body, out of him, and back inside in loops, he willed the lines to move and imagined the result he wanted.
The lines passed through the liquid and it stained the mana in them toward that liquid. Slowly, the water began to stir on its own.
His smile almost broke his concentration.
It took time and it was crude, but with training, this could be a more efficient and adept way to shape water than, say, creating a giant floppy hand out of mana to ‘physically’ move it around as he had done before.
And when you were more advanced, you could begin to mix the two. Eventually, the book said, this could scale up to spells like [Control Fluid] with which mages could control rivers or the tides.
Micah chased that daydream … though he wasn’t going to get that far in a quarter-hour.
He used the sieve to remove as much of the pulp and seeds as he could. When he had most of them, he cracked one Camouflage Toad crystal after another into the pan and cast, “[Dissettle].”
The patterns of the fruit took on a colorless, kaleidoscopic sheen and Micah watched in fascination.
Tower fruit and Camouflage Toad crystals had an odd interaction with one another where fueling the former’s pattern with the latter’s essences and [Dissettle] made it more responsive to stimuli, which could be leveraged for control.
The phenomena had existed with similar monsters before the changes, but their understanding of the mechanics underneath it was limited.
Micah knew there were a variety of theories and studies on the subject, but he had only ever heard of one or two, and he had his own ideas on how it should work.
As he saw it, the skin pattern of the fruit was so weak that the skin properties of the Camouflage Toad’s essence could blend seamlessly into them and their contents, the same as another pattern would. It altered the fruit from a container for magic, nutrients, and information into a sensory organ whose only input could be attention or magic—as those were the only things that could affect the camouflage aspect of the Toad on an essential level—while their only output could be its contents.
Here, he had removed as much of the material and seeds as he could, making their pattern something that released magic the moment it detected the right amount of magic or attention—which both overlapped in mana, a mental magic.
Sadly, the patterns of fruit could only contain so much, and stronger patterns had to be matched by stronger camouflage monster essences, so the phenomenon was of limited use.
It still worked wonderfully for what he was making. Micah envied the person who had come up with the recipe. This version used the new ingredients from the Tower, and they had to have leveled from making and selling it.
Fruit Ichor Blossom was its official name, though it was marketed as April Showers potion since they’d released it then and it fit the recipe. The students he knew called it blue coffee.
Micah turned the stove off, dumped the runny ‘jam’ into the flower plasma tea, and retrieved a tiny bottle from his locker.
Last ingredient: A tiny, light blue half-dome blob zipped around inside the bottle with sudden flashes of light. It ran up the sides of the bottle and hit the lid.
It was a lightning slime. He’d bought a few for his ammunition experiments, and the recipe recommended using a lightning crystal of his choosing, but from what he could tell, this should work just as well.
He screwed off the lid and tipped the slime into the pot. It zipped around as a bright blur at the bottom of the liquid.
Stirring, Micah cast, “[Dissolve].” The purple jam and grey plasma blended into a dark blue smoothie. The indigo sheen of the plasma’s pattern, the iridescent sheen of the berries’, and the slime’s color mixed to give the result a clear blue glow most associated with mana.
Micah smiled. It was a mana potion. The first he’d ever made … and nobody was around to show it off to.
Then again, it wasn’t really a real mana potion. It worked regeneratively, slowly aiding a person’s natural mana recovery over time, some of its effects were lost on vibrancy if you drank it while casting spells, and it didn’t even give that much back in total, with a bit of a crash. There was a reason people called it blue coffee. But it was perfect for students and people who used spells on the job, and it was cost-efficient and easy to make, even for some non-alchemists. Cafés were beginning to sell it.
Micah reigned his excitement in and tried a sip with a spoon, though it was still warm. Its consistency was a little slimy, like a watery smoothie or oatmeal drink, and its sweetness shocked the tongue, but it had an oddly bitter aftertaste.
Strong essences could mess with his sense of taste, he had noticed. It was probably less intense for others.
He took the pot off the stove and began the relaxing process of cleaning up his workstation, then bottled and [Chilled] the potion when he was done.
It was one that had to be consumed in greater quantities rather than the standard two hundred and fifty milliliters range, so this batch would only last him about a week. During that time, he could practice basic spells as much as he wanted.
Which … meant another week of constant training. Micah didn’t really look forward to that.
Because as much as he wanted to be like Ryan, and even if he had vitality potions to help him, he still needed breaks.
As he walked back to his room, he looked out at the buildings through the windows, the new furniture stacked in the hallways, the construction sites where they put new windows into the old rooms to keep the warmth better.
He didn’t really want to be here during the day when they were preparing the school for the next year.
He mulled over an idea.
“I’m back!” He juggled his things as he wiggled his key out of the lock. “Sorry it took so long, and for not being around as much this week.”
He glanced at the wristband laying next to a cracked window and waved a breeze at it. Its green threads began to stir.
Micah walked to his closet and sorted his things, talking as the spirits woke up.
“I had an idea. How about I show you around Hadica tomorrow? Like, as thanks? I don’t want to be a bad host because I got what I wanted out of training already, y’know? And what I got is awesome.”
He pulled a change of clothes out and ran down a mental to-do list in the back of his head—laundry, equipment maintenance, clean up room, organize stuff for next year, read the letters, count money, talk to mom and dad about dentist, magic item shopping, best floor to gather funds?
He couldn’t always go to floors with interesting ingredients … though he bet he could make money fighting golems one more time before his other piton broke.
“Because like, I’m pretty sure I can use my … lung essence?” He froze, considering.
A few spirits woke up, drifted out of the wristband, and joined him.
At the same time, they made a face. No.
“My … aero?” That felt weird on his tongue, though it may have been the potion. He liked the word better than most things he‘d tried so far. Maybe he would get used to it?
He looked at the spirits. “Aero?”
They lazily drifted, noncommittal. Maybe, if it had been a spell once, they associated the word with mana rather than their kindred essences?
Time could change that. “I think I can use aero in potions. It’s more potent than most crystals on the lower floors and I don’t have much of it, but it comes back!”
Micah switched into a pair of running shorts, an undershirt, and a long-sleeved jacket. He slipped the wristband on. “So, earth practice first or jogging?”
The wristband sagged on his arm, hanging a little lower. Earth? he could imagine the spirits sighing. Again. They weren’t fans of his choice of element, though they were fans of very little.
“If you help me, I’ll get it done quicker?”
Almost like another sigh, half a dozen wind spirits plumed from the band like seeds from a dandelion and hovered around him, bringing a faint breeze to his room.
“Thanks!”
Micah grabbed a bit of placard leftover from a school presentation, a golem hand, one of the pebbles he used for ammunition, and poured some of the golem veins he had mined into two low bowls.
Before he settled in on his bed, he found all of the remaining wisps of aero inside him, gathered them up, and expelled them out the window.
He needed to ignore his body for this version of his exercise. Even just a peek inside could ruin it all.
He slipped his right arm out of his jacket, fit its sleeve onto the end of the stone hand, put the stone hand into one bowl, and put his right hand into the other bowl on the other side of the placard, glued into a ‘T’-shape to hide them.
This wasn’t his main way of practicing. He’d seen some classmates doing something similar for fun once and half-thought it might have practical uses, half-thought it could be fun to do with the spirits.
Not just for him—he’d tried and failed to shape some of his aero into a tassel to trick them with. Maybe someday.
For now, Micah looked ahead until only his left hand and ‘golem hand’ were in the peripheral of his vision.
The spirits manipulated a breeze to brush over his ‘golem hand’ and real, right hand in the bowl of stone essence at the same time.
The two looked too different to trick his mind with sight alone … so he let his eyes unfocus and reached out with his perception. Not his dominion. And he only reached out a little. Too much and he couldn’t trick himself.
He could feel the wind brush over his hand, and he could sense the wind essence brush over the gauntlet. In time, the two stimuli blended together until he could feel the wind brush over the gauntlet instead.
And, in time, he didn’t know if the wind spirits had stopped. He couldn’t tell the difference anymore. His right hand felt like it was made of his stone, and his real right hand felt petrified and far away.
As always, Micah felt a brief flash of discomfort at the thought, like he had brushed some fear inside of him.
He pushed the feeling aside and forced a smile at how cool this was. Tingles shot down his spine. He wanted to show Lisa and Ryan this trick.
Micah focused his perception and found the stone veins running through ‘his’ right hand, the same veins earth spirits used to control their suits of armor.
He could also sense the bowl of stone golem veins ‘his’ hand was resting in, and he used his spirit to draw on those essences, guiding them through ‘his’ hand along those veins to reinforce them.
Nothing happened. The dissonance almost threatened to break his concentration, but he breathed deeply, let his mind wander, his vision blur, and focused only on this one task.
Drawing on the stone essences, reinforcing those crystal veins.
Working with stone essences could be dangerous, Lisa had told him. Micah had found out why first-hand when he’d nearly petrified himself before a fight.
Similarly to his wind aspect, he had to take it slow, steadily building up a sort of tolerance to the essences, and building up a spiritual support for that aspect as he had done with his pure ‘spirit veins’ half a year ago.
But Micah didn’t have time to take it slow, he had to keep up and he had so much else on his plate.
And [Lesser Constitution] had fixed early mistakes he’d made with his spirit veins, which meant he could make mistakes.
Then what? He couldn’t hope for a Skill to save him every time he did, couldn’t waste one on that either, and what if doing this wrong caused him irreparable harm? Lisa wasn’t here to teach him anymore.
So Micah had found his own solutions:
He was focusing his stone aspect on his hands alone at first, as that should speed up the process compared to getting a wind aspect for most of his body.
He’d found something to guide him during the process instead—earth spirits used a similar concept to control their stone golems.
And he was training not to get a permanent stone aspect but a temporary one. Like a Skill.
After all, Lisa had told him working with stone essences was dangerous, but he was an alchemist and they worked with dangerous chemicals and equipment in the workshop all the time. That didn’t stop them. Instead, they took precautions, used safety equipment—
They put on gloves.
A wind spirit slapped his cheek lightly to signal him when he was done.
Micah jerked his hand up to defend himself—and nothing happened. He needed a moment to remember how to use his right arm again.
The golem veins that had been in the bowl were missing.
He flexed his right hand to test his dexterity, picked up the pebble, and exerted his dominion to draw on its essences, guiding them into the replica of stone golem veins inside of him.
Micah smushed the pebble like dough.