Though life on the land is hard and it can take up a lot of your time, there are of course moments that you find during the day where you have the chance to do something other than farmwork. Maybe that might be reading a book, taking a nap, or pursuing some sort of artistic endeavour you’re interested in… if you were somebody else.

For me, right from the beginning, every single one of these moments has been occupied by my Baptisms.

It started even before I seriously began working on the farm. The techniques I had at hand described in the volumes of the Compendium I figured would help towards my body’s recovery in the beginning. They did, and at the same time improved my physical condition through the strength and flexibility they created as I practised them. Plus, I’m fairly certain that the flicker of mana at the end of every exercise I did did something as well to make my return to health unusually quick I found.

But aside from that…that’s all the progress I’ve made.

Typically, with the time I have to myself outside of my chores and other side projects, I can perform a Baptism technique to completion by the end of one, maybe two days, and perfect it to the point where I feel the flicker of mana every time I finish at around the average of about one week.

What this adds up to is, is that in the twelve years that I have been here on this farm, I have performed, practised and perfected over that entire span of time, 605 of the total 2809 individually unique Warriorhood Baptisms I have at my disposal.

And not one of them has panned out.

Look. I understand the clear problem and the obvious solution right in front of me. I have no mana. Not an ounce of it. So of course these techniques which are designed for the men and women of Calzyn who are inherently born with mana are simply not going to work for me.

In any way, shape of form it seems.

However, though you may deem it delusion, denial, desperation, obsession, stupidity, hope or maybe even some abstract faith in a higher power I believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that what I’m doing is not pointless, and that there is a Path for me here somewhere in the work that I am doing. Somewhere in these books, is an answer to a question I haven’t asked yet, that will open up a door for me to a place I have no idea about, but that I feel deeply is real and possible.

So I go on.

It’s not like I haven’t the time to spare anyway. It took me 12 years to go through 600 of these different exercises altogether, so using basic maths and assuming nothing changes (an easy assumption given my life out here, isolated, alone, and cut off from the world) it should take me another 56 years or so to get through every last remaining one.

If nothing changes, that would bring my total years living on this farm to 68 years and bring my identity’s age to the end of an average person's lifespan. If, and I am saying if, in these next 56 years I don’t succeed, if I don’t find a way to connect with the mana of this world, if I will forever be this weak little jellyfish that will be forever at the mercy of this merciless sea and the terrible beasts that surround me… It will be time for me to leave this place, and move on to something else.

In these twelve years I have realised this reality and accepted it. But nevertheless, I am not giving up yet.

It’s not like I haven’t been trying to figure out what the problem is for all these years. I have no mana, a confirmed fact, but I don’t accept that I do not have a mana affinity. And surprisingly, I have some evidence to support this claim.

The first ever Baptism I performed was the one Kara gave to me, the one her own father founded his entire life upon as a Warrior, a technique from the solid (Earth) end of the Physical Strata of the affinity spectrum.

Knowing that this technique didn’t work for me, naturally, I began my endeavour by testing out a Baptism attuned to a completely different affinity first, Liquid (Water). Also an affinity within the Physical Strata but directly opposed to my first attempt.

But of course that failed as well. So then I tried a Gaseous (Air) affinity Baptism to cover all my bases for the Physical Affinity Strata with the same amount of success.

Still determined, I continued on. Moving into the Life Strata techniques as I tried out Baptisms with the affinities for blood, bone, strength, speed, stamina, poison and some more others on top of all of those, all resulting in failure.

None of the techniques I tried blossomed within me the Life Strata Baptisms, so once more, I moved up through the technique categories again into the Energy Strata, and started performing exercises with the affinities of fire, frost, lightning, etc, etc, etc.

Again, no change.

Now somewhat desperate, I now tried my luck in the Force Strata and performed Gravity, Friction, Magnetism, and eventually all the Baptisms of all the affinities that involved force, but not one, not one, of them paid off. All of them gave me nothing different than what I had already experienced with every single one that had come beforehand.

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However… Even in the face of constant failure and burgeoning hopelessness, I did discover something… interesting. Minute differences. Very small discrepancies. Across all the exercises I performed.

Infinitesimal dissimilarities admittedly… but noticeable nevertheless.

For example, when I performed a particular Baptism for a metal affinity (Iron as a matter of fact) meant to make its practitioner a Warrior of hard, steel-like flesh with great strength and resilience interwoven within every fibre of their body, I noticed something odd.

What this particular oddness was, was that when I performed the Baptism the very first time, unexpectedly, I perfected it right away. In the next three hours I found that I could carry out the movements for it easily for numerous times from the first attempt, getting the mana flicker at the end without fail every time.

Another thing I noticed when I was performing a Life Strata Baptism that in this instance was focused upon the sensory affinity of sound, was that the flicker at the end seemed to be a bit bigger than what I had generally felt for all the other Baptisms I had done before.

Noticing these irregularities, and eager to explore any opportunity or chance to figure out what exactly the hell was going on between me and them, I began documenting my experiences with each technique I performed and perfected in detail and then started comparing them all against one another.

At first, there were no real conclusions to be drawn. It seemed that what I might be documenting wasn’t really anything at all, just a collection of random observations.

But as time went on, and I became more and more familiar with the sensations involved when I underwent each one of these Baptisms, while in turn becoming more and more precise in the data I could describe and collect from each practice I did. As the years went on… only then did I begin to see correlations.

All the differences I found: how long it took to reach the flicker the first time, when I brought the technique to perfection, the strain my body underwent, the feel and magnitude of the mana flicker I felt at the end, how comfortable the whole process felt altogether and a few other factors on top of all of all of these… were actually telling me something.

Only when I had made my way into the 400’s of my Baptisms did I realise what was happening and what I was really doing with my documentation and research.

Somehow, completely unintentionally… I was mapping out my own mana affinity spectrum.

What I was doing ignorantly for all these years … was an utterly groundbreaking discovery. If any researcher from the Institute found out about my research and discoveries they would be absolutely flummoxed.

You see, despite all the Scholar Associations work and research over the millenia that was centred on investigating and discovering the secrets of the mana affinity spectrum, they had come nowhere near through anything to what I was doing at the moment.

To begin to understand what I’m talking about you have to realise that the whole basis of the Warriorhood and Sorcerer Paths (though I’m not sure about the Spiritualist Path, even with all the knowledge that I’ve accumulated I barely know anything about it) is that an individual has to have enough talent. And what this talent is derived from is the quantity a certain specific mana affinity occupies within your mana spectrum.

So, let’s take for instance a typically average member of the Coalition. They would have a percentage of 10 to 15 percent of their mana affinity spectrum occupied by a single mana affinity that was detected when they underwent the Selection, the only thing the Institute is at all interested in determining. Upon joining the Coalition and embarking on a Path, generally that of a Warrior, all your attention and anyone else’s is focused on you working with and exploiting your single affinity talent to the best of your ability. A result from the aeons that have been spent cementing it as the only way that people become stronger while also climbing the world’s hierarchy.

Because of this, what the rest of that 85 to 90 percent that your mana affinity spectrum is made up of doesn’t concern you or anyone else, and so is completely left to the side as basically a forgotten and useless appendage.

So, with this perspective and motivation hammered into you and your culture for the past twelve thousand years or so, this, what you might even call a discarded part of yourself, is not given any serious thought as there’s not even any consideration as to it being able to help you. And even if it might do, while you might go off exploring a completely unknown part of yourself that has no promise of reward, everyone else is focusing on what they know works and using it to grow stronger and more powerful.

And let’s not forget that even with the Scholar Association's best efforts though its history, it still hasn’t come to a conclusive answer about the specific nature of the mana spectrum, only that it is most likely made up of thousands of affinities.

With all these factors combined, looking further into one's mana affinity spectrum would be a pointless venture that has no end goal in sight, even if anyone felt passionate about exploring it.

This is what makes what I’m doing so unprecedented. Even the best, most well learned and greatest in strength members of the Coalition, have no idea what their mana affinity spectrum is made up of. Only their central affinity, the part they dedicate their lives upon from their origin, the Baptism.

No one cares about the mana affinity spectrum outside of what happens when a certain affinity reaches a certain percentage within a person, and then what they can do with it after they discover it.

But to reiterate once more, I have no mana, and so these Baptism techniques that aren’t working for me as they would any other person in Calzyn, instead having some sort of malfunctioning effect on me, are helping me with something else. Though it’s not helping me step out of this life of hiding and deceit that I’m living in, it is illuminating the particulars of my mana affinity spectrum.

And if I have a mana affinity spectrum…then I must have mana affinity, something to link me to mana. And assuming my mana affinity spectrum is just like everyone else’s, then I must have a central mana affinity, a mana affinity through which it is optimum for me to step onto a Path.

A.k.a. My link to mana.

Even if it’s at the level of 1% of my mana affinity spectrum, the Institute has long concluded in their research that everyone has a main central affinity, no matter how small in quantity, that is most suited for them when matched with a corresponding Baptism.

My lack of mana might actually be somewhat of a benefit for me in my unusual case. The Institutes Selection only detects people with affinity percentages at 5% or over, leaving the rest ignorant of their core nature. So for the common people who have the rare chance to pick up a Baptism, they do so with no idea about what one would suit them best, and their inherent mana would simply accept whatever affinity it encountered and fuse with it.

But because I’m disadvantaged in that area I’m hoping that with the right affinity Baptism, the one that matches my central affinity, the suitability will be enough to kick start the Baptism process and put me on the path to obtaining mana.

This new revelation. This new hope to base all my efforts on. My quest to find the Baptism that would work for me it seemed, would continue on from that point, renewed in its vigour.

All that mattered now was time. Time and patience.

I have all the Warriorhood Baptisms in the world with me and all the time in the world to try them all out. If everything works out, some time in the coming years, I’ll find the right matching technique to allow me to infuse mana into myself, set off down a Path, and well from that point on I can only say…

Time will tell.