"Oh, Kalitra Good Morning!" the lavender haired sweets vendor chirped as she noticed Kali.
"Morning Faylen," the white-hared elf greeted back with a smile, her gaze washing over the sweets spread out in front of her.
"How is your training?"
"I should be done with the basic stuff today," said Kali, picking up two chocolate-covered fruit slices.
"Congratulations," the woman clapped excitedly, "the third one is on me today, ah and while you are at it, please take another one for little Lexy."
"Sure, thank you," Kali smiled gratefully. Over the past month, she'd become a regular at Faylen's stall. Sweets and treats were few and far between in this village and the woman made the best ones. "See you later!"
"Sure~ You are my favorite customer~"
"Of course I am," Kali rolled her eyes with a smile. "I pay ten times the money others do for the same snacks."
"Teehee~"
Kali walked through the village with a smile, slowly nibbling on one of the treats while she made her way over to Avariel's house.
Today was a big day. Yesterday, they had gone over the range expansion structure for the last time, and today would be the time when the Archdruid gave Kali a last check over, a test of sorts. Not that she was overly worried. She felt a quarter of this time would have been more than enough for her to memorize everything, but the druid was nothing if not thorough.
Kali patted down her pockets, finding them once again running low on mana crystals. With her lacking any other expertise she could leverage in bantering, she had to use the pricy crystals as currency, even if she was grossly overpaying everyone. Avariel was nice enough to give her some more once she'd run out and promised to teach her how to make some of her own once she made sure Kali has mastered the cultivation technique along with all of its auxiliary parts.
As Kali strode through the streets, some people gave her reserved nods and some even greeted her, which she cheerily reciprocated. The children she came to know form running into them at Faylen's stall even gave her waves when they saw her. There were still grumpy old people here and there, giving her glares and huffs while making sure she heard them as they disparaged her between themselves. But overall the village has warmed up to her.
They weren't treating her as one of their own, far from it, but the change still put a spring into the girl's steps.
Kali slowed as she neared her destination, her ears flicking up and listening intently. Avariel wasn't alone in her home, there was another voice echoing in the building. A voice which quickly went from distressed to shouting and screaming.
Kali stopped, biting her cheeks as she thought about what to do. As far as she knew, the Archdruid cleared her schedule whenever she came over, so if someone was in there with her it should be important and based on the stranger's tone, it might even be an emergency.
She didn't want to intrude. That was one of the few things that managed to endear her to the villagers so far. She was a guest, a nice guest who wasn't sticking her nose into their business and was more than happy to stay that way while she learned fun stuff from the resident Eladrin.
Still, Kali was a curious girl barely out of her teenage years. If Avariel didn't want others to listen in, she'd have put up a silencing barrier. Kali knew the woman could do that and so much more so a little … listening in couldn't hurt. Right?
"As I've said, the previous ten times. It is impossible." That's Avariel's voice, damn she sounds irritated.
"BUT WHY?! You should be the greatest Alchemist on the planet?? How is it impossible?" The other voice was definitively female, no male could make a screeching sound like that. Kali stopped listening in. The stranger sounded almost hysterical, with her tone cracking on every second word. She might start sobbing at any second. Now I feel bad for eavesdropping.
Not long after, the door flew open and a woman — no, a girl? — stormed out with a furious expression on her face as she wiped her eyes with her long sleeves.
Kali barely noticed those parts though as her jaw hung open, her gaze locking onto a pair of fluffy silver ears lying prone on the woman's head and a long busy tail of the same colour swimming through the air as the girl stomped away.
"Ah, sorry," Kali apologised as she jumped away, hopping out of the girl's path.
"Oh," the girl stopped, blinking at her for a moment. After a moment of awkward staring between the two, the argent haired — and furred? — girl shook her head as she murmured an apology before rushing past Kali.
Kali's gaze lingered where the girl disappeared behind a house.
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"Kali?" Avariel's voice shook the princess out of her daze.
"Yes?"
"Quit standing around and come on in."
"Oh, okay." Kali nodded, pushing the weird encounter to the back of her mind, but the girl's enthralling amethyst coloured eyes lingered in her head for a while more.
Kali stayed silent as she followed behind the Archdruid, despite her rarely showing it she had actually developed some social acumen over her life dealing with some upstart nobles and tutors. Using this experience, she could tell that the druid was … miffed, yeah, miffed by the meeting with the strange foxgirl.
Kali couldn't tell if it was due to the girl shouting at her, she was rather sure if the fluffy stranger didn't have a good reason to do so, she'd have left the house flying with her legs above her head and wouldn't have landed until she was out of the village. Kali was curious, of course she was. She had to mentally slap her cheeks every few seconds to keep herself from asking about what happened, but since she was such a considerate young lady; she managed to keep herself from doing so.
The wall shifted again, the simple wooden surface turning into the by now familiar entry into the underground hall. The two walked down silently and settled into their usual meditative positions in the center.
"We will go over everything you've learned so far." The woman stated. "First, a session of Cultivation, then you will absorb mana through the buffer from a mana crystal and then you will absorb a small core through the Essence Buffer with us finishing with another session of Cultivation where you test out the range expansion structure, alright?"
"You got me a core?" Kali latched onto the most interesting thing she caught.
"I did," the woman gave a slight smile. "It's the core of a very weak monster, but it is a core and it is fresh enough to still have enough essence to push you to the next level."
"Thanks," Kali chirped with an excited smile. "What about the Mana Drain?" She asked after a moment.
"You should try using that together with the Mana Buffer."
"Didn't you say I could only use one of them at a time?" Kali gasped. Mean! Did she lie to me?
"You should be only capable of using the base technique for a long while but you are … unusual," the woman narrowed her eyes at the princess. "You have proven that you can use the technique with a single add on more than well enough, so for your test, we will try two at once. Those two should be the least dangerous if we do it while your core is near empty."
"Okay," Kali said uncertainly, looking dubiously at the woman. "So … I could theoretically use all of them at once?"
"Not that you'd ever have to, or should for that matter," Avariel sighed while sending Kali a tired look. "But yes, yes you could."
"Could I cast magic while cultivating?"
"Can you overpower the pull of the technique with your control?"
"Maybe?" Kali answered uncertainly. Yeah, it'd probably rip out any mana out of my grasp that I tried to fill my Runes with.
"No, you wouldn't," the woman rolled her eyes. "Maybe after the second breakthrough, but I doubt you'd be using the same technique by then."
"Why?" Kali blinked. "You used it to reach your current level, right?"
"I did," the woman shrugged. "And it took me 15 centuries. Do you want to wait that long?"
"I could hunt monsters."
"And you should," Avariel nodded. "With moderation, of course. Do not decimate the environment by sucking up all mana and killing all monsters. Am I understood?"
"Yes," Kali nodded seriously, her spine straightening as she did.
Meanwhile, she was swooning inside. Such a druidy thing to say, so cool.
"Keep in mind though," Kali started paying attention again. "You can use some of them together, but some — like the Essence Buffer — should only ever be used by themselves, you shouldn't even use that together with the main technique."
"So it won't overload me with mana, right?" Kali asked back, receiving a nod. "Can't I just use the mana buffer then and be done with it?"
"You could," the woman rolled her eyes. "Yes, certainly you could use four highly complex Rune structures at once to make it a bit faster when your most complex Spell is made up of five Runes at most or you know, you could just use ONE?"
"I understand," Kali deflated a little at the druid's scathing tone.
"Your line of thought wasn't wrong dear," the woman sighed and her gaze softened. "You are already ahead most of what I'd consider your peers. I don't want you to harm or cripple yourself with a dumb mistake. You might be able to handle all four at once here, in the calm, silent meditation hall, but what if you got interrupted by someone while doing it out in the wilds? Death is just a single mistake away when you are playing with powers so much beyond us."
"Us?" I'd get that it is beyond me, but 'her' too?
"Mana is a power that can reshape the world, Kha'Lythria. All mages strive to learn all there is to know, but even our collective knowledge would only ever amount to a tiny speck when compared to everything there is to know about magic."
"Really?" Kali blinked owlishly.
"You know, I was alive during the time of the 'Descent'" the woman mused as she leaned back in thought. "I didn't personally meet 'HER' but I spoke with some who did, and a single quote stuck with me over the centuries."
Kali leaned forward. Stories about the 'goddess of magic' were few and far between. Well, the ones that had any spec of reality mixed into the outlandish tales were to be exact.
"They asked her, 'What is Mana?', do you know how she answered them?"
"No?"
"'I don't know, I'm still figuring it out.' can you believe that?" The druid giggled. "The being that taught every sentient race on this planet about magic, the one who knew most, admitted to not knowing what Mana is?"
"But surely she knew?" Kali tilted her head. "How else would she come up with Runes and Enchanting?"
"There is a saying among the Eldar," the woman said with a distasteful curl of her mouth. "'The more we learn, the more we understand how little we know.' and while the Eldar might be obnoxious lunatics, the saying applies perfectly to Magic and Mana."
Aww, come on. Master somehow came out as an Eldar and if it wasn't his mother who was one, then it was his father.
Kali hid the twitch of her lips behind a thoughtfully raised fist.
"Get started on it, young lady." Narrowed, reptilian eyes stared at Kali.
----------------------------------------
Kali could almost picture it before her mind's eyes, a swirling mass of arcane energy collecting into a hollow orb with two large constructs orbiting around it. One acted like a secondary storage for her mana, and only a small, controlled stream of mana went from it to the large swirling mass of energy below. This was her Mana Buffer.
Somehow, it interdicted mana that wanted to just rush into her core, making itself the center of all the attractive force the vortex generated while keeping her core safe from overloading. It wasn't perfect. The buffer itself had a limit and to keep itself from reaching that limit, it was doing something to use up the mana, but it could still be overwhelmed.
Not that it was an issue at the moment.
The second structure was like a string extending from the buffer, or a vein to be clear. It extended from the beating heart of her spiritual self that was the core and crawled up to her shoulders and down along the bones in her right arm. Around her wrists, the magical artery split into five, one running along each of her fingers before separating to uncountable hair-thin veins to cover every cell in her fingertips.
Fingertips, which were holding a tiny finger-tip sized blue crystal.
Kali watched with utmost curiosity as layers upon layers of the shiny crystal flaked off into blueish dust, which dissipated into the air, leaving behind nothing as a steady stream of mana surged through her newly made magical veins.
She could clearly feel the vein now that the warm energy was flowing through it.
Her eyes narrowed as her amateurish mana senses tried push beyond the surface of her skin, with a bit of effort she extended it to cover the little crystal in her palm and she stared transfixed as the hundreds of thin mana veins extended into it and dexterously dismantled the structure layer after layer.
Mana Drain was a weird thing, but all the more useful. She could now drain almost anything magical to recover mana once she ran out of crystals and didn't have the time to sit down and cultivate for half a day. Mana was everywhere and with this technique, she could drain it to replenish her reserves.
Plus, it could dismantle basic enchantments if she ever needed to use it that way, though anything beyond amateurish work would have at least a basic layer of shielding which would ward off her attempts at cannibalizing it.
Kali closed her hand into a fist as the last tiny shard of the crystal turned into dust, but she felt nothing in it and when she opened it up, she found only air. Solid mana, that was what mana crystals were, but Kali still found it fascinating how an invisible, untouchable energy could turn into normal matter and then back into mana so simply.
"Good," Avariel said, nodding. "Now shut down the main technique but keep the two auxiliary ones running."
"Okay?" Kali obliged. Only her curiosity for what she was about to learn holding her back from voicing said curiosity.
"Now," the woman spoke as the small vortex crawled to a halt, having only been started half an hour ago. "Try to reverse it. Now that your core isn't pulling the mana in, control the mana in your buffer to slowly start going back up through your veins and into your fingertips."
Kali nodded and did just that. The action was rather instinctual. Like flipping a switch, the inert mana in the buffer got back to moving and aside from the small amounts already flowing towards her core, it all followed her guidance and flowed to her fingertips.
"Remember how that crystal looked, how it was set up, imagine solidifying the mana in your grasp into that."
Kali nodded, her fingers snapping into place as if she was still holding the crystal as she imagined it all. She felt it perfectly with her mana sense before, tiny crystalline structures went between even tinier blobs of mana.
Kali closed her eyes, focusing only on the image even as she felt the warm energy flowing out of her fingertips.
She stopped when she felt something solid in her grasp, and with her focus relaxing, the mana at her beck and call slowly retreated into the buffer. Still, Kali felt it was much less than before, but with the tiny, crude crystal grasped between her fingers, it was clear why.
"Why is it so ugly?" Kali whined as she turned the thing around. It looked more like a blue rick she'd have found in the dirt than the shiny crystals she was familiar with.
"It's quite good for a first attempt," Avariel smiled as she took the crude rock out of the girl's hold. "Hmm, the structure is good, very good, but I think you forgot to hold the image of how it should look as clearly in your mind."
"Maybe?" Kali flinched. She just focused on how the tiny balls of mana connected to each other and recreating that base structure, but she might have forgotten to look at the bigger picture.
"Not a problem, really," the woman flicked the rock back to Kali with a gentle smile. "Much better than Zad's first crystal. That thing looked nice, but it could barely hold a hundredth of the mana that yours could."
"Won't people laugh at me if I try to pay with this?" Kali stared at the thing in her palm like the child she'd just given birth to turned out to be a goblin.
"They might," the druid gigged at Kali's crestfallen expression. "But only because they are not Mages and have no way of measuring how much Mana this crude little rock holds. It is the quantity of mana held that gives it value, not how shiny it is."
"Okay," Kali grumbled, promising to herself that she was going to make it look at least somewhat presentable before she ever considered using it as a currency. Still, it'll be good as an emergency mana source.
"Remember how you made this one?" the woman said sternly. "As I said it holds much more mana than most other first try crystals. Whatever mental image you used to make this one should be a solid starting point. Don't change it much, just expand on that image. Alright?"
"Yes."
"Now let's check that range expansion structure and then you can go rest some, alright?"
"YES!" Bath~