Chapter 11.1 Unexpected Discoveries

The wind is warm, humid, maritime. The smell of salt and seaweed, but not the disgusting one that lingers in modern ports, but the one that makes it clear: the sea! Even here, in the mountains, or rather, almost on top of the former volcano, you can feel the freshness of the sea breeze, which perfectly dispels the stuffiness.

During this month I'm already tired of the eternal stuffiness, of my shirt always sticky with sweat, of the heavy air that you don't breathe — you drink! And here, in the mountains, it is simply wonderful!

 Not only the soul rests from the stress of studying and training, but also the body feels as if it is saturated with strength. It's good that I have a lot of free time to do my own thing. No, for the first week, Mayuri-san tried to get me and her daughter together, but she quickly realized the futility of that: even when we were alone, we were doing our own things, separately.

And when I was either studying or reading, the girl would stupidly freeze up, turn into a doll, and sit stupidly with her eyes closed all the time. And what is the main trick: she did not meditate, did not sleep, what she was doing — it is unclear, and if she practiced going into the astral, her mother is a shaman, and would quickly feel it, and repelled her daughter these impulses.

All in all, a strange child. Anyway, I spend some of my free time in the evenings in trance, learning how to control the dolls, or just observing them through their eyes. Yes, I already have five of them!

Where did you get them? Well, this cunning pair of birds somehow miraculously adapted little ghosts and mousies that made four exact copies of my spider. Good thing the crystals had time to grow, so I didn't have to steal my master's goods again.

So I'm practicing in trance to either watch several spiders at once, or to keep all of them attentive — it's like a single monitor of tracking, divided into images from different cameras, or I take control of one and manage it. It's hard, it gives me constant headaches, nosebleeds, shaky hands or legs for hours on end. Potions save the day. I even complained about headaches once and was taken to a healer.

Conclusion: weakness of acclimatization, will pass soon, drink strengthening compositions. In general, I drink and train without fear of a stroke. And the birds promised that if you need more dolls, they will quickly make in any quantity — there is experience. I, on the other hand, am waiting for a new batch of crystals to be ready, which is a week and a half. Bad "oven", I have to get on with my plan.

So now I'm sitting in a trance while the spiders snoop around underground. The thing is, while walking I found a deep but narrow crack in the rock that leads somewhere into the darkness of an extinct volcano. There's no way I can climb there myself — it's narrow and scary, to be honest. But to launch spiders there is a nice thing — they turned out to be very nimble and agile, no different from the real ones, and even stronger. But trouble came when I didn't expect it.

Or rather, I did not think. In short, it turned out to be dark under the ground, and insects do not see with their eyes, but with whiskers and hairs on their bodies. I'm picking something up, in a general way... no, as a training, great way to do it, but... short BUT!

So here I am thinking about a solution to the problem. Why else would I be sitting on the mountain, I mean, I wanted to see caves and rocks and all that, and it's a bummer! It's good that spiders memorize the terrain, and I don't have to go back to what I passed, and there — maybe I'll solve the problem.

Meanwhile, I came out of the trance, let the spiders off the leash, let them climb there themselves. I spent about forty minutes exercising my body: stretching, shuttle running, pull-ups, stretching again. I've started a period of rapid growth, and I do such "runs" several times a day, depending on my workload.

Goro-san mentioned one night that he himself was involved in body development at my age (though he is not tall, but rather wiry and agile), and that he had a good karate teacher. So this teacher told me that child magicians have a huge advantage over ordinary people in terms of physical development if they do it.

The thing is that the magic of the child itself protects it, like an automatic symbiont, so we get less sick, we are more easily given martial arts, because magic somehow understands the usefulness of it and helps.

Magic also seriously stimulates all the processes of the body, heals wounds and bones faster, fights and cleanses the body of harmful substances. Therefore, when the period of rapid growth begins, one should be engaged in the development of flexibility, agility and endurance, because the body begins to perceive the changes as a norm, and magic then supports the achieved bar.

The man also shared the complexities of training that he still remembered, and I did it right away, because when I have to work with a clan mage, I need all the strength I can get.

When I'm done with the exercise, I sit down on a stump, calm down, and go into a shallow meditation, just to correct my breathing, calm my heartbeat, and channel magic to fix the micro changes.

So, drop by drop, the power comes. I arrived at the Mori family home a few hours later, taking one spider with me and leaving the others to explore the underground passages. There was still time before dinner, and I could have done some magic, but Mayuri-san had decided to cook and make the family happy. So I'll do something else.

Sitting on the veranda, breathing in the evening air, I sketched a picture that came to me with a simple pencil. In that life I had a friend who was a great artist, he would pick up a pen or a pencil and just draw something. Just like I'm doing now. I wonder how he felt when inspiration came? For example, I feel something like a faint trance, like someone else's thought is flowing into me, and it's so strong that it definitely doesn't belong to that person.

I wonder if it's like that for everyone. Sometimes I see pictures, images directly, fueled by the "delicious" sensations that come with it. It is difficult to describe these sensations, very difficult, because everything is intertwined there: taste, hearing, seeing, emotions.

 And so on. I now feel a fresh flow, strong but not coarse, colored in blue and violet shades with golden sparks, silver lines, strings, from which ripples of soft but long ringing spread out. The spiral corridor of the vortex, filled with lines and sparks, distorting the light of nearby stars and bright nebulae, gradually appears on the album page. The outline of a comet, losing chunks of ice and a tail of gas, rushing somewhere. A yellow planet, illuminated by the yellow light of a local star.....

Feeling the onset of fatigue, I fall out of the trance, dropping the album beside me. It's hard to breathe, my body is shaking with cold sweat and shivering. My eyes swim, my head is a buzzing noise, and red spots swirl around, obscuring everything. I don't know how long I sat there until I came to my senses, it was really fucked up, but when I let go, I picked up the album on automatic and froze in astonishment.

There was a window to a distant cosmic landscape on the sharply hardened sheet of the album. It was alive, in motion. The magical image reflected everything I felt, sensed, and saw: distortions swirled, a large comet flew by, meteorites flashed, a yellow planet rotated, a gas cluster glowed with rainbows, stars glittered, and a mystical ringing was felt. What am I going to do with this? — Before I could think, I felt a man beside me. I turned around to see a frozen Mayuri-san holding her palm to her mouth. Hmm, you can't hide it now... ....