Price of Progress, Part I

Day or night, Tercius spent the hours being instructed by the magi or giving instructions to Lucky. He pushed himself forward of his own free will and the three magi supported him unconditionally with anything he needed.

In his case, potions staved away the need for sleep almost entirely.

For Lucky, Mistress Kalina used those berries that the ram liked, some adjusted sleep staving potions, and infused it all into sea salt. Whenever the ram wanted to take a nap or sleep, Tercius just gave Lucky a little of that salt to lick. That brought him back to the land of the sleepless quickly.

At the beginning of this endeavor, his riding attempts had gone poorly. More than once, he had to be rescued from the back of a rampant beast that had no other desire than to throw the tiny rider off its back. It didn't help that he had little riding experience himself, but Mistress Prime'era had been quick to correct that.

With each passing day he picked up more and more from her verbal and practical riding lessons, all the while her {Teaching Bond} provided him a sense of how exactly things should be done on a level he found almost instinctive. It was like he knew what to do right when he needed to do it, almost as if he had done it a million times before.

Tercius fed Lucky with his own hands all the time and he saw just how much greenery the massive beast could eat. He indulged Lucky's occasional need to butt heads, which likely served to level up Lucky's Skills or something like that.

As Lucky got more and more used to him and more open to the sensation of carrying a rider on his back, things went more smoothly.

What made another real difference with his relationship with Lucky was a little bit of help from the past.

The guide on giant mountain sheep delved into a couple of ways of taming wild ones and following the recipes his Mentor had made an alchemical ointment that he then used to massage the velvety fur around the base of Lucky's massive horns. Apparently, the horns of male giant sheep were almost constantly in a state of growth, and that growth came with some pain. A single ointment-enhanced touch and the massive beast would literally melt into a bleating sleepy puddle.

As soon as he stopped, Lucky would get energetic and demand more by lowering its massive head and horns towards Tercius and pushing at him.

More than once, Tercius had been thrown away or pushed down to the ground by the eager beast. It was a reaction that both Tercius and Mistress Prime'era tried repeatedly to discourage the beast from doing because more than once Tercius had minor injuries as a result of it, but they found little success so far.

What they did manage with {Teaching Bond} was to make it clear to Lucky that the ointment massage was only a reward for work well done. After that, the beast was even more pliable and willing to work as Tercius instructed.

On the third day of training, Tercius had what he counted as his first true success.

The ride didn't last long but it was progress. Then he and Lucky did it once more and again after that.

Even though failure remained prevalent, success became more and more common.

*** *** ***

Days were long this time of year, the summer just past its peak, and the sun was struggling to completely set. There was not a single cloud on a pink and red sky. The lightly forested grassland that they used for training was devastated— the grass trampled, holes dug and stones uncovered, dark brown earth sprayed everywhere.

But they did it.

Tercius slowly patted Lucky's broad back, praising the fellow for the new record. A straight hour of uninterrupted riding might seem like nothing, but it was a result of just a few days of work for both of them. Tercius could only shake his head in wonder at it. How much progress would another day bring?

Thinking about the passage of days brought with itself other questions and worries that he kept only for himself. Going to the Temple of Balance of Spheros had come with a price. He had learned what he sought, but that knowledge had ended up costing him valuable time— five days so far and the price would rise at least two to three more days.

Having Lucky would give him a reasonable explanation for his movement speed across the mountains, and he was grateful for it, but…

Well, Mistress Kalina seemed perfectly willing to have him spend his days training, and Tercius suspected that she wouldn't say a single contrary word should he choose to forgo this path he was on. Tercius shook his head. No point in spending time dwelling on that now. Focusing on improving himself and Lucky should instead be his primary and only drive in the next few days. The sooner both got into shape, the sooner he would be on his way.

He turned towards the bond he had with Lucky, trying to emulate the way he used {Familiar Bond} with Amber, his faraway familiar. His hands massaged Lucky's back. The hairs of the ram's strong back were fine and soft below his palms, and Tercius could feel a rhythmic pulse at the tips of his fingers. The lean muscles and bones of the body on which he sat were steady as a mountain and alive with the constant expansion and contraction of Lucky's massive ribcage. Tercius' eyes slowly closed. He reached to develop the connection to a more firm and deeper one, a bond similar to the one he had with—

A yowl pierced the heavens and Tercius felt Lucky's back tense under his hands. Tercius' eyes went wide open. Like a wildfire on a windy summer's day, the {Teaching Bond} that linked him to Lucky grew frantic.

Suddenly, Tercius saw the world at a strange angle.

One moment he was flying and the other sharp pain came from the back of his head and then his entire back screamed with pain. Then all pain became about his left leg. Painful darkness consumed him, but then his eyes opened. Nothing seemed right. Blurry greens, yellows, and reds were everywhere he looked, with tiny dark spots swimming across his vision. Half grunting, half whimpering from the pain in his foot, Tercius tried to keep still. He was quite sure that it would be advisable not to try moving and help was on the way.

Like a phantom, a murky gray figure appeared above Tercius. "I'm here, Tercius," his Mentor said. "I'm here."

Mistress Kalina's cold hands held fast onto the sides of his head. His vision started improving and he saw how concerned Mistress Kalina was, the glowing green lanterns that were her eyes unblinkingly looking at his own.

"Keep still while I check."

"I… know…"

"Your head is bleeding and you have a minor concussion. Your ankle is broken and the tissue around it is… Well, we'll mend that in half an hour. There will be bruising around your chest, most surely, and some pain as well, but I can deal with all of that with a single potion."

Near them, Lucky was back on his legs and looking at them.

Mistress Kalina looked at the beast with narrowed eyes. "Sleep."

The giant ram folded like soaked paper.

"You were lucky he threw you off before he started thrashing. A moment later, and I might have had to… Well, it didn't happen so let's not go there."

"I got lucky…" Tercius chuckled and winced. "Then again… Lucky was the one who almost—"

"Numb Pain."

The aches and pains vanished abruptly and the words froze on his lips.

"You can joke. That's good. You'll be fine, but I think Mistress Prime'era should have a look at you. Come," Mistress Kalina waved a hand and Tercius found himself floating beside her like some piece of luggage.

"What was that noise? It spooked him like crazy."

"One of those cats we saw the other day," his Mentor said. "It headed your way and I gave it a small jolt. It scrambled after that, but not before it unleashed that vocal Skill of its."

Tercius shook his head.

"This is a good thing that happened here and now, Tercius. At least now we know that we need to train him in another aspect. That kind of reaction has to be tempered down, otherwise you might just lose your head under his weight,"

From the corner of his eye, he saw that Lucky was now on the ground, one horn stuck in the earth, mouth half-open. Although he had seen it happen time and time again— this was not his first fall or injury in the past few days and nights, after all— it was still so strange seeing a mountain of lean muscles fall asleep from a single word.

Back inside their cliffside tent— which was hardly accessible by any other way than with the ability to fly— Mistress Prime'era took a look and made her judgment known.

"Kalina is right in her diagnosis. For this, some proper rest will be needed—"

As he rushed to protest, Mistress Prime'era wagged a long pale finger at him.

"No, no. This is a good opportunity to let your growing resistance to the potions you're using fall back somewhat. Tonight and tomorrow, don't take those potions at all."

When he took the potion to stave off sleep earlier in the day, he had to double the dose for it to start working. Perhaps she was right.

He nodded.

Persuaded from straining himself in any way until the next morning, Tercius was first given to drink an assortment of various healing potions, ending with a sweet one that vaguely tasted of strawberries. Contrary to the vile ones before it, that one made him smack his lips and almost ask for more.

He had to make himself comfortable on a spacious cot inside the massive tent. The fine gray cloth was embroidered with massive, faintly lit runes of red, the carefully arranged arcs, straight lines, and dots of the dozens of pictograms all strange and unreadable, different from the standard runic.

With narrow eyes and a small headache behind his temples, Tercius tried to figure out the key that hid the functions of the runes.

He might as well have tried searching for a needle in a primeval forest. Keycoding of runes was never done with simple keys even for the most ordinary of enchantments, let alone for a portable tent that someone like Mistress Prime'era carried in a little triangular piece of metal worn around her neck. While keybreaking of coded runes was never nor would it ever be a crime– in fact, magi always needed more people in this branch of magic, according to his Mentor– the difficulty and time consumed on breaking the key made sure that it was simply much, much easier to earn some currency and buy the blueprints from the Repository.

After a while of making no headway whatsoever, he turned to the side in his cot, keeping careful watch of his recently mended foot, looking straight into the gray canvas of the tent. If he couldn't train himself and Lucky, then he would just have to train himself in some other productive way.

He closed his eyes and then reached for {Distant Mind} to take him away. The darkness deepened, the sound of chirping insects fading away to nothing, the smell of grass and flowers, and the feeling of a cool evening on a clear mountainside fresh on his skin dulling to a null void, the remains of all pains flowing away from him.

When he came here, it was as if he had cast away all that held him back out there.

His thoughts comfortably expanded inside the void. The lightheadedness was left out there, too, unable to follow him here. But he was not here for this tonight. His focus sharpened and his thoughts focused and so formed they reached for a small blue and green marble.

The darkness vanished, leaving him below a massive rotating globe of blue and green. Two enormous disembodied hands hovered above the globe, as if the planetary representation was a simple crystal ball used by a fortune teller. Thin silvery-white threads linked the gargantuan fingers to the globe, occasionally twitching or moving and in doing so making the threads waver. Compared even to the little fingers, Tercius came up short.

Tercius moved around the massive globe, searching behind its considerable bulk for his Anima tenant.

The wisp was no bigger than a tennis ball, a small glowing core bound with rings upon rings of satellite-like chains. The captive wisp hovered a little bit here and then a little there, seemingly without any pattern to its movement.

Flu, as Tercius called the being, had been with him for years.

"I've had a crazy day," Tercius complained to the wisp as he approached. "Just… crowded with a lot of… Anyway, I won't bore you with my troubles. Now, less talk and more work."

He reached out and grabbed towards the outermost chain. A single touch was enough for the chain to pop like a bubble. A freezing pain shot up Tercius' arm just as Flu came to a halt. Ignoring his pain and the wisp's sudden halt, Tercius quickly reached out with his {Energia Manipulation} and grabbed the moving energia under his hold before any of it had a chance to escape from the colored Core and into the endless gray fog of his Anima.

By the time he reached for another chain, the one he popped earlier was completely regrown. The wisp was still, as if waiting. Harvesting the chains was actually the only thing that had ever made the wisp react in any way and Tercius took the being's halt as a sign that the being wanted to be free.

"One day, Flu. One day."

The deeper he tore through the chains and the closer he approached the occasionally visible core, the faster the chains regrew. Years ago, he had tried to see how far he could go and when he got to about a third of the way through the chains, he had simply blacked out from the pain. After that, he had spent an entire day in bed, just blank and without a will to move even a finger afterward.

Not even {Distant Mind} had been able to shake him out of that strange state.

Harvesting the outermost chain over and over again was much easier than delving deeper, almost as if someone had specifically made the chains this way. That way, anyone able to see and interact with the wisps would be unwilling to commit to going deeper, down where the price of energia harvest was much steeper. After all, who would choose to harvest an absolute killing of a precious resource the hard way, when you could get the same thing with an easier one instead?

He liked to think that he would. The energia he got from Flu's chains had helped him and those around him many times now, and repaying Flu somehow was appropriate.

Letting Flu get back to its wanderings, Tercius looked at the ball-sized sphere of white silver energia that he harvested. Where magia was almost gas-like, energia was almost liquid-like. Where he could compress and scatter magia, he could do neither to energia.

Seemingly opposite, yet similar.

Tercius narrowed his eyes trying to bore holes into the sphere, mentally ordering the energia to stay put in place.

Gently, he loosened the firm mental grip he had on the sphere. Once it was completely free of his hold, he stopped and observed the sphere. It held the nearly perfect spherical shape for a little bit, but then it wobbled little by little and started to untangle itself into watery threads before his eyes. The white threads drifted towards the gray fog, pulled by a newly developed emptiness in his Anima.

Tercius was quick to take all the energia back under his mental control before it crossed Core's boundary, but his eyes narrowed at the fog. It was somewhere in that direction then. He remade the sphere and before he let it go again, he gave another order— it was to hold the shape he gave it for as long as it could.

Without waiting, the perfect sphere moved slowly towards the gray fog of his Anima. Tercius nodded to himself; that movement was likely a pull by the vacuum of {Magia Touch} unstable Core.

Tercius reached out with {Energia Manipulation} and recaptured the precious resource under his firm grasp, dragging it all back towards him in a blink of an eye.

Picturing the destination in his mind, Tercius ordered two things to the ball. It had to hold its shape and move to the spot pictured. As soon as he let his hold on the shape fade, the ball of energia wobbled in place and made a tiny movement towards the destination he imagined, but then it settled, unmoving. Tercius came near it, observing the snail's pace the ball of energia had towards his Anima, in the direction opposite of his command.

The pull of the vacuum that the chaotic Core of his new Skill had was just a little bit stronger than his command… Interesting.

The shape started decaying into watery threads soon enough, while the rest of the ball started gaining some speed towards the vacuum. Tercius let the energia threads move until they almost reached the fog of his Anima and only then did he re-establish his hold over them and bring them back.

He already knew that this would work. This was something he had done many times before, both consciously and otherwise. This was the base for the real test.

He refocused on the ball of energia and brought it between his palms. This time he didn't send his commands towards the white ball, but rather towards {Energia Manipulation}, the chain of command altered only slightly.

"Make the energia ball hold that shape."

The Core came alive with light and Tercius startled. A hunger growled from deep inside him, demanding food. His green eyes blinked in surprise. The energia sphere in his hold buzzed with excitement and sought to escape, but he held it back as he took a look at the giant green and blue globe.

He knew that hunger intimately. His {Energia Manipulation} was at [40], at its second boundary of change. The Skill wanted to grow in this direction, but found no energia to fuel the growth. He had to feed this growth.

He smiled. A new change. A good one. More than good, actually. Even at first glance, this alteration to his Skill seemed like a solution to many current problems and, better yet, he could easily see this opening new avenues for the future.

It was powerful in a way—

Tercius looked down at the ball of energia. This kind of alteration rang true to something else he had been interested in and the similarities, while tentative, were there.

Was this one way to Intent casting, perhaps?

In Introduction to Terms and Concepts of Spellwork, the teacher of the class, Master Lazarus, had spoken about many things but one of those things that stuck with him was "ways of spell expression". At its core, what spell expression meant was how the spell's framework was created. A Gesticulator would use arms, hands, and fingers to outline the framework, all the while focusing on metamorphosing the magia into the appropriate state. Some would even use their entire bodies, making an elaborate dance of the framework. A Vocalist would create that same framework simply by speaking, or chanting, or even singing, all the while keeping their mind focused on the process of metamorphosis.

There were other ways of expression— and you could even combine these ways if you wanted and were reasonably good at it— but casting by Intent meant creating both the framework and the metamorphology with nothing more and nothing less than thoughts alone. That required keeping numerous parameters of the spell's nature and shape in mind at all times. A single slip and you didn't get the spell you wanted, but rather some minor or major deviation of it. The danger with deviations was that, more often than not, they were entirely unstable, so much so that in some cases the magia that was used for the shape and nature of the spell ended up imploding or more often exploding.

While not exactly a common occurrence, Tercius had heard of students in upper years who had started a fire through that exact kind of explosion, setting clothes and furniture on fire, losing fingers, or scarring their face simply from having an errant thought while they were changing the nature of their magia.

Learning how to cast a spell by Intent was a work of a dedicated lifetime and until a Magos learned how to do it consistently, other ways of expression were made available.

So what if instead of manipulating energia with the Skill, he grew the Skill in such a way that it would manipulate energia as he commanded?

In a way, that was a kind of Intent casting. Or should he call it Interface casting? Was he breaking the game?

Tercius chuckled to himself.

Yes, he could see this as a way towards a kind of Intent casting… He just had to pave it properly and then find a bridge to magia itself. One such bridge came to mind immediately. What would happen if he used so altered {Energia Manipulation} to overcome a boundary of {Magia Manipulation}?

The very thought of it excited him to no end. But to get to that, he had some work to do.

His eyes narrowed.

The mental grip that he kept on the ball of energia was suddenly released, letting the sphere gently slip between his mental fingers. Instantly, the small white star floated not for the gray fog as it did before, but rather in the completely opposite direction— directly for the green and blue globe. Tercius' narrow gaze followed it as it sank into the globe and disappeared. He looked around the Core.

Nothing seemed different…

Well, nothing to it but onwards. After all, altering his Skill in this way would require a considerable portion of energia. Energia that would require hours of pain.

Time to burn himself with pain.

Tercius caught up with Flu again. Once more, with a small white sphere in his mental grip, Tercius gave an order to {Energia Manipulation} and expected from the Skill to execute the command on his behalf. The Core came alive with light and hunger and the energia that he paid for with pain was ripped away from him and integrated into the green and blue globe.

He winced and grimaced and hissed and grunted as chain after chain popped at his touch, but every scrap of harvested energia was gobbled up by the Skill as soon as he tried ordering it to order the energia.

Tercius cycled through harvesting energia and then sacrificing it all for a new function to grow and the Skill to evolve to a new state, calling on {Distant Mind} every now and then when harvesting pains became too strong. Using the Skill was like rubbing a cool ointment on a burn. It offered some relief, but as soon as he started harvesting again the burn would just get ignited again and start spreading itself.

Only time could heal this pain.

Harvesting energia was without a doubt the worst pain-inducer he ever experienced, eclipsing even the pains that went along with the formation of the Well, a burst appendix, a broken leg, and a major burn.

As he kept on harvesting more and more energia, he remembered how he shied away from the pain, but those times were long gone. To him, this pain had become something of a currency that was used for exchange. Years of willing exchange had made him specifically numb to it, but it never stopped hurting. Not one bit.

{?} [?] fuels the advancement of {Energia Manipulation} [40]

As the Core started keening and the brightness of the surroundings increased, Tercius sighed deeply. He was combusting internally, each thought of his getting slower and slower. "Finally."

He had expected the function to take a lot of energia and his expectations had been met. Only a few of his prior experiments had taken more energia than this.

{Energia Manipulation} [40] is now {Energia Manipulation} [41]

Weary, in burning pain, and in serious need of some proper rest, it was only Tercius' curiosity that kept pushing him forward. He mentally called out the Skill's name.

{Energia Manipulation} [41]

— As you focus your will, your connection with energia deepens.

—{?}: ???.

—{?}: ???.

Tercius hummed to himself. Any time he brought a Skill over a boundary of change this way, for some strange reason the Skill wasn't able to tell him of what it was capable of for quite some time afterward. In most cases, it had taken months, in more rare ones years, for the description to unravel. Curious to see if perhaps this time was any different, he mentally called out {Distant Mind}.

{Distant Mind} [61]

— At will, your thoughts create distance from your surroundings and turn inwards. The senses of your body close. Your emotions slowly fade to a neutral point. Your focus sharpens.

—{Visualization}: At will, your thoughts express themselves visually.

—{?}: At will, the Skill extends into your anima.

—{?}: ???.

After a moment of study, Tercius hummed. There was a change. Just weeks ago there was no mention of anima in the description. Rather it said that the Skill extends into the World of Fog, as he called his anima back then.

But a change here and there was the norm. As {Distant Mind} leveled, the line about senses went from something like "the senses of your body dull" to the full closure that it was today. Yet he rarely noticed these changes before his first —{?}:. His creations were more prone to change than most and they made him pay close attention to the wording of the description.

Over the years he noticed that any time he started fundamentally thinking about some related concept in a different way, he could expect a change to happen after some time had passed.

Now that he knew of this change, he wanted to check on a few more Skills, but he really didn't have it in him anymore. With a mental push, he left the Core and returned to the pleasant darkness of his mind. His thoughts shrunk inwards, gently floating in the void.

Before he pushed his Skill away and went to sleep properly, he had to let the burns cool a little.

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***