171, 2/2

Erick woke and the world was as he left it. The sky was clear. The white city nearby was completely uninhabited. The waters far, far below had a pod of whales swimming around the large arches of Yggdrasil’s surface-breaching roots.

He crushed his panic down and away.

“Good day, Father,” Yggdrasil said. “Nothing happened while you slept.”

Ophiel chirped in agreement as he fluttered down from the headrest of the bed, onto Erick’s chest like a playful cat. Erick patted the little guy, saying, “Good morning, Ophiel.” He looked up and smiled. “Good morning, Yggdrasil.” He got up, saying, “Let’s go find some breakfast. Yggdrasil? I’m going to the city right over there. You want to [Scry] me? I’ll be back soon.”

Yggdrasil’s branches creaked a bit while his leaves shimmered to dim green. “I don’t want you to go.”

“I’ll be right over there.” Erick dressed himself as he said, “Be back soon, too. I want to experiment with a runic web, and I want you to help with that, but I need to find some supplies first.”

“… Okay.”

Erick smiled brightly, feeling a flush of warmth all over. He had hoped that Yggdrasil would be better after some time together, and that proved to be true. After the talk of yesterday, Erick had worried that he had erred, deeply, in how he interacted with his largest summon. Leaving Jane behind with the sitters while he had gone to work had been tough, but necessary, but Jane didn’t have the capability to simply [Teleport Other] him, to keep him near her at all times. Life would have been very different if that had been a possibility.

Raising Yggdrasil right was going to be tough, and happen a lot sooner than he expected it to happen. But…

Erick absolutely loved the idea of having another ‘kid’. Ophiel was great, but it’d be a hundred years before he turned barely sentient, and longer still till he was sapient. Yggdrasil, though, was already there. And since Yggdrasil was going to live forever, that was another impetus to look into [Immortality], because maybe Jane could find her own way to that spellwork, too—

Oh.

Wait.

Jane would simply [Polymorph] her way to immortality, wouldn’t she? She already had her solution to the problem of death. Erick was the one lagging behind.

With a small laugh at realizing what he should have realized a long time ago, Erick stepped off of Yggdrasil’s branch, into the light, feeling supremely giddy. He might need to resume his search for [Immortality] after this Worldly Path, for the future was looking bright! Unfathomably bright, indeed.

– – – –

Erick found the king’s dining hall in the center of the white castle. The walls were gilded wood. The ceiling was a fresco of a long lost universe. Candles flickered and orbs of light held in the air above, while down below, a thousand different foods were laid out, eternally waiting for people who were long gone. This whole land was a mausoleum to a forgotten place and time…

But the food still tasted great. Copies of the food, anyway. Erick wasn’t about to eat the originals.

Plates of gold and silver and platinum hovered all around him as he filled them up with breads and meats and vegetables. Glazed maybe-ham. Not-pheasant under glass. Racks of sorta-lamb. Asparagus-adjacents in lots of butter, with not-broccoli pilaf. Sugary gels that resembled slimes, with ‘cores’ of candy. Drinks that fizzed and gravies that shimmered like white gold.

Erick copied some of the fine white-pearl jewelry he saw, too, alongside their precious metal inserts. He even found some odd metals he couldn’t name, in the shapes of replica artifacts with surely large significance. When he was done, Erick and Ophiel escaped the white palace with enough loot to make a seasoned adventuring team blush with envy, and enough food to feed maybe two hungry orcols. But he hadn’t stolen a single thing.

He also didn’t erase the manasphere in his passing, either.

Let the incoming wrought see exactly what he had done to their holy land; let them see he had taken nothing and everything. He was kinda excited, wondering what their reaction would be. Maybe they would focus more on [Renew] upturning every single magic school the world over, or how Yggdrasil was planted in the Core, or how Rozeta had probably talked to them all and told them to behave.

Erick took a glance at the wizard’s tower, but he left that alone, again. That place was much less a priority once Erick understood the language, and realized that none of it would be useful for him. Magic simply did not work on Veird like how it used to work back in the Old Cosmology.

He also didn’t want to go there because of its obvious connections to Wizards, but he would probably have to… Soon. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow.

Thoughts about magic held heavy in his mind as he inspected his loot, back atop Yggdrasil’s upper branches. Of particular note was a massive white metal and many-jeweled scepter. It was shaped like something a king would use to show they were the boss, and according to some of the paintings that littered the white palace, that was exactly its purpose. The king used this scepter in place of a crown— Well. Not this scepter. This scepter was a copy of the original that Erick left untouched, in the throne room. That original —which was also copy of the original scepter that was lost to the Old Cosmology— remained laid across the throne, like it was set there to prevent people from sitting on that massive white metal chair. The throne remained behind, though this copied scepter came with him.

Erick suspected that the throne and this scepter were made out of the same materials, anyway, so this was fine. Whatever this scepter was made out of weighed in at thirty kilos of solidness. The rainbow of gems that inlaid its surface probably weighed less than a quarter kilo. If not for those gems, it could probably serve as a good mace.

Erick swung it around a few times, testing weight and balance, as he told Yggdrasil and Ophiel, “I could make it into some sort of unbreakable weapon with some [Flying Striker Rune]s, but honestly, I’m thinking I should make it some sort of [Undertow Renew] scepter. Something that could be stuck into a central node of a runic web and—” Erick stopped.

He stared at nothing as a large thought suddenly dominated his mind.

Erick whispered, “I don’t know the runes for [Renew].” After a moment, he added, “I don’t know the runes for [Undertow], either.” Erick set down the scepter and then he set down himself, laying down on Yggdrasil’s bark, spread eagle and staring upward.

After a moment, Yggdrasil asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m thinking.”

“… Talk to me?”

Erick gladly did so, “Ancient Script is very precise, but it’s also specifically made to rhyme. I had been doing all my major spell creation in Ecks, while sometimes adding in English words as needed. I did my [Renew] creation in Ancient Script, too, except I used the English word for [Renew] because both Ecks and Ancient Script don’t have a great word for that concept, and because I had to create a new concept. That’s what I did when I spoke that spell into existence. I created a concept and attached specific moldable meaning to that concept. I created magic.” Erick breathed. He said, “But I’m not sure what that means for making runework for [Renew], because I don’t know how that translation works. Do I simply write [Renew] into platinum and—” Erick stopped himself. He got back up to his feet, saying, “I’ll have to experiment. I was going to, anyway. Might as well start now.”

He went over to some of the loot he gathered and studied the coins, the rings and the broaches, the bars of precious metals and even the white scepter, once again. And then he dismissed all of that and went to his backpack. He grabbed the sliver of the platinum he had taken from that elemental, which he knew to be pure, and then he started copying it.

Yggdrasil asked, “How would you make the runes for something you don’t understand?”

Erick paused a bit. That was a very coherent thought coming out of Yggdrasil— Ah. Yggdrasil was parroting Erick’s own question back at him to try and understand the question himself.

Erick started talking while he worked, [Duplicate]ing slivers of platinum till he had a good ball of them, then [Metalshape]ing them together, then copying that ball. “I have no idea, Yggdrasil. I’m going to try a few things that might work out, but they probably won’t. My first idea is to write down [Renew] in English, and hope to the gods that doesn’t work, because ‘[Renew]’ in English doesn’t fit with any existing rune structure.

“The second idea is to try and combine some of the words I used in the spell’s creation to make a new word. That’s how most of Ancient Script is, with most high-concept words being mashes of smaller words. It’s like how the Mandarin word for ‘computer’ is ‘lightning brain’ in English, but as one word, or how the Ecks word for ‘book shelf’ would be ‘knowledge repository’ in English. In this way, [Call Lightning] became its own set of runes using Ancient Script notation, so I can only guess that [Renew] will follow the same example.

“Third idea is to try creating my own rune for [Renew]. Probably won’t work, because the Script makes the runes, and [Call Lightning] didn’t get its own rune. But then again, I made the spell, and the Script solidified it to work with the rest of its magic, so maybe it’s special.

“The fourth idea is probably the only thing that would work, though.” Erick said, “I’m going to have to get Darabella or someone else with Greater Shifting Runes to lay down some testing runes in some adamantium, and I’m gonna have to constantly infuse those runes with [Renew] until the true runes for [Renew] appear to me.”

Erick was slightly straining now under the weight of his cubic meter block of platinum. While it was under [Metalshape], it was pretty much weightless, but as he let that spellwork relax…

Without his [Lodestar] supporting the strength of his [Greater Lightwalk], his telekinetic hold upon the metal would have already fractured, for a single cubic meter of platinum had to weigh in at something like 21 metric tons. And it was definitely that heavy. Erick slowly set down the cubic meter of white gold and relaxed as Yggdrasil took all of the weight, effortlessly. Something about that surprised even Erick, though it truly shouldn’t have. Yggdrasil’s main component to his body was eternal stonewood, and thus he was much lighter and stronger than normal wood, or even concrete, but he still had to weigh as much as a small mountain.

With a scoop of Shaping power, Erick took some platinum off the top of the block. Since he had copied the metal inside his [Prismatic Ward], it was perfectly primed to accept runes and other magics. It was Prismsteel, as Grosgrena called it. Useful for multi-elemental spellwork. Super rare, too, because [Prismatic Ward] was also rare, so the uses of this particular metal were not well known to most people.

But Enduring Forge’s books on prismsteel were exhaustive. Though Erick had not read most of them, he had read enough to know that prismsteel was good enough for almost all applications.

He smiled as he cast a [Particle Vacuum] into the air, and a [Condense Platinum] into the center of that. It didn’t take long for that space to empty of contaminants. At that point he stuck the platinum clump into the space and had an Ophiel turn on a low-grade [Incandescent Aura], heating up his clump of platinum, but keeping it below the melting point. As long as a phase change didn’t occur, the magic remained inside the metal; the prismsteel remained prismsteel.

With the red hot platinum, Erick began smashing his clump of metal with all of his force, deforming it with an aching groan. Heat and vacuum and smashing light removed small impurities like so much sparking char, though the prismatic platinum remained in the center, completely at peace with its location.

Squeezing and smashing, Erick gradually began to work out the kinks and interior spherical oddities that had slipped into the metal’s structure when he used [Metalshape]. He probably should have done this before he ended up with a cubic meter of platinum, but it had grown so fast, and oh well.

Soon, his prismsteel was at the pliable stage, and that was good enough. Erick worked his light into the center of the metal and expanded outward, forming a bubble of platinum first, and then physically pushing and prodding it into a tetrahedron, ensuring that every strut and every corner was solid, and secure.

It was the start of a minor runic web; a testing space to see how runes flowed magic from one point to another. Erick had made a few of these days ago— over 33 days ago, actually. But those ones had been made out of normal steel, and were not very durable, or conducive to magic. He hadn’t wanted to display his [Duplicate] in front of anyone up there, either, but down here? Eh. Fuck it.

Ophiel turned off his [Incandescent Aura]. Erick surrounded the wireframe runic web with hard light, and canceled the vacuum. Gradually, he relaxed his hold on the atmosphere, letting air back into the space, onto the platinum. With a gentle touch of [Frozen Mist Aura], the platinum gradually cooled enough to touch, and Erick fully released his lightgrip. Each corner of the prototyping runic web held a flat space to carve runes, but other than that, it was nothing special.

Erick copied the runic web a few times. He set those copies aside and grabbed his adamantium knife out of his bag. With a deep breath and a bit of focus, light streamed into his knife and Erick got to work, inscribing the runes for lightward upon three of the four corners. This first web was just a tester to ensure he had done everything right, after all.

When he was done, he imbued the metal with a lightward—

And, working exactly like it should, Erick’s 10 mana lightward, which produced an effective 200 mana spell, soaked into the platinum web and spread out to three of the four tetrahedron points like liquid illumination. Light clung to prismsteel, which acted almost like a fluorescent bulb, but since the fourth node of the web wasn’t runed the light barely extended up the paths toward that fourth point. Other than that, the light spread rather evenly. It was kinda hard to tell in the full light of the Outer Core, but Erick guesstimated that his 200 mana lightward had been split into thirds.

Erick went ahead and runed ‘lightward’ into the fourth node.

As soon as he finished carving the final slash, imbuing the final bit of meaning into his runes, the runic web dimmed to half strength and the number of lit runic paths doubled, from three, to six. The entire tetrahedron of platinum bars and nodes was lit with a cloying lightward.

“Perfect.” Erick held up the lit runic web, eyeing it for any defects at all. He found none. “Looks good.”

Yggdrasil asked, “What did you do?”

Erick smiled, and then happily explained as he picked up another runic web, and went through the whole process again, explaining it to Yggdrasil as he did.

His next runic web was different.

‘Lightward’ went to a single node, but on the other three nodes Erick tried three different ideas for [Renew]. One node gained ‘[Renew]’, written in English; putting that word into the metal felt weird, and he probably did it wrong, but this was all an experiment and there was nothing to do for the weirdness of it all but try. The second node gained ‘mold mana to spell’, which was about the direct translation of what [Renew] meant, but it was not at all as elegant a rune series as some spells. [Force Bolt] was literally two singular runes, ‘force’ and ‘bolt’, and both of those runes were deeply ingrained into the Script as their own individual glyphs. Carving that second node felt all sorts of wrong, though, so it was probably a failure, too.

The third runic attempt was one of Erick’s own creation, combining and overlapping the simple rune for ‘[Rejuvenation]’, which was the most basic Healing Magic rune, and the rune for ‘mana’. It ended up as a circle with a wave in the center, which also felt all sorts of wrong, but it certainly looked nice and thematic.

None of them worked.

Erick imbued a lightward into that rune, and then he held his hand against each [Renew] attempt, trying to will [Renew] into the metal exactly how he knew it should go, but each time he ended up with a handful of white rain, and the runic web remained unimbued. The lightward didn’t get stronger, at all. The English ‘[Renew]’ failed utterly, but the other two weren’t any better.

He frowned.

“Ah. Well.” Erick guessed, “I’m fluent in Ancient Script, but I certainly don’t use it all the time. Maybe the word I want is already in there, somewhere, and I just haven’t heard it? Maybe I simply haven’t come across the concept yet.” He looked up at Yggdrasil. “Want to call up Poi again? I need to ask him to find me something.”

“Okay.”

Erick nodded, and dove back into Yggdrasil’s consciousness. The world became an ephemeral ocean and flames once again, but with two ghostly pathways leading out from this land of unchanging day. Erick went with Yggdrasil down the correct path—

He hit a block.

Erick had no idea what he was looking at, so he pulled back. Once again sitting on Yggdrasil’s branches, Erick steadied himself, and tried to get through to Poi again. This time he paid special attention to the pathway—

He hit a grate; not a true block. It was hard to understand the grate for what it was, for the land was as solid as the sky and nothing stayed in one place for long at all. Even Yggdrasil’s pathway shifted left and right, appearing and vanishing out of this surrealist landscape like a road in the desert that only appeared when the wind blew away the dunes. And yet, even that imagery wasn’t true, for Yggdrasil had no trouble at all navigating this land, like some great whale of a thousand tails, hovering above and behind Erick, free to swim or fly or crawl as he desired.

Erick only had the one path ahead of him, and the dunes blocked his travel.

With the mental approximation of a frown, and the ethereal idea of grabbing hold of a shovel, Erick stuck his hands into the sand to clear them away—

He came back to himself to see his hands broken, with bone poking out of flesh and blood highlighting and hiding his new wounds. Pain had yet to manifest, but it came on quick enough. Calmly, Erick used his sunform to move his hands back into something approximating their original shape, and he cast [Greater Treat Wounds]. Wounds began to close—

A blue box appeared.

Another blue box appeared.

Erick frowned. “Fair, I suppose.” He [Cleanse]d his blood away as he thought. There were ways around this new limitation, some of them very obvious, so he took one, telling Yggdrasil, “If anyone asks, Yggdrasil, could you tell them I’m okay, and that I’ll be back when I can?”

Yggdrasil said, “I tell people this.”

“Thank you.” Erick asked, “Are you having any trouble with people since yesterday, when we went out together?”

“No trouble. Not anymore.”

“Good.” Erick turned back to his work, and wondered, “So. If I can’t continue making a runic web with [Renew], and [Gate] is blocked, then… What am I here for— Oh.” He looked at his skin, and at his [Personal Ward]. With the stability of the manasphere all around and the lack of threats, he might be able to drop his defenses and actually work on his aura control. Even if he couldn’t get much further with his [Gate] goals, getting aura control out of this trip would be a fantastic outcome, too. A glance outward showed that there were no people here, either— “Actually. Let’s Scan for people again.”

A [Cascade Imaging] went out, searching for ‘people’, its radio waves easily bouncing across the thousands upon thousands of kilometers of the ‘bowl’ of this inner world. Ten minutes later the results appeared on the map. Only one ‘person’ was found, and that person was located exactly where Erick expected them to appear; a single blue dot appeared in the center of the Imaging, representing Erick himself.

With that cleared out of the way, Erick remembered another way to check for people; The Quest Board. If there were Quests it meant that there was someone submitting Quests in the Inner Core—

There were Quests. None of them were new. All of them looked ancient. Only three of them, though. Erick’s eyes went a bit wide as he read, for he was already on two of these three quests, and he hadn’t even known.

“Huh,” Erick said.

The wind blew across the land.

Hopefully, Erick hadn’t already violated that ‘without endangering current civilization’ part. No way to truly tell, though. The first Quest was right out; no way to do that, and Erick didn’t want to, anyway. The second was… Erick was getting there? Maybe? Whatever. Erick was actually working on the third quest, though.

He thought for a bit. Mostly, his thoughts were half baked, but they included ideas about Fate, alongside questions of whether Fate could be imbued into Quests. The Script supposedly locked most Fate Magic away from people, but the Worldly Path was a giant ritual of Fate that doused the Walker of the Path in deepest Fate. It made sense, then, that Rozeta and others might be able to take some Fate and bind it to other ‘Ultimate Quest’s, and then place everyone on those quests in the hope that Fate might one day solve these Quests for them…

Ah.

Hmm.

Erick activated his Minor Entity status and voiced his question to the local goddess, “Rozeta? Did this Quest drag Jane and I to this world?”

A blue box appeared.

Erick blinked a bit, dispensing with unneeded emotions.

He’d get a better answer from her later, maybe.

For a while though, he just thought.

– – – –

Eventually, Erick decided to get on with the aura control lessons. He searched for people again, and finding none, he continued. Yggdrasil was set to watch over him, but he told the big guy not to interfere unless necessary. Ophiel got the same message. And then Erick stripped down to his pants. White light flickered across his body as his [Personal Ward] turned off. His rings came off, and he also decided to shave his face and cut his hair back into the proper shapes, as he did sometimes. He turned off all of his spells and briefly felt vulnerable, but he checked on his [Cascade Imaging] again, flickering the Scan through all iterations of different types of people, and through all the standard protective spells that someone might be wearing like a [Personal Ward]. Erick was still the only person that showed in the Imaging. His spellwork was still the only spellwork active nearby.

He breathed a bit, relaxing.

First came some light stretching, which was practically unneeded since Dexterity had him covered, but it still felt good to touch his toes, and then kiss his own knees. A twist of his arms had him curled backward, forming a bridge with his body. He hadn’t done that since before college. It brought another smile to his face.

And then he sat down, and started going through his aura control exercises.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Bring hands in.

Push hands out.

Repeat.

Repeat.

– – – –

Erick surfaces from a trance, to float above an ocean of nothing that slowly recedes in all directions. His eyes cannot open, for his eyelids are impossible weights, but his mana sense is active, and dilated. He sees the shifting world around him. He watches that world resolve into something approaching reality, but it is likely more Reality than real.

He is on his back again, on a cloud of stone, and yet ‘stone’ does not cover the barest bit of the being at his back, made of love and connection. The stone is comfortable, and slightly green around the edges. It yields as Erick relaxes, and Erick floats above the stone. Feathered eyes float with him. They watch and protect.

And Erick sees Reality and reality, and the Truth of it all.

He sees the Truth of himself.

It is exactly what he expects.

– – – –

Erick surfaced, slowly, and methodically.

His heart rate increased. His eyes began to move under his control. Ideas flooded, incomprehensible. That’s where he found himself stuck for a bit, for his Truth was cloudy once again. He still knew it, but it was like knowing what happened in a dream.

Laying back upon the unyielding branches of his largest [Familiar], deep in the Core of Veird, Erick opened his eyes and saw the world in a new light.

Several new lights.

For he had a new ‘eye’ opened.

He raised a hand into his line of sight. Under the brightness of the Core, he could barely tell that his skin was flushed with brightness, like he was some sort of wrought fluorescing under blacklight. But it was. Like the bark of Yggdrasil beneath him, Erick glowed with luminosity that gently extended into the air around him, filtering into the world on wispy white glows.

It was not the power of [Greater Lightwalk]. Erick understood that much instantly. For one, he wasn’t running that spell. For another, the light in the air around him was practically a mist that ebbed and flowed around him like a fog, and it felt so very much different than anything he had ever felt before.

[Greater Lightwalk] was a pressure, a control, a flipped switch that allowed Erick to operate differently from his physical self. With his lightform, he could move through the sky with barely a thought. But he couldn’t feel the world through that lightform; not like he could when he was a physical person.

Elemental Bodies had no nerve endings, or brain, or hormones telling the user to feel certain ways about certain sights, or events. One could still feel fear, or hope, or joy, but those feelings were purely intellectual events; they were like ingrained pathways in the person wielding an Elemental Body that were triggered by ingrained responses to stimuli.

But this glow… This was different. It was a lot less controllable, for one.

This was probably because Erick’s [Greater Lightwalk] was, in truth, an ‘aura’ enabled through elemental essence unlocking the ability and the Script handling how that ability worked. The Script made [Greater Lightwalk] inherently strong, and Erick had grown used to understanding how to wield that strength well.

This aura that clung to him now was barely mobile. Erick had no idea how to move it. It was his aura, for sure. Of that there was no doubt. But it was odd. It was weak. Unlocked auras had no Script assistance, so this much was normal. So far, most things about this were normal.

What wasn’t normal was that Erick’s aura was rather bright. Erick held up his arm, and the fog of his light moved with him. He pushed his arm forward and the fog trailed with his movement—

Erick sent a concentrated command through his new aura, attempting to move it like he would his lightform. Power rippled through the foggy light and it solidified around his body. But that was all it did. Less wisping, more solidity. Erick relaxed, and the gathered light began to fog away, like so much tattered cloth.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Oddities compounded as Erick concentrated on his new aura and felt the mana inside it all.

Like a flubbing child, Erick began to play with the building blocks of magic, pushing and pulling and twisting, but with considerably less control than he normally had. Using aura was like starting all over again, learning how to control his power with hands that were numb, and barely regaining feeling with the passage of time.

The differences between lightform and aura continued to manifest as Erick realized he also couldn’t adjust his sight to different locations in his aura, or even to simply view the full world all around him. He had grown used to seeing the world from every possible angle, but at least the light didn’t block his own sight. With a bit of testing and understanding, Erick gauged that his new aura was simultaneously there, and yet not; like he was seeing it with a third eye; not with his normal two. He wasn’t ‘seeing’ his aura with his mana sense, either. This was some sort of new sense that he had unlocked, that was specifically a part of himself and his aura. It still felt ‘sleepy’, too.

And thinking of mana sense, Erick’s mana sense had lapsed, so he turned that back on and viewed himself—

His skin glittered, his eyes radiated light fully and completely, like a Shade’s.

“Ah. Damn.” Erick frowned. He shut off his aura, closing his ‘third eye’. The light went away, pulling out from his eyes to reveal his white irises and his black pupils. “At least it turns off.”

Well!

This was his aura, and it probably did all the normal things auras normally did. Erick didn’t particularly understand why there was so much light in his aura, but it made sense. His ‘Truth’, if you wanted to call it that, was that everything could be made better, and that all one had to do was try, and that he was here to help those better things happen. Nothing groundbreaking.

But with an aura made of light… There were some uncomfortable allusions in his aura toward his Shade-given title of ‘Fire of the Age’. The idea of all that was uncomfortable for Erick, though, because if Erick was the ‘Fire of the Age’, then that meant that Veird had been fucked up for so long that any true, actual advancement of technology and ideas was enough to warrant him a place of philosophical power.

And wasn’t that just sad.

Ahhh.

Anyway! His aura was full of light, and this was fine. Now, to practice.

– – – –

Sweat dripped down Erick’s chin, falling onto the glowing white bark of Yggdrasil below to join all the rest of the drops of sweat. A cool wind blew across the world but it didn’t touch Erick. It did, however, disturb his aura control, feathering the edges of his oozy, clinging aura, ripping it out of his control for the thousandth time. The length of aura he was trying to extend from his hand to a meter away suddenly became too hard to control, and then the wind caught the length of aura just right, breaking off a meter long section, causing it to dissipate into the air like so much scattered lightward.

Sudden exhaustion claimed Erick, his heart stalling out ever so briefly as cold shot up through his spine and across his shoulders. His aura settled back to ‘base-state’ as Erick couldn’t hold it open any longer. Oozy light flowed back to his skin, away from the stretched-out hand as his arm fell down to his side. He almost collapsed to the ground, but he was stronger than that.

With a deep breath, Erick closed off his aura, closing his third eye, and relaxed, taking count of all the ways he had succeeded in the last hour, and all the ways he had failed. Holding his aura open didn’t require mana, but it did require the activation of a sense that seemed to weaken his mana recovery. When he did flow mana into his aura —which was almost like channeling, but only in that both events expelled mana into the manasphere— Erick could move that mana around, creating spells. Theoretically, anyway. He hadn’t managed yet to manually cast any spell, but he was close. With some more practice and more ability to control his aura, he could begin Remaking a lot of magic.

His first task, once he could manually cast spells, was to Remake all of the Shaping spells and regain the 7 points he had spent to purchase all of the basic Shaping spells, and [Metalshape]. There were some worries regarding how his aura seemed naturally Light-aspected, and how he might have trouble shifting the mana into the proper Elements in order to Remake six of the seven Shaping spells he had bought, but he also needed to Remake the Skill, Mana Altering, which would also give him another point. In the process of manually learning how to Alter to different Elements, Erick expected to be able to solve his non-[Lightshape] (potential) issues.

Mana Shaping and Aurify should come along in due time, as well.

But for now, Erick still needed to learn precision. After a few hours at it, his aura was starting to feel less like a nerve-dead limb, and more like an old, stiff injury that never quite healed right…

So? Progress?

Yes. Progress.

There was an oddity, though, besides the Light-aspect.

Awakening one’s aura was the first step, and that awakening usually birthed an aura that barely reached beyond one’s skin; that barely moved when stressed to move. Erick’s aura was probably the size of himself, added to himself; so twice his body size. It was rather large even by normal aura standards. His aura teacher, Singer Kaffi, had an aura that naturally lay upon her skin with a depth of two centimeters. Teressa’s aura was only a centimeter deep, but she was an orcol so she naturally had a lot more space to work with— Though Erick had already found out that thinning your aura felt horrible, so maybe Teressa wasn’t that much better off than anyone else. Poi’s aura was rather large but it was always locked to his tendrils of thought, since that’s how he telepathically communicated with everyone. Erick hadn’t actually known that Poi had great aura control until they went to Songli, but that man kept his capabilities very hush hush, so Erick had never wanted to pry, to understand how Poi had gotten such a great aura. Lots of practice and natural Mind Mage aptitude, no doubt, honed to a great degree ever since he was young.

Erick’s aura was at least a decimeter deep, which was probably a match for Poi.

Which was odd.

Kaffi had once suggested that something like this might happen, but even she would likely be surprised at this outcome. Perhaps Erick had unlocked his aura a while ago, but because his aura was trapped inside his [Personal Ward] all the time, he had been incapable of recognizing, using, or understanding his aura.